Benjamin

 

Picture yourself in Washington DC on a rainy fall evening in 1941.  As you stand under an awning, trench coat and fedora soaked from the rain, a similarly outfitted man approaches. 

“Is it ready?  Do you have it with you?” he asks in a British accent.  “We’re out of time.” 

You nod and jiggle the leather valise in your hand.  He lets out a sigh of relief. 

“You may have just saved Britain,” he says as you hand him the briefcase.  Inside, a map detailing Nazi Germany’s plans to invade South America has begun its journey into the hands of US President Franklin Roosevelt.  Two days later, FDR will address the nation at the Mayflower hotel.  The following part is real, by the way.

“I have in my possession a secret map made by Hitler’s government. It is a map of South America and part of Central America, as Hitler proposes to reorganize it,” FDR will tell the crowd.  With American approval for involvement in a war in Europe hovering in the low teens, this sudden threat to the Americas will change the course of modern history.

There’s just one problem.  The map is a fake. 

At the outset of the Battle of Britain, Winston Churchill authorized a new counter intelligence operation known as the British Security Coordination.  Their remit was to fill the gap left by the legal neutrality of the United States and the now war-entangled MI6.  Members of the BSC were sent to the US to convince Americans that Hitler was too dangerous to be allowed to establish a German empire across the continent.  Churchill gave them nearly total independence to bring the US military into the war by any means necessary.  It was a matter of survival for Great Britain.  A little forgery was a small price to pay.  In later years, the world would learn of the horrors of the Holocaust and countless other atrocities committed by the Nazi regime that more than justified any small acts of deception that furthered the cause of righteous defiance of evil.  The BSC were willing to accept the outcome of broken laws and damaged alliances to defeat an existential threat.  

Do you like Star Trek?  I LOVE Star Trek.  I have trouble picking a favorite series.  They’re all so good, except for Discovery.  That show sucks.  Like, it might be a good show if it was a standalone property, but it just doesn’t do Star Trek stuff.  If you just want action-based sci-fi, that’s a different conversation and… I’m off topic.  Star Trek Deep Space 9 was the first Trek show that presented a serialized, episodic format and it used that format to tell a seasons-long story of hostile invasion of the United Federation of Planets and its allies by a collective of slave-owning, eugenics implementing aliens called the Dominion.  The Dominion means to enslave the people of the Federation if they can, and start a genocide if they can’t.  The stakes are therefore as high as they can be.  The Federation operates under very strict rules for maintaining the highest ethical and moral standards, even in times of war or when great sacrifices are required.  However, the threat from the Dominion is too great for some in the Federation to continue to adhere to those standards, and so a secret plot is crafted that is hoped will draw a previously neutral, but militarily powerful alien race called the Romulans to join the war on the side of the Federation.  A fake video file is created that shows the Dominion leaders plotting to invade the Romulan home world.  That fake video is then given to a Romulan ambassador who inspects it and discovers that it is a fake.  You may be familiar with this scene as portrayed in a popular meme format featuring a pointy eared alien holding a thumb drive and yelling, “It’s a faaaaaaaaake!”  A secret operative of the Federation then places a bomb on the ambassador’s ship that explodes shortly after it departs the Federation space station and kills the ambassador.  The Federation quickly publicly blames the Dominion and the Romulans find the now damaged video file which appears to be legitimate in its mangled state, which brings them into the war on the side of the Federation.  The captain responsible for the plot struggles with his lapse in ethics, but ultimately decides that he feels justified knowing he saved billions of lives at the cost of one.  

"So… I lied. I cheated. I bribed men to cover the crimes of other men. I am an accessory to murder. But the most damning thing of all… I think I can live with it. And if I had to do it all over again, I would. Garak was right about one thing, a guilty conscience is a small price to pay for the safety of the Alpha Quadrant. So I will learn to live with it. Because I can live with it. I can live with it."

The Federation was willing to accept the outcome of broken laws and damaged alliances to defeat an existential threat.  

Fidel Castro’s communist revolution in Cuba in 1959 was perhaps the single most destabilizing event of the Cold War.  Castro’s government brought the threat of Soviet nuclear weapons to Cuban bases only 90 miles away from the United States and therefore easy striking distance.  The US intelligence agencies, taking advantage of the change in presidential leadership in 1961, made extensive plans to remove Castro from power in Cuba.  The failed Bay of Pigs invasion further heightened tensions that culminated in the Cuban Missile Crisis in 1962.  The United States government, through its own diplomatic failures and internal conflicts between President Kennedy and his military leaders, faced the potential for a nuclear holocaust if Soviet missiles were launched from Cuba.  In response, the US intelligence agencies and military leaders devised a plan known to history as Operation Northwoods.  This plan contained a host of false flag operations designed to give President Kennedy the public justification needed to invade Cuba with the full force of the US military and remove Castro from power.  Among the proposals:

Blame any US space program failures or disasters on Cuban terrorists.
Stage an attack on the US base at Guantanamo Bay.  

Stage a Cuban terrorist attack on the islands of Jamaica and Trinidad-Tobago to bring the United Kingdom into the invasion of Cuba.

Sink ships carrying Cuban refugees and blame it on Castro.
Shoot down remote controlled commercial aircraft repainted to look like US fighter planes and blame it on Cuba.

The proposal was presented to President Kennedy in 1962.  Kennedy had developed a deep mistrust of his intelligence and defense leaders and rejected the plan repeatedly.  Operations Northwoods remained on defense secretary Robert McNamara’s desk for the remainder of Kennedy’s time in office, which also happened to be the rest of his life.  Kennedy’s decision to stand on principle quite possibly saved the world from a nuclear war.  A few months after rejecting Operation Northwoods, Kennedy resisted his military leaders again during the Cuban Missile Crisis and resorted to diplomatic solutions that ended the standoff without any casualties or nuclear detonations.  He refused a detailed plan with promises of favorable outcomes for an uncertain future full of negotiations and concessions, and we all lived to see another sunrise.

If you enjoy sweeping, epic, historical films, I give you my highest recommendation to find a copy of the Ultimate Edition director’s cut of the 2005 Ridley Scott masterpiece Kingdom of Heaven.  It was a modest financial success, but most people seem to have either missed it upon release or forgotten it completely, which really is a shame.  It is a beautiful film with amazing visuals and fantastic performances.  The movie portrays a semi-fictionalized account of the third crusade told through the journey of a French blacksmith-turned-knight named Balian who finds himself embroiled in political intrigue of the Christian kingdom of Jerusalem as it prepares for a renewed war from the Muslim army lead by Saladin.  At court, Balian begins a dangerous liaison with Sibylla, the king’s sister who is married to a villainous Templar knight named Guy de Lusignan who is determined to eliminate the Muslims from the Holy Land.  King Baldwin hopes for peace in the holy land and wishes to negotiate with Saladin, but he is also dying from leprosy and has little time left with no direct heir to follow him.  In order to avoid a power vacuum that would ultimately be filled by Guy, Baldwin and Sibylla try to convince Balian to join a plot to assassinate Guy and marry Sibylla to place a peaceful ruler on the thrown and continue Baldwin’s work towards peace with Saladin.  Balian cannot bring himself to commit such a sin before God, no matter the justification or rationalization presented to him.  His moral compass simply will not allow such a thing.  Upon hearing his rejection of this plan, Sibylla, now fearing what will become of her and her young son as the threat of war with Saladin becomes inevitable, slaps Balian in the face with the hardest of hard truths: 

“There will be a day when you will wish you had done a little evil, to do a greater good.”  

At the end of the film, Saladin does indeed take Jerusalem, ending Christian rule, but Balian is able to negotiate safe passage from the city for the European Christians and a more peaceful withdrawal instead of annihilation.  Balian rejected the detailed plan full of promises of favorable outcomes for an uncertain future full of negotiations and concessions.  

These examples all share a common thread of heroism mixing with wisdom and a dash of good luck to present a victory for freedom, democracy, and survival.  But what happens when it doesn’t?  It’s actually a lot harder to find cinematic examples of these, so please excuse my lack of parallels drawn here.  You probably get where all of this is going anyway so let’s just talk about the history stuff. 

In August 1964, the Johnson administration was still following Kennedy’s plans to cap the American involvement in Vietnam at sending “military advisors.”  The American public had no interest in supporting another war in Asia after the Korean War.  However, LBJ really wanted to spend some money on military equipment and he couldn’t do that if nobody was blowing up our tanks and boats and helicopters.  So, on August 2 the USS Maddox, a destroyer patrolling the Gulf of Tonkin encountered three North Vietnamese torpedo boats.  The Maddox fired warning shots, the NVA boats returned fire, then the Maddox returned fire on them and damaged all three boats and killed four sailors while taking only a single bullet hole in the Maddox’s hull.  Two days later, the commander of the task force that included the Maddox reported that the NVA vessels had returned and opened fire on the group of US ships.  This attack never happened, but LBJ was able to use the reporting as pretense for the Gulf of Tonkin Resolution, which opened the door for a wider military engagement in Vietnam and we all know how that played out.  Ten years, billions of dollars, and thousands of lives lost later, American helicopters desperately airlifted the last American personnel out of Saigon as the NVA arrived in tanks.  

In October 2002, George W. Bush… you know what, I’m going to skip most of this.  Most of you lived through it and it’s been reported frequently.  To sum up, American business interests really wanted to invade Iraq and so the Bush administration presented United Nations inspection reports that alluded to the presence of weapons of mass destruction in Iraq.  There was a very one-sided war, then a long occupation, then we left when everybody noticed how high the tab had gotten.  Nobody really believed the Bush administration’s claims of WMDs, but nobody really did anything to stop them from ordering the invasion either.  By 2006, Bush had publicly admitted that the “intelligence was faulty.”  Hundreds of thousands of Iraqis died.  Trillions of dollars were spent.  Saddam Hussein was removed from power.  

It’s neither fair nor accurate to hand wave away these events as “history is written by the winners.” It’s something lazy writers say to avoid evaluating humanity from the street level.  The very human reality is that we put people into positions of authority to make these decisions for us, often under cover of darkness.  That’s a very scary, unsettling thought.  

I think something’s coming… yep, I can feel it… it’s going to happen.  Here it comes… 

“Son, we live in a world that has walls, and those walls have to be guarded by men with guns. Who’s gonna do it? You? You, Lieutenant Weinberg? I have a greater responsibility than you could possibly fathom. You weep for Santiago, and you curse the Marines. You have that luxury. You have the luxury of not knowing what I know—that Santiago’s death, while tragic, probably saved lives. And my existence, while grotesque and incomprehensible to you, saves lives. You don’t want the truth because deep down, in places you don’t talk about at parties, you want me on that wall. You need me on that wall. We use words like honor, code, loyalty. We use these words as the backbone of a life spent defending something. You use them as a punchline. I have neither the time nor the inclination to explain myself to a man who rises and sleeps under the blanket of the very freedom that I provide, and then questions the manner in which I provide it! I would rather you just said, ‘Thank you,’ and went on your way, Otherwise, I suggest you pick up a weapon and stand a post. Either way, I don’t give a damn what you think you are entitled to!”

That’s right, you got the monologue from A Few Good Men.  Colonel Nathan Jessup was right in what he said.  He was also very wrong in what he did.  The hard truth is that we do want someone making those decisions with very serious consequences and we don’t really want to know about it as long as there’s still toilet paper on the shelves at the Costco.  It’s hard to believe that there are a lot of people that have forgotten that four years ago, that was a very real problem that we all faced.  The people that we allow to have that authority matters.  A leader’s character matters.  Humanity matters.  

It’s 2024.  It’s an election year in the United States.  It’s time to pick a new president.  We know who Donald Trump is.  We know his character.  He’s been on tv continuously for the last nine years - which, yeah, that has to stop.  Over the next four years, those big decisions are going to need to be made.  We have to give the nuclear codes to someone who would struggle with the decision to do a little evil for a greater good.  Donald Trump will never even be faced with that ethical dilemma.  It would never even occur to him that his decisions, his authority, and his actions in office exist because the people expect him to make them on their behalf.  Seriously, try to picture Trump in FDR’s place in 1941 or Kennedy’s place in 1962.  Over the next one or two presidential administrations, the very real possibility exists for Russian victory in Ukraine, China’s invasion of Taiwan, and a nuclear war in the Middle East.  If any one of those events happens, what comes next?  Russia will keep moving west into Europe reclaiming former Soviet territory.  China will control manufacturing and trade routes in the Pacific.  Mass migrations of refugees will create a diaspora on an unimaginable scale from North Africa to India.  The world is not prepared to deal with those outcomes.  

Voters, even if you don’t like the transes, or you don’t want women to have abortions, or you don’t like paying taxes… do a little evil for a greater good.  Vote for Kamala.