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I wish my current prime minister of Canada, Justin Trudeau, born out east with a silver spoon in his mouth, could somehow know as much about other leaders, and be as humble and grounded, as President Harry Truman was.
My favourite 20th century U.S. president, Truman was a humble vice president until late in WWII. Truman knew people, knew that, as he put it, some of the politicians who come to Washington, on the Potomac river, tend to get swelled up like frogs with “Potomac fever.” He knew about being humble. Maybe that was why, although civilians couldn’t pass a federal anti-lynching law, he used a simple one page document, as commander in chief, to order the U.S. armed forces to be racially integrated.
Like my favourite 19th century president, (Lincoln) Truman knew mostly failure right up until he became president. His father was a little guy with a goodly share of troubles. A reporter once asked Truman something like, “Do you think your father was a failure?” Harry bristled: (From memory) “My father raised a son to be president of the United States. That is success enough for any man!”
Truman surely knew what Bertrand Russell knew: There is no such animal as a benevolent despot: If a benevolent man becomes a despot, then the benevolence disappears, while the despotism remains. And so the pictures from my youth of China’s shining benevolent leader were “misinformation.” I wonder if those millions of “little red books” ever got recycled? Today nobody carries around Quotations of Chairman Mao.
Truman was raised in the west, amidst the Missouri corn belt, far from the rich people out East, and sophisticated eastern journalists. What Truman often said to reporters, and they thought it was corny, was, “The only thing new is the history that you don’t know.” There’s a lot Prime Minister Trudeau doesn’t know. Maybe he still thinks Mao was a good guy.
Someone once asked Harry if human nature could be improved. “No…” He expressed great respect for the U.S. Constitution, noting that it was written to take human nature into account by having checks and balances and separation of powers. No dictator with total power. Truman, who served overseas in WWI, was born in 1884, just 35 years before my father, who served overseas in WWII. Father had three high school history textbooks in our basement. Reading them, I saw history repeat.
I have seen old Putin be athletic with his shirt off, just like a certain old despotic Roman emperor; Putin stepped up oppression of gays, without any opposition from the west, not even during the Sochi winter Olympics, remember? And then he ended up changing the constitution so he could stay in power….
Over in China, the leader stepped up oppression of a group I had never heard of, the Uyghers. And then he changed the constitution to be “president for life.” And now certain leaders around the world are taking note, they too are progressing “backwards in time,” acquiring more power through reducing human rights, keeping the majority uneasy and in line…
The leader’s power base continues to be the rural areas, where peasants continue to be oblivious that “the new boss” is repeating history. For peasants, history might as well be algebra, mysterious and irrelevant.
Algebra is something I all but failed two years in a row, because things were too disconnected: Natural numbers, negative numbers, whole numbers, quadratic equations: How did they even relate to each other, let alone to real life?
As an adult—too late—I learned that if you would skim the entire math book at the start of the year then you know more than a peer who studied every page of Chapter One: Because you would be oriented, and know how everything relates. I suppose young Justin Trudeau, insulated by his wealth, fame and good looks, never had to encounter the ugly side of life, never suffered from bullies or unfair businessmen, and so he never had to weave together his own ideas of history and human nature.
One of my dad’s school books tie together the passing years in terms of things like The Quest for Equality, or The Quest for Security—This section had a picture of a baron, pointing a crossbow, standing in the doorway of a poor serf’s hut. All too often, schoolchildren would think history was as disconnected as algebra, glumly memorizing the dates of battles and changing national borders. Perhaps such a grim view of time is why, when the cold war finally ended, and the Berlin Wall was dismantled by regular people, and the “evil empire” of Russian communism collapsed, then a man famously proclaimed, “It is the end of history!”
But when the Cold War passed— praise the Lord—many people were surprised when this did not, finally, mean peace. Instead? “Brush fire” wars. Ethnic cleansing. Borders changing in Africa, Europe, and the former Soviet Union. But I will tell you who would not have been surprised: Harry Truman.
Under Truman’s watch The Bomb was dropped. I wonder if young Prime Minister Trudeau has grasped the central fact of our age: The arrival of the Atom Bomb couldn’t change human nature, only human behaviour. Leaders in Russia and China still have their greed and lust for power. Hence Putin used a “slow motion invasion” involving masked mystery soldiers to grab Crimea. China is now grabbing islands, even building islands, to unfairly claim brand new territorial waters, far beyond the United Nations 200 mile limit. It’s as if the Chinese Communist Party believes “some nations are more equal than others.”
President Harry Truman wouldn’t be surprised to see China visibly on the move to replace Russia as the world’s next evil empire, but my prime minister still seems to be in denial. For one thing, Justin Trudeau avoided parliament—and ordered all liberal party MPs to do the same—on the day parliament voted on whether or not genocide exists in the Uyghur area in China. (It does)
History teaches: “All that is necessary for evil to triumph is for good men to do nothing.”
Shortly before Chinese officials admitted to the world truth about covid, they instructed certain former Chinese in Canada—who still loved China more than their neighbours, more than their adopted homeland, and even more than common decency—to buy up all publicly available PPE (personal protective equipment) in Canada, and ship it to China. (Global News, television clip) From the prime minister’s office (PMO) the reaction was …crickets…
How queer: By reading Truman’s “history you don’t know” I am somehow smarter than my mighty prime minister. I know what exists: Russia is using troll farms to fool western anti-vaxers; China is co-opting our naive prime minister.
I miss Harry, miss my dad. As for young Justin, I won’t miss him at all.
…
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Sean Crawford
Survivor of the 1960’s, but without long hair,
West of Krakatoa, west of Java
April 2020
History Repeats OR Why China hates Taiwan:
Today (2021) there are Russian troops in East Ukraine helping the Russian-speaking Ukrainian rebels.
“Western countries and Nato accused Russia of sending troops over the border into Ukraine, but Russia maintains any Russian fighters there are “volunteers””. … During Truman’s time, with no Chinese declaration of war, Chinese “volunteers” went to fight in Korea. Later China dragged out the peace talks, as innocent soldier kept dying, insisting on no peace unless all the “volunteers” who were prisoners of war of the U.N. would be forcibly “repatriated.” Meanwhile, what the People’s Liberation Army “volunteers” wanted, with the coming of peace, was to be released from the South Korean prison camps into freedom, so they could freely make their way to Taiwan. The communists must have gnashed their teeth at the very thought. “Curse Taiwan!”
Update: Does it get any scummier? This week an independent organization wanted to give the female president of Taiwan an award. The Trudeau government forbade it by saying all further government funding would be pulled if they went ahead with the award. I call that appeasement of a dictator, and I don’t mean at Munich.
Footnotes:
~Here are echoes of what Mao’s book once meant to 1960’s readers.
~Here are sample quotations.
~The exact Russel quotation about despots is in my February 10 essay Quotations for Radical Muslims.
~The Finns are now educating the public about the existence of Russian “troll factories” as in this six minute BBC video. The BBC contacted the Russian government but have not received a response.
~Here is an example of using the idiom “crickets,” in reaction to something Anya said, “It could be bunnies,” in a musical scene from Buffy the Vampire Slayer.
