This blog was stimulated by my
wondering about the almost universal characteristic of leaders to casually send
innocent people to their deaths. One need only think of beheadings by ISIS
leaders in the news right now; or Israeli leader Netanyahu ordering the
massacre of thousands of helpless civilians in Gaza; or even President Obama
taking pride in his orders to assassinate alleged terrorists by drone—sorry
about that collateral damage. Of course, it is during all-out wars that this
capability (or flaw) assumes its most savage form. In fact, it was in reading
about the sinking of the Lusitania
during World War I (see Dead Wake, by
Erik Larson, Crown: 2015) that my specific thoughts about all this were set in
motion. It is important to note that prior to Germany’s U-boat campaign against
merchant ships, the accepted protocol, embodied in the so-called “prize laws”
of the 19th Century, entirely forbade attacks against passenger
vessels. Even with regard to merchant vessels shipping war materiel, the rules
said that war ships could stop a merchant vessel to search it, but had to keep
its crew safe and bring the ship to a nearby port. All this changed with
Germany’s U-boat attacks, which violated all such protocols, although they mostly
still refrained from attacking passenger ships. When the Cunard passenger liner
Lusitania (the biggest and fastest
liner then operating) left America for Liverpool in early May of 1915, though, the
German Navy considered it too ripe a target to pass up. It sent its most
ruthless commander and U-boat ace, Walther Schwieger, to the area, and set him
loose. Thus, on May 7, when Capt. Schwieger, who was heading his U-20 back to
home port after several ‘kills’, saw the mammoth ship entering his field of
vision near Kinsale off the Irish coast, this “wonderful man” who “couldn’t
kill a fly” never hesitated about trying to sink it. Despite the fact that the
ship had no defenses, despite the fact that it was filled with almost 2,000
passengers including 33 infants and 123 Americans, despite the fact that it
carried no war materiel or anything else that could be of value to Britain’s
war effort, Schwieger took aim and fired his last torpedo, and the ‘great ship
went down.’ Nearly 1200 civilians perished.
Strangely
enough—especially to the British Admiralty who knew Schwieger’s submarine was
in the area targeting neutral vessels but did nothing to warn the Lusitania
or provide it with a destroyer escort—the sinking of the Lusitania did not bring
the United States into the war, as Britain’s leaders had hoped. That would take
two more years. But after a brief period of refraining from attacking neutral
ships (due to bad publicity from the Lusitania
sinking), Germany embarked, in early 1917, on an even more savage series of U-boat
attacks. The plan, approved by Kaiser Wilhelm on January 9, 1917, authorized
its U-boats, now numbering more than 100, to “sink every vessel that entered the ‘war zone,’” in the deluded hope that
this would so cripple Britain’s war effort and morale that it would surrender
before America was able to enter the war. The plan didn’t work, and America
finally did enter the war— thanks to another deluded effort by the Kaiser to
induce Mexico to join Germany’s war against the allies, in return for which Germany
pledged its help in taking back Mexico’s “lost territories” in Texas, New
Mexico, and Arizona. When the plan was exposed (see the Zimmerman Telegram, by Barbara Tuchman), President Woodrow Wilson
was finally shaken from his rigid stance of neutrality, and declared war
against Germany on April 2, 1917.
What’s
relevant here is that even aside from the German willingness to attack innocent
civilians, the British high command, including First Lord of the Admiralty
Winston Churchill, were quite willing to sacrifice their own civilians on the Lusitania
in order to bring America into the war. The British Admiralty knew the
whereabouts of virtually every German U-boat because their intelligence
service, known as Room 40, had broken the Germans’ wireless code. They had
access to every one of Capt. Schwieger’s messages—which demonstrated
conclusively that he was prowling in the very area the Lusitania was entering. But they did not want to reveal their
knowledge for fear the Germans would change their code. So, to protect its
valuable intelligence asset, the Admiralty allowed the Lusitania to enter the U-boat zone unaware of the specific danger. Afterwards,
the Admiralty sought to put the entire blame for the tragedy on the Lusitania’s captain, William Turner—again,
to divert attention from itself and its secret knowledge. Nor was this
callousness toward innocent life limited to the admirals. Winston Churchill,
generally celebrated as one of England’s all-time greatest leaders, was quite
deliberate in seeking to induce the United States into the war by any means
necessary. As Erik Larson points out, Churchill early on wrote to Walter
Runciman, head of England’s Board of Trade, that it was “most important to
attract neutral shipping to our shores, in the hopes especially of embroiling
the United States with Germany” (190). And when fear of Germany’s subs had
reduced the traffic from America, Churchill told Runciman “For our part, we want the traffic—the more the better;
and if some of it gets in trouble, better
still.” ‘Embroiling the U.S.’ and getting its ships ‘in trouble’ are not-so-subtle
ways of saying: let’s hope there are American deaths. Indeed, one of the
prominent scholars investigating the Lusitania
episode, Patrick Beesly, stated unequivocally that the British high command literally
engaged in a conspiracy to have the Lusitania
sunk:
“…on
the basis of the considerable volume of information which is now available, I
am reluctantly compelled to state that on balance, the most likely explanation
is that there was indeed a plot, however imperfect, to endanger the Lusitania in order to involve the United
States in the war.” (324).
In short, both Winston Churchill
and the British Admiralty considered it quite rational and acceptable to sacrifice
thousands of innocent passengers from their own nation in order to further
their war aims.
If
this were an unusual circumstance, one might attribute it to something in the
genetic code or diet of German or British leaders, especially when they possess
weapons or information that gives them an advantage. Unfortunately, such
calculations are by no means limited to any one people or any one situation.
Men (they are usually, but not exclusively men) in positions of leadership
routinely make such calculations and find them acceptable. When planning for an
invasion, commanding generals usually calculate their estimated losses—10% or
20% or 50%: this many thousands of men will die. In fact, in the run-up to
America’s entry into World War I noted above, Secretary of State Lansing said
this:
The
American people are at last ready to make war on Germany, thank God. It may
take two or three years. It may even take five years. It may cost a million
Americans; it may cost five million. However long it may take, however many men
it costs, we must go through with it…” (340).
And if the calculation involves
enemy deaths, leaders tend to be even more cavalier. When the President of the
United States, Harry Truman, had to decide whether to drop the atomic bomb on
Japanese cities, he knew the loss of life would be massive. He decided to do it
anyway, despite the fact that he knew Japan was already defeated. Winston
Churchill and the allies made the same calculation—knowing Germany was already
done for—when initiating the firebombing of German cities like Dresden. Bomb them back to the stone age: that
was the remark made by U.S. General Curtis LeMay (the model for Dr.
Strangelove) when he was urging the massive bombing of Hanoi during the Vietnam
war (and also when he directed the devastating firebombing of Japanese cities
in WWII). And how about the grisly term applied to the bombing of Iraq just a
few years ago: shock and awe. There
is something almost joyous, gleeful about these expressions made by those
administering the shock and the awe. And it makes one wonder: what is it with
these guys? What happens to them when they get into positions of power? Do they
lose the human capacity for empathy entirely? (or are they selected precisely
because they lack it to begin with?) What detaches them so entirely from the
bodies they are decimating? What makes them so free from remorse? What allows
someone like Paul Tibbets, the Enola Gay pilot who dropped the atom bomb on
Hiroshima, instantly evaporating 100,000 human beings, to say: “I sleep clearly
every night.”
Perhaps
they are all similarly cold and calculating, thinking not in terms of flesh and
blood, but numbers. Perhaps they all have a similar ability to stay above the
ground, like Tibbets in his B-29: high above it all, far away from the
realities on the ground below, deficient in the imagination it takes to
contemplate the roasting of flesh, the screams of children, the splashing of
blood and brain. Perhaps they are somehow selected from the common herd based
on their ability to “see the larger picture” without getting diverted by messy
details; to encourage “sacrifice” and “nobility” without involving themselves
in what those words really entail. Because even when some of them, usually officers,
actually do get themselves engulfed in the dirty business on the ground, they
are protected by the protocols that they have carved out for themselves: that
officers are treated differently, deferentially as prisoners; that heads of
state, like Pinochet of Chile, or the Emperor of Japan, are normally excluded
from blame and punishment when they lead their nations into war. To be sure,
this doesn’t save them from the disgrace that normally falls upon war’s losers.
Think of General Lee at Appomattox. Which may be—this threat of public
humiliation—the most severe threat of all to such types. To avoid which they
will do almost anything.
And
this opens the final consideration.
What
is it that leads many leaders—often at the very moment of their greatest
successes— to initiate plans that court disaster? It is almost as if they share
a tendency with the street types we hear so much about these days, to “commit
suicide by cop.” That is, some guy stopped for a traffic violation suddenly
decides to pull a gun and fight it out, knowing full well that it’s virtually a
one-way ticket to the morgue. And the pop theory is that they have intended all
along to commit suicide. Now I don’t think this is the same phenomenon as
so-called suicide bombers—because presumably suicide bombers are driven either
by threats or ideology or some fundamentalist hope that their certain death
will be rewarded with a better existence in a virgin-filled afterlife. No, what
I’m referring to is the tendency of many actual leaders—like Hitler, like
Napoleon, like Kennedy or Castro—to make decisions that prove absolutely fatal.
It is almost as if they want to fail, fall, be stopped. Such decisions stand
out by representing such a vivid contrast with their rise to the top, where
most seem to lead charmed lives, charting success after improbable success. But
then, at the very apogee of their lives, they make a decision so stupid it is
hard to imagine how they could not have seen the consequences. Hitler, for
example, had essentially conquered all of Europe and seemed on the verge of
defeating the English into the bargain. And yet, in June of 1941, he turned on
his then-ally, the Soviet Union under Stalin, and diverted hundreds of
thousands of troops and machinery into his attack on the eastern front. When
the Soviets did not fall despite immense losses, but counterattacked instead,
Hitler’s war was all but lost. But why did he do it? Hadn’t the Fuhrer read
about Napoleon’s similar error in trying to occupy Moscow? Did he not know that
the Grand Army of France, also at that point in control of all of Europe, was
literally destroyed as a result of this blunder? Apparently not; or perhaps the
Nazi leader thought he could avoid Napoleon’s mistakes. Itself a mistake. And
closer to home, think of JFK and his 1962 decision to go to Texas for a
campaign trip. This was shortly after his great triumph over Krushchev and
Castro in defusing the Cuban missile crisis. The President was riding high. Why
ignore all the counsel of his closest advisers warning of the dangerous mood in
Dallas, and take such a trip? Or what about Ronald Reagan launching the
Iran-Contra fiasco. Why engage in such idiocy? Or, returning to the Cuban
crisis, why would Fidel agree to the Soviet proposal to place missiles ninety
miles from the United States in the first place? Did he think it would go
unnoticed? Unchallenged?
One
has to wonder: what is behind such massive blunders? Shakespeare seems to
argue, in the person of Macbeth, that it has to do with momentum:
“I
am in blood
Stepp’d in
so far that, should I wade no more,
Returning
were as tedious as go o‘er.”
(III.iv.136-38)
In other words, I’ve gone so far
out onto a limb that retreating would be more dangerous than going forward.
Surely that must be part of it, but is that all? What about something more related
to the psychology at play here? The burden at the top? Surely there must be a
weariness, a constantly-maintained tension that afflicts those leaders who must
make life-and-death decisions daily, hourly. And these are not simply decisions
affecting one or two lives, but decisions affecting whole armies, whole nations,
the whole planet, where each move is fraught with often-unforeseeable
consequences. And the leader is usually at the apex of criticism for each
decision. Must it not be the case that at certain points, the tension simply
exceeds the capacity of any human, even a cold-hearted politician, to sustain
it? One thinks of Nixon talking drunkenly to the portraits in the White House
at the most excruciating point of the Watergate scandal. One thinks of Lyndon
Johnson finally giving in to the clamor penetrating the White House from the
constant chants of “Hey, Hey, LBJ, How many kids did you kill today?” and
declaring on national television that he would not run again. And one thinks of
Hitler, cowering in his bunker, with his Third Reich collapsing around him, and
finally succumbing to a poison pill for himself and his mistress, Eva Braun.
I
don’t know. One almost gets the sense that those who hurl themselves, claw
their way into national leadership positions have an unsuspected underside that
eventually explodes at the surface. These are people who thrive on adulation,
on the constant assurance that every move they make is great, that they are
great and the work they are doing is great and will be seen by all posterity as
heroic. And the other side of this need for adulation may well be the fear that
at its core it is really nothing. Nothing at all. A sham. A conjuring trick. When
that suspicion arises and takes over, it could move either towards a drive into
recklessness—as with Clinton’s sexcapades in the Oval Office; as with Hitler’s
attack on Russia—or a complete collapse of confidence, as with Nixon and
Johnson. In both cases, in all cases, it reveals what may be a void at the
heart of every leader. Indeed, perhaps it is the same void that allows them to
order the deaths of millions without batting an eye. The same void that drives them,
even unknowingly, to the negation of all they’ve worked for. The two being
opposite sides of the same coin. Complementary.
And
finally, the two tendencies may operate more collectively, more globally as
well. We, the entire human race, are now experiencing one of these eruptions
from below. For what is the current carbon-driven crisis on this planet but the
logical if self-blind result of the very industrial-technological successes
humans have registered in the last 300 years? Which are beginning to seem like
nothing. Like shams. In consequence of which, like lemmings, we are
collectively driving ourselves towards climate catastrophe. The only question being
whether we, or some pressure from somewhere below, can stop us before the final,
irrevocable steps are taken. If they haven’t already have been taken, that is.
Follow
those leaders. But watch your parking meters.
Lawrence DiStasi
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