When good people do too little...

“All that is necessary for the triumph of evil is that good men do nothing.”

Though often attributed to Edmund Burke, we don’t really know whose the saying is. But it’s an important idea. And it’s particularly apt today.

There’s no doubt that Trump’s outbursts against four Democratic Congresswomen were deeply racist: when you tell Americans of colour, living in the US, to go back where they came from, you’re saying that the country is no home for them.

The Congresswomen Trump told to go back where they came from
They are all American. Only one was even born abroad.

Of course, as Hillary Clinton pointed out, in telling the Congresswomen the government in their home country was lousy, Trump was exactly right. Their home country is, after all, the US, and Trump heads its catastrophically bad government.

However, what’s worrying isn’t so much that Trump made his comments, but that a lot of people sympathise with him. They may not want to voice such opinions publicly, since racism for the moment still carries a stigma. But in private, or to themselves, they share his view. As he countered, when charged with racism, “many people agree with me”. As long as many people agree, it can’t be racism. The reality is that the fact that many agree doesn’t alter the racist nature of his views, it only makes them more dangerous, making it more likely that a racist might be re-elected to the White House.

What makes the quotation attributed to Burke so apposite is that there are many who dislike racism but still plan to vote for Trump. They may not be bad people, but they haven’t grasped that no good person can give racism a pass. Good people not acting will allow the evil of racism to triumph.

In Britain, too, the situation is dire. The government is in the hands of a party in which Islamophobia is rampant. But 70,000 or 80,000 members of that party are about to inflict on the whole country a Prime Minister who has expressed Islamophobic views himself in the past, and certainly has no intention of combating them today.

In particular, he refuses to denounce the toxic bilge coming out of the White House as the racist slander it is. Boris Johnson claims to speak for British independence, in his support for Brexit, but he’s so anxious to dance to Trump’s tune that he can’t bring himself to condemn his most poisonous pronouncements.

Opposite him stands a Leader of the Opposition who has just been rightly told by some of his party members in the House of Lords that he had failed the leadership test. And why? Because instead of addressing the problem of antisemitism in his own Party when whistle blowers warn him of it, he’d prefer to deny the truth of the message and then denounce the messengers.

You have failed the test of leadership

This isn’t his first offence. Ever since the Brexit referendum, he has refused to endorse a pro-EU stance, for fear of alienating those xenophobic voters who backed the Leave camp. Here was a chance to denounce racist thinking and back an internationalist position, and he refused to endorse it.

Another failure of leadership.

Ever since I first saw it, I’ve loved Shaw’s play Arms and the Man. At one point the protagonist, an artilleryman who’d commanded a machine gun battery under attack from cavalry at a recent battle, describes how they’d laughed when they first saw unprotected horsemen attacking their powerful weapons:

… but when the sergeant ran up as white as a sheet, and told us theyd sent us the wrong cartridges, and that we couldnt fire a shot for the next ten minutes, we laughed at the other side of our mouths. I never felt so sick in my life…

[Those aren’t typos, by the way: Shaw didn’t like apostrophes…]

Unloaded guns won’t defeat an enemy. Labour has at the top a man who has failed the leadership test. He’s a gun that can’t fire. And with this we are to confront a racist and puppet of a racist, in the most powerful office in the land.

Corbyn may well not be an antisemite. But he’s soft on antisemites. Why? Sadly, because many of them are keen supporters of his anti-Israeli stance. And to retain their support, he’s prepared to backpedal in his fight against racism. Just as he was prepared to accommodate xenophobic leave voters to keep them on side (an approach which, as it happens, has failed).

So in both main parties in Britain, as in the United States, some of the most evil ideas to have poisoned human life down the ages, culminating in the terrible racist atrocities of the twentieth century, are allowed to grow from strength to strength. Merely because good people won’t stand up against them. “Corbyn’s a man of principle,” they say, “he has some great ideas on the economy or foreign affairs. Let’s pretend there is no antisemitism in the Labour Party.”

And the corrosive effect spreads further. Evil moves towards its triumph. Because the good do too little to stop it.