"The big tyrants never face justice"
About this Quote
Galloway’s line lands like a cynical shrug dressed up as an accusation: power doesn’t just evade accountability, it’s engineered to. “Big tyrants” is doing double duty. It’s not only the caricatured dictator on a palace balcony; it’s a category that scales up to states, war rooms, intelligence services, and the polite institutions that launder violence into policy. The word “never” makes it sting. It’s not a complaint about one trial that didn’t happen, but a claim about the operating system: international justice is selective by design.
As a politician, Galloway isn’t offering a courtroom argument. He’s drawing a moral map with a clear enemy: the impunity of the mighty. The subtext is that tribunals and sanctions behave less like neutral instruments and more like geopolitical tools, hauled out when convenient and shelved when they would threaten major interests. He’s inviting the listener to notice who gets docked at The Hague and who gets memoir deals, speaking tours, and “legacy” debates.
The phrasing also flatters the audience’s suspicion. It implies you already know the score: the spectacle of accountability is for smaller villains, while “big” ones rewrite history fast enough to outrun prosecution. That’s why it works rhetorically. It compresses decades of frustration about war crimes, regime change, and double standards into seven words that sound like a fact, not a thesis. Whether you agree with Galloway’s politics or not, the line weaponizes a widely shared feeling: justice, at the top, is optional.
As a politician, Galloway isn’t offering a courtroom argument. He’s drawing a moral map with a clear enemy: the impunity of the mighty. The subtext is that tribunals and sanctions behave less like neutral instruments and more like geopolitical tools, hauled out when convenient and shelved when they would threaten major interests. He’s inviting the listener to notice who gets docked at The Hague and who gets memoir deals, speaking tours, and “legacy” debates.
The phrasing also flatters the audience’s suspicion. It implies you already know the score: the spectacle of accountability is for smaller villains, while “big” ones rewrite history fast enough to outrun prosecution. That’s why it works rhetorically. It compresses decades of frustration about war crimes, regime change, and double standards into seven words that sound like a fact, not a thesis. Whether you agree with Galloway’s politics or not, the line weaponizes a widely shared feeling: justice, at the top, is optional.
Quote Details
| Topic | Justice |
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