“I know about people who talk about suffering for the common good. It’s never bloody them! When you hear a man shouting ‘Forward, brave comrades!’ you’ll see he’s the one behind the bloody big rock and wearing the only really arrow-proof helmet!”
— Terry Pratchett Interesting Times
In Dante’s imaginative design for Hell, with its circles and districts designated for particular sins, there was something that even a well-rounded Renaissance man had forgotten. There was a circle for the evil councilors (in the conventional burning pit), while the overly ferocious warriors and criminals were sitting in a lake of boiling blood – which is perhaps as it should be. But imaginative as these punishments were, something was still missing.
In Inferno, an interesting ‘upgrade’ to Hell’s geography written in the 1970s by the science fiction duo Larry Nivens and Jerry Pournelle, Dante’s Wood of the Suicides was fading away, given over to a diabolical industrial park for those without an environmental conscience. There was space reserved elsewhere in the Abyss for future development when new sins (perhaps related to unwarranted genetic manipulation) came along. Yet between the two literary explorations, there was a field of human sin that really deserves its special place in the nether-regions.
What are we to do with the contemptuous ‘heroes’, those leaders of causes who urge others to engage in suicide attacks against the innocent, while remaining safe themselves? They are a growing problem.
One can think of Osama Bin Laden and the command council heading al Qaeda – urging Muslims to hurl themselves on “Crusaders and Jews” in suicidal attacks. Osama let hundreds of al Qaeda and Taliban militia die in the Tora Bora region of Afghanistan in January of 2002, while he moved from deep cave to deep cave, until safe in a secret new sanctuary in Pakistan. He has dispatched dozens of ‘martyrs’ to immolate themselves, but – if martyrdom is such a good thing – he seems curiously unwilling to embrace that honor for himself.
Like Bin Laden, Yasser Arafat and Saddam Hussein have also encouraged ‘martyrdom’ while taking pains to keep their own hides unscratched. Arafat – on those occasions in the last couple of years when the Israelis encircled his compound – would emerge when it was safe with a firearm of some sort to make it look to journalists as if he was a combatant, but…. Arafat’s sole ‘military’ feat before the PLO was created was a daring midnight raid on an unguarded Israeli water pipe.
Saddam has also posed with weaponry too, but is not known to have used any against armed opponents since he was 19, when he took part in a botched assassination attempt. There are numerous suggestions and reports that he has been utterly ferocious in torturing and executing prisoners, and the long time it has taken to run him to earth (still not accomplished as of late July 2003) is a testament to his meticulous attention to his personal security.
In the Second World War, it seems easy to contrast Hitler and Churchill (or the British Monarch). Although a survivor of four years in the trenches in the First World War, Hitler never came close to the front lines between 1939 and 1944. When the front finally came to him in 1945, he was deep within a well-appointed bunker, where he took his own life rather than face the fury of the Russians. But on many occasions before that, Hitler attempted to impose his ‘will’ on military situations by giving impossible orders to his troops – as if his soldiers were unreal tokens in a game to him, rather than flesh and blood.
Hitler (seemingly like Saddam in the recent war) never toured bombed out areas in World War Two. Some wounded and maimed veterans being shipped home from the Russian Front also told a story about how their train was stalled in a siding alongside Hitler’s luxurious rail car – and seeing the curtains being drawn so that der Fuhrer did not have to gaze on his broken warriors.
One can contrast these with the late Queen Mother’s remarks about the bomb hit on Buckingham Palace in 1940 – “Thank goodness, now I can look East Londoners in the eye.” Churchill was also seen to have been visibly moved when cheered by bombed out British civilians or veteran troops from Allied armies. Abraham Lincoln, who had visibly aged under the burdens of the American Civil War, was also seen to have emotional moments. Horace Porter, one of General Grant’s staff officers, presented several compelling accounts about Lincoln when visiting the Union Army in the field, including his reaction when riding (unescorted) among a Corps of Black American soldiers.
In another comparison to Hitler, Eisenhower and Montgomery have recorded their disapproval of Churchill’s frequent attempts to see the front lines for himself – which didn’t stop the incorrigible Prime Minister from hearing bullets crack overhead once or twice in 1944 and his following the first wave of assault transports over the Rhine. The great American jurist Oliver Wendell Holmes, as a junior officer in the American Civil War, once berated Lincoln for unnecessarily exposing himself to fire during a Confederate attempt on Washington’s defences.
This willingness to share danger underscores an important point about true leaders and the Hitlers and Bin Ladens of the world: Empathy. Real leaders understand how other people are feeling; they respect and admire courage, compassion or dignity in others. They are troubled when they know that their decisions are putting people in a danger they cannot share; and yet they have the moral courage to send them anyway.
While most leaders, the Bin Ladens and the Churchills alike, have an eye on history, leaders with empathy are less worried about their personal place in it, and more worried about seeing the job of the day done. Saddam Hussein has had his name stamped on every brick lodged in a rebuilt version of the Ziggurat of Ur, so that his name will be known millennia from now. Hitler talked of his ‘Thousand Year Reich’, and Arafat’s lust to be the leader of a real nation state has been one of his primary motivations. One can contrast this with Churchill’s wish to see the world move into the “broad sunlit uplands” of a promising future, while Lincoln talked of healing and reconciliation.
This contrast between a personal lust for glory and the hope of the betterment of all humanity is the most significant indicator of the base selfishness of the totalitarian and terrorist leaders who have savaged the world. The differences between truly heroic leaders, and the sham heroism of the Husseins and Hitlers should be self-evident. Unfortunately, far too many people can’t tell the difference and we are left with the hope that divine justice might be more fitting than ours is.
