Trump

A rotten state

/ Geoffrey Gibson / Leave a comment

The desolate prince was right when he described the state of Denmark as ‘rotten’.  The Compact OED gives us ‘rotting or decaying…. morally or politically corrupt.’  And there was a lot more to that decay and corruption than an ‘o’er hasty marriage’ and binge boozing behind the battlements. 

We can see signs of this rotting in governments generally in what we call the western world, but none more so than in the United States.

In her most enlightening book, Autocracy Inc, Anne Applebaum traces the similarities between the current regime in the U S, and those autocratic regimes like China or Russia, or ‘illiberal democracies’ like Turkey, Malaysia, India, the Philippines, or Hungary.

They share a brutally pragmatic approach to wealth.  Unlike the communist and fascist leaders of the past…the leaders of Autocracy Inc often maintain opulent residences and structure much of their collaboration as for-profit ventures.  Their bonds with one another, and with their friends in the democratic world, are cemented not through ideals, but deals – deals designed to take the edge off sanctions, to exchange surveillance technology, to help one another get rich…. Autocracy Inc offers its members not only money and security, but also something less tangible: impunity.

Does that not describe the Trump malaise in the U S?

After referring to ‘the fascist belief in the liberating power of violence’ and describing the feeling of success and calm after the fall of the Berlin Wall, Anne Applebaum says:

Everyone assumed that in a more open, interconnected world, democracy and liberal ideals would spread to the autocratic states.  Nobody imagined that autocracy and illiberalism would spread to the democratic world instead.

Later, the author refers to the remarks of a U S senator who said that ‘the same techniques of concealment used to facilitate offshore thugs and criminal activities also facilitate the political activities of domestic special interests.’

The book prompts discussion of the following – the relationship between political and financial dishonesty; the fundamental fallacy that underlies every aspect of the Trump administration; the limitations of the notion of kleptocracy; and the liability of the profiteers to account for their obtaining profits from their offices.

Trust and probity

People who hold office in government are in a position of trust owed to those who put them there.  They were not appointed or elected to look after themselves, but to serve the interests of others.  If they choose to break the rules about the limitations on their political powers, then they may just as easily break the rules about how they help themselves financially.  If they are dishonest politically, why not be dishonest financially?  If you are rotten about the rights of others, why not be rotten about their money?

There is nothing new in the notion that those in charge of the most austere political regimes are also likely to be the most corrupt financially.  Here from my schooldays is J B Bury, the bible on ancient Greece, on Sparta.

…..  the ‘communism’ which we observed in the life of the citizens was only superficial.  But it was specially provided by law that no Spartan should possess wealth in the form of gold or silver.  This law was at first eluded by the device of depositing money in foreign temples, and it ultimately became a dead letter; Spartans even gained throughout Greece an evil reputation for avarice.  By the fourth century, they had greatly degenerated, and those who wrote studies of the [Spartan] constitution contrasted Sparta as it should be and used to be with Sparta as it was.

The Spartans were not alone in having an evil reputation for avarice.  Greed was good generally – just look at Timon of Athens.  Bury remarks that Solon of Athens introduced reforms that ‘hit the rich hard,’ but that he was ‘too discreet to attempt to interfere seriously with the money market by artificial restrictions’. 

But it does seem that otherwise austere regimes cause its members to resort to graft as a way of life.  Does anyone believe that the rulers of Burma or Iran or Venezuela have clean hands?

Yet for centuries, Oxbridge clung to the myth that ancient Athens and Rome were civilized.  The wealth of each was built on slavery and the protection racket called empire.  Both slavery and empire disqualify the ancients from being called civilized. 

It was not until England shed its empire that it saw the ancient world for what it was.  Neither Athens nor Rome had ever dreamed that each of us is born with a dignity or worth merely because we are human – the sine qua non of civilization after the teaching of Jesus of Nazareth or Immanuel Kant.

For many, including me, The Republic of Plato is a blueprint for fascism.  But if we go to authentic fascists like those of Nazi Germany, we find real graft and corruption on a huge scale.  Put aside the dog-like loyalty of people like Hess and Rohm – Hitler, Goring and Himmler wallowed in mansions and riches, much of it the product of what the Romans called rapine.  Indeed, the conquering Roman armies lived off rapine – vae victis – in a manner that would only be surpassed by Attila the Hun, and Napoleon the Corsican.

It is not surprising that people cannot silo their dishonesty or greed.  That is why I take the view that we should be wary of dismissing as irrelevant the failures of those in public life that may be characterized as ‘private’.  If a person in a position of public trust cannot be trusted by those close to them, where does that leave the rest of us? 

That view may sound old fashioned.  That is not of itself a problem for most of us – if, for example, you also believe in having a trained independent civil service, or two political parties both capable of serving equally in government and opposition.  Each of those has gone clean out the window here in the last two generations.

So, that is the first point.  People in power who break the rules of government may be just as likely to break the rules about crime generally, and enrich themselves at your and my expense.

The present Trump regime stands for every part of that proposition.  Its own contribution is to be more brazen – shameless – than any of those who came before it – starting in the garden of Eden.

Government and business – and profit

The second point is the fallacy that underlies the whole Trump administration.  About forty years ago, some business people in Melbourne thought it would be simple to save struggling football clubs.  Just run them like their business.  They were dead wrong, and they sadly failed in their mission. 

Trump makes the same error.  He thinks he can run the U S like a business.  He is wrong. 

A trading corporation is formed and managed to return a profit on its business for its shareholders. 

That is not what the United States was formed for.  Its founders may have been grandiose, and hypocritical, but their stated object was not to make money.  Putting to one side the dreams of the Puritans, the aim of the founders was to deliver and ennoble the new Promised Land:

We the People of the United States in order to form a more perfect Union, establish Justice, ensure domestic Tranquillity, provide for the common Defence, and general Welfare, and secure the Blessings of Liberty to ourselves and our Posterity ….

The congeries of slave owners who had their own self-evident truths were not after profit, but justice, tranquility, and general welfare. 

Those aspirations are pure moonshine for the New York property developer and his rough mates.  He is in it for profit and fame, and that contradiction undermines every part of his administration.  To adopt the phrase of Anne Applebaum, he puts deals way above ideals. 

Although he did not write one word of the book, Trump is obsessed with ‘the art of the deal,’ and his coming out the winner.  This is a different universe to that of Lincoln, Roosevelt, or Truman, whose one aspiration was to serve the people of the United States – ‘of the people, by the people, for the people.’  Trump does not believe in God, but if he did, he would surely know that God did not create him to serve the people.

It follows that this presidency stands on an obviously false premise.  But it gets worse.  The first object of government is to keep the peace – to ensure domestic tranquility and general welfare.  The laws of the union about guns make the first impossible, and the opposition to the Welfare State, that is pursued everywhere else in the West, make the second impossible.  The United States has not achieved its stated objectives.

Trump must be taken to have admitted that the United States has not ensured tranquility for Americans.  He says he should send the federal army into cities that have let crime run amok.  That would be unthinkable in Western Europe – or, say, Australia or Canada.

Because Trump is so egocentric, his political responses are often so personal.  During the Dark Age, the justice of the state was created to replace the vendetta.  Trump now uses – or abuses – the organs of the state to pursue his own personal and political vendettas, and to give succor to those whom he persuaded to try to overthrow the Constitution.  We therefore have a fearful combination of Alice in Wonderland and Nineteen Eighty Four.

There is something more about Trump’s infatuation with ‘deals’ – as when he told President Zelensky that he, Zelensky, did not hold the right cards.  To which the obvious response was – this is not a card game. 

But deals are games for Trump, and he is a very bad loser.  (Witness the Nobel Prize, a loss he suffered in full war-like mode.)  

People do not come back for repeat business with Trump.  Good business people know that the best ‘deals’ are contained in documents that are put on file and left there.  Ongoing arrangements turn on trust – and Trump’s whole career in business suggests he cannot be trusted. 

You can, if you wish, start with two admitted facts – he avoided national service, and he avoided paying tax.  In any other western nation, his history on those grounds alone would disqualify him from being elected to any significant public office.

So, there is something unsettling, is there not, about the following proposition?  ‘Jack and Jill went into politics – and then Jack and Jill got filthy rich.’

Kleptocracy

That leaves the kleptocracies discussed at length in Autocracy Inc.  Trump puts Mammon before God every time.  (His ego has no room for God.)  And he is making millions for himself and his family from the public offices he holds.  (I could be typing this under a framed cartoon of Trump as Superman.  He sold the cartoons.  The proceeds did not go to charity.  The very idea would be absurd.) 

Words like kleptomania come from the Greek kleptos meaning ‘theft.’  Wikipedia says:

Kleptocracy is different from plutocracy (rule by the richest) and oligarchy (rule by a small elite). In a kleptocracy, corrupt politicians enrich themselves secretly outside the rule of law, through kickbacks, bribes, and special favours from lobbyists and corporations, or they simply direct state funds to themselves and their associates.

That is not Trump.  His schtick is not theft.  That is a crime.  But Trump’s profiteering certainly looks unlawful and dishonest.

Under our Westminster system, ministers of the Crown, the members of the executive government, hold positions of trust.  As the great English legal historian, Maitland, said in another context, ‘for every exercise of the royal power, some minister is answerable’.  Civil servants are servants of the Crown and the people, and being in the same position as employees, they owe obligations under the general law of loyalty and good faith to those whose interests they serve.

It is not the Westminster model, but the rule of law that regulates the way that our governments ministers discharge their obligations under the law, at least to the same extent that we regulate the way that directors of public companies are obliged to act – in the interests of shareholders, and not themselves. 

That is very much the way of the common law in the view we take of the proper role of all those in government.  It is not to the constitution that we ordinarily look in order to control those who direct government, in much the same way that we seek to control those who direct business.  Parliament looks after its own, but otherwise these are matters for our general law – the common law and the statutes of our parliaments.  The rationale is the same.  These people are where they are for us, and not for themselves.

Unjust enrichment or unconscionable profit?

The ministers are, therefore, subject to legal duties owed to those who put their trust in them.  As such, the Ministers must put the interests of the public before their own; they must act toward the public with the utmost good faith (uberrima fidei); they must avoid any external obligation that conflicts with their duties to the public; and they must account to the public for any financial benefit they derive from breaching any such obligations.

There is a kicker for grifters in that last remedial proposition.  We are not constrained to talk about cases where the fault of the agent has led to loss of the principal.  If the principal happens to score a win, the agent may get the windfall.  The liability to account under our laws does not turn on dishonesty. 

The duties I refer to are customarily called ‘fiduciary’.  That is a very slippery word.  It is not understood by most lawyers, let alone those who are appointed as Ministers of the Crown.  It is a standing invitation to circular reasoning – he has to account, because he is a fiduciary; because he is a fiduciary, he has to account. 

But the obligations owed by public officers (or public servants) to the Crown (the Commonwealth) are described as ‘fiduciary’.  And the law is clear that the ordinary relationship of a contract of employment entails that the employee is subject to fiduciary duties to the employer.  It follows that those serving the Commonwealth, including Ministers of the Crown, owe these duties to the people of Australia.  They are accountable to the people of the Commonwealth for any failure to observe those duties and are liable to account to those people for any profit they derive from doing so.

Now, there may I suppose be nuanced arguments about the extent of these duties for public officers, but it would be difficult for ministers to say that they did not have to act in good faith, or that they could make and keep a profit arising from their position without seeking some form of authority – or without disclosing it.  Such a denial would of itself lead to loss of office.

This part of the law, generally called equity, turns on conscience, rather than fault, and it provides a remedy for conduct it regards as unconscionable.  And it does so in terms that would shock those shysters who are wont to clip the ticket, and with much greater thrust than our regulators can summon up.

Here are extracts from two texts of undoubted authority on equity.  The first is the standard text of Maitland.

….wherever a person clothed with fiduciary character gains some personal advantage by availing himself of his situation as a trustee, he becomes a trustee of the advantage so gained…the rule includes persons who are not trustees properly so called, but all those who stand in what is called a fiduciary position …it is a general principle of equity that if an agent acquire any pecuniary advantage to himself from third parties by means of his fiduciary character, he is accountable to his employer as a trustee for the profit he has made.  

The second is the great American text of Story.

But by far the most comprehensive class of cases of undue concealment arises from some peculiar relation, or fiduciary character, between the parties …the relation of client and attorney and principal and agent.  In these and the like cases, the law, in order to prevent undue advantage from the unlimited confidence, affection, or sense of duty, which the relation naturally creates, requires the utmost degree of good faith (uberrima fides) in all transactions between the parties.  If there is any misrepresentation, or any concealment of a material fact, or any justsuspicion of artifice or undue influence, courts of equity will interpose and pronounce the transaction void ….

In short, it may be laid down as a general rule, that a trustee is bound not to do anything which can place him in a position inconsistent with the interests of the trust, or which has a tendency to interfere with his duty in discharging it.  And this doctrine applies, not only to trustees strictly so called, but to other persons standing in like situation.  … Besides, agents are not only responsible for a due account of all the property of their principals, but also for all profits which they have clandestinely obtained by any improper use of that property.

Story originated in the U S.  These citations come from an English edition.  But I am not qualified to say what may be the American law relevant to the millions upon millions Trump and his family are milking from the people as a result of his use, or abuse, of public office. 

Nor do I know whether abuse of, or misfeasance in, public office gives rise to a cause of action there, or whether our law of unjust enrichment may apply.  (That law derives from the decision of Lord Mansfield given before the United States was born, in Moses vMacferlan, and which was founded simply on the ‘ties of natural justice’ and ‘the equity of the plaintiff’s case’.)

It may help to mention two English cases where people have had to account for profit they made out of a relationship where they had to act in good faith.  Only one case involved dishonesty. 

In Reading v Attorney- General, an English sergeant during the war made a large amount of money by using his position and uniform to assist smugglers.  The court held that the assets of which the sergeant had control, or the facilities which he enjoyed, or the position which he occupied, were the real cause of his obtaining the money, and he was therefore accountable for it to his employer – at common law.  It mattered not that the employer had not lost any profit, nor suffered any damage.  (Sadly, our texts on equity are reluctant to discuss this decision at common law – given at the highest level.)

Previously, the same court (the House of Lords) in Regal Hastings Ltd v Gulliver had ruled that where the directors of a public company had, as if by accident, derived a profit from a corporate restructure, they were liable to account to the company for that profit.  It arose while they were discharging a fiduciary obligation, and that liability did not depend on any finding of fraud or bad faith.  ‘The profiteer, however honest and well intentioned, cannot escape the risk of being called to account.’ That is not comfortable reading for company directors.  Or servants of government.

So, our law makes not only the greedy pause before feathering their nest.  For present purposes, we need not stay to see what particular legal rubric – what we call common law or equity – that the court applied, since all have moved on since.

Under our laws therefore, Trump and his family would be liable to be sued for millions.  I do not know what is the position in the U S. 

It is easy to hear the response of Trump.  ‘I have not even been furtive; I am the most brazen hero of the Golden Age since Achilles.  In any event, I can do what I like since I am the President of the United Sates.’  Neither could be a defence, and either should inflame the remedy.

The assertion that the President is above the law represents an argument that was lost in England in 1215.  The President would strike at the very basis of the rule of law in the United Sates if he asserted that he could derive profit from breaching the trust imposed on him by virtue of his office, and that the law denied any remedy to the people.  Such a proposition may or may not hold in China, Iran or Russia, but not in the United States.

There is a medieval background beside Magna Carta.  The Statute of Westminster 1275 provided that ‘No Sheriff nor other’s King officer shall take any reward to do his office, but shall be paid out of that which they take of the King.’  Later, Lord Mansfield said that a ‘public officer’ held ‘an office of trust and confidence concerning the public.’  The general law – common law or equity – had for long provided that someone misusing an official position for personal gain was liable to the relevant authority under a writ of account.  This was not a matter of what we call ‘constitutional law.’  It is the law that applies to the boy selling pies at the footy.

The old writ of account at common law, which was later effectively taken over by courts of equity, goes back to at least the twelfth century.  It involved two phases.  First, the issue was whether the defendant was accountable.  Secondly, a judgment for the return of capital and any profits from its use.  As was common with the development of substantive law from procedure, the writ came first, and the doctrine followed later – reluctantly.  Still, a leading text book is entitled ‘The Duty to Account’.

There is nothing therefore extraordinary, at least for Australian lawyers, about public officers at the highest level being subject to the general law of the land.  To adapt the language of A V Dicey, no one is above the law, but all of us, whatever our rank or condition, are subject to the ordinary law of the land, and amenable to the jurisdiction of the ordinary tribunals.  ‘The principles of private law have with us been by the action of the courts and parliament so extended as to determine the position of the Crown and its servants; thus, the constitution is the result of the ordinary law of the land.’

The second proposition does not apply in the United States.  The first did not apply in France.  I would be surprised if that were so in the United States.  (A footnote in Dicey, published in 1885, refers to the ‘servitude of the French.’)

The Prime Minister of Australia and the janitor at Parliament House are subject to the same laws about how they go about serving the people of Australia.  If the barons got it right at Runnymede in 1215, this issue is not one of governance, much less the constitution, but one of domestic housekeeping.  The law in Australia is clear that employees are liable to account to their employers and this applies to employees of government.  It would be odd if the Prime Minister had less exposure to the law than the janitor.  Is the state of the revenue less important than the state of the loo?

Put differently, the question is not whether Ministers of the Crown are accountable to the Commonwealth and the people for any profit obtained in the carrying out of their trust, but on what legal ground could it be submitted that they are not?  A standard work of authority is blunt: ‘Wherever A owes a duty to B, B is entitled to recover from A every benefit obtained by A by virtue of his fiduciary position, without B’s knowledge and consent.’

If the legal position is not the same in the United States, it might be time they came clean about it.

Now, the proper plaintiff in any action against the President would, I suppose, be the nation – the United States.  Trump could prevent that – but only while he is in office. 

There are ways around this where a company refuses to sue its directors – one is a ‘derivative shareholder action’ – but I do not know what the position may be in the United States.  Eventually, however, Trump and his family could be held to account.

Which brings me back to the disconsolate prince of Denmark.  He fell to ground like the providential sparrow.  He felt cursed that it was left to him to put things right in Denmark.  The problem for America is that no one is putting their hand up to do so there.

And it would be a shame if they were seen to go back nine hundred years on the bequest of the nation from which they seceded.

Notes

Maitland on ministers of the Crown: The Constitutional History of England, C U P, 1963, 203.

Equity: Maitland, Lectures in Equity, Cambridge, 1910, 82-83.

Equity: Story, Commentaries on Equity Jurisprudence, First English Edition, Stevens and Haynes, 1884, pars 218, 232, and 462.

Moses vMacferlan (1760) 2 Bur 1005.

Reading v Attorney- General [1951] AC 507.

Regal Hastings Ltd V Gulliver [1967] 2 AC 134n, 144.

Statute of Westminster, 1275, 3 Edward I, Ch 26: Paul Finn, Fiduciary Obligations, 2016, 358, fn 15. (Wikipedia offers a different version.)

Lord Mansfield: R v Bembridge (1783) 22 State Trials I, 155-156.

The writ of account: J A Watson, The Duty to Account, Federation Press, 2006, pars 2, 61, and 169.  The writ said the defendant must ‘duly and without delay render to the plaintiff an account’ for the time during which he held the plaintiff’s money: Pollock andMaitland, The History of English Law, 2nd Ed, Vol II, 221.  The authors there say that in the thirteenth century, statutes ‘sanctioned a procedure against accountants which was in that age a procedure of exceptional rigour.’

Dicey, The Law and the Constitution, Macmillan & Co, 1885, 177 (and footnote), 216.

Haffner on Hitler

/ Geoffrey Gibson / 1 Comment

Hitler embodied evil.  It is therefore as well to note some symptoms.  The following observations come from The Meaning of Hitler by Sebastian Haffner that is the subject of the note below.

There is no development, no maturing of Hitler’s character and personality.  His character was fixed at an early age – perhaps a better word would be ‘arrested’ – and remains astonishingly consistent; nothing was added to it.  It was not an attractive character.  All soft lovable reconciling traits are missing…. His positive characteristics – resolution, boldness, courage, perseverance – lie all on the ‘hard’ side.  The negative ones even more so: ruthlessness, vindictiveness, faithlessness and cruelty…. a total lack of capacity for self-criticism.  Hitler was all his life exceedingly full of himself and from his earliest to his last days tended to self-conceit……

He did not wish to be the first servant of the state but …. an absolute master.  And he perceived correctly that absolute rule was not possible in an intact state mech anism but only amidst controlled chaos….and he knew how to control it…. A close study of him reveals a trait in him that one might describe as a horror of committing himself, or… anything final.  It seems as though something within him caused him to recoil not only by way of a state system, but also his will by way of a firm set of goals…. As a star performer Hitler probably ranks higher than Napoleon.  But one thing he never was – a statesman….

Of course he was no democrat but he was a populist, a man who based his power on the masses, not on the elite, and in a sense a people’s tribune risen to absolute power.  His principal means of rule was demagogy, and his instrument of government was not a structured hierarchy but a chaotic bundle of uncoordinated mass organisations merely held together by his own person.  All these are ‘leftist’ rather than ‘rightest’ features…

Nothing is more misleading than to call Hitler a fascist.  Fascism is upper class rule, buttressed by artificially manufactured mass enthusiasm, but never in order to buttress an upper class.  He was a class politician, and his National Socialism was anything but fascism….

…. There is no denying the voluntarist trait in Hitler’s view of the world; he saw the world as he wanted to see it.  The world is imperfect, full of conflict, hardship and suffering …. he does not state these things with the sad courageous earnestness with which Luther calmly faced what he called original sin, or Bismarck what he called earthly imperfection, but with that frenzied voice with which Nietzsche, for instance, so often hailed what was deplorable.  To Hitler, the emergency was the norm, the state was there in order to wage war.

Three things.  Haffner may have added the frenzy of Wagner, Hitler’s pin-up boy.  The poet said, or meant to say, that comparisons are odious, but the whole fabric of our law turns on learning from the past. 

Finally, fans of the poet, and Coriolanus, will love the reference to a people’s tribune risen to absolute power.  In the hands of a genius, you don’t know who is more dangerous – the hero, or the jealous tribunes claiming to stand for that fiction called the people.

THE MEANING OF HITLER

Sebastian Haffner

Folio Society, 2011.  Translated by Ewald Osers and introduced by Mark Roseman. Illustrated.

The author was born in Berlin in 1907 as Raimund Pretzel.  He therefore came of age under the Nazis.  He qualified as a lawyer, but he left Germany in 1938 because of his relationship with a Jewish woman.  Before leaving, he wrote a manuscript of a book that would be published posthumously only in 1992 under the title Defying Hitler.  He was in a law library when the brown shirts came in to round up the Jews.  He joined the staff of the Observer in 1942 and began writing for publication. 

The present book was first published in 1978.  Haffner chose the name ‘Sebastian,’ because it was Bach’s middle name, and ‘Haffner’ after a Mozart sonata.  His writing style is pithy and laconic, and the book was written before the works of Ian Kershaw and Richard Evans were published.

Defying Hitler caused a sensation when it came out.  Here was direct eye witness evidence of the Terror before the Holocaust began – and by someone so well qualified to comment.  It caused me to see a lot of things differently.  In it, Haffner said:

The only thing that is missing is what in animals is called ‘breeding’.  This is a solid inner kernel that cannot be shaken by external pressures and forces, something noble and steely, a reserve of pride, principle and dignity to be drawn on in the hour of trial….  At the moment of truth, when other nations rise spontaneously to the occasion, the Germans collectively and limply collapsed.  They yielded and capitulated, and suffered a nervous breakdown….  The Kammergericht [superior court] toed the line.  No Frederick the Great was needed, not even Hitler had to intervene.  All that was required was a few Amtsgerichtsrats [judges] with a deficient knowledge of the law. 

We might pause to note what a biographer of Mussolini had to say as it applies to Hitler word for word.

Mussolini still needed their [the moderates’] help, for most of the liberal parliamentarians would look to them for a lead.  He also took careful note that chaos had been caused in Russia when representatives of the old order were defenestrated en masse during the revolution:  fascism could hardly have survived if the police, the magistrates, the army leaders and the civil service had not continued to work just as before, and the complicity of these older politicians was eagerly sought and helped to preserve the important illusion that nothing had changed.

The liberals failed to use the leverage afforded by his need for their approbation.  Most of them saw some good in fascism as a way of defending social order and thought Italians too intelligent and civilised to permit the establishment of a complete dictatorship.  Above all, there was the very persuasive argument that the only alternative was to return to the anarchy and parliamentary stalemate they remembered….Mussolini had convincingly proved that he was the most effective politician of them all: he alone could have asked parliament for full powers and been given what he asked; he alone provided a defence against, and an alternative to, socialism.  And of course the old parliamentarians still hoped to capture and absorb him into their own system in the long run; their optimism was encouraged by the fact that his fascist collaborators were so second-rate. 

In the present work, Haffner says of Hitler (in the second page):

His life lacked – before and after – everything that normally lends warmth, weight and dignity to a human life: education, occupation, love and friendship, marriage, parenthood.  Apart from politics and political passion, his was an empty life and hence one which was certainly not happy, was strangely lightweight, and lightly discarded.  A continuous readiness for suicide accompanied Hitler throughout his political career.  And, at its end, almost as a matter of course, stood real suicide….Hitler had no friends.  He enjoyed sitting for hours on end with subordinate staff  – drivers, bodyguards, secretaries – but he alone did all the talking….His character was fixed at an early age – perhaps a better word would be arrested – and remains astonishingly consistent…His positive characteristics – resolution, boldness, courage, perseverance – lie all on the ‘hard’ side.  The negative ones even more so: ruthlessness, vindictiveness, faithlessness and cruelty.  Added to these, moreover, from the very start was a total lack of capacity for self-criticism.

Here, then, is a writer who gets to the heart of the matter.  Hitler relied on charisma and terror, hope and fear, the populist trademark.

That ability for mass hypnotism was Hitler’s first, and for a long time his only, political capital……On the whole, the management and dosage of terror during the first years must be described as a masterly psychological achievement by Hitler.

Or again:

Hitlerism has at least one thing in common with Marxism – the claim to be able to explain the whole of world history from a single point of view….For there is no denying the voluntarist trait in Hitler’s view of the world: he saw the world as he wanted to see it….To Hitler, the emergency was the norm; the state was there in order to wage war.  And that is where he was wrong.

As a cartographer of evil, Haffner is in my view up there with Hannah Arendt.  This book ends this way.

For German history does not end with Hitler.  Anyone believing that it does, and possibly even rejoicing at it, does not realise just how much he is thereby fulfilling Hitler’s last will and testament.

A mugging in Washington

/ Geoffrey Gibson / Leave a comment

Three men are involved in conflicts that affect the whole world – Putin, Netanyahu, and Trump.  They look to me to have one thing in common – a contempt for humanity, or at least some parts of it.  It is impossible to believe that any of them accepts what Kant said – that every human being has his or her worth or dignity, which derives merely from the fact that each of us is human – and not some animal.  Each of them is happy to treat humans they regard as different as being inferior.

Russia began a brutal war against Ukraine.  This is not the first act of Russian aggression here, and Russia has defaulted on previous attempts to bring peace.  Putin denies that Ukraine exists as a distinct national entity.

Those who claim to be in charge of Gaza (Hamas) launched a brutal attack on Israel.  Gaza has a long and painful history – as does the whole of the Holy Land going back to prehistory.  Hamas wants to destroy the state of Israel.  Israel stands in the way of Gaza acquiring statehood.

In the course of its attack on Israel, Hamas took hostages – about 250, I think.  In the course of its war against Ukraine, Russia has forcibly kidnapped children – a war crime perpetrated by the Nazis.  (Bear in mind that Russia refuses to acknowledge that there is a war.)  Estimates of the number of childhood victims vary – but there is no doubt that thousands have been taken, up to say, 20,000. 

There is inevitably something heartless about this exercise in statistics about the denial of human worth.  That dedicated mass murderer called Stalin knew this.  The death of one person is a tragedy.  The death of a million is a statistic.  Shakespeare of course had seen this.

I am in blood
Stepped in so far that, should I wade no more,
Returning were as tedious as go o’er.  (Macbeth) 3.4.142–144)

(When his wife chided him, Macbeth replied: ‘We are but young in deed.’  Murdering, it would seem, is like making millions – it gets easier as you go.)

We here in Australia stand outside these calamities.  The discussion of the Gaza war is here coloured by the fact that we have here people who identify with either side – it is difficult to imagine any Australian taking the side of Russia.  Or wanting to have anything to do with a nation perpetrating war crimes like those of Hitler and the Nazis.  What decent human being would want to do anything like that?  And we are speaking of a war crime predicated on race, or perhaps worse, caste.

And here it looks like we are all complicit in a denial of the principle of humanity.  International news programs are full of live accounts of the return of hostages in Gaza staged in a manner that is as bizarre as it is brutal.  But we do not hear that much about the deaths of people in either war, and we get next to nothing about the fate of thousands of children who have been kidnapped.

Put the numbers to one side.  Let’s say that there are only 250 children kidnapped.  (Does not the word ‘only’ chill the blood?)  No, let’s say just a dozen, or even a pair, or just one child is involved.  Would the conversation be the same if that one child was a citizen of the US or Israel?

Of course not – and we are all complicit in this denial of universal humanity.  We should be ashamed of ourselves, but the whole history of the world is full of stories of otherwise decent people just lying down before dictators.

That brings me to that recent dreadful scene in the White House.  There was obviously no time to refer to the fate of children there.  It is hard to know what is worse – the conduct of those at the time, or the nonsense offered by sycophants later.

We might look at three words.  Lindsey Graham, the archetypal poodle, said Zelensky should not have taken the ‘bait’.  A bait is something you offer to someone to induce them to act to their detriment.  Why would people negotiating in good faith want to do that to Zelensky?  Well, they were just there to complete a shakedown of a man and a nation on their knees.  They were making an offer they thought Zelensky could not refuse.  I cannot recall any public international conduct as disgraceful as that.  It makes me feel sick.

Many say Vance led the attack.  But Trump commented on the attire of Zelensky immediately he arrived, and one of his goons from the press he favours began the press conference by asking Zelensky why he was not wearing a suit. 

Here again is one of those moments from the Marx Brothers.  The goon said many Americans thought Zelensky showed a lack of respect in turning up like that.  Trump was not surprised by the question and looked mildly quizzical about the answer.  The offended Americans don’t spend most nights in a bomb shelter.  And the goon looks like a drunk out of luck whose idea of decorum is to wear tan sneakers under a suit of the revolting blue favoured by Trump, a man notorious for his lack of taste.  And then of course there is his mate Elon, who turns up at the Oval Office with a silly hat on his head, and a child on his shoulders.  Groucho Marx may have looked cross-eyed at the whole lot of them.

Then there is the issue of ‘respect’.  Some Americans have actually asked Zelensky to apologise for his lack of respect.  According to my Compact OED above this desk, the two primary meanings of that term are ‘a feeling of admiration for someone or something because of their qualities or achievements’ and ‘consideration for the feelings or rights of others.’  You can decide who showed a lack of respect to whom in either sense.  Even at Fox News, does anyone outside the boondocks respect either Trump or Vance?

Finally, Vance, who had once compared his leader to Hitler, deployed his zeal as a convert to bad mouth previous presidents of the U S.  That is appalling misconduct in public, and Vance has never been to the Ukraine – he prefers his laptop.  In his gushing premeditated arrogance, Vance decided to offer his guest a patronising lecture on diplomacy.  According to the same dictionary, ‘diplomacy’ means ‘the profession, activity or skill of managing international relations’ or ‘skill and tact in dealing with people.’  Vance and his boss know nothing of either.  It is impossible to imagine a greater failure of diplomacy.

So, putting to one side the contribution of US armaments to the rubble in Gaza, a one-time New York property developer, now an illiterate convict and the President of the United States, wants to drive out the residents of Gaza and engage in a property development, and then extract wealth from the Ukraine when it has been brought to its knees by his mate and fellow victim of a witch hunt, Vladimir Putin. 

And then, like Richard III, he can say ‘I am myself alone.’ 

And the people of America would be advised to stay home.  They have not a friend in the world.

These were some reflections when in horror yesterday I wrote the following.

Two things seem clear enough.

  1. Trump is aligned with Putin and if necessary will drop Ukraine and NATO.  Either Putin has something over Trump, or they have a common view on the world order.  We are looking at a Trump/Putin axis.
  2. Neither we nor anyone else can ever take the US at its word again.  Trump has the morals of a Mafia don and the US has lost all respect and trust.

We kept saying all this the first time Trump was President, but it is hard to see the U S sinking any lower. 

And the whole nation will have to accept full political responsibility – something they have not been good at since the Puritans arrived and set about cleansing the land of the Indians.  And then offering thanks to their God.  Then they bought slaves.  Then they lied about that in their Declaration. Then the losers in the Civil War did not accept the judgment.  They have not cleared themselves of the stain of slavery.  But then they behaved heroically by rebuilding world order after Hiroshima.  But they have not won a war since.

Now, worst of all, the old Uncle Sam is back in all his arrogance – and, in the full sense of that term, with a ‘vengeance.’

Only someone with an intellect as tortured as that of Vance could think that any of his position is compatible with the teaching of the Jewish Hasid who said we should suffer the little children to come unto him.

Passing Bull 400 – A president on causation

/ Geoffrey Gibson / Leave a comment

We are back in familiar territory.  Is it possible for Donald Trump to get any worse, or to sink even lower? 

If an English, Canadian or Australian prime minister responded to a national tragedy in the way that Trump just did, he or she would be run out of town – it was so gross and offensive and bigoted and stupid and cruel that the culprit could not survive politically. 

What is it about the United States that allows a president to get away with being so utterly unpresidential?  Why do Americans tolerate what no other civilized nation would tolerate?

For reasons I can understand, U S psychiatrists agreed not to debate the mental health of the most powerful man on the planet.  But you do not need medical training to see that this man’s ego is so dominant, that there is little or no room for compassion, or even feelings, for others – or even conscience.  Trump would not know the meaning of the word ‘empathy.’  We should not be bullied or conned from stating the obvious.  This conduct of Trump was an affront to humanity at large.

Trump is in it for Trump – and those who toe his line.  He is not in it for all Americans.  If you are a grieving parent or child in Wichita, but a Democrat – bad luck.  You picked the wrong horse, and you are a loser.  You are in truth the enemy.

A two-party system cannot survive that moral blindness.  In thirty years of hearing cases against the government, I endeavored to recall the maxim that the most important person in the room was the loser – and that I at least had to try to be fair to both sides – even the bloody government!  Sane politicians recognize just that on election night.  Not Trump.

And now we have a new justification for bigotry against people who do not conform – ‘common sense’.  Why not?  It is a perfectly natural reaction to seek scapegoats.  It all started with Eve and the snake, and neither has had a good press since.  Just ask people of colour or queers or migrants or religious minorities.  Or cripples.

But we have a justified hope that people in high office can rise above the gutter – not least when the prejudice is magnified by the complete absence of evidence to support the abuse of the chosen culprit.

Trump is now boasting about how much time he gives the press.  This is because he loves the sound of his own voice.  He embodies the insight of Blaise Pascal:

I have discovered that all the unhappiness of men arises from one single fact, that they cannot stay quietly in their own chamber. 

Trump was followed by two toadies whose own position is so precarious that they must just play follow the leader at all costs – Hegseth and Vance.  They both saluted – dutifully and mindlessly – and revoltingly.  As if in a cabinet presided over by Kim Jong Un – just as it was in 2016.  (Do you remember Kim?  The mad murderer that Trump ‘fell in love’ with – probably just to spite the other murderer Trump admires, Vladimir Putin.)

Go back over a century or so and ask when a government succeeded by being presided over by a greedy illiterate convict surrounded by mindless and gutless sycophants.

It passes all understanding that a nation like the United States could have sunk so low, so fast. 

And there are worrying symptoms that the disease may spread – even to our shores.  We should therefore watch out for people – yes, especially men – who have an affinity for authority, division, and conflict, and who come from an area on the fringe that specialises in festering chips on the shoulder.

A Great Dane, a Confession, the Cataclysm, and a Bad Day

/ Geoffrey Gibson / Leave a comment

 

The Dane

But for Einstein, Niels Bohr may have been seen as the greatest scientific mind ever – but he still comes out of it much better than Salieri in Amadeus. Bohr won his Nobel Prize the year after Einstein.  As well as being a genius, this great Dane was, as they say in death notices, a devoted husband and father.  He was also a great teacher.  He told his students to treat every assertion that he made as a question.  Einstein says: ‘He utters his opinions like one perpetually groping and never like one who believes he is in possession of definite truth.’

There are obvious limits on our ability to understand the universe at either end – atoms and galaxies.  The major work of Niels Bohr was to work out the structure of the atom.  He said to Heisenberg, who discovered the principle of uncertainty, that:

When it comes to atoms, language can be used only as in poetry. The poet, too, is not nearly so concerned with describing facts as with creating images.

This is terribly important.  As explained by Jacob Bronowski, what Bohr was saying was that when it comes to atoms, our language is not describing facts but rather is creating images. What lies below the visible world must in some sense always be imaginary, ‘a play of images’.

There is no other way to talk about the invisible – in nature, in art, or in science. When we step through the gateway of the atom, we are in a world which our senses cannot experience.

Einstein said that he rarely thought in words. What we think that he meant was that in his work and at his level, he generally thought not in words but in mathematics. His job was to find the relevant laws of the universe. He was fond of saying that ‘God does not play dice.’ One day Bohr responded: ‘Stop telling God what to do.’

Even where we think that we understand the meaning of words describing events in the universe or in history, there is a separate question of the extent to which we come to grips with comprehending the scale of what is being spoken of.  Do we really have an understanding of how an atom is made up?  Do we really have an understanding of the size of a galaxy when as far as we know, it may have disappeared millions of years ago, but it is just that news of that disappearance is yet to reach us?  Are we able to come to grips with the brute fact that more than 20 million Russians died during World War II, or that more than six million people were murdered in what is called the Holocaust, or that some historians have given up trying to count how many millions died under Mao?  Can we come to grips with the economy of China, or the fact that China builds the equivalent of the city of Brisbane every day?

To go back to the world of physics, one mathematician said that ‘I am now convinced that theoretical physics is actually philosophy.’  New ideas in physics give us a different view of reality. What we are told now is that the world cannot be fully separated from our perception of it. Newton took God’s eye view of the world. Einstein took the view of each of us – the world is what we see and is relative to each of us. We cannot know what the world is like of itself – we can only compare what it looks like to each of us by talking about it. Jacob Bronowski summed it up as follows:

But what physics has now done is to show that that is the only method to knowledge. There is no absolute knowledge. And those who claim it, whether they are scientists or dogmatists, open the door to tragedy.  All information is imperfect. We have to treat it with humility. That is the human condition; and that is what quantum physics says. I mean that literally.

Some say that Gödel made illusory the notion of truth in mathematics.  These are humbling thoughts about the power of thought.  Bohr indeed was a philosopher, even if he said that they all talked nonsense.

A biography of Bohr I read after Christmas referred to a sometime priest called Steno as the only prominent scientist to be beatified who said (in Latin):

Beautiful are the things we see

More beautiful those we understand

Much the most beautiful those we do not comprehend.

Bohr wrestled a lot with his own relativity.  He understood, he thought, that whether an object behaves as a participle or a wave depends on how you look at it – what kind of experiment you use to assess it.  You may hardly be able to ‘see’ either.  He believed that you cannot always separate thought from emotion.  He used a difficult word ‘complementarity.’  He referred to old truths, such as ‘we are spectators as well as actors in the great drama of existence’ and ‘if we try to analyse our emotions, we hardly possess them any more.’  The relativity comes in when you try to try to draw the line between subject and object.

Bohr was like other great wrestlers like Michelangelo, Luther, Beethoven, or Ibsen.  And he was that most beautiful gift – a decent, modest hero.  And God bless him – he gave us a glimpse of mystery in science, at least as deep as the mystery of religion; and in so doing he stuck it right up those arrant God-deniers who want to abolish all magic – and who even claim to have the answer!

A Confession

If you promise not to tell anyone, I watched a bit of the new pyjama game final last night.  I wanted to see Jacques Kallis in what I think will be his last visit.  He is as tough as Steve Waugh.  I also wanted to see if KP is earning his money.  He is, and I have no doubt that he is enjoying his cricket and being part of a team for the first time in a very long time.  The young Australian Muslem was a revelation in correctness.  The bits I saw were therefore encouraging, but I turned it off before the end.  I am trying to acquire this technique with red.

The Cataclysm

We must brace ourselves for disaster in the U S.  On the Democrat side you have a moral disaster and a managerial trainwreck.  The other side is unspeakable.  Trump has done a deal with Palin.  I infer that there is a deal that Trump bought Palin’s endorsement with a ministry.  She chose environment.  She can stand on her Alaskan shoreline with an AK47 and see the visible disproof of global warming.  Good Republicans – and there are some – fear Cruz more than Trump.  Cruz has two things that Trump doesn’t – brains and an agenda.  In a nation that slaughters its children in the name of ideology, we are entitled to be terrified.  If this most decent nation thinks that it will be able to reel in one of these galahs – on either side – if elected, let them reflect on what happened to a people who thought that they could the same with a brutal clown that Trump so closely resembles.

Mussolini still needed their [the moderates’] help, for most of the liberal parliamentarians would look to them for a lead.  He also took careful note that chaos had been caused in Russia when representatives of the old order were defenestrated en masse during the revolution:  fascism could hardly have survived if the police, the magistrates, the army leaders and the civil service had not continued to work just as before, and the complicity of these older politicians was eagerly sought and helped to preserve the important illusion that nothing had changed.

The liberals failed to use the leverage afforded by his need for their approbation.  Most of them saw some good in fascism as a way of defending social order and thought Italians too intelligent and civilised to permit the establishment of a complete dictatorship.  Above all, there was the very persuasive argument that the only alternative was to return to the anarchy and parliamentary stalemate they remembered….Mussolini had convincingly proved that he was the most effective politician of them all: he alone could have asked parliament for full powers and been given what he asked; he alone provided a defence against, and an alternative to, socialism.  And of course the old parliamentarians still hoped to capture and absorb him into their own system in the long run; their optimism was encouraged by the fact that his fascist collaborators were so second-rate. 

Here is the myth of the strong man cleaning the stables.  Does that not seem to be word for word a correct rendition of how decent Germans probably reacted to Hitler?  Still today you will find Christian apologists for Franco, and not just in Spain, who say that his fascism was preferable to republican socialism.  Mussolini had the other advantage that for reasons we now regard as obvious, no one outside Italy could take Mussolini seriously.  As his biographer reminds us, Mussolini was, rather like Berlusconi, seen as an ‘absurd little man’, a ‘second-rate cinema actor and someone who could not continue in power for long’, a ‘Cesar de carnaval’, a ‘braggart and an actor’, and possibly ‘slightly off his head.’  There is Trump.  Churchill always took Hitler seriously; he could never do that with that Italian buffoon.

A Bad Day

If I say that of tomorrow, I will just sit back and wait for an Abbottism about what I might wear on my arm.  So I won’t.  From 2015, 26 January will be looked back on as the day when Tony Abbott came out.  It was on that day that the Prime Minister of Australia formally announced that he was crackers.

In the meantime, Australians like me are resigned to popping up daisies before this nation reaches the stage reached by the United States on 4 July 1776.