For defenders of authority, it seems there is no act so obscene it can’t be counterbalanced by the claim that it serves a greater good:
• Bombing Hiroshima and Nagasaki saved lives in the long run.
• Torture is vital to preventing greater agony elsewhere
• Arming and funding tyrants is a necessary evil if one is to protect the world from barbarians or communists or terrorists, or whoever happens to be bogeyman that year.
• The death of a million civilians is a price worth paying to prevent a tyrant from stockpiling weapons of mass destruction (discretely changed to ‘a price worth paying to depose a tyrant’ when the weapons fail to show up.)
You might notice a potential for conflict between the last two points. But no fear, one can always factor-in timing. While it was for the ‘greater good’ of international diplomacy that Donald Rumsfeld warmly shook hands with Saddam Hussein in 1983 – at a time when he was known to be using chemical weapons – it was clearly a reprehensible gesture after 1990, when he was known to be using chemical weapons.
Presumably if Germany had won the last war and the Reich had lasted to the present we could expect today’s professional commentators to calmly explain away Auschwitz and Dachau as unpleasant necessities. Popular historians would caution us not to judge our predecessors too quickly and to bear in mind the genuine threat posed by world Jewry, Roma, and the disabled.
In reality there is the case of Mubarak’s Egypt. According to a January report by Human Rights Watch:
“Security forces' routine use of torture initially targeted political dissidents, or those suspected of being dissidents, whether armed or peaceful. Torture subsequently became epidemic, affecting large numbers of ordinary citizens who found themselves in police custody as suspects, or in connection with criminal investigations.”
If the US is the champion of freedom and democracy in the Middle East one might ask why it supplied this regime with $1.3 billion in military aid for each of the last 30 years? What moral impulse could have prompted Hillary Clinton to defend Mubarak as a family friend and Tony Blair to laud him as “immensely courageous and a force for good”.
The answer of course is the greater good. As all ‘responsible’ analysts agree, the only way to foster freedom in the Middle East is by bankrolling the indefinite suspension of freedom. The only way to diminish the police state is by active support of the police state. The only way to broker peace is through the sale of weaponry. The only way to prevent terror is to terrorise.
Clearly there are times when the only moral option is to grit your teeth and choose a lesser evil. But this is an easy principle to abuse. All too often the ‘greater good’ is just a means of excusing deliberate policies, ones motivated by less noble desires. It is now clear that the West’s support for Mubarak’s regime was never a means to an end, it was the desired end in itself – hence the muted reactions to its collapse. Like so many other dictators, before and now, Mubarak wasn’t paid by the West to encourage democracy, he was paid to be a dictator, and suppress it.
