Last week, I raised a question that many people in today’s modern democracies sometimes wonder about: Can a politician be a saint? I pointed out that there are rare examples of such cases in history and cited Louis IX of France, Saint Louis (1214–1270). This would prove that a saint can be a politician but not necessarily that a politician can be a saint. And yet there is at least one modern politician who achieved something close to an uncontested state of secular sainthood: former South African President Nelson Mandela. It was partly due to his living martyrdom as a political prisoner for 27 years and even more so to the fact that, after so much suffering, he overturned an apartheid regime in South Africa that had become an object of quasi-universal obloquy. He was the good that clearly vanquished evil.
But what happens when we ask this variation on the question: Can a politician become a saint? Mandela’s aura of sanctity preceded his exercise of politics. In our modern democracies the very idea that a politician can become a saint seems unthinkable, if not outright fantastical. If only because all politicians spend at least half their time begging for money and the other half implementing laws favorable to those who funded them, sainthood seems reserved for other classes of people. And yet, in the case of American right-wing activist Charlie Kirk’s “martyrdom” we see that a broad swath of the population is hankering to see a figure identified with politics elected to sainthood.
US President George W. Bush and UK Prime Minister Tony Blair undoubtedly convinced themselves that, like Mandela, they had a noble mission to accomplish. They saw themselves, perhaps in the tradition of St. Louis, as crusaders defending the good vs. the evil infidel, Iraqi President Saddam Hussein. Their mission turned out to be mistaken when the evil they claimed to have identified for certain — weapons of mass destruction — turned out at best to be a figment of their shared imagination. And we now know that the good they believed they were executing produced manifestly evil effects.
Imagine, however, that after invading Iraq, inspectors discovered that there actually were weapons of mass destruction. Imagine equally that the regime change war executed by their “coalition of the willing” had produced the ideal fairy tale ending, an era of political bliss in the Middle East. From the Devil’s Advocate’s point of view, even if that turned out to be the case, they would still be denied sainthood. Why? Because we know they didn’t know but claimed they did. Anyone can be lucky, even a shameless liar.
British PMs and the root of all evil
Speaking of which, Blair’s successor two decades later, Boris Johnson, demonstrated his disqualification for sainthood most spectacularly in April 2022. He persuaded Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy not to sign a negotiated peace deal with Russia on the pretext that thanks to the backing of the NATO alliance, Russia would be handily defeated. It’s the old story of “a friend in need.” In case there was any doubt about the ambiguity of Bojo’s motives, The Guardian has recently revealed that Johnson’s advice to Ukraine’s president was a convenient way to secure a gift of a cool £1 million a year later thanks to the generosity of Christopher Harborne, a dear friend of Boris who happened to be in the business of selling weapons to Ukraine.
Blair has, of course, been in the news recently to demonstrate the long-term benefits of geopolitical initiatives capable of spreading havoc across an entire region, sacrificing more than a million lives in an endless war and provoking waves of desperate migrants seeking shelter in Europe. The resulting influx ensured the rise of populist xenophobic right-wing parties in multiple European democracies, whose influences have weakened their governments and economies. Blair later admitted that he had “underestimated Iraq’s destabilising forces,” much as Johnson would later underestimate the instability of Zelenskyy’s regime or the incoherence of NATO. Simple mistakes to make from the vantage point of 10 Downing Street. But all is for the good since his net worth is now estimated at $60 million and he’s likely to receive a major payout for his constructive work rebuilding Gaza.
This Devil’s Advocate believes that Blair was still lying when he made the following statement back in 2016: “We learned that once you get rid of the dictatorship, that is the beginning of a new chapter where all these poisonous forces and influences come out and start to disrupt the situation.” Not that his description of the consequences is false. What appears false is that he “learned” anything or that he is even capable of doing so. Yes, today, so The Guardian informs us, Blair ”appears to have won the endorsement of the Palestinian Authority to be involved in the reconstruction of Gaza.” But does that establish his credentials as an impartial builder? Al Jazeera describes the subservience of the Palestinian Authority (PA) in these terms: “The PA has actively helped Israel to keep tight control over the Palestinian population. Many perceive the body as a tool of the Israeli security apparatus.”
Is Angela Merkel a European outlier?
Most people with any insider experience of politics will admit that lying is part of the job. But there is good and bad lying. There is even another category: evil, diabolical lying. Most people would describe this as lies whose visible consequences are destructive war and the deaths of hundreds of thousands or millions of people. There may be some ambiguity about whether the awareness of the ensuing consequences was real at the time of the lie. It is thanks to that generous instinct that many Democrats in the United States who opposed Bush and his pursuit of the “global war on terror” consider him today a well-intentioned purveyor of regrettably mistaken policies. Even after understanding, based on well documented historical evidence, that there was massive prevarication.
American radio host Scott Horton has written an entire book about the history of lies that have contributed to fashioning the discourse of an entire generation of politicians and media commentators who have stated and continue to maintain, as if it was a verifiable truth, that Russia’s invasion of Ukraine in February 2022 was “unprovoked.” Horton provocatively titled his book, Provoked. The consensus around the idea that there was no rational explanation built around Russia’s fear of NATO expansion has been impressive, but flies in the face of historical reality. “Former German Chancellor Angela Merkel,” Horton writes, “later told Der Spiegel that she also considered Minsk to have been a ruse all along to buy time and prevent Ukraine from being overrun.” French President François Hollande, a signatory to the agreements, was pranked into admitting that “we were playing for time to strengthen Ukraine, to improve its military capabilities.” In June 2022, former Ukrainian President Petro Poroshenko, the principal signatory, explained that the Minsk accords “gave Ukraine eight years for building up [the] army, for building up [the] economy, and for building up [a] global pro-Ukrainian, anti-Putin coalition.”
More recently, Merkel demonstrated her peculiar taste for honesty, even at the risk of upsetting the quasi-unanimous consensus in Europe, when she described for Deutsche Welle “the events leading up to Russia’s attack on Ukraine in February 2022.” We notably learn that “she had initiated talks between the EU and Russia in June 2021, with the intention of stabilizing the fragile ceasefire between Ukraine and Russia.” Had she been allowed to do this, a nearly four-year-old war with potentially nuclear consequences that shows no sign of ending might have been avoided.
Keeping truth at bay: sticking to the battle lines
What could have possessed Frau Merkel to promote the outdated concept of diplomacy at what the recently elected US President Joe Biden insisted on calling a historical “inflection point?” Historians may end up seeing that moment in history more as an “infection point” coming as it did in the midst of the Covid-19 pandemic.
What did Biden think was being “inflected?” History itself? Or maybe the geopolitical rulebook? Or perhaps Biden was just catching up with the fact that the new century was already two decades old. In any case, the veteran 20th century politician solemnly stated a philosophical and moral position that consisted of affirming his steadfast opposition to the world’s “authoritarian” regimes. He considered them singularly unworthy of engaging in dialogue with the ever virtuous, deeply democratic members of NATO.
The US commander-in-chief was in effect ordering the world’s citizens to recognize a fundamental truth: that because the great, brave and always virtuous democracies were called upon to face off against cowardly autocracies, the time had come to eschew outdated doctrines inherited from the Cold War such as “indivisible security.” Russian President Vladimir Putin may continue to this day to insist on it as a convenient way of avoiding conflict, but that, for a leader as perspicacious as Biden, is only rhetoric. Putin’s unquestionably and officially designated “unprovoked invasion” of Ukraine proved that, at bottom, even Putin agreed with Biden that indivisible security made no sense. By lopping off four oblasts from the Ukrainian nation, Putin was practicing his brand of “divide and conquer.”
As for Merkel’s proposal in 2021 that the European Union negotiate with Russia, the media at the time apparently failed to even notice it. Since then, all commentators have erased it from their collective memory, which helps to explain their surprise when so brutally reminded of it. Worse than Merkel’s proposal, which had it been adopted would have literally saved millions of Ukrainian and Russian lives, was her citing the names of the nations that weighed in to prevent the EU from implementing it: the Baltic states and Poland. Biden wasn’t the only leader who opposed her heretical gambit.
“According to Merkel, she wanted ‘us as the European Union to talk directly to Putin.’ This was not supported by some countries, primarily the Baltic states. Poland was also against it as they were afraid that we did not have a common policy towards Russia.”
How impertinent of Merkel to remind them of that today, at a time when European leaders are united in preparing to wage a war their governments clearly cannot afford. But backing down today or acknowledging their failure to avoid a history-changing catastrophe is out of the question. It’s as if Merkel, the plain speaker, is trying to make Europe’s current breed of va-t-en-guerre leaders feel guilty. This cohort includes coalition-of-the-willing leaders French President Emmanuel Macron, UK Prime Minister Keir Starmer and German Chancellor Friedrich Merz.
The reaction from those nominally accused was immediate:
“‘It’s outrageous,’ Andris Pabriks, Latvia’s defense minister between 2019 and 2022, told DW. ‘Because basically, she’s accusing us of enabling the invasion. […] She’s turning things upside down and is unable to admit her own mistakes, which have actually cost a lot,’ he said.”
Note that Pabriks believes it is Merkel who is “unable to admit her mistakes.” She seems to be implying that pushing for diplomatic negotiations is a mistake. And she may be right. According to the current set of values that has possessed Europe, diplomacy is a sin.
Every devil in the lowest circles of Hell is celebrating this inversion in Europe’s scale of values.
*[The Devil’s Advocate pursues the tradition Fair Observer began in 2017 with the launch of our “Devil’s Dictionary.” It does so with a slight change of focus, moving from language itself — political and journalistic rhetoric — to the substantial issues in the news. Read more of The Fair Observer Devil’s Dictionary. The news we consume deserves to be seen from an outsider’s point of view. And who could be more outside official discourse than Old Nick himself?]
[Lee Thompson-Kolar edited this piece.]
The views expressed in this article are the author’s own and do not necessarily reflect Fair Observer’s editorial policy.
The post Martyrs, Money and the Manufacture of Political Holiness appeared first on Fair Observer.
from Fair Observer https://ift.tt/EXkKQ7p
0 Comments