Politics & Power Quote by Wilfred Burchett

The line reads like a cold memorandum of empire: not describing prejudice, but prescribing it. Burchett’s phrasing is surgical in its brutality. “Must be made to feel” shifts racism from attitude to method, a program of psychological warfare designed to outlive any battlefield victory. The target isn’t simply Vietnamese resistance; it’s Vietnamese self-conception. By pairing “racial inferiors” with “no right to national identity,” the quote exposes the colonial logic that humiliation and denationalization are inseparable: if a people can be convinced they are lesser, their claims to sovereignty can be rebranded as insolence.

That’s why the sentence works as an indictment even without naming an actor. It sketches the machinery of domination as something deliberate, managerial, and repeatable. The passive construction (“must be made”) implies institutions - schools, media, military occupation, administrative language - doing the work. It’s not the crude racism of a lone soldier; it’s the strategic racism of policy.

Burchett, a journalist famous for reporting from the communist side of the Cold War divide, is also performing a kind of rhetorical ambush. He compresses a vast critique of French colonialism and later Western-backed anti-communist projects into a single instruction-like clause, daring readers to recognize familiar patterns: the “civilizing mission,” the paternalism, the moral alibis. The subtext is that wars of “stability” and “containment” require an earlier victory: making the colonized doubt they deserve to exist as a nation at all.