Nicholas
Reid reflects in essay form on general matters and ideas related to
literature, history, popular culture and the arts, or just life in general. You are free to agree
or disagree with him.
STRANGEST CONSEQUENCE
It is
1970-something. We are all good students and we are protesting at the
possibility that a sports team from Rhodesia might tour the country. Our anger
is righteous. We know that under Ian Smith, Rhodesia, unilaterally declared
independent, is a racially-segregated country. It is attempting to perpetuate
the white supremacy of the colonial era, just as its neighbour South Africa is
doing. So we are on the side of those who are fighting against the Smith
regime. Joshua Nkomo, Robert Mugabe and others. If the true democratic will of
the African people is unleashed, it can only be for the good.
Flash forward
30-plus years.
We got our wish
– sort of.
Rhodesia
disappeared from the map. Smith and his regime vanished into history. And for
the best part of 30 years, Robert Mugabe has led the new state of Zimbabwe.
Mugabe has
driven it into the ground. He consolidated power by genocidal attacks on tribal
enemies. He has destroyed the country’s chief asset – its farming – in the
guise of nationalising it. Opposition parties are tolerated to a very limited
extent, as Mugabe does go through the regular process of pretending to hold free
elections – but then, when the opposition actually won an election, he had to
rig things to keep them from power. Government goon squads beat up and
intimidate any opposition figures who get too prominent. When he runs short of
ideas (which is fairly constantly), Mugabe simply blames his country’s woes on
its old colonial masters, who left long ago. Zimbabweans understand what a
farce this is. The country’s currency is now worthless (inflation rates are much
higher than those in the worst depths of Weimar Germany). Trade is by barter or
by using foreign currencies that actually have some value (dollars, yuan etc.).
The material standard of living for the country’s citizens is much, much lower
than it was under Smith’s white supremacist regime. And human rights are
ignored. Zimbabwe is a desperate and impoverished country ruled by an ageing
megalomaniac.
So – were we
wrong to register our protest all those years ago? Were we, unknowingly,
supporting something at least as bad as the thing we were protesting against?
We can multiply
this example by reading Martin Meredith’s The State of Africa. It is the
woeful chronicle of all the failed states in Africa, dictatorships and
kleptocracies, that have come into being in the fifty or sixty years since
European colonial powers pulled out. In the wrong hands, the book could become
ammunition for those who argue in favour of the old colonialism and who say
Africans are not capable of ruling themselves. Meredith definitely does not hold this view, but
the story of modern Africa is in part the story of good liberal hopes thwarted,
betrayed and destroyed with – in country after country – populations poorer and
more degraded than they were under the old regimes.
We can move the
argument to another continent.
When the Korean War
was fought in the early 1950s, it was fought in Cold War terms. The US and its
allies saw themselves as defending the south from Communist aggression
(especially when China poured troops in to occupy the north). Left-wingers
pointed out that Syngman Rhee, the leader of the south, which the US supported,
had slaughtered many civilians to keep himself in power. There were many upheavals
in the south (a failed students’ “revolution” with much bloodshed; a military
coup and assassinations) before something resembling a functioning democracy
emerged. So many left-wingers in the west supported the north in the conflict
and believed themselves to be opposing aggressive Western imperialism.
Flash forward
half a century. Geographically smaller South Korea (population c.51 million) is
a prosperous functioning multi-party democracy, with one of the world’s highest
standards of living. Geographically larger North Korea (estimated population
about 24 million) is a closed, impoverished, paranoid totalitarian state,
different even from those other surviving “communist” countries in its rigid
Stalinism, the cult of personality that surrounds its leader Kim Il-Sung and
the complete subservience of its people to their overlord. It cannot feed
itself and has suffered famine for which it has had to receive international
relief, although its leadership never mentioned this fact in its
state-controlled media.
So, were those
old lefties in the early 1950s wrong when they criticised Western policy during
the Korean War?
I could at this
point get side-tracked on the issue of the great delusion that Communism was to
many in the West in the mid-twentieth century, but I will stick with my
subject.
My point is – do
we point to the judgements that people once made and say they were morally
wrong in the light of subsequent history? Were we wrong to protest against a
white-supremacist regime? Were people wrong to side against American policies
in the Korean War?
When I consider
this question I think at once of two lines that T.S.Eliot puts into the mouth
of Thomas Becket in his Murder in the
Cathedral. The first should be emblazoned on the forehead of every
historian or would-be prophet. It is:
“history at all times draws /the strangest
consequence from remotest cause.”
We simply cannot
know how exactly the future will develop, and any political judgements have to
be seen in the context of their own times and what was knowable in those
times.
Eliot’s second
line is an answer that Thomas Becket gives to his accusers:
“You argue by results, as this world does, to
settle if an act be good or bad.”
Do we judge the moral
rightness or wrongness of things simply by outcomes?
Despite the rise
of relativist morality, despite feeble arguments against “moral realism”, some
things are intrinsically wrong and others are intrinsically right. Yes, we
should think carefully about consequences, but it is simply beyond human
capacity to read the future accurately or to foresee all consequences of
current events and situations.
White
supremacism was (and is) an evil. A dictator who slaughters his own citizens
was (and is) an evil. It was morally
right to protest against these things, just as it is morally right now to deplore
the regimes of Robert Mugabe and Kim Il-Sung.
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