Leadership Quote by Zbigniew Brzezinski

Brzezinski’s line is a neat little demolition of a comforting post-9/11 script: the idea that America is targeted because it embodies an abstraction called “freedom.” He concedes the emotion (“I think they do hate”) while stripping away the fairy tale motive. That first clause, “Not to mention… of course,” mimics the tone of cable-news certainty just long enough to expose it as lazy. Then he pivots: terrorists aren’t perched in some philosophical armchair, “abstractly hating freedom.” They’re political actors, shaped by grievances, strategy, and circumstance.

The intent is corrective, almost disciplinary. Brzezinski is warning an American audience against turning geopolitics into morality play, because morality plays are politically useful but analytically disastrous. If you assume the enemy’s motive is metaphysical, your response becomes metaphysical too: endless war on an idea, suspicion of dissent, and a foreign policy that confuses self-affirmation with security. His subtext is that slogans like “they hate our freedom” function as a kind of narrative anesthesia: they soothe, they unify, and they conveniently dodge harder questions about history, intervention, alliances, and blowback.

Context matters: Brzezinski was a Cold War strategist who thought in terms of power, incentives, and unintended consequences. He’s not exonerating terrorists; he’s insisting on specificity. The rhetorical move is blunt realism dressed as common sense, pushing the listener from myth to motive - and implying that democracy is weakened, not strengthened, when it replaces analysis with self-flattery.