Politics & Power Quote by Barbara Amiel

"Of course" is doing the dirtiest work in Barbara Amiel's sentence. It signals a shared understanding, an elite shorthand: we all know the world is full of nasty governments, so let's not pretend the villainy we’re discussing is unique. The line isn’t primarily about Latin America or apartheid South Africa; it’s about calibrating a reader’s moral outrage, turning it into something sortable and, crucially, comparable.

Amiel’s phrasing also smuggles in a walled-city worldview: there is an inside ("the walls") and an outside populated by "unpleasant regimes". That spatial metaphor frames politics as containment and proximity, not just ideology. Regimes become environmental hazards beyond the perimeter, less like societies with histories than threats to be managed. It’s an old journalistic move with a modern edge: compress a complicated map of power into a list of recognizable villains so the reader can orient quickly and keep moving.

The choice of examples matters. "Military dictators of Latin America" is intentionally broad, almost generic, evoking Cold War-era strongmen without naming Chile, Argentina, or the U.S. fingerprints in those histories. "The apartheid regime of South Africa" is more specific, because apartheid had become an internationally legible moral benchmark. Pairing the two creates a spectrum of revulsion: one category you can gesture at, one you’re expected to condemn outright. The subtext is less "these are bad" than "badness comes in familiar types", a setup that often precedes a harder argument about which evils are tolerable, strategic, or convenient.