By Steve Bolton
One of the most disturbing aspects of modern Western
civilization is that the men and women popularly recognized as “great leaders”
in our day are, in fact, quite good at leading. Yet most of them are only great
in the sense of being great failures as human beings, and are praised solely
for leading humanity in the wrong directions.
Humanity is apparently permanently prone to the
temptation of praising monsters merely for their success in business, on the
battlefield or in politics, without taking into account the means or ends of
their conquests. If this were not true, our ancestors would not have fallen
into the bad habit of affixing the epithet “the Great” after the names of some
of history’s greatest butchers. In fact, every single one of the “great”
political leaders honored with this title was only great at committing evil. Among
the first examples in the annals of history was Ramses II (1279– 1213 B.C),
the best-known pharaoh of ancient Egypt, who shed a lot of blood in the Middle
East to establish the power of his dynasty throughout the region. Yet instead
of using his conquests to benefit the common people of Egypt, he put his
kingdom to work building monuments to his own name - in precisely the same
manner that all of the worst despots of the 20th Century, from Kim
Il Sung to Lenin to Saddam Hussein, filled their own nations with statues and
immense portraits of themselves. This was a magnification of an endemic fault
in ancient Egyptian civilization, which is wrongly praised for erecting useless
monuments like the pyramids. Their engineering skills were certainly
impressive, but this is not to their credit, any more than the scientific
prowess of the Third Reich reflected well on Nazi Germany. It is no credit to
Ramses II or the ancient Egyptians that they expended so much human life and
resources glorifying evil monarchs in such a gaudy way, rather than spending it
on productive projects like aqueducts, canals or greater rations of food for
the common people.
Alexander the Great (356-323 B.C.) likewise
accomplished little except to spread carnage across the Middle East, as far as
the western edge of India. This violent and possibly bisexual megalomaniac succeeded
only in plowing the sea, to borrow an expression from Simon Bolivar, for after
his death at the age of 33 (probably from an infectious disease of some sort)
the territory he conquered was carved up into four separate dynasties, all of
which evaporated within a few generations. His military conquests were
impressive for his age, but were utterly pointless in the end; his short-lived
empire was large by ancient standards, but the whole region represented merely
a small fraction of the territories of the empires that ruled it later, like
the first Muslim caliphate and the Mongol and Ottoman Empires. One of the other
well-known “Greats” of ancient times was Herod the Great (74-4 B.C.), the King
of Judea, who was despised as one of the most vicious and unbalanced despots of
all time, even before he butchered the first born males of Jerusalem in an
attempt to kill Jesus in infancy. Peter the Great (1672–1725) and Catherine the
Great (1729-1796) were not quite that bad, but they hardly deserve the acclaim
they receive in our history books for “modernizing” Russia. What this meant, in
practice, was forcibly subjugating the common people and enforcing new extremes
of exploitation upon them. Catherine, for example, is celebrated as a heroine
of the Enlightenment for associating with such trendy philosophers as Voltaire
and Diderot, but in practice she acted like an incredibly reactionary despot,
to the point of reinstituting serfdom for Russia’s suffering peasants. When
they naturally revolted in 1773, she crushed them without mercy. Both Peter and
Catherine gutted freedom of religion in Russia by subjugating the local branch
of the Eastern Orthodox Church and making it a virtual arm of the state, which
helped lead to its current anemic, ineffectual state. By fomenting inequality
they helped create the socioeconomic conditions for the Russian Revolution of
1917; by stamping the life out of the Eastern Orthodox Church, they ensured
that no force would be potent enough to stand up against the Bolsheviks when
that revolution came; and the tradition of despotism they strengthened would
help the Communists establish a totalitarian regime, once the Revolution was
over. Catherine’s contemporary, Frederick the Great (1712–1786) of Prussia,
likewise paved the way for the Nazi takeover of Germany a century and a half
after his death. He upset the balance of power in Europe by seizing the
province of Silesia from Austria in 1740, in a particularly brazen way that is
reminiscent of Hitler’s own naked aggressions. He then joined with Russia in
partitioning Poland and engaging in other wars that would later enable Prussia,
with its militaristic culture, to unify Germany in the 19th Century,
rather than Austria. Many of Nazi Germany’s most noxious characteristics, such
as its preoccupation with militarism and penchant for naked aggression, can be
traced back to this “Great” leader, who was so beloved by Hitler himself. Ivan
the Terrible (1530-1584) outdid all of these rulers except for Herod in
brutality, but he was cut from the same cloth. It would be far more accurate to
affix Ivan’s epithet to Ramses, Alexander, Herod, Peter, Catherine and
Frederick, for they were all Terrible rulers. Only Peter had the best interests
of his people at heart, but the means he used to modernize Russia did not
justify the ends.
Such
men are still praised to this day, despite the inconvenient fact that their
deeds were often monstrous. Their bad behavior is either ignored, explained
away or rationalized as the unfortunate cost of some materialistic goal, like
“modernization” or technological progress. Unfortunately, the same red carpet
treatment is still given in modern times to demagogues and despots, even to
butchers who are still alive and walking freely on our streets today. A decade
ago, it was still possible to find elderly Russians who clung to the old propaganda
about “Papa Joe” Stalin as a father figure to the nation, despite the fact that
he butchered at least 20 million Russian citizens. Similarly, some Mongolians
view Genghis Khan as a great national hero merely because he brought their
ancestors temporary fame and fortune centuries ago. To do this, they must
downplay the fact that he was the greatest butcher and war monger of all time,
one whose final death toll was limited only by 13th Century
technology and the limited world population of his age. One of the most
sickening examples from our age is the devotion that Efrain Rios Montt still
enjoys in Guatemala, despite the fact that his death squads murdered more than
a hundred thousand innocent civilians, after he participated in a CIA-backed military
coup in 1982. Earlier his year, formal charges of genocide were finally brought
against him, but until then he walked the streets of Guatemala with impunity
and even dared to run for elected offices like the presidency. He retains a
devoted core of supporters, mainly among former peasants soaked in propaganda
by the death squads in the 1980s and members of Protestant cults that Montt
introduced into the country.
Applause for Our War Criminals: How
Reagan, North, Dulles and Kissinger Betrayed America
The
assumption that such bad examples are confined to historical figures from
supposedly ignorant cultures is actually a sign of American arrogance, for we
are becoming even more prone to justifying monsters than other societies of the
past or present. One of the worst examples is the slavish, fawning devotion
given to Ronald Reagan, whose presidency was a complete and unmitigated
disaster in every conceivable area of public policy. He claimed to be a
Christian, but in practice what he actually worshipped was wealth and status;
like much of the Republican Right, his belief system was actually synonymous in
every way with that of the Pharisees, the right-wing order of arrogant
religious men who killed Jesus. He was believer in capitalism, which on its
face is an anti-Christian economic ideology, one that conflicts with all of the
mandatory Catholic commandments against speculation, paying unjust wages,
charging unjust prices, usury, hoarding, monopoly power and the like. Instead
of upgrading the nation’s union movement into full-fledged guilds, as popes
like Leo XIII called for, he gutted them, in order to exploit the common people
more easily. Reagan and his followers conveniently ignored the innumerable
condemnations against the worship of wealth in the Bible, such as the warning
by Jesus that it will be easier for a camel to pass through the eye of a needle
than for a rich man to get into Heaven, as well as warning against treating the
poor as if they were sinners, such as Sirach 13:24: “Poverty is evil in the
opinion of the ungodly.” Instead he and his ilk infected our culture with a
virulent new brand of materialism and class prejudice, in which the rich are
viewed as oppressed heroes and the poor as loathsome deadbeats living off the
Captains of Industry. As a result, we have suffered from more than three
decades of continually falling living standards, wanton deregulation of Big
Business and a continuous shift of the tax burden from the rich onto the middle
class. Reaganomics was a crackpot economic theory that led the nation straight
into bankruptcy; before his second term was over, he had already
single-handedly transformed the nation from the world’s leading creditor to its
greatest debtor in just a few short years. The economic philosophy he preached
was not only contradictory and fiscally disastrous, but anti-Christian to boot.
He couldn’t even get the sexual side of Christian ethics right, given that he
was our first and only president to be divorced and remarried – in direct
contravention of Matthew 5:32, which says that “he who marries a divorced woman
causes her to commit adultery.” The Republican Right hypocritically hounded
Bill Clinton for committing a few instances of adultery while office, while
conveniently ignoring the fact that Reagan committed it every day of his
presidency.
To
make matters worse, he was complicit in aiding the current genocide of
abortion, which has claimed 43 million American lives since 1973. Reagan won
the presidency largely on the strength of Christian voters who fell for his
false campaign promises to fight abortion, just as they have fallen for the
same trick of the Republican Party ever since. Yet privately, Reagan wasn’t
committed to the cause at all. He was far more concerned with his crusade against
Christian ideals on wealth and status, to the point of flouting the
Constitution. In 1980, abortion was not yet an ingrained part of our
civilization, so it might have been possible to fight the Supreme Court’s
illegal decision in Roe v. Wade, if
Reagan were willing to risk a constitutional crisis. He was not willing to
fight to prevent the killing of our own babies at home, but he was quite
enthusiastic about securing his own right to kill foreign babies. That is what
the Iran-Contra Affair boiled down to, basically. Congress denied Reagan funding
to supply military equipment to the Contras, an army of misfits the CIA had
trained in terrorist tactics to overthrow the democratically elected government
of Nicaragua, largely because they were only adept at killing tens of thousands
of innocent civilians. So Reagan simply stole the money and equipped them
anyways, then compounded his crime by trading arms to one of our staunchest
enemies, Iran, in order to finance it. This amounted to treason as well as a
breach of the Constitution every bit as serious as Watergate - all for the
privilege of equipping an army of terrorists to kill innocent foreigners, in order
to prevent a democratic government from carrying out some mild economic reforms
that Corporate America didn’t like. A wide section of public was vehemently
opposed to the Reagan Administration’s wars in Nicaragua, El Salvador and other
Third World states, at a time when the movement against the Vietnam War was
still part of recent memory, so it is unlikely that he could have invaded them
at will without risking a veritable uprising at home. That is why Lt. Col.
Oliver North (when he wasn’t busy stealing public property and handing it over
to the same genocidal rebels) drew up a plan called Readiness Exercise 1984, in
which he envisioned suspending the Constitution and using the armed forces to
round up critics of the Reagan Administration, if it chose to invade Nicaragua
and El Salvador. If there were any justice in the world, both Reagan and North
would have stood trial for crimes against humanity merely for handing over
arms, training and cash to the Contras and death squads of El Salvador and
Guatemala. Several hundred thousand Central Americans were butchered by these
terrorist groups with your tax dollars, almost all of them civilians, many of
them children.
It
is a measure of how Orwellian our society has become that we have honored
Reagan’s crimes by naming the airport of our nation’s capital after him, while
North was cheered as a hero in 1987 by a section of the public for treating
Congress contemptuously in hearings on the Iran-Contra scandal. Yet these are
merely two of the worst examples in America’s long history of honoring
monsters. In fact, Washington, D.C.’s other airport is named after former Secretary
of State John Foster Dulles, another right wing fanatic who was likewise
responsible for some of America’s greatest foreign policy crimes during the
Eisenhower years. Even the CIA recognized that Guatemala was a charnel house by
the 1980s, but this situation was entirely produced by Dulles, who engineered
the overthrow of the nation’s democratically elected president in 1954 to
prevent him from nationalizing the United Fruit Company’s properties. He was
also directly responsible for our current disastrous rivalry with Iran, whose
democratic government he also overthrew in 1953, in order to prevent its
president from nationalizing our oil investments there. In both of these
incidents, Dulles put our national honor, resources and the lives of our
soldiers at risk, at the behest of corrupt cronies in Corporate America. He was
not merely a terrible failure as the head of our State Department but a war
criminal to boot, given that these actions were punishable under international
law. Likewise, the media has anointed Henry Kissinger as the éminence grise of
our foreign policy establishment, but this is due more to his stylish German
accent and renowned ability to manipulate reporters, not for any competence on
his own part. He was guilty of unnecessarily prolonging the Vietnam War, at the
cost of thousands of American lives and hundreds of thousands of Vietnamese
civilians who were bombed mercifully throughout his tenure. Kissinger was one
of the chief architects of the American intervention in neighboring Cambodia,
which destabilized the nation so badly that it opened the door for the genocide
of the Khmer Rouge in the late ‘70s. Like Dulles, Reagan and North, he was
guilty of numerous war crimes, such as conniving in the overthrow of duly
elected Chilean President Salvador Allende, merely to stop him from
nationalizing mines owned by the Kennecott and Anaconda copper companies. When
the dust settled, the Chilean military had killed 30,000 civilians, as well as
Allende himself. To make matters worse, Kissinger allowed himself to be
manipulated by Israel during the Yom Kippur War, to the point that we nearly
got involved in a nuclear confrontation with the Soviet Union over minor
geopolitical matters which really had no effect on the balance of power. This
should have been highly embarrassing, given that Kissinger’s whole faulty
philosophy of international relations revolves around that concept. He is
credited with opening up China to the West in order to play it off against the
Soviet Union, but it was actually Mao Tse-Tung who successfully played us off
against the Soviets. That is why China emerged from the Cold War in a better
geostrategic position than either of the superpowers. Kissinger accomplished
nothing during his tenure except to get more American soldiers and more foreign
civilians killed, often on behalf of corrupt interests, while simultaneously
draining the national treasury and putting the security of the whole planet at
risk. Incredibly, he got away with these crimes with his reputation as a
foreign policy guru intact, just as he got away with participating in the
Watergate-era wiretap scandals without serving a day in jail.
Bad Businessmen and Muddled Thinkers
The greatest crimes against humanity typically occur
in international relations, first because it is the level of politics most
removed from the common people and therefore the most corrupt, and second
because so many lives and so much wealth is at stake. That is why all of the
bad leaders I have listed so far all exercised some kind of power on the
international stage. One of the unique aspects of the West’s modern commercial
civilization, however, is its penchant for glorifying a particular class of
thieves guilty of committing crimes lesser crimes on a national scale. America
is particularly vulnerable to this fault, possibly because we have been
governed by salesmen and merchants for at least the past century; both
professions are adept at smooth talking and subtly deceptive advertising, which
may be why they have succeeded in making us praise the Robber Barons among us.
In fact, one of our most prestigious magazines, Fortune 500, is geared entirely
towards glorifying the faults of the leading swindlers in Corporate America. As
the great Catholic writer G.K. Chesterton once pointed out, many of our modern
capitalists would have been beaten in the public squares of most medieval towns
for manipulating markets and wielding monopoly powers. These are among a class
of economic activities that the Catholic Church dogmatically defined long ago as
crimes, along with speculation, usury, paying unjust wages and charging unjust
prices, which also happen to be the chief means by which most capitalists make
their fortunes. Andrew Carnegie, J.P. Morgan and John D. Rockefeller would
never have grown fat at the public’s expense if they could not commit these
sins with impunity; the charitable works they did for the public are of no
consequence, because at best, they merely restored a little of what they stole
to the public. Chesterton pointed out many other the shortcomings of the kind
of condescending philanthropy that capitalists are routinely and quite wrongly
applauded for. The following warning from
Matthew 6:1-2 applies to every philanthropist who donates a medical building
with their own name affixed to it, or starts a foundation named after
themselves: “Be careful not to practice your righteousness in front of others
to be seen by them. If you do, you will have no reward from your Father in
heaven. So when you give to the needy, do not announce it with trumpets, as the
hypocrites do in the synagogues and on the streets, to be honored by others.
Truly I tell you, they have received their reward in full. But when you give to
the needy, do not let your left hand know what your right hand is doing, so
that your giving may be in secret. Then your Father, who sees what is done in
secret, will reward you.”
Many
of the billionaires living among us today fall into the same boat, such as Bill
Gates. He is widely praised for donating a fraction of his money to the poor,
but he attaches his own name to his acts of charity, plus he does not follow
the rule of Mother Teresa: “Give until it hurts.” If our capitalist class made
its money honestly, they would still have to give as secretly as possible, to
the point that their sacrifices put their own physical well-being in doubt,
before they would deserve any praise. Given that most of their fortunes are
acquired through economic sins rather than through hard work of their own, then
they are honor bound to restore every dollar they have stolen from the public
anyways, merely to avoid blame. Carnegie and Rockefeller didn’t succeed because
God loved them more, or because they performed labor that was of unusual
valuable to the public; they were simply criminals who went unpunished. The
same applies to men like Gates, who got rich by applying the principles of the
Robber Barons to the software industry, not because he wrote better computer
code than anyone else. He railed against widespread sharing of code between programmers
in an effort to make software proprietary – yet he himself was the greatest
software pirate in history. As depicted in the 1999 film Pirates of Silicon Valley, Gates simply stole code from Xerox and
Apple, then deliberately manipulated the entire software industry to make
programmers and consumers alike dependent on Microsoft’s code. His rival in
that film, legendary Apple executive Steve Jobs, was no better. After his death
last October, the media was rife with positive portrayals of his life and
praise for his technological vision. He was undoubtedly a genius when it came
to product development and marketing, but these skills have no bearing
whatsoever on his character, which was deeply flawed. By all accounts, he was a
mean-spirited monster with a bad temper, who abused his employees without
mercy. This is really the only thing
about him that matters. Fans of Jobs and other capitalists with the exact same
faults like to deflect such criticism through dishonest means, such as pointing
out all of the products they designed, the railroads they built and the
buildings that they erected. Yet if their philanthropy was no credit to them,
then matters of pure business certainly aren’t either. Such people think that
man is made for technology, rather than technology for man. Toys like the iPad
are worthless in comparison; in fact, many modern inventions actually make us
more miserable in the long run, because all they do is make the rat race run
faster. Most of humanity would be content to live in peace with fewer material
goods, but slave drivers like Jobs make it impossible. Capitalists like to laud
the spirit of competition – as long as they are insulated from it themselves by
their oligopolies and fortunes – but the version they preach comes from the
Devil, because it is based on class prejudice and force. The excuse that men
like Rockefeller and Jobs make the trains run on time is precisely the pretext
that the Germans of the 1930s used to whitewash Hitler’s excesses.
These
perverse ideas were defended with greater clarity during the Enlightenment, by
such philosophers as Adam Smith (1723-1790). Like many of his contemporaries,
however, Smith didn’t know what he was talking about; “the Invisible Hand” that
he speaks of in The Wealth of Nations
was shown to be demonstrably false by the mid-19th Century, when an
absence of government anti-trust regulation made it possible for monopolies to
appear. “Free markets” do not regulate themselves so serendipitously, any more
than Kissinger’s balance of power automatically maintains itself without a
conscious effort; that is precisely why capitalists like the concept, because
it allows them to establish monopolies free of competition or regulation, in
the name of competition itself. It would be a mistake to call Smith a monster,
or any of his contemporary philosophers, like Thomas Malthus (1766-1834) or
Charles Darwin (1809-1882), for they were probably decent people in person. Yet
the vast majority of the philosophies of the Enlightenment were not only false,
but were used for despicable purposes for future generations of monsters. For
example, almost all of the famous names of German philosophy in the 18th
and 19th Century contributed to the rise of Hitler in the 20th.
Racism, for example, was given an intellectual justification by Joseph Arthur
de Gobineau (1816-1882), while Freidrich Nietzsche (1844-1900) provided the
fascination with power and distaste for Christian ethics. Men like Ludwig
Bucher (1824-1899), Jacob Moleschott (1822-1893), Albrecht Ritschl (1822-1889),
Ernst Haeckel (1834-1919) and many others contributed the anti-Christian
elements of the Nazi program. Other celebrated German philosophers like G.W.F.
Hegel (1770-1831), Friedrich Jodl (1849-1914), Emile Durkheim (1858-1917),
Freidrich W.J. Schelling (1775-1854) and Freidrich Schleiermacher (1768-1834)
all made their own unwitting contributions to the Holocaust. So did Darwin,
whose whole philosophy lent itself to racist interpretations of history.
Because Germany’s main moral fault was excess nationalism, Hitler was able to
seize upon the excuse that if we are descended from animals, then the Jews and
Slavs might be closer to them on the evolutionary tree than Aryans. Because
America’s main fault has always been class prejudice, our own thinkers turned
evolution into the philosophy of Social Darwinism, or the idea that capitalists
have been selected by Nature itself to exploit their fellow man, which makes
regulation of business tantamount to obstruction of human Progress; this is an
idea, by the way, which has never fallen out of favor among the upper class.
Likewise, Malthus’ philosophy of overpopulation was proven false beyond a
shadow of a doubt as he wrote it, since Europe was then in the beginning of an
unprecedented population boom thanks to unexpected advances in technology,
which drastically increased the carrying capacity of the planet. That carrying
capacity is still increasing for the same reason as we speak, yet Malthus’
false ideas are being used as excuses to justify population limitation through
contraception and abortion. The latter of these has cost a billion lives
worldwide in the last four decades, a number equivalent to a sixth of the
world’s current population, in the greatest genocide in the history of the
planet.
Almost
all of the Enlightenment philosophers failed to shed any light on anything,
because they weren’t particularly intelligent, but they did help powerful men
with dark motives to conceal their crimes. Most of them exhibited a particularly
unbalanced habit common to Protestant thinkers, of looking at only one side of
an argument; this is what Malthus did when viewed people merely as mouths to
feed, rather than as hands that could be put to work to produce more food.
Despite the manifest failures of their ideas, many of the Enlightenment
philosophers are still revered as “great thinkers,” when clear thought was
precisely what they lacked. A modern equivalent might be Stephen Hawking, who the
media has anointed as the smartest man alive, largely due to the fact that he
has a highly visible disability, not because he’s a particularly good physicist –
or a particularly good person, given that he is an abusive double-divorcee with
a bad attitude. Like most physicists, Hawking routinely strays into metaphysics
without realizing it, then makes grand pronouncements which betray just how
foolish and mean-spirited he really can be. I seriously doubt he has ever read
the Summa Theologica, or has any
other training in theology, but the media gives him a platform for vicious
views like this: “I regard the brain as a computer which will stop working when
its components fail. There is no heaven or afterlife for broken down computers;
that is a fairy story for people afraid of the dark.”[1]
If Hawking were half as intelligent as the media thinks he is, he would be
capable of much more sophisticated arguments than this one, which is so weak that
even I could punch holes through it. Yet he is still honored as the leading
genius of Western civilization.
Applause From Monsters: Why the New
America Loves Villains and Bad Role Models
The
reverence all of these historical figures enjoy is a testimony to the power of
propaganda, which is magnified by the power of the modern media. The really
disturbing thing about our modern penchant for praising monsters, however, is
that it also being fueled by a declining capacity for criticism on the part of
the public at large. It is difficult to pinpoint what this breakdown in the use
of human reason stems from, but it can be gauged by the amount of propaganda
required to produce an unreasonable result. Not only is the mass media growing
more sophisticated and more ubiquitous, but our capacity for filtering out bad
reasoning seems to be declining drastically. One of the signs of this has been
the frightening speed with which the whole of Western civilization has
succumbed to the idea of homosexual marriage, without any critical examination
of the historical evidence and logic against it. Another is the proliferation of entertainers as
candidates for political office in the U.S., such as Clint Eastwood, Jesse Ventura, Sonny Bono
and Arnold Schwarzenegger, as if they were actually qualified to speak on
matters of public policy or had any special insight into the nation’s problems, simply because their television characters were entertaining.
Reagan’s presidency was one of the first symptoms of this plague of bad
judgment. He was an entertainer, not a capable leader, but was talented at
convincing people he was, simply because of how he spoke. Reagan was an expert
in two professions which specialize in lying, acting and politics, and put
himself at the disposal of Big Business, which specializes in advertising and
sales, yet his naïve supporters seem surprised at the suggestion that almost
everything he represented was a lie. He was quite capable of making people feel
good about themselves, even after his cronies had picked the nation’s pockets,
but that is precisely what salesmen and politicians do. What he proved is that
the public will swallow any justification given to them, as long as it is
packaged the right way – which is odd, given that just ten years before
Reagan’s presidency, the nation was embroiled in deep political, class and
racial conflicts which had sharpened the public’s capacity for debate. Back
then, most of the nation had the critical capacity to recognize that Malcolm X
was a villain; a few decades later, Spike Lee (a director I normally respect)
was able to change that image overnight simply by producing a slick and biased
film about his life. The fact that Malcolm X converted to a religion is held up
as prima facie evidence that he became a better man, without asking if he was
betraying Christianity in favor of a false faith. He claimed to follow
Mohammed, whose name has now been deemed immune from criticism by the mass
media, despite the manifest crimes against humanity that the Koran openly
speaks of him committing. Pointing out the historical facts that he murdered a group of Jews in cold
blood, authorized rape of virgins during
war and said that God gave him alone the right to marry nine wives, including
his nine-year-old niece, is now labeled as “hate speech,” even though the Koran
says this itself. His actions were as hateful as those of any of “the Greats” I
pointed out earlier, but this fact must be swept under the rug, out of a
cowardly fear of offending his followers.
Mohammad should not be praised merely because the religion he founded now has a
billion adherents, any more than Alexander should be praised for conquering
territory, or the Robber Barons for building railroads. Malcolm X should not be
admired by blacks simply because he was a black activist, or by the public at
large simply because a movie was made about him. Likewise, Kissinger is praised
more for his foreign accent than his accomplishments, just as Reagan was
admired for making America feel good about itself, even as he was setting it on
a course toward ruin.
What all of these historical figures have in common is
that they were listened to merely for possessing status, wealth, eloquence and
other gifts, not for how they used them. As I have discussed elsewhere ad
infinitum, the New Testament gives us a complete personality profile of the
Pharisees, the religious order that worshipped wealth and status and killed
Jesus because he stood in their way. People who think like them seem to be most
at risk of being fooled by the same kind of nonsense, particularly the
so-called Religious Right and the right wing of the Republican Party. People
who fall into this bracket seem easily impressed by such external factors as
“dressing for success,” personal popularity and clever speech, like the
Pharisees were. Men like Reagan and North are heroes to rich bourgeoisie, as
well as to members of the lower classes who think they deserve to be rich,
because they tell bad men that it is a virtue to do bad things, which is
equivalent to granting liberty to oppressors. They are more likely to admire a
man for being influential, rather than for how they use that influence,
especially if it helps free other influential men from using their gifts responsibly.
In this, they follow the lead of the second-most influential intelligence in
history, Satan. When a society weakens morally, it becomes more susceptible to
the kind of shock and awe that this false angel of light is adept at employing,
which may be behind the mental breakdown of America. The more we succumb to the
materialistic lures of our commercial civilization, the less capable we will be
at using abstract skills of reasoning and the more amenable we will be to
external elements of style like Kissinger’s accent or Jobs’ flashy technology
over the substance of their character. The
harder at heart we become, the softer we will get in the head, to paraphrase
Chesterton. The less glitz it takes to dazzle us, the less sophisticated the
arguments will have to be to convince us to admire bad things or bad men.
If Western civilization weren’t rapidly losing its
capacity for reason, it would strive to prevent the Kissingers, Jobs and
Reagans of the future from arising to positions of influence, not imitating
them. If we did act against them, they would probably play the martyr card and
unfortunately, many millions of Americans and other Westerners would probably
swallow the ploy hook, line and sinker. Margaret Sanger and Bin Laden
(who is wildly popular in the Eastern Hemisphere, where Osama is now the
second-most common name for newborn Muslim boys) are two modern monsters who
proved that evil geniuses can play that game too, for the benefit of the most
perverse causes. Self-sacrifice is a prerequisite for real heroism, but it is
not the sole requirement; in fact, it may actually make evil men a hundred
times more dangerous. It was the willingness of Mafiosos to make sacrifices for
the omerta which made the Cosa Nostra
so much more effective than any other criminal organization of the 20th
Century, for example. The possession of any type of gifts does not justify a
man either; as many Catholic saints have pointed out, wealth in particular puts
a man at particular risk of damnation.[2]
Even possession of legitimate authority does not necessarily guarantee that a
man will exercise it correctly; in some cases, excessive deference to authority
may even qualify as the sin that St. Thomas Aquinas identified as “the respect
of persons.” Lauding people merely for possessing such gifts will inevitably
lead to praise of monsters of one brand or another, particularly conquerors and
bad businessmen. A portion of the public is particularly prone to certain idols
that convey status, which causes them to lose all common sense on cue whenever
a seducer puts on a suit or waves a flag in front of them. Admiration for mere
possession of these things is actually an evil. Praising someone for causing
injustice is actually intrinsically immoral, which is why I have little
tolerance for admirers of any of the monsters I have listed here. It behooves
anyone who is going to take stands on issues like this to make every effort to
find out what they’re talking about, because the wrong answers can lead to
injuries and even mass murder against countless innocents. Yet it is rarely
done, because abstract thought is hard work. This is less of an excuse today,
when information is so widely available through the Internet. The people I have
least tolerance for, however, are those who have information about the
wrongdoing of their favorite heroes at hand, but choose to call it good. You
have a legal right, thanks to the blessing called freedom of speech, to speak
your mind, no matter how corrupt it may be – but it doesn’t give anyone the
moral right to speak or think evil. Freedom of speech does not mean freedom
from criticism, for I am within my free speech rights to call your choice of
heroes disgusting, if you indeed admire the monsters listed here despite full
knowledge of their crimes.
Anyone may speak in America today in favor of all sorts of
wildly incompatible causes, running the full gamut from capitalism to Islam to
homosexuality to anti-smoking fanaticism to the watered down, counterfeit
version of Catholicism taught today across most of the West. The one common
denominator that unites them all is that they are contrary to Catholicism, as
defined by the encyclicals of the popes, the documents of the church councils
and the writings of the saints. These people defined a hero as a person who
sacrifices themselves to prevent injustice, not as one who sacrifices others to
prevent justice, like all of the monsters I have mentioned here. In their
definition, heroes take away the freedom of the wicked to do evil, rather than
taking away liberty from the good. Usually, when we hear a public figure
praised, it is because the blind are leading the blind. To avoid falling in the
ditch, we must have a clear definition of what heroism and good leadership
really are, which entails a detailed standard of justice that we can make
judgments by. As Chesterton points, the really unique thing about Jesus is that
he exhibited all of the virtues defined in Catholicism, not just one. There
must be something good about the Catholic standard, for one stark fact of
historical veracity: the only three prominent men of history commonly called
“the Great” who actually behaved in a humane way were all leaders of the
Catholic Church. Albert the Great (1206-1280), the Catholic thinker, was
perhaps the smartest man in the history of Western civilization aside from his
pupil, St. Thomas Aquinas, or perhaps Leonardo da Vinci. The characters of both
Pope Leo the Great (391-461 A.D.) and Pope Gregory the Great (540-604 A.D.)
were beyond reproach. It is high time we started giving genuine heroes like
this the admiration they are due, rather than saving it for monsters. Then we
will recognize that it is our duty to prevent bad men in high places from doing
monstrous things, for as Proverbs 28:4 makes clear, “Those who forsake the law
praise the wicked, but those who keep the law strive against them.”
The writer is a former journalist with a Bachelor’s in
journalism and a Master’s in history from the State University of New York at
Brockport, with a focus on American foreign policy and specializations in
U.S.-Latin American relations and counterinsurgency history. He has worked as a
paid foreign policy columnist for several newspapers and has credit towards a doctorate
in Latin America history. He is a convert to Catholicism from atheism and has
been an avid reader of textbooks on topics ranging from particle physics to
psychology to economics since age 9.
[1] Chaplain
Mike, 2012, "The Sad Views of Stephen Hawking," published May 17,
2012 a the Internet Monk website page available at
http://www.internetmonk.com/archive/the-sad-views-of-stephen-hawking .
[2]
The last word on this topic is Chrysostom, St. John, 1869, Four Discourses,
Chiefly on the Parable of the Rich Man and Lazarus. Longmans, Green, Reader
and Dyer: London.
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