by Emmett R Smith
From the New Yorker magazine comes the following article, about US soldier Sabrina Harman at abu Ghraib:
http://www.newyorker.com/reporting/2008/03/24/080324fa_fact_gourevitch/?yrail
Plainly, there is much to the task of leading of a nation that will trip up people who have exclusively a power-attitude, know the price of everything and nothing whatsoever of the value of anything.
The worst failure of all, of what Winston Churchill called the moral theme in History, is to be not aware of the actual condition and value, the real character, of subordinates.
Generally by History such leaders will be found out, with very few exceptions, to have been overly energetic personalities who never learned that their “best intentions” can only be in effect as good as — and never better than — the morals of the lowest people taking part in any in any “big operation.” In fact, if the looming Chinese have not yet learned this, then their coming turn in the World Round will be only another weary rehearsal of the same historical tragedy, and they will last no longer in the game than did anyone else before them. This is all the more to be regretted as, now, obviously, a bare handful here and there among this last generation of american officials are doing all they can in this final summing up of the american story, to teach to their Han successors the limits on the fantasy of “total power.” It is a mode of communication that we are witnessing, although no longer directed by “our” leaders to us but, rather, by a small clique of the gifted to their actual heirs in the World as it is, today. By the leadership of their example is the information being communicated. To the future. Today, but as I have noted not to us. Today in Iraq. Today, and to China tomorrow.
[Emmet R Smith all rights reserved 21 March 2008]
In his autobiography “Something of Myself” Rudyard Kipling – who, as you know, lived in your country for a while – comments:
“Every nation, like every individual, walks in a vain show – else it could not live with itself – but I never got over the wonder of a people who, having extirpated the aboriginals of their continent more completely than any modern race had ever done, honestly believed that they were a Godly little New England community, setting examples to brutal mankind.”
As then, so now.
A Further parallel is that, to-day, as noted by the traveller, Mr Paul Theroux, in his 1980s’ account, /Riding the Iron Rooster/, the chinese Han, like the Americans as long as their subjects don’t prance or kick up a row, are inclined to be sentimental about their ‘quaint’ non-Han ethnic populations. Whereas now in Thibet, as at Wounded Knee in the american South Dakota in 1973, the mask does slip a tad, from time to time, hmm?
NEITHER Presbyterian nor confucian-examination exceptionalism quite bear easy export; nor, often, do these alien things admit of over-easy imposition on others, suspicious and thankless primitives over-inclined to note the sudden increase in the VD-rate.
AN Abroad correspondent writes:
‘What appalled me about that “New Yorker” piece was the moral EMPTINESS of everyone involved. Although what was going on there shocked them at first, and they found it ‘weird’, they were all quite soon stringing along, acquiescently if not happily, on the basis that if their superiors said it was OK, it must be. Not a hint that any of them found it a moral outrage, or a betrayal of the values they had been brought up to believe America stands for. [Bush said “this isn’t the America I know” – but then he wouldn’t, would he?]
When during WW2 we learned of the Nazi atrocities and the concentration camps and people said “that could never happen here”, I disagreed because I was pretty sure that there are thuggish and brutal people in every society who can be recruited into SS-style units, as well as others who aren’t originally thuggish and brutal, but who will supinely go along with the flow.
Seems as though I was right, but I don’t know what the remedy is.