Moral or pragmatic?

Popular misconception notwithstanding, it’s usually not necessary to choose. The moral political choice often turns out to be the most pragmatic one, but with one proviso.

It has to be informed by true, rather than false, morality and by correct ideas rather than misguided ideologies. Thus, American neoconservatives justified their criminal attack on Iraq by pseudo-moral considerations.

Their aim, they insisted, was to carry American-style democracy to every tribal society in the Middle East. To begin with, the region should be freed from its oppressive dictators, the Saddams, Gaddafis and Mubaraks of this world. What could be more moral than that?

Even assuming that they were indeed driven by what they saw as noble impulses, it was clear to any intelligent observer at the time that the underlying principle was asinine to the point of being evil.

It took monumental ignorance to believe that the outcome could ever be other than what has transpired: a region drowned in blood, chaos reigning, wicked foreign regimes moving in, Europe flooded by millions of refugees, global terrorism intensified and so on. And sacrificing millions of lives out of ignorant motives is a useful definition of political evil.

Going back further in time, it was misconceived amoral pragmatism that allowed the two satanic regimes of modernity, Bolshevik Russia and Nazi Germany, to mature beyond gestation.

Directly they completed their coup d’état, the Bolsheviks signed a unilateral peace with Germany, thereby violating Russia’s obligations to the Allies. The country became a de facto ally of Germany and a de jure enemy of the Allies.

Yet the latter had shipped mountains of armaments to Russia’s northern ports to help the country fight the Central Powers. Now there was a distinct danger that those supplies would fall into the Germans’ hands, making them better equipped to prolong or even win the World War.

To protect those supplies, the British landed a force of 170 Royal Marines at Murmansk and Archangel the day after the betrayal at Brest-Litovsk was signed. Instead, given the disarray in the Bolshevik hordes, perhaps a single division could have been sufficient to move inland and wipe out the Red troops.

Yet the cabinet, with the exception of Churchill, didn’t deem that to be the pragmatic choice. In fact, it was under duress that Lloyd George agreed even to a limited intervention.

In his memoirs, he writes: “Personally, I would have dealt with the Soviets as the de facto Government of Russia. So would President Wilson. But we both agreed that we could not carry to that extent our colleagues at the Congress, nor the public opinion of our own countries which was frightened by Bolshevik violence and feared its spread.”

In the same book, Lloyd George displayed his sterling knowledge of Russia by identifying Kharkov as a White Russian general. Yet ignorance was no obstacle in the way of such pseudo-pragmatic statements as:

“Our attitude [towards the Bolsheviks] was that of the Fox Whigs towards the French Revolution.” “A Bolshevik Russia is by no means such a danger as the old Russian Empire.” “Bolsheviks would not wish to maintain an army, as their creed is fundamentally anti-militarist.” “There must be no attempt to conquer Bolshevik Russia by force of arms.”

Hare-brained thinking and staggering ignorance are here happily united with what Lloyd George probably saw as an exercise in much-vaunted British pragmatism. However, had Britain heeded Churchill’s entreaties springing from his moral revulsion of Bolshevik monstrosity, the world would have been spared its worst catastrophes ever.

Had bolshevism been nipped in the bud, Lenin would have again become a wild-eyed immigrant hack shunned by normal people, Stalin would have advanced his career as bank robber, and Hitler would have continued to rant off soapboxes to dwindling audiences.

It doesn’t take much of ‘what if?’ conjecture to see that the next world war wouldn’t have happened, millions of lives would have been spared, and the West wouldn’t have had to spend trillions trying to contain the Soviet – and now post-Soviet – threat.

That was an example of moral and pragmatic wholly overlapping. Munich, 1938, on the other hand, is another example of misconstrued pragmatism trumping real morality to disastrous effect.

Neville Chamberlain (predictably, John Major’s favourite PM) was cast in Lloyd George’s role. He refused to join a “quarrel in a far away country, between people of whom we know nothing” and instead triumphantly waved a surrender paper in the air.

Yet at that time the French army and the British Expeditionary Corps had the German forces greatly outmanned and outgunned. And Stalin hadn’t yet shipped enough raw materials to Hitler to sustain a prolonged war effort.

Moreover, when the Nazis finally attacked Poland, they left their western borders completely unprotected. A Franco-British tank force could have rolled on to Berlin practically unopposed. Yet all the Allies waged was the Phoney War.

Had a real war started in September, 1939, it would have ended Nazism there and then, sparing some 50 million lives. The moral choice would at that time have also been the pragmatic one – yet again.

Western countries are facing such choices now, and again morality and pragmatism should converge rather than each going its own way. For example, our government thinks it’s acting pragmatically by letting the Chinese and the Russians gain more and more control over our economy.

Rather than throwing KGB money back in its wielders’ faces, HMG elevates them to the House of Lords, while allowing the Chinese to take over much of our strategic infrastructure. In parallel, we are disarming at the same speed at which those two evil regimes are arming .

Nor is HMG, whose head fancies himself as heir to Winston Churchill, reacting to Turkey’s blatant aggression against Armenia. In the year my father was born, the Turks committed the first genocide of the 20^th century by massacring 1.5 million Armenians. Now thousands of Turkish volunteers are fighting with the Azeri Muslims in the on-going conflict over Nagorno-Karabakh, and Turkish warplanes are flying combat missions over Armenian territory.

Boris Johnson and his jolly friends are probably telling themselves that they are acting with laudable pragmatism in their refusal to resist evil predators. In fact, they, along with their Nato allies, are rapidly moving to a point where armed response would become the only possible one.

The upshot is that ‘or’ is the wrong conjunction in the title above. As often as not it should be ‘and’.