Politics & Power Quote by Jose Eduardo Dos Santos

“Our goal is not to crush the enemy at any price” is the kind of opening clause that pretends to soften a fist while tightening it. Dos Santos, speaking as a statesman in a country defined by post-independence civil war and Cold War proxy pressures, frames violence as reluctant pedagogy: the enemy must “realize” a lesson. The verb choice matters. “Crush” is visceral, embarrassing, and openly coercive; “make it realize” swaps brutality for moral instruction, recasting a military campaign as civic education. It’s a rhetorical laundering of force.

The pivot is the word “illegal.” In a democracy, illegality is supposed to be adjudicated in courts, not on battlefields. By staking legitimacy on “a democratically elected government,” Dos Santos positions his side as law itself, implying that opposition is not political dissent but criminal insurgency. That move collapses a messy conflict - ideology, ethnicity, patronage networks, foreign backing - into a simple binary of order versus lawlessness. It also smuggles in a claim many leaders crave: if you oppose me, you oppose democracy.

The subtext is deterrence, aimed both at rebels and at international audiences. “Not at any price” signals restraint to outsiders worried about atrocities; “illegal to take up arms” signals an uncompromising line at home. The sentence tries to turn a civil war into a policing action, and in doing so, it invites the central question it wants to dodge: who gets to define legality when the state is still being forged through force?