Politics & Power Quote by Tom Paulin

Paulin’s line is a cold diagnosis of how moral energy gets routed through charisma and media legibility rather than through consistent principle. He’s talking about a particular asymmetry: plenty of sympathy exists, but it fails to harden into pressure on the British state. The reason he offers isn’t policy nuance or historical complexity; it’s branding. Anti-apartheid “had a high profile” because it could be narrated cleanly, staged publicly, and anchored by a hero who read well on Western television. Mandela becomes not just a leader but a story engine: dignified, patient, unjustly imprisoned, easily cast as the democratic saint.

Arafat, by contrast, is positioned as the opposite kind of symbol: compromised, harder to photograph as innocence, coded by decades of terror discourse and Cold War geopolitics. Paulin’s subtext is unsparing: movements succeed in liberal democracies when they supply an “engaging figure” who allows sympathizers to feel righteous without feeling implicated. Engagement here is not admiration; it’s usability.

The intent, then, is not to compare the justice of causes but to expose the gatekeeping mechanism of British public empathy. It’s a critique of selective outrage that flatters itself as ethics while operating like entertainment: one struggle becomes a moral blockbuster, another becomes an uncomfortable dossier. Paulin, a poet with a political edge, is also needling the British left: if your solidarity depends on a protagonist you can comfortably adore, it isn’t solidarity yet; it’s consumer preference dressed up as conscience.