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.

The fine British tradition of wishing Americans well on Independence Day

Best wishes to all my American friends, this fourth of July.

I say that with complete sincerity, even though I’m British, and the celebration is of American independence from Britain. In fact, by wishing them well on this day, I’m merely perpetuating a tradition fully rooted in Britain. It stretches back to the time of that breach, nearly two and a half centuries ago.

The names of many of the leaders of the American side in that struggle still resonate today. Men like George Washington, Thomas Jefferson, Alexander Hamilton or Benjamin Franklin, though we draw a delicate veil over the inconvenient truth that the first two of those champions of liberty were slave owners, and the other two endorsed a constitution which allowed them to continue.

Their opposite numbers in Britain are far less well remembered. Maybe some retain a vague sense that there were two William Pitts, the elder and his son the younger, and even maybe that they both became Prime Minister. Some still recall the name of Edmund Burke, if only as the father of modern Conservatism. And there may even be those who remember the great wit and maverick, rival of the younger Pitt, Charles James Fox.

Pitt the Elder, Pitt the Younger, Charles James Fox, Edmund Burke

If I had to pick four figures who stand out as extraordinary from that period of British history, it would certainly be those. And they stand head and shoulders above those who prosecuted the war against the Americans, most notably King George III and his Prime Minister, Lord North.

What did those four have to say about British action against the colonists?

In 1775, even before the Declaration of Independence was issued, the elder Pitt, by then Earl of Chatham, by then already suffering from his final illness, came into the House of Lords to call for conciliation of the colonists:

We shall be forced ultimately to retract. Let us retract while we can, not when we must.

On 12 June 1781, his 22-year old son, by then a Member of Parliament himself, made his own heartfelt declaration about the conflict in America to the House of Commons:

It is a most accursed, wicked, barbarous, cruel, unnatural, unjust and diabolical war… Where is the Englishman who on reading the narrative of those bloody and well-fought contests can refrain lamenting the loss of so much British blood shed in such a cause, or from weeping on whatever side victory might be declared?

The British blood whose loss he lamented was being shed on both sides – like most of his contemporaries, he saw this fight as pitting British subjects against British subjects.

Charles James Fox said something similar, speaking presciently to denounce Lord North’s behaviour towards the colonists in October 1775. He was:

the blundering pilot who had brought the nation into its present difficulties ... Lord Chatham, the King of Prussia, nay, Alexander the Great, never gained more in one campaign than the noble lord has lost—he has lost a whole continent.

In a pamphlet of April 1777, Edmund Burke was even blunter in his denunciation of British government policy:

When any community is subordinately connected with another, the great danger of the connection is the extreme pride and self-complacency of the superior, which in all matters of controversy will probably decide in its own favour…

They have been told that their dissent from violent measures is an encouragement to rebellion. Men of great presumption will hold a language which is contradicted by a whole course of history. General rebellion and revolts of an whole people were never encouraged, now or at any time. They were always provoked.

The government had provoked the uprising against its rule. But it wasn’t an uprising against Britain, only against certain British leaders. Burke, Irish born and therefore aware of what oppression from London could feel like, knew what he was talking about and backed an opposition that would have hoped to do things differently had it been in office.

It was indeed the short government in which he held ministerial office that ultimately forced the King to recognise American independence.

It’s not the outlook of the men who waged a brutal and futile war in North America, but that of these outstanding figures, that I’d like to emulate.

And it’s in the spirit that I wish all my American friends a happy July the fourth.

Slavery: seems the Blacks were just fine with it. Like victims of any abuse

A Polish émigré, Julian Niemcewicz, who visited George Washington in 1798, commented ‘Either from habit, or from natural humour disposed to gaiety, I have never seen the blacks sad.’ 

So that was OK, then. The slaves were happy. What was wrong with slavery?

Niemcewicz’s words are a striking example of the capacity we all share to convince ourselves of any belief we find convenient. At the time he expressed that view, the Northern US states were busily abolishing slavery, and yet the South would cling on to the ‘peculiar institution’ for nearly seven more decades, and only give it up after a crushing defeat in a bitter civil war.

Not many miles from Washington’s home lived another major figure of the early United States, Thomas Jefferson. He wrote those stirring words that inspired the revolutionary war: ‘We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness.’ Yet he too was an owner of slaves, and even fathered several children on one of them, Sally Hemings.

In fact, those very words were used against African Americans by Chief Justice Roger Taney, when he wrote what must be one of the most shameful documents in US history, the final judgement of the Supreme Court in the Dred Scott case:

‘The general words above quoted would seem to embrace the whole human family [...] But it is too clear for dispute, that the enslaved African race were not intended to be included, and formed no part of the people who framed and adopted this declaration [...] The unhappy black race were separated from the white by indelible marks, and laws long before established, and were never thought of or spoken of except as property, and when the claims of the owner or the profit of the trader were supposed to need protection.’

So a proclamation of the equality of all men was turned on its head, into an argument in favour of the inferiority of the ‘black race’ and a justification for its enslavement.

What makes this kind of self-delusion particularly extraordinary is that, not only was slavery repugnant, it was also known to be economically inefficient, even in Washington’s day, as Dr David Stuart, from his extended family, made clear: ‘[Slaves’] support costs a great deal; their work is worth little if they are not whipped; the [overseer] costs a great deal and steals into the bargain. We would all agree to free these people, but how to do it with such a great number?’

I say nothing for Taney, but Washington and Jefferson were outstanding men who understood the issues. Yet even they felt powerless to act. It’s that ‘how to do it’ in David Stuart’s words that is most striking: he knew what was right and he knew it was expedient but he saw no means to do it.

Curiously the same impotence to overcome entrenched wrong has marked many of the other great abuses in history, whether discrimination against religious minorities, the denial of rights to women, the use of child labour, the refusal of minimal protections to workers. They have been preserved either by a self-delusion worthy of a Taney, or by a failure to act by those who knew that change was needed. ‘All that is necessary for evil to triumph is for good men to do nothing,’ wrote Edmund Burke. Slavery is a classic case of an evil that was not extirpated because good men did nothing (and a few bad ones did a great deal too much).

Edmund Burke: understood how evil could triumph

Once the abuse has been ended, a new consensus appears which finds it extraordinary that it had ever been tolerated. Slavery? Appalling. The wonder is that it lasted.

But when we look at the Washingtons and the Jeffersons and wonder how they could have lived with that abomination, we should pause a moment and ask ourselves a few questions too. Because right now, in our own advanced, democratic countries we’re tolerating abuses which may in turn come to be regarded as just as incomprehensible as slavery.

In Britain, thirty people a week are dying after having been deemed fit for work by an agency acting for government. This means that terribly ill individuals, often disabled, are being denied benefits, their suffering hugely increased as they go to their deaths. This is presented as tough but intelligent economics.

On both sides of the Atlantic, huge numbers of people are being denied access to healthcare either because it is being sacrificed to shareholder interest in the US, or subject to increasingly draconian restrictions in Europe. People are dying needlessly, and in greater pain, than they would if we were prepared to invest more in their care.

The kind of racist thinking that inflamed Roger Taney continues to poison the debate about immigration or about Islam, and the greatest ‘minority’ of all, women, are still far from attaining equality with men or the full protection of the law, as casual attitudes towards domestic violence or rape constantly attest.

We can look back on those grand old men of the eighteenth century and puzzle at their blindness and wilful self-delusion. If we don’t want future generations to look back at us with the same condescending contempt, we need to take a look at what we’re doing wrong in our time.

And fix it. Fast.