Politics & Power Quote by Breyten Breytenbach

“The goal, I submit, is obvious” is a rhetorical feint: a lawyerly phrase that pretends modesty while actually shutting down debate. Breytenbach isn’t wondering aloud; he’s indicting. The sentence builds like a courtroom closing argument, stacking charged descriptors - “barbarian, dangerous, envious and ungrateful” - not primarily to describe the world, but to expose the story empire tells itself to justify dominance. Those adjectives read like an inventory of colonial alibis: if the outside is savage and resentful, then coercion can be framed as protection, and conquest can pose as order.

The parenthetical is the quote’s most surgical move. By placing the insult in brackets, Breytenbach signals it as received language, the kind of cliché that circulates in security briefings and patriotic media: the world is a problem, America is the solution. The subtext is that US power doesn’t merely respond to threats; it manufactures a worldview in which threat is everywhere, gratitude is owed, and “interests” become a moral category instead of a self-interested one.

Context matters because Breytenbach comes out of apartheid South Africa, where “stability” and “security” were also the regime’s favorite euphemisms for domination. He writes with the instincts of someone who has seen how a state narrates its violence as necessity, and how the language of civilization can be a mask for control. The quote’s sting isn’t just anti-Americanism; it’s anti-imperial grammar: the way certainty, fear, and entitlement get braided into policy until subjugation looks, to its authors, like common sense.