"Violence is like a weed - it does not die even in the greatest drought"
About this Quote
Violence, Wiesenthal implies, isn’t a storm you wait out. It’s an invasive species: opportunistic, resilient, and perfectly capable of surviving on scraps of grievance and fear. The weed metaphor is doing a lot of work. Weeds don’t need ideal conditions; they exploit neglect. They spread quietly, take root in the margins, and when the “drought” ends - when society relaxes, when oversight weakens, when a new crisis offers cover - they surge back stronger. That’s the warning beneath the line’s calm surface: the absence of open conflict is not evidence of moral progress.
Coming from Wiesenthal, a Holocaust survivor who spent his life tracking Nazi perpetrators, the image also carries a prosecutorial edge. Postwar Europe liked to tell itself a comforting story of rupture: the war ended, the camps were liberated, the world moved on. Wiesenthal’s work exposed the lie embedded in that narrative. The capacity for cruelty doesn’t evaporate with defeat or treaties; it persists in bureaucracies, in euphemisms, in “just following orders,” in the quiet reintegration of the guilty into respectable life. A drought can mean many things here: economic hardship, political instability, even cultural exhaustion. None of it guarantees the death of violent ideologies. Sometimes deprivation is exactly what keeps them alive, feeding them with scapegoats and simplistic solutions.
The intent is less despair than vigilance. If violence is a weed, the task isn’t to pray for better weather. It’s to do the unglamorous work of uprooting: law, memory, accountability, and the refusal to normalize cruelty when it returns in smaller, more socially acceptable forms.
Coming from Wiesenthal, a Holocaust survivor who spent his life tracking Nazi perpetrators, the image also carries a prosecutorial edge. Postwar Europe liked to tell itself a comforting story of rupture: the war ended, the camps were liberated, the world moved on. Wiesenthal’s work exposed the lie embedded in that narrative. The capacity for cruelty doesn’t evaporate with defeat or treaties; it persists in bureaucracies, in euphemisms, in “just following orders,” in the quiet reintegration of the guilty into respectable life. A drought can mean many things here: economic hardship, political instability, even cultural exhaustion. None of it guarantees the death of violent ideologies. Sometimes deprivation is exactly what keeps them alive, feeding them with scapegoats and simplistic solutions.
The intent is less despair than vigilance. If violence is a weed, the task isn’t to pray for better weather. It’s to do the unglamorous work of uprooting: law, memory, accountability, and the refusal to normalize cruelty when it returns in smaller, more socially acceptable forms.
Quote Details
| Topic | War |
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