Don't do as I do

Tweet

 

After more than six decades, it’s hard to remember exactly what I was taught about history in primary school, but such odd strands as come to mind relate more to the stories of individuals than those of peoples and cultures. The kings and queens of England certainly featured a little; the princes of Wales rather less, except around March 1st. For some people, that may be the only sort of history they ever learned, a version based on the idea of ‘great men’ whose deeds are treated as though they drove history rather than as sitting in any sort of wider context.

Whether it’s an accurate way of looking at history is another question entirely. How different, for instance, would the twentieth century have looked without a Churchill? He certainly had a way with words and many found him inspirational during a period of great challenge, although a more rounded picture can’t escape his innate racism, nor avoid wondering whether all his war time decisions were really as brilliant as they have been painted. If he hadn’t been there, who would have been in charge during the second world war, and would it have changed the outcome greatly? Would a different individual have risen to the challenge? We can never know, because we only live history once, and it is what it is. Related questions can be asked about Hitler, or Stalin. Were these uniquely evil people or, given the circumstances at the time, would they have simply been replaced by other, equally evil, individuals?

One of the justifications for political assassinations – a field in which the USA tends to excel, even if normally practiced outside the territory of the USA itself – is that killing evil men protects the rest of the world. And I’ve even seen some argue that if Hitler had been assassinated in the 1930s, the holocaust could have been avoided. Maybe, if the entire Nazi leadership had been ‘taken out’ before coming to power (even assuming that to be possible), things might have been different; but it’s impossible to tell and, by the time they had taken control of Germany, there were more than enough potential replacements. But there are at least two other problems with that scenario, even if we conclude that it would indeed have made a difference. The first is that it really means eliminating people before they’ve committed the crimes, and pre-emptive extra-judiciary execution isn’t something which can be easily justified morally. But the second is a much bigger, albeit incredibly simple, question with no easy answer – who decides?

Whilst Trump appears, at times at least, to be seriously unhinged and whilst he is, for many of us, a deeply unpleasant person generally unsuited to the job of president, his first term in office didn’t put him in the same category as a Stalin or a Hitler. Some of the proposals being floated for his second term have some very unlovely historical precedents but, given his propensity for distancing himself from concepts such as truth, judging him guilty to the extent of deserving to be executed on the basis of what he says today is, at the least, premature. It’s certainly not the sort of decision which any society with even the remotest claims to being democratic and abiding by the rule of law should be leaving to a lone gunman with a rifle.

The condemnation of yesterday’s attack has rightly been near-universal, but the reaction of both Trump and Biden would sound a lot more sincere if there was some sign that it had caused either of them to reflect on the USA’s long-standing proclivity for conducting or facilitating assassinations elsewhere.