QuoteProject
The worst crime committed by totalitarian mind-sets is that they force their citizens, including their victims, to become complicit in their crimes. Dancing with your jailer, participating in your own execution, that is an act of utmost brutality.
Azar Nafisi
ShareWTF𝕏

Interpretation

What this quote means

Totalitarian regimes compel individuals to participate in their own oppression, which is a profound moral failure.

In this quote, Azar Nafisi highlights the insidious nature of totalitarianism, where the systems of power not only oppress but also force individuals to be complicit in their subjugation. The metaphor of 'dancing with your jailer' and 'participating in your own execution' illustrates the brutal reality that victims become unwitting supporters of their own oppression, emphasizing the psychological and moral violence inherent in such regimes.

Themes

TotalitarianismOppressionComplicityBrutalityCitizenship

In practice

Example use cases

This quote can be used in a lecture about the consequences of authoritarian rule.

More from Azar Nafisi

Lots of times you can feel as an exile in a country that you were born in.
Azar NafisiRead
After the rigged Iranian presidential elections in 2009, the Islamic regime attacked the 'humanities' as the main source of protests, the most effective tool used by the West, especially America, to corrupt and incite Iranian youth, and finally closed down all the Humanities departments in Iran's universities.
Azar NafisiRead
I believe that it is only through empathy, that the pain experienced by an Algerian woman, a North Korean dissident, a Rwandan child or an Iraqi prisoner, becomes real to me and not just passing news. And it is at times like this when I ask myself, am I prepared - like Huck Finn - to give up Sunday school heaven for the kind of hell that Huck chose?
Azar NafisiRead
I am suddenly left alone again on the sunny path, with a memory of the rain.
Azar NafisiRead
It takes courage to die for a cause, but also to live for one.
Azar NafisiRead
Do not, under any circumstances, belittle a work of fiction by trying to turn it into a carbon copy of real life; what we search for in fiction is not so much reality but the epiphany of truth.
Azar NafisiRead

Similar quotes

We are like plants which have the one choice of being in or out of the light.
Simone WeilRead
The world dies over and over again, but the skeleton always gets up and walks.
Henry MillerRead
Till we can become divine, we must be content to be human, lest in our hurry for change we sink to something lower.
Anthony TrollopeRead
There is competition, but it is used in a good way. It is positive to want to go first, provided the intention is to pave the way for others, make their path more easy, help them, or show the way. Competition is negative when we wish to defeat others, to bring them down in order to lift ourselves up.
Dalai LamaRead
If we do wrong and no harm comes of it, we are not thereby justified. If we did evil and good came of it, the evil would be just as evil. It is not the result of the action, but the action itself which God weighs.
Charles SpurgeonRead
The evidence for our New Testament writings is ever so much greater than the evidence for many writings of classical authors, the authenticity of which no one dreams of questioning. And if the New Testament were a collection of secular writings, their authenticity would generally be regarded as beyond all doubt.
F. F. BruceRead

A little wisdom, now and then

Subscribe for the occasional hand-picked quote. No noise.