It's been a hell of a long time since I've posted anything here, but I've decided to reduce my political commentary on Facebook, and use the blog for the extended political stuff.
Novelist Alistair MacLean is known primarily for his
thrillers like Ice Station Zebra and The Guns of Navarone, but, to me, one of
his best passages is near the end of The
Secret Ways, in which a British Secret Service agent meets up with two
Hungarian resistance heroes in an attempt to repatriate a British scientist who
had defected to the Soviets.
Jansci, the Resistance leader is talking to Jennings, the
scientist:
“Tell them, tell your people at
home, that our lives and the lives of generations to come lie in their hands. Tell
them that there is only one thing that ultimately matters on this earth, and
that is peace on this earth. And tell them that this is a very small earth, and
growing smaller with every year that passes, but that we all have to live on it
together, that we all must live on it
together.”
“Coexistence?” Dr. Jennings raised
an eyebrow.
“Coexistence. A terrible word, a
big bogeyman word, but what else could any sane man offer in its place – all the nameless horrors of a
thermonuclear war, the requiem for the lost hopes of mankind? No, coexistence
must come, it must if mankind is to survive, but this world without spheres,
the dream of that great American, Cordell Hull[i],
will never come if you have impetuous fools, as you do have, Dr. Jennings,
shouting for big results now, here, today.
MacLean wrote this in 1959… yet here we are, 58 years later,
with Trump shouting for the “biggest,” the “greatest” and claiming that “I
alone” can deliver.
“Most of all, it will never come so
long as our leaders and governments, our newspapers and propagandists teach us
incessantly, insistently, that we must hate and fear and despise all the other
peoples who share this same tiny world with us. The nationalism of those who
cry ‘We are the people’ – the jingoistic brand of patriotism – these are the
great evils of our world today, the barriers to peace that no man can overcome.
What hope is there for the world as long as we cling to the outmoded forms of
national allegiance? We owe allegiance to no one, Dr. Jennings, at least not on
this earth.
He predicted the Tea Party and Fox long before they crawled
out of the slime.
“And that, I think, is the real
answer – not the proposing of courses of action, as Dr. Jennings suggested, but
in creating the climate of good will in which those actions can flower and bear
fruit. Ask the rulers of the great nations who should be leading our sick world
to a better tomorrow what their greatest need of today is, and they will tell
you scientists and still more scientists – those luckless brilliant creatures
who have long since traded in their birthright of independence, buried their
consciences, and sold out to the governments of the world – so that they can
strive harder and still harder until they have in their hands the ultimate
weapon of destruction.
[snip]
“The governments of the world may
not be mad, but they are blind, and their blindness is but one step removed
from insanity. The desperate, most urgent need this world knows or will ever
know is the need for an effort without parallel in history to get to know
ourselves and the other people of the world even as well as we know ourselves,
and then we will see that the other man is just as we are, that right and
virtue and truth belong to him as much as they do to us. We must think of
people not as a conglomerate mass, not conveniently, indiscriminately, as a
faceless nation: we must always remember that a nation is made of millions of
little human beings just like we are, and to talk about national sin and guilt
and wickedness is to be willfully blind, unjust, and unchristian, and while it
is true that such a nation may go off the rails, it never goes off because it
wants to, but because it can’t help it, because there was something in its past
or in its environment that inescapably made it what it is today, just as some
forgotten incidents, some influences that we can neither recall not understand,
have made each of us what we are today.
“And with that understanding and
knowledge there will come compassion, and no power on earth can compete against
compassion – the compassion that makes the Jewish Society issue world-wide
appeals for money for their sworn but starving enemies, the Arab refugees, the
compassion that made a Russian soldier thrust his gun into Sandor’s hands, the
compassion – a compassion born of understanding – that made nearly all the
Russians who were stationed in Budapest refuse to fight the Hungarians, whom
they had come to know so well. And this compassion, this charity, will come, it
must come, but men the world over must want to make it come.”
Jansci’s statements about the Communists could be repeated
equally well today, by merely substituting “far-right-conservatives” for “Communists.”
The world MacLean wrote about is the world that Trump and his ilk want to
recreate, not in Eastern Europe, but here in the United States, a nation where
criticism of the government sentences you to a labor camp, where secret police
round up and execute dissidents, where the Party, rather than the government,
holds ultimate power.
[i]
Hull was Secretary of State under FDR, from 1933 to 1944, and received the
Nobel Peace Prize in 1945 for his work in establishing the United Nations.
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