"Peace does not include a vendetta; there will be neither winners nor losers"
About this Quote
Peace, for Ben Bella, is not the polite pause after a fight; it is a refusal to keep fighting by other means. The line lands like a warning to revolutionaries tempted to treat independence as a license for payback. Coming out of Algeria's brutal war against French colonial rule, "peace" could easily have been marketed as a victor's celebration. Ben Bella strips that illusion: if peace turns into a vendetta, it's just the old hierarchy wearing new colors.
The phrasing is calibrated for a country with fresh wounds and competing claims to legitimacy. "Does not include" reads like a legal exclusion clause, as if he's drafting the terms of national life: revenge is not an allowable ingredient. Then comes the political sleight of hand: "neither winners nor losers". In a postwar moment, declaring no winners sounds counterintuitive - even insulting to those who sacrificed. That's the point. He is trying to dissolve the very logic that makes vendetta feel righteous. If everyone is positioned as a "winner", someone must be a "loser" - and the next cycle of violence is already booked.
Subtextually, it's also a bid for state authority. By denying the moral permissions of revenge, Ben Bella is asking citizens to trade personal retribution for institutional order: courts, amnesty, the monopoly on force. It is idealism with a hard edge. In a new nation, the fastest way to lose the future is to govern the past; his sentence tries to close that account before it becomes the country's only politics.
The phrasing is calibrated for a country with fresh wounds and competing claims to legitimacy. "Does not include" reads like a legal exclusion clause, as if he's drafting the terms of national life: revenge is not an allowable ingredient. Then comes the political sleight of hand: "neither winners nor losers". In a postwar moment, declaring no winners sounds counterintuitive - even insulting to those who sacrificed. That's the point. He is trying to dissolve the very logic that makes vendetta feel righteous. If everyone is positioned as a "winner", someone must be a "loser" - and the next cycle of violence is already booked.
Subtextually, it's also a bid for state authority. By denying the moral permissions of revenge, Ben Bella is asking citizens to trade personal retribution for institutional order: courts, amnesty, the monopoly on force. It is idealism with a hard edge. In a new nation, the fastest way to lose the future is to govern the past; his sentence tries to close that account before it becomes the country's only politics.
Quote Details
| Topic | Peace |
|---|
More Quotes by Ahmed
Add to List
