War & Peace Quote by Thor Heyerdahl

Heyerdahl is puncturing the flattering story every ideology tells about itself: that it is the fixed center and everyone else is the dangerous fringe. Coming from an explorer rather than a party boss, the line lands as fieldwork, not theorizing. He is describing politics the way a traveler describes borders: real on the map, constantly revised on the ground.

The opener, "Today we are fighting Communism. Okay". is doing quiet demolition. The "Okay" isn’t assent; it’s a shrug at the simplicity of the slogan. Then he flips the timeline and exposes the relativity: yesterday’s "radical" becomes today’s mainstream, and today’s Conservatism would have worn the enemy label in a prior era. The intent isn’t to defend Communism so much as to show how elastic the accusation is. "Communism" becomes a floating signifier, a cudgel for disciplining change, not a precise description of policy.

The subtext is Cold War exhaustion. In the mid-20th century, Western politics often reduced complex questions of welfare, labor rights, and state power to a single moral drama. Heyerdahl notes how quickly the casting changes: "heroes and villains keep on changing parts". That metaphor matters. It suggests performance, not destiny; roles are assigned by the needs of the moment, and yesterday’s villain can be recast without anyone admitting the script changed.

As a man who spent his life arguing that accepted histories were incomplete, Heyerdahl is also warning against intellectual complacency. If labels mutate this fast, the responsible move is to interrogate the story, not just cheer for the team.