These are times of change. My feeling is that we are at a real crossroads in human history, one where we decide to opt for freedom and cooperation, or, alternatively, fear and tyranny.
At the heart of this situation, and one of the most important determinants of its outcome, will be the man in uniform: the soldier, the policeman, the government bureaucrat. As we have all seen during the protests across the Muslim world against tyranny, poverty and corruption, these people are forced, sooner or later, to make a choice between two conflicting identities: the man who obeys orders, and the man who does what he knows to be right. It begs the question: at what point does an individual’s duty as an employee of the state become superceded by their identity as an ethical, moral, free-thinking human?
It is the normal role of the uniformed man to uphold the law and to keep the peace. But what happens when the regime, or the law itself, is hurting the people these public employees are meant to protect?
I saw a video yesterday, which really made me think about the reality of such a choice, and the different ways in which those in uniform respond to it. It’s really not nice to watch so be prepared for it.
These men that sprayed the unarmed crowd with bullets, killing and wounding indiscriminately, made their choice; they chose to uphold the corrupt and repressive regime against which these protesters were merely trying to express themselves. The irony is, of course, that these soldiers (or ‘hired killers’ as they should more rightly be called) are also members of society themselves, with families and friends of their own. They might fancy themselves as ‘insiders’, but it should be easy for anyone to see that, ultimately, everyone outside the political elite pays the price for oppression and corruption.
History is littered with examples of how the moral agency of humans is weakened or extinguished by the sense of conformity and duty that goes with being a so-called figure of state authority. This from Alexandr Solzhenitsyn on the failing of collective moral agency that led to the rise of Stalin’s tyranny:
“And how we burned in the camps later, thinking: What would things have been like if every security operative, when he went out at night to make an arrest, had been uncertain whether he would return alive and had to say good-bye to his family? Or if, during periods of mass arrests, as for example in Leningrad, when they arrested a quarter of the entire city, people had not simply sat there in their lairs, paling with terror at every bang of the downstairs door and at every step on the staircase, but had understood they had nothing left to lose and had boldly set up in the downstairs hall an ambush of half a dozen people with axes, hammers, pokers, or whatever else was at hand?… The Organs would very quickly have suffered a shortage of officers and transport and, notwithstanding all of Stalin’s thirst, the cursed machine would have ground to a halt! If…if…We didn’t love freedom enough. And even more – we had no awareness of the real situation…. We purely and simply deserved everything that happened afterward.”
Solzhenitsyn’s logic is undeniable: strength, quite literally, is in numbers. It doesn’t matter how many troops tyrannical governments put on the streets, how many guns they have, or how brutal and indiscriminate their violence becomes, tyranny can only thrive when good men fail to act. Every tyranny in history was upheld by a small majority of the population which created a paralysis of fear amongst the majority, something that is beautifully captured in this scene from the film A Bug’s Life-point being that even a child can grasp the idea.
Gandhi understood this logic perfectly, and it was he that created the movement which stopped the might of the British Empire in its tracks-without the use of violence. Indeed, the more the British used violence against the peaceful majority, the more assured the end of their rule in India became. Their violence was demonstrably the end of any moral authority they may have previously claimed in order to govern. Many in Gandhi’s movement died in the course of their protests, and it is this understandable fear of being the first to stand up (and likely be cut down) that enables tyrannies to take hold and sustain themselves.
‘Support our troops’ is a mantra of the modern world in times of military conflict, and it is one which has always disturbed me because of its monumental stupidity. Its stupidity lies in the assumptions that it makes: 1. That all troops are the same, and are equally deserving of respect, regardless of their personal conduct. 2. That ‘supporting’ the troops has any other function than ratifying the use of military force by governments, no matter how corrupt or immoral such actions may be. 3. That ‘support’ can never mean bringing them home to safety.
I wonder how many citizens of Bahrain, Libya, Egypt, Yemen, or Tunisia are supporting their troops right now, after their brutality in defence of corrupt elites. I wonder how many black South Africans supported their troops and police during the apartheid era. I wonder how many everyday Germans genuinely supported the Nazis compared to those who just felt powerless to stop the country’s descent into madness.
I’ve become a firm believer in the disbandment of standing armies. Thomas Jefferson was also convinced that this should be so. Armies should be assembled in defence of the nation, of all nations. The very existence of a military machine can create the temptation and tendency to use force, and such a machine necessarily wields considerable influence on government by its very nature. When combined with the existence of an armaments industry, the vast financial rewards for some of building and using machines of war make conflict ever more likely. Dwight D. Eisenhower, a man who held the highest positions in both the military and politics, summed up the dangers of the military industrial complex, as it has become known:
The simple fact is that politicians can lie and manipulate people as much as they like, driven by their hawkish associates and paymasters, but if the population decides that there will be no war, there will be no war. How can conflict take place if there is no one to pick up the gun? To drop bombs on villages from a plane? To beat children with clubs behind brick walls? To perform the ritualised humiliation and degradation as witnessed at Abu Ghraib? War will only stop when we really want it to.
Tags: Bahrain, conformity, Egypt, freedom, Islam, Libya, muslim, tyranny
