Oct. 2020
A few months back I read an interview with Masha Gessen, a Russian/American journalist who stated that anyone working in Trumps cabinet was an accomplice to his regime. She didn’t accept the argument that it was better to help tempering the fire from within the building than screaming outside and having no whatsoever impact. Reason being that you cannot have impact on Trump and it’s thus better not to have your reputation on the line.
It’s an interesting thought, on which I have been chewing a little bit lately, and which becomes more and more actual. As of which point can we decide that collaboration is no longer an option, and we have to sit out the pain until it finally blows over.
If you have no impact at all, it seems clear that you are wasting time, so that’s an easy case, but are there gradations where a minimal impact is sufficient to accept of being part of a regime you explicitly do not support? And if you have some impact on the decision making, as of which level is participation acceptable? These type of questions are relevant to other domains, but it’s the 1st time that the question becomes so imminent with an American elected president. It sounds crazy, but the fundamental question is if collaboration with the president of the United States is still acceptable?
It led me to the following mind game, which goes one step further: in the assumption there is no good coming out of a collaboration with a stakeholder, is it your moral obligation to actively not cooperate? And if so, should you even go further and is active rebellion your moral duty?
It’s a tempting but dangerous thought. If I believe I’m right and it’s my internal conviction that the opposite party is moving into a direction which fundamentally goes against my innermost values, it only sounds natural that I have to prevent the other to reach his goal. Anytime. At all means. Right?
The other party will however have the same line of thinking when being confronted to a collaboration request being a frontal attack to what he considers being righteous.
So it’s clear on where you stand in the ideological spectrum, you will consider one as a man of principles and the other as a fundamentalist extremist. Looking at the very recent history of the United States, we notice a community which is highly divided, and has for some years now been struggling to collaborate both on national as well as international level. While I learned so many years ago in college that Democrates are not that different from Republicans, today this is not true anymore. The US is not the only country struggling internally with this division in minds, culture and convictions.
Take for example the UK. Few years ago, nobody could believe the English to decide to leave the EU. It didn’t matter where the truth was, the leave camp has won the referendum not based on actual facts but rather on a mix of nationalistic emotions and straightforward lies. Nonetheless, Johnson has made his career on these lies and has in the meantime been rewarded the highest political position in the UK.
Both presidents have clearly been elected into positions based on dubious tactics. Although Trump & Johnson can both be seen as a sign of the times, there are big differences: Trump voluntarily wants to destroy the public sector and has shown at multiple occasions attitudes which can unambiguously be interpreted as racist & misogynistic. From Johnson you can just say he’s driving for himself, with a lot of collateral damage, but you cannot say that he’s for instance a racist. He might be a liar, but many of us are, so it’s not distinct enough. Although being an extreme opportunist, in the end he will eventually try to do some good.
So comes back the question, when do you (non) collaborate? The example Trump/Johnson makes clear that the difference lies in what can be considered as a minimal set of common values. Destroying the public sector as in Trump’s case or voluntarily destroying welfare as is the case for Johnson is not sufficient as an argument. People have chosen in a democratic way to be represented by them, and although they can be truly wrong, we all have to sit out the race. Annoying, but it’s just the way a democracy works.
It changes however if that person doesn’t play according to the most basic rules of the game, and uses his power to cheat. In a human society, this is the framework of our values, which is translated into the ‘Universal Declaration of Human Rights’. Although not all countries have signed this, it can be considered as the most commonly accepted treaty global wide.
Probably if you would pass Trump through the test, he will not succeed, Johnson can be accused of a lot of deficiencies, but will probably succeed on all dimensions.
Again, is this sufficient to base any decision on collaboration or not?
Take the example of waterboarding, a clear example of torturing. Bush has used his presidential veto right to ensure that this technique could be used to interrogate suspects and potential terrorists. Lot of EU countries have explicitly or implicitly accepted these dubious techniques, for example just by accepting the transfer of terrorist suspects within their national boarders or even helping the CIA in kidnapping suspects.
Clearly waterboarding would not pass the test of the human rights treaty. At the other side it is assumed that this technique has led to the elimination of Bin Laden.
The technique has been forbidden by Obama, but Obama accepted the detention of terrorists on Guantanamo bay without any legal representation, this last one again being a strict violation of human rights. Obama is known for having wanted to put a stop to these illegal detentions, but even after 8 years of presidency, he did no fully succeed.
So many politicians struggle with the respect of some basic values, it’s probably naive to dream of a world where even Western politicians are playing 100% by the rules. We thus come back to the subjective evaluation of what the person stands for. We are willing to accept to some extent that a person with power has to balance between the positives from the final result and the negatives from not respecting the utmost human values. You could call this Jack Bauer thinking. If he saves the world, we are willing to forgive a lot of things.
So let’s get to the last example to understand if rebellion can be an acceptable political act. The police in the US is known to have a lot of racists amongst their cops. Being a black citizen there, you don’t want to get into a situation where you are confronted with the police. The summer months the black lives matter initiatives made it very clear, the “I can’t breathe” slogan was everywhere. Some weekends ago again a black citizen has received 7 shots in the back, causing a lot of riots in the streets by black citizens. The riots are a clear example of rebellion against a regime that is supporting the police behavior on the streets. The president is not moving to change this, so what options are there left? Lay back and accept that black lives will keep ending by brutal police interventions? Await next democratic elections in the hope that the next president will matter? Or rebel now in the hope that you can force the society to change and save lives in the end?
There’s a whole spectrum between no collaboration and violence. It’s generally accepted that violence cannot be a legitimate action to obtain your goals if you have not used all the democratic tooling at your disposal. In the US, it’s known that a lot of black citizens don’t vote, they can make the difference if they really want to change things. The fact that they do not make sufficiently use of the democratic tools, should be sufficient to end the discussion about the legitimacy of violence to change things.
No collaboration however can be defendable and even be your moral duty in some occasions. You do not have to accept to collaborate with people who feel torturing others is ok. You cannot collaborate with political parties being racist, independently if they have been democratically elected. If it’s so clear that your counterparty is voluntarily not respecting a set of commonly accepted values, collaboration makes of some of us Collaborators in the most negative sense of the word.
Let’s hope that Jack Bauer wins the elections.
Just someone in the crowd 