Corruption, great and small
OF THE MANIFOLD and diverse forms of corruption men have devised to further their interests or gratify their desires not many 'matter very much. There can be few who have travelled abroad Who have not at some time carried out petty frauds upon the Customs and Excise authorities. During war or at other times of Specific shortages black markets spring up as swiftly and easily as weeds after rain. In docks and road transport various forms of thieving are usual. In public houses, the stealing of cigarettes by members of the staff has become so common — and commonly accepted — that more and more cigarette machines are being installed., Shops probably lose more through fiddles by their assistants than through theft by their customers. Stealing from building sites is part of the game. Honesty may be the best policy; and it may also be the commonest policy of most of the time; but very few people indeed will be able to declare honestly that they have not engaged in any of the above or similar malpractices in their lives, which would be to claim that they have never behaved without corruption.
CORRUPTION on a small-scale and of the nature described is ineradicable, and no more likely to be prevented than would boys . be from climbing trees to steal apples or eggs; there has never been a society without sexual deviation and deception; no man seeking power has done so without dissembling nor can any ambitious priest do without the calculations of hypocrisy, and no Journalist, come to that, has ever written the whole truth and nothing but the truth. All these corruptions are part and parcel of the normal commerce of living. There are other corruptions _ and certain actions which, not technically corrupt, are corrupting — which might not differ in kind from those in some of Which all of us have trafficked, but which, differing hugely in scale, offend natural taste, threaten to destroy and disrupt the social and ptlitical disciplines and arrangements of society, and are capable of acting poisonously and demoralising the general state. Such corruptions and corruptings are making a great deal of noise these days; but it is not certain that their toxicity is as sizeable as their publicity. We are fairly well immunised. And to s.eme extent, sense of proportion is appropriate. We are far, for Instance, from the nepotistic debaucheries of public life in renaissance Italy, and from the Rome of Nero.
NEVERTHELESS, we may discern certain practices and theories current nowadays which offer us no ground whatever for presuming that the human race has morally progressed from the (1,.ays of Nero, say, or Attila: in their different fashions, Stalin and tlitler easily outclassed the traditional tyrants of the past. The lieov;,er democratic politicians possess and exercise nowadays is 014" greater than that dreamed of by divine kings or infallible 110Wers. Wars are fought on a scale, and with a furious intensity, rutality, destructiveness and slaughter unimagined before this entury. Men who would hesitate to smack a naughty child think 11,ttle or nothing of bombing and burning hundreds and 1r2ousands of children to death; politicians think little or nothing '12 ordering generals, who think nothing or little of obeying, to rganise mass murder by the million. Trees and seas, rivers and 'Le air we breathe do not escape a corrupt contamination which 'j sinoral as well as physical; and beside all these enormities which et plotted and perpetrated by men who are, but would not earn of considering themselves, corrupt, corrupted and cor rupting, the actions of architects, councillors, local government officials, party political organisers and fund-raisers, junior ministers, financiers, entrepreneurs, property speculators and public relations people, whether or not such actions are technically or legally corrupting, are petty and tawdry. Watergate is not as corrupt as Vietnam. Nevertheless, it is very corrupt.
THE PRESENT WILDERNESS of men's devising, although doubtless the best of all possible worlds in which everything is a necessary evil, contains within the context of corruption two specific dangers. The first is being blunted by the massive corruptions of war and being also aware of the massive brutalities of Hitler's Germany, Stalin's Russia, and Mao's China, is to consider lesser corruption as scandalous and interesting, but of no great account. The second danger is idly to suppose that because Brandt's Germany is rehabilitated, that because the present regimes in Russian and China are marginally less oppressive then they were, that because the Americans have withdrawn from Vietnam and now no major war involving white men is taking • place, and that because Nixon and Brezhnev have embraced each other and the doctrine of peaceful co-existence and a degree of strategic arms limitations, the civilised world is secure from the threats and corruptions of war, and matters are really not too bad, even if there are still a few unlovely things in the garden.
WE ARE being corrupted when we permit our desire for a peaceful world to lessen our vigilance to protect our freedom and our interests as well as when we fight wars to protect our freedom and our interests. We are corrupted when we tolerate the violent ,suppression of opinion. We are corrupted and contribute actively to the corruption of others when we condone or excuse corruption in public figures, whether the highest or the lowest. Men risk corrupting themselves and others when they indulge in speculative financial deals for massive profits, however legal their actions may be and, however much approved by relevant establishment opinion. We will never end corruptions of one sort or another. The dangers of the massive corruptions of war will never be organised out of existence; wars themselves will never remove the dangers of the massive corruptions of massive power. Men will continue to kill, to bully and to steal. There will always be thugs; and there will always be thieves, blackmailers, and men ready and eager to bribe and to be bribed; nor will the corruptions of terrorism and intimidation ever be eradicated. But none of this means that we should shrug and do nothing. It means, rather, that we should be of ever-increasing vigilance in exposing corruptions in high and in low places; that we should never cease to assert that to know and understand and find out as much of the truth as is possible is better than to turn aside or cover up or deceive; that we should never flinch from expressing our opinions, however much offence they give, and should always assert the other man's right to his opinions, however offensive they may be to us; and that in the settlement of dispute, however great or small, we should eschew violence as long as the other man does. Some of these precepts involve practical contradictions. All of them may be expressed in absolute terms; but there are no absolute absolutes. When, however it is a choice between exposure and concealment, between free speech and its suppression, between ' witch-hunting ' public figures and allowing them to escape from the consequences of their responsibilities, then there can be no doubt on which side any journal concerned to lessen corruptions, big or small, through the publication of facts and opinions should be.
EXPOSURE IS the enemy corruption fears; responsibility is the duty the corrupt man, big or small, seeks to avoid: it is true in war and peace, in high and low places, and in private as in public life. The exposure, and the consequences of the responsibility, should be commensurate with the nature of the corruption; and the greater the corruption then the more merciless the exposure and the more dire the consequences of accepted and attributed responsibilities. Freedom and democracy are not only about free speech and freedom from arbitrary arrest and voting for representative politicians; they are also about the acceptance of responsibility for their actions by all men entrusted with power and the acceptance also that when that responsible power has been abused, then punishment and the removal from positions of responsibility and power are not only appropriate but essential. And this holds good from the little corruptions of small-town councillors to the great corruptions of the President of the United States.
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