Liverpool opinions
Upstarts - The smaller they are the harder we fall
By John Williams
Abraham Lincoln once said, " Human beings can withstand almost any adversity, but if you want to find out what people are really like give them power."
When Joseph Stalin was plotting his rise to power, while Lenin was dying, he was generally perceived to be a buffoon, a work horse onto which could be piled all the unwanted or unglamorous chores. The 'buffoon' cheerfully accepted every mundane administrative task tossed his way and quietly used the machinery of the various bureaucracies he commanded to accrue a murderous empire which was to stand for decades.*
History is littered with stories of the little man, the parvenu, the arriviste who arrived to become a monster. Sergeant Idi Amin, Corporal Napoleon Bonaparte, Corporal Adolf Hitler, the list goes on. I can't help but think of the meaning of the Greek word Aristo, rule by the best. Of course, how you define what is best is highly subjective not to say problematical. That said, I cannot choose from any of above mentioned a person who can be said to be the best choice of leader with regard to the advancement of the human race.
It is arguable that Napoleon was the best military commander of his epoch, or that Hitler was a supreme propagandist, or even that Idi Amin was the best heavyweight boxer in the British army, but what good did they do for humankind?
Napoleon left behind a set of laws, which could considered of some use, and his troops carried the revolutionary principles of emancipation to many people including the Jews, but his troops also murdered Spanish freedom fighters en masse. The autobahns that Hitler built in order to facilitate troop movements in his drive to create an autarky are still in use, carrying the Volkswagens that he ordered built.
Other than those few tendentious examples, tendentious because cars and highways are not high on the list of benefits to the planet, and because some laws are bad laws, I can't think of much else that these upstarts did that contributed to the total good of humankind. In short they created no ethica, Greek for the good.
Indeed, just the opposite is true. These men were responsible for heinous crimes against humanity. So is there any way we could 'screen' these people out of the system? Stalin, for instance was the victim of terrible cruelty at the hands of his drunken father. Joseph was beaten on a daily basis and was left with one arm shorter than the other. His deformity ensured that he would not be enlisted into the tsarist army, and that he would always be photographed with his withered arm hidden from view.
Since it is beyond question that violence breeds violence then possibly the signs of latent sadism might have been recognised in Stalin.
Perhaps if we were more democratic, and allowed people to experience real power at the lower levels of the social structure then Lincoln's dictum could be seen in action and so potential tyrants could be dealt with. Then again, there ain't much level lower than a Corporal.
In any case, the military mentality would hardly find fault with a soldier who acted with total disregard for his underlings, or his foes, would they? It's a problem, spotting the tyrant, unless we accept that we are all potential despots and that the real evil is the system or systems that spawns tyranny.
It is no coincidence that Hitler embodied the Feuhrerprincip, where executive power is invested in one man. The danger with investing total power in any single person becomes apparent at times of military tension between nation states. For instance, many Americans were opposed to American involvement in both world wars, and it took the great political skills of Presidents Wilson and Roosevelt, coupled with the brutal mistakes of the anti-democratic German military, to overcome the reluctance of the masses to join the war.
The German people had no choice in either war, because all executive military power was invested in autocrats. That's the problem with absolute leadership, the leaders say 'jump!' and the only question you can ask is, 'How high?'
Another Greek word springs to mind, Anarchos, which means to live without leaders. Now I could quite put up with a 'guide' system, whereby the guide could offer an informed opinion about a direction I could take, but at the same time leave me the option of refusing his advice, something no leader could allow. The right to refuse is, after all, the first article of the UN charter for human rights. Another argument in favour of Anarchy is that if you can't lead you can't boss and if you can't boss you can't bully which means that you cannot play the tyrant.
Of course nowadays the word Anarchy is synonymous with caricatures cloaked in black throwing bombs at all and sundry. Perhaps Anarchists should do a 'Windscale.' Windscale was a troubled nuclear power plant that changed its name to Sellafield. It's still troubled, but in the short term the change worked.
It took 20 years of mis-management to create the same irradiated stink around the new name as that which adhered to the old one. Perhaps we could operate within a system of co-operative individualism and rename anarchy as, say,
Rescue from the Spectre of annihilation...or more simply 'Respect!'
As a son of Liverpool once pleaded,
" Imagine......."
Three years after this essay was published some 'original' thinkers, including George Galloway, that ardent admirer of Saddam and various other murderous upstarts who masquerade as freedom fighters, unless you are a woman, a gay, or an unbeliever, had a similar notion. Can I sue I wonder?