Politics & Power Quote by John Boyd Orr

He refuses the easy enemy. By insisting that the Soviet state’s “real evil” isn’t communism, John Boyd Orr is picking a fight with the comforting Cold War script that turns complex regimes into single-idea villains. The pivot is surgical: the problem isn’t an economic theory you can debate in parliament or dissect in pamphlets, but the machinery that makes debate irrelevant. “Secret police” and “concentration camp” aren’t policy failures; they’re instruments of rule, the infrastructure of fear.

The subtext is a warning about category errors. Ideology can be argued, reformed, even voted out. A security apparatus that surveils, disappears, and imprisons doesn’t negotiate; it conditions citizens to self-censor before they even form dissent. Orr’s phrasing implies that moral horror lives less in what a state claims to believe than in what it must build to enforce belief. Communism becomes almost a decoy - a banner under which coercion travels.

Context matters. Orr wasn’t a pamphleteer; he was a public figure shaped by two world wars, mass displacement, and the mid-century emergence of “human rights” as a political vocabulary. By naming “concentration camp,” he deliberately echoes the era’s most charged symbol of modern evil, collapsing the supposed moral distance between fascist and communist repression. It’s an admonition to Western audiences too: if you fight an ideology and ignore the institutions of unaccountable power, you miss the actual threat - and risk reproducing it at home under different slogans.