93 - "Absolute Power Corrupts Absolutely"
Malaysia has jailed its all-powerful Prime Minister Najib Razak, omnipotent leader for nine years and former head of his country’s long ruling United Malays National Organization He stole $1 billion from the nation’s sovereign investment fund, and will now serve a prison sentence of twelve years. A supreme court panel of five judges convicted him on seven counts of corruption. His appeal, it said, was “devoid of any merits.” He and his wife purchased a huge yacht, a Picasso painting, and used the stolen funds to invest in – of all things – the movie “The Wolf of Wall Street.” Absolute power corrupted absolutely, as Lord Acton commented in 1887. “Great men are almost always bad men,” he concluded.
Acton’s aphorism must also apply to men who think themselves great and who run off with a nation’s archives, including top secret and super-top-secret classified documents. What was a president of the world’s greatest democracy thinking when – living out Acton’s words – he stashed not one or two but dozens and dozens of documents in closets, filing cabinets, cheap safes, and cardboard boxes?
And for what conceivable purpose? To glance at them again and again to remind himself of his presumed greatness? But we are told that he rarely reads. So why? Possibly to remind himself, just by having them near, of his greatness and his ridiculous correspondence with another corrupted man – Kim Jong-Un? Or, as the conspiracy-minded among us suggest, so that he could someday sell some of the documents, especially the North Korean correspondence, for big bucks?
After all, the document thief (his lawyers promised to return the full trove of missives but lied to the FBI) could even have made copies. But photocopies of the top secret ones, or even the Korean love letters, could hardly sell as well as originals.
Could there be embarrassing exchanges -- among the documents now back in proper government hands -- from Putin, or from the thief to Putin, extolling their mutual deep and abiding friendship?
Why would anyone in a position of real power cart off so many documents, possibly at random, or – more likely – with some devious strategy in mind? Saying that “I took them because I could, because they are mine,” is childish, but possibly as close to the truth as we will ever learn. Or - a wild thought – did he just fancy tearing up the odd classified document, chewing it, or flushing it? What possesses someone to do what he has done throughout his life, much less as a supposed president? Lord Acton was right on the money: absolute power absolutely corrupts, and it has enormously and possibly terminally corrupted these United States.
To return, if we must, to Malaysia for the moment, Acton said that great men were always bad. Certainly men, like our mad former president, are the usual thieves. But Najib Razak’s wife was in on the thieving, too. Rosmah Mansor, the self-styled queen of Malaysia, is now on trial in Kuala Lumpur for bilking the state (and its people) of up to $4.5 billion. When she was arrested in 2018, investigators found her with 27 gold necklaces and bangles, 567 handbags, 423 watches, 14 tiaras, bundles of cash, and a 22-carat pink diamond set into a necklace. The whole collection was valued at about $23 million, monies looted from a state investment fund and laundered in the U. S. and elsewhere. She was charged with receiving a total of $45 million in bribes, and seventeen counts of money laundering. Goldman Sachs facilitated much of this peculation, and paid a fine of $3.5 billion.
Thievery is thievery, whether of a nation’s hard earned investment funds or of a nation’s inestimable assets – its ordinary letters, its classified correspondence, and – goodness – its super top secret eyes only in a secure facility – exchanges. And then there is the obstruction of attempts by the National Archives and the FBI (on behalf of the Archives) to regain proper control of these materials.
In Malaysia, the stain of the Razak thefts is so pervasive that a 97-year old former prime minister, now hospitalized with a case of Covid-19, threatens to run again for high office in order to clean out his country’s Augean Stables. (Could he please come clean out ours as well, a truly Herculean task?)
Mahathir Mohamad, who was prime minister of Malaysia for twenty-two years beginning in 1981, came out of retirement the first time when he was 92 to lead a political coalition against Razak. He was prime minister for twenty-two more months, and now feels that the nation needs him and his moral rightness again. He argues now, as he did when I interviewed him high up in the Petronas tower in Kuala Lumpur in 2006, that unquestioned personal integrity enables political leaders, especially tough ones like himself, to do good. But they must work for the people, he said, not for themselves.
In Mahathir’s case, he used absolute power to benefit Malays and to build Malaysia into a strong Southeast Asian nation. But, in his case, as in the case of American presidents like Harry Truman, absolute power hardly corrupted. Now, as in the case of Razak and one of our own, we are all besmirched by the pretensions of someone who abused power absolutely, and now absolutely attempts to game the system.
Moreover, Kenya and Angola held close presidential elections in recent weeks. In both cases the losing candidates said that the results were falsified. But they are leaving a final decision up to their national courts and are refraining from trying to incite mobs to attack the winners and their capital cities. If Africa can respect electoral outcomes, why can’t those who once held absolute power in Washington, DC, and let it corrupt them, do the same? As President Biden said last night, “You can’t love your country only when you win,” he said. “It’s fundamental.”
President Biden also reminded us that to overcome absolute power that corrupts, we must now win the “battle for the soul of the nation.”
More from this Newsletter after Labor Day