David Beresford
ANOTHER COUNTRY
Leafing through an old copy of the Penguin Book of Lies (out of which falls a dusty gift card fondly admonishing me not to “take it personally”) I am moved to a confession, not as to a lie, but a resource.
Parkinson’s gets one down from time to time – times sometimes marked by my shuffling around in querulous search of a battered booklet published by Stanford University’s Hoover Institution on war, revolution and peace.
My confession is by way of embarrassment, because old political instincts urge me to hide, rather than publicly discover it.
For a start it is written by someone called James Bond Stockdale, which smacks of parody. A naval pilot on the “wrong” side of the Vietnam War, he is transparently an “American patriot”.
And he concludes the booklet – entitled Courage under Fire – with the cloying sentimental lines of WE Henley’s Invictus: “It matters not how strait the gate/How charged with punishment the scroll/I am the master of my fate/I am the captain of my soul.”
In other words Stockdale (vice-admiral today) runs the gamut of my personal and political prejudices.
I stumbled across this publication by accident. Despite the prejudices I quickly became engrossed.
Based on a speech delivered at King’s College, London, in 1993 it is a brief account of Stockdale’s eight years as a prisoner of war after being shot down over North Vietnam. He spent four of the eight years in solitary, two years in leg-irons and was tortured on many occasions.
Stockdale had done a postgraduate course in philosophy at Stanford before his capture and developed a passion for the Stoics, relying on their teachings to survive his subsequent ordeal.
What intrigues about the booklet is not Stoicism, but why I should be embarrassed by its authorship. Stockdale, holder of the Congressional Medal of Honour, is – no matter what his taste in poetry – an admirable human being. So why the reluctance to recognise it?
The answer is that concatenation of lies which did not make it into the Penguin Book of Lies (published as it was in 1990) – the Cold War. Because, of course, my prejudice against Stockdale was as a “Cold War warrior”.
Even now, looking back over the Cold War years, I suspect I have not come to a full appreciation of how that conflict warped my view of the world. I say that as one who prided himself on being a professional sceptic.
I was frankly astonished by the power of the totalitarian lie and the confusions of perspective it gave rise to.
The extent of those distortions was brought home to me in Mozambique.
Renamo had long enjoyed a special place in my catalogue of infamy, for a record of hideous atrocity seemingly confirmed by allegiance … heads planted on supermarket shelves … children made to butcher their own parents … founded by Ian Smith’s illegal regime …
The devilish nature of Renamo was a “truth” over which I had often waxed indignant in print. Which led to a simple paradox confronting me when I visited Maputo for the election of 1994: that these “bandits” enjoyed sufficient support to be credibly challenging for power in a democratic ballot.
Puzzling over this conundrum, I hurried off on a long overdue trip to test rural sentiment in a war-time “hot spot” well removed from the capital.
The picture I returned with offered no claims of atrocity as such, but a bitterness at being visited by the hardship and brutality attendant on war – a bitterness nursed towards Renamo and Frelimo with striking impartiality.
How had my misapprehension arisen? The government’s manipulation of the media might have had some impact. But I remain convinced the West outstripped the Soviets in the closely related black arts of propaganda, psychops, public relations and spin-doctoring.
Besides, the Cold War involved delusion on such a scale that even governments fell victim to it – notably Western governments which so memorably fooled themselves with regard to the economic and military strength of the Soviet Union up to the moment of its collapse.
Looking back on the Cold War period, at its mad landscape of competing hysterias and collective self-delusions, one cannot help but marvel at the failure of our species to recognise our inability to reliably inform ourselves.
It impinges most seriously on leadership. All men being born equal in their capacity for self-delusion, none are fit to lead, at least in anything more than a nominal capacity.
Looking back on the 20th century the factor most destructive in its impact on the social order is the conceit of political leaders that they enjoyed a wisdom given recognition by leadership.
Nelson Mandela was threatened by the syndrome, to judge from a brief flurry of presi-dential pronouncements on such as the need to enfranchise children, but in the end was saved by his apparent understanding of the theatrical nature of politics.
The Ronald Reagan administration is castigated for his self-evident stupidity. But is it not to be applauded for the recognition that all the presidential role properly demands is for an incumbent to maintain his vacuous grin for the cameras.
Plato advocated rule by philosopher- kings. From our vantage point in time we can see this to have been a contradiction in terms. Only in comic roles are kings nowadays to be exalted.
Who is to rule us? But why do we want rulers? We have the law. Not statutory law – representative, as it so often is, of the tyranny of the day – nor even the “quick fix” of constitutional law, but the common law, the evolutionary nature of which most closely mirrors if not the purpose, then at least the apparent process of creation.
Its existence points to the need to put the rule of man beyond the rule of man. To do otherwise is to acquiesce in the rule of such as us, whom time will inevitably expose as fools.