133 - Are There Any Honest Leaders Still Among Us?
Just as Diogenes, the 4th century BCE cynical philosopher, searched relentlessly for honest men, so is our troubled twenty-first century world still short of integrity in politics. What must we make in 2023 of a sometime candidate for Speaker of the House of Representatives who condemns Trump then denies that he ever did so – all to try vainly to gain a deeply compromised position as second in line to the greatest nation’s presidency?
That same aspirant Speaker depends on the support of Congresspeople who lie not surreptitiously but blatantly: like George Santos, from Queens and Long Island, who falsified almost every item on his resume and appears to have violated numerous campaign expenditure laws, not to mention running from a swindle in Brazil. And the putative Speaker’s Republican opponents also falsify their policy positions, their motives, and their determination to gain power.
Santos is just one in-your-face example of Republican chicanery and deceit: think of liars and Trump echoers like Marjorie Taylor Greene, Kari Lake, Elise Stefanik (a real flip-flopper), and Jim Jordan; reputed sex traffickers and prevaricators like Matt Gaetz, and the 200 or so Republican national office holders who persisted in denying the validated results of the 2020 presidential election. The House of Representatives’ Jan. 6 committee uncovered countless examples of egregious deceitfulness by persons who knew better, but who remain outright naked opportunists (like possible Speaker Kevin McCarthy).
The aliens and the alienated are displacing the honest men for whom Diogenes still searches. Outside the U.S., a retreating recent president of Brazil refused to convey the sash of office to his successor. President Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva, and fled to Florida, that new sanctuary for the politically depraved. Jair Bolsonaro, the defeated incumbent, rightfully fears prosecution for corruption, abuse of office, financial mismanagement (even peculation), and influence peddling. He reckons that he is safe in Orlando, close to the shelter of another skirter of laws in Palm Beach, and within the jurisdiction of the state’s ambitious governor.
Farther away, the dishonest military rulers of junta-controlled Myanmar pile prison sentences on the slim frame of Daw Aung San Suu Kyi, the democratically elected popular leader and Nobel Laureate whom they deposed two years ago in a sudden coup. December’s third rigged court judgment against Suu Kyi added seven years to her earlier twenty-six year sentence – allegedly for misusing imported equipment and renting a helicopter. Senior General Min Aung Hlaing is angry that Suu Kyi eclipsed his central place of power and threatened his and the military’s methods of enriching themselves corruptly. Hence, the endless lies that – unless another coup comes or the valiant Myanmar opposition of students and ethnic militias somehow encourages the country’s huge army to purge itself -- Hlaing and his colleagues use to immure a gentle 77-year old woman.
Rwanda denies that it funds and motivates M23, the rebel movement in the eastern Democratic Republic of Congo that has caused so much mayhem. Rwanda’s President Paul Kagame refuses to acknowledge how he tricked the acclaimed hero of Hotel Rwanda -- Paul Rusesabagina -- and then abducted him to face a show trial in Rwanda, all because Kagame (like Hlaing) felt threatened by Rusesabagina’s global popularity as a human rights’ campaigner. The latter now sits in a Rwandan prison, supposedly for twenty-five years. Even so, the false imprisonment is less deadly than Kagame’s assassinations of opponents (and former comrades) that were engineered locally, in Britain, Sweden, and South Africa.
These travails of calumny -- including the autocracies of Cambodia’s President Hun Sen, Cameroon’s President Paul Biya, Equatorial Guinea’s President Teodoro Obiang, and Zimbabwe’s President Emmerson Mnangagwa -- are each fully anchored in dishonest dealings and cruelties. But their thefts and killings all pale before the immense pile of dishonesty crowding the Kremlin and the presidential dacha in Sochi. This New Year’s repetition was the falsehoods that Ukraine was not a nation and its people really Russians controlled by Nazis. But throughout the eleventh month illegal invasion and vale of tears foisted on Ukraine, Putin has repeatedly lied about his intentions, his goals, his reasons, his results, Russian casualties, Russian methods, atrocities in Ukraine, and much more. Diogenes, were that self-styled citizen of the world with us today, would be appalled at how so many of our leaders routinely betray the truth. In despair, he would plunge himself deeper into the large ceramic jar that was his refuge first in Athens and then in Corinth.
Has humanity descended so deeply into depravity and discord that publics and voters no longer demand full-time integrity from their leaders? Until the U. S. Department of Justice brings Trump to book; prosecutes Santos, Gaetz, and others; and expels Bolsonaro, probity will remain scarce. Likewise, until Chief Justice Roberts manages to persuade Justice Clarence Thomas to recuse himself in response to his wife’s revealing responses to the Jan. 6 committee, we can repose little trust in the objectivity of the Supreme Court.
Trump can theoretically be busted (on tax evasion like Al Capone, if nothing more) but how is the globe to be protected from dangerous serial prevaricators and psychopaths like Putin?
The past that we thought was thankfully behind us after Stalin and Mao died and their successors bumbled their ruling proclivities forward to Mikhail Gorbachev and Deng Xiaoping is, depressingly, still with us. The globe and these United States’ most pressing needs include returning honesty to leadership suites across the planet. President Harry Truman had many faults, but he was truthful to a fault. Sir Seretse Khama and his successors in distant Botswana showed us how leaders should behave. So did Prime Minister Lee Kuan Yew, more coercively, in the Singaporean city-state. South Africa’s Nelson Mandela sparkled, too, with clarity of mind and magnanimity toward his one-time oppressors. Today, alas, their like are too few, and oft-compromised by exigency or contingency.
Only in Ukraine do we now see authenticity under fire. President Volodymyr Zelensky persists, under harrowing circumstances, to speak truth to power in a manner that Diogenes and even his antagonists Socrates and Plato would easily have applauded. He and his like are hopes for future eras.