Imagine a president took office and served a term in what is considered a completely successful administration. There are no scandals the president deals with every crisis with skill and forwards policy that makes the world and objectively better place and enjoys as a result a high approval rating. On the last day of office however that president brutally murders his wife with his bare hands. How should history judge such a president? Normally and instinctively we say that certain acts override any good someone has done to the world. It doesn't matter that Jimmy Savel supported many charities that doesn't change the fact that he was a serial child abuser.
So should we judge world leaders in the same way it doesn't matter what good they do certain acts such as murder are simply unforgivable? What if to go back to the analogy if instead of killing his wife he killed a civilian in Pakistan with a drone? By comparison to every US president since World War Two I wish a presidents only crime could be to kill a single civilian with a drone. Why is this any different from the wife murder there both human beings with hopes, dreams, ambitions wiped off the face of the earth. This is assuming both killings were deliberate many civilian casualties are rightfully seen as accidents. Nonetheless there is nothing hypothetical about US presidents being murderers as Noam Chomsky identified if the Nuremberg laws were applied every post World War Two president would be hanged.
How then should be judge Obama a man who did many great things the affordable care act, equal marriage, withdrawal of troops from Iraq, DACA and yet he did some utterly unforgivable things such as turning Libya into a failed state where black africans are sold in open air slave markets.
On this issue i'm torn in two some days I think that world leaders should be judged simply one whether they did more good than harm. But by that definition Stalin a mass murderer could be seen as a good leader, as some people argue, because without his industrialisation Hitler would have dominated most if not all of the world. Yet I feel deeply uncomfortable with calling Stalin a good leader given he was responsible for the murder of millions of innocent people.
Perhaps i'm looking at this wrong caring too much about the personal humanity of world leaders. There's the saying "great men are almost always bad men" perhaps the (metaphorical i'm an atheist) souls of all major world leaders have been lost. Maybe we shouldn't try and judge the personal moral character of powerful people and instead look at the overall impact of there policies.
What do you think?
YOU ARE READING
Stray thoughts
Non-FictionBased on Orwell columns series though I can only aspire to his standard of writing. A collection of my thoughts on a wide range of social, economic and political issues written based on whatever i'm currently thinking about. Likely to vary in length...
