Reflecting on the film "The Good
Shepherd"
Moral blankness in fiction and in reality
[1-17-07]
by Berry Craig
PADUCAH, Ky. – "Doing what is morally right," my wife
says, "is almost always the practical thing to do, too."
I was thinking of Melinda’s wise words after we saw The Good Shepherd.
In case you haven’t seen the spy movie, I won’t give away the plot. Matt
Damon stars as Edward Wilson, a character partly based on James Jesus
Angleton, the famous CIA spymaster.
"As the years pass, [Wilson]...develops a kind of moral blankness
disguised as service to his country," wrote Eleanor Ringel Gillespie in an
Atlanta Journal-Constitution movie review. "Wilson drifts through the
highlights of the cold war impervious to his lethal machinations," according
to Wesley Morris’ review in The Boston Globe.
"Moral blankness disguised as service to … country," is a good definition
of the CIA and the Soviet KGB. Throughout the cold war, both spy agencies
operated in the my-country-right-or-wrong mode.
I’m not anti-spy. Good intelligence helps win wars, cold or hot.
Of course, we expected "moral blankness" from the Soviets. Far from the
"workers’ paradise" Lenin promised, the U.S.S.R. became a brutal
totalitarian state under Stalin, aptly dubbed the Red Czar.
We were supposed to be different. Hence, the CIA's "moral blankness"
mocked our democratic principles and made us look like hypocrites. "Moral
blankness" proved impractical, too, driving millions of people to communism.
Guiding the real Edward Wilsons were presidents of "moral blankness."
Republicans and Democrats, they armed and bankrolled dictators whose job was
to make their countries safe for American economic and military interests.
"He may be a son-of-a-bitch, but he’s our son-of-a-bitch," FDR supposedly
said privately of a Latin American strongman. Other U.S. presidents openly
cozied up with despots. At the White House, Ronald Reagan toasted Philippine
dictator Ferdinand Marcos and his shoe-happy spouse for "the shared values
which unite us."
"Our" SOBs helped pushed China, Cuba and Vietnam to the communist side.
Chiang Kai-shek, our man in China, was pro-American but not
pro-democracy. He lost to Chairman Mao.
Before dictator Castro in Cuba, there was dictator Fulgencio Batista.
Likewise, our puppet rulers in South Vietnam were as anti-democratic as they
were anti-communist.
We were supposed to be the good guys in the cold war, defenders of the
"free world" against the Red Menace. We preached democracy but didn’t always
practice it, as The Good Shepherd suggests.
In the movie, a new leader the U.S. doesn’t like gains power in a Latin
American nation. He sticks up for poor peasants who toil long hours at low
pay on coffee plantations, presumably U.S.-owned.
Wilson sends small airplanes to bombard coffee plants with swarms of
hungry grasshoppers. Later, the leader is murdered in a Wilson-sponsored
coup.
The incident was Hollywood make-believe, but it was based on history. In
1954, Guatemalans elected Jacobo Arbenz, an independent-minded Socialist and
reformer, as their president. "... Arbenz had expropriated 234,000 acres of
land owned by United Fruit [a U.S. company], offering compensation that
United Fruit called ‘unacceptable,'" wrote Howard Zinn in A People
As a result, Arbenz "was overthrown by an invasion
force of mercenaries trained by the CIA at military bases in Honduras and
Nicaragua and supported by four American fighter planes flown by American
pilots," Zinn added.
With Arbenz dead, Col. Carlos Castillo Armas, a U.S.-backed dictator,
took over. Right on cue, Armas handed "the land back to United Fruit,
abolished the tax on dividends to foreign investors, eliminated the secret
ballot, and jailed thousands of political critics," Zinn wrote.
From the Bolshevik Revolution through the cold war, communists never
toppled a genuinely democratic government. The Czar, history instructs,
begat the Bolsheviks.
Our "moral blankness" was wrong time and time again – and it didn't work.
Old cold warriors would doubtless disagree. They would probably argue that
the CIA helped us win the cold war precisely because of Edward Wilsonian
"moral blankness." Spying, Morris wrote in his review, is "a deadly, dirty
job."
Indeed it is. But if we had consistently practiced what we preached about
democracy in the world, we might have won the cold war sooner and without
the loss of so much precious blood and treasure in Korea, Vietnam and
elsewhere.
"Moral blankness" is tragically apparent in Iraq, too. British journalist
Robert Fisk correctly characterized Saddam Hussein as "the Beast of Baghdad,
the Hitler of the Tigris, the man who murdered untold hundreds of thousands
of innocent Iraqis while spraying chemical weapons over his enemies."
But writing in The Independent, Fisk pointed out that Saddam was
our guy in the bloody Iran-Iraq war. "Who encouraged Saddam to invade Iran
in 1980, which was the greatest war crime he has committed for it led to the
deaths of a million and a half souls?" Fisk asked.
"And who sold him the components for the chemical weapons with which he
drenched Iran and the Kurds? We did. No wonder the Americans, who controlled
Saddam's weird trial, forbad any mention of this, his most obscene atrocity,
in the charges against him. Could he not have been handed over to the
Iranians for sentencing for this massive war crime? Of course not. Because
that would also expose our culpability."
