There is a story which is not being told strongly enough of the Afghan employees of the UN inside the country who are saving hundreds of thousands of lives everyday by their bravery and nobody talks of them.
You are dealing with people who have taken the responsibility of killing their own because they think that they are right, they think that they are serving the interests of their people. They not going to give that up easily, just because you've shown up.
Interpretation
What this quote means
The quote emphasizes the complexity of human conviction and the difficulty of changing deeply held beliefs.
Lakhdar Brahimi's quote illustrates the challenges faced when confronting individuals or groups who are deeply entrenched in their beliefs, often to the extent of causing harm to others. It conveys that those who view their actions as justified, even in extreme circumstances, will not easily relinquish their mindset simply due to external arguments or appearances, highlighting the need for understanding and dialogue in potentially volatile situations.
Themes
In practice
Example use cases
In a discussion about political conflict, this quote can illustrate the deep-rooted nature of opposing views.
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It never occurred to him to be spiritually won over to the enemy. Many moderns, inured to a weak worship of intellect and force, might have wavered in their allegiance under this oppression of a great personality. . . . But this was a kind of modern meanness to which Syme could not sink even in his extreme morbidity. Like any man, he was coward enough to fear great force; but he was not coward enough to admire it.
I wasn't sleeping on the streets at night. Of course, there were a lot of good people sleeping in the streets. They weren't fools, they just didn't fit into the needed machinery of the moment. And those needs kept altering.
Now I confess myself as belonging to that class in the country who contemplate slavery as a moral, social and political evil.
There is no better proof of a man's being truly good than his desiring to be constantly under the observation of good men.
The dominant propaganda systems have appropriated the term "globalization" to refer to the specific version of international economic integration that they favor, which privileges the rights of investors and lenders, those of people being incidental. In accord with this usage, those who favor a different form of international integration, which privileges the rights of human beings, become "anti-globalist."
blindness is a private matter between a person and the eyes with which he or she was born.