Politics & Power Quote by John Hume

Hume’s line refuses the easy moral geometry of good guys versus bad guys. “There were two mentalities” is a deliberately leveling move: he’s not absolving anyone, but he is insisting that conflict survives on mutual habits of thought, not just on one side’s villainy. The phrase “had to change” lands like a policy memo and a sermon at once. It’s pragmatic and impatient, the voice of someone who has watched arguments about principle become excuses for paralysis.

Calling out “the Afrikaner mind set of the Unionist politicians” is a surgical provocation. Hume borrows the language of South Africa to reframe Northern Ireland’s unionism as a recognizable pattern of settler insecurity: a group with state power that nonetheless experiences itself as embattled. That’s the key subtext in “protect their identity.” He doesn’t say “protect their interests,” which would sound merely selfish; he chooses “identity,” a word that smuggles in fear, memory, and the psychology of siege. It’s an attempt to explain discrimination as a strategy of self-preservation, not just cruelty.

The context is Hume’s broader project: shifting Northern Ireland from a zero-sum sovereignty fight to a rights-based, power-sharing logic. He names “holding all power in their own hands” as the engine of grievance, but he also signals to nationalists that changing the system requires changing the story each community tells itself. It’s less a condemnation than an invitation to abandon the romance of permanent victory.