A little knowledge is a lot of knowledge
Don’t follow the money; follow the idea
When I was doing my post-graduate diploma in legal practice, one of the courses I followed was advocacy and pleading. In it, I learned two things. The first was that cross-examination has a hyphen in the middle. And the other stemmed from an actual case that was recounted to the class.
The case involved about ten accused, all of whom were being tried on charges resulting from some bust-up or fracas or riot, or whatever (the charge itself is not important). The procurator fiscal (that’s a district attorney in Scotland) called a witness, in the form of a policeman, who was asked whether he recognised any of the ten accused standing in the dock. The officer perused the faces of the besuited gentlemen1 lined up across the other side of the court room and declared that he did not recognise any of them. And that was that. Or so it should have been.
The sheriff (that’s a judge in Scotland) inquired of defence counsel whether any of them wished to cross-examine the witness, and one defendant’s representative stood up and addressed him: “Can I therefore take it, officer, that you do not recognise my client?” The client in question was identified to the witness who then responded with, “Well, now that you mention it, his face is indeed familiar. Yes, he was involved.” The concrete confirmation that counsel had sought was not to be forthcoming, and he had instead sealed his client’s conviction. The second thing I learned on that course was therefore: never ask a question to which you do not already know the answer.
Image: Robert Mugabe, leader of Zimbabwe 1980-2017.2
During the Rhodesia crisis in 1978, the British Foreign Secretary, David Owen, and the American Secretary of State, Cyrus Vance, engaged in talks with the Rhodesian government, led by Ian Smith, and the Patriotic Front, which included Joshua Nkomo’s Soviet-backed ZAPU and Robert Mugabe’s Chinese-backed ZANU, both of which were united against minority white rule in Rhodesia, even if not entirely on an even keel with each other. Dr Owen addressed the UK House of Commons on the progress he was making on 18 April 1978, during which he was at one point asked whether treating Mugabe and Nkomo as if they were some sort of lepers because they may or may not be Marxists, ran counter to the welcome Britain had extended to the intervention and support of the Soviet Union in the fight against fascism in 1940. Owen responded by saying
I am convinced that all the nationalist leaders are prepared to take their chance on a test in an election. [O]ne of the essences of democracy is that one is able to put different ideological issues to the people and let them decide.
The principal bone of contention that led to the Rhodesian Bush War, and ultimately to independence, was land apportionment. The prime goal of independence was to tear up the Land Apportionment Act of 1930 and redistribute land rights on what the blacks saw as a more equitable basis. When independence came at last to Zimbabwe-Rhodesia, as it had become known in the interim, in addition to land reform, ZANU’s founding president Ndabaningi Sithole pledged that a bill of rights would be entrenched in the constitution guaranteeing the rights and freedom of every citizen, declaring that ZANU would accommodate people who share a common destiny and democratic rule by the majority, regardless of race, colour, creed, or tribe, that it stands for democracy, socialism, nationalism, one man/one vote, freedom, pan-Africanism, non-racism, and republicanism. That is one small idea for a man, and one giant heap of ideologies for Zimbabwean mankind. It was also a pipe dream.
The Bush War that plagued Rhodesia throughout the 1960s and 1970s was not predicated on a tussle between minority white rule and a united black patriotic front. The source of much of the bitterness lay in tribal disagreements among the indigenous population themselves. It was those disagreements that Robert Mugabe set out to nullify when he was elected as Zimbabwe’s first and, for 37 years, only leader (as prime minister till 1987, as president thereafter): it took a coup to remove him in 2017. The one man/one vote ideal propounded by Sithole quickly turned sour when it was established that many one votes were being exercised by many none men. Democracy and republicanism meant as much in Mugabe’s Zimbabwe as they would come to mean in Putin’s Russia. Of course, Ndabaningi Sithole’s shopping list of political luxuries were commodities that meant everything and nothing, depending on what slant you were to give them, and there was nothing unique to Zimbabwe in any of that.
It’s pretty safe to say that the overwhelming majority of people are not billionaires and, what’s more, do not endorse the creation of billionaires at their expense. And yet, democratic governments, where I am and where you are, fail time and again to get elected on a manifesto promise to smoothen out the playing field between the upper 0.1 per cent and the bottom 50 per cent, who represent a barely discernible fraction of national wealth (less than 5 per cent). And it doesn’t matter whether you’re in Zimbabwe or the States, or the EU or wherever: democracy simply doesn’t work, because it repeatedly fails to deliver the one thing that people want: less tax for them and more tax for those who can afford it, which means less tax for 90 per cent of us and more tax for 10 per cent. It is that simple. You would have thought that 90, being a bigger number than 10, would get their way. But one man/one vote is incapable of achieving that, which Robert Mugabe was aware of. Which is why, if you will, he was a Marxist. A cold-blooded, authoritarian Marxist.
I sat behind Mr Mugabe at my 1984 graduation—as close to him then as you are to me now—when the University of Edinburgh conferred upon him an honorary degree in the same ceremony. It was stripped from him, the first such demotion by a British university, in 2017, just after the coup d’état that unseated him and two years before his death. Robert Mugabe was a totalitarian, Marxist dictator. And Marxists are far more easy to condemn than their capitalist counterparts.
The role of business in the rise of the German Nazi party is hardly ever mentioned. The jackboots and the book burnings, the concentration camps and the Blitzkrieg, the Roman salutes and Berchtesgaden, the Jewish pogrom, the burning of the Reichstag, the bellicose speeches, and the Night of the Long Knives. That was Nazi authoritarianism, but none of that could happen without money, and it was German industrialists who provided it in unending quantities. If Mugabe’s money came from Soviet and Chinese sources, then what of it? Does anyone truly believe in the power of one man/one vote?
David Owen said that one of the essences of democracy is … to put different ideological issues to the people and let them decide. Let them decide. Todd Landman is an academic magician who goes on stage and invites a random member of the audience, not a plant, but a truly random audience member, to think of a number. Here he is doing it in a film that forms part of another programme about the number he is guessing:
If you like that ability to guess a number, what about this ability to guess what page of a book someone is looking at, again with Todd Landman?
What’s clear about magic, as performed as stage entertainment (is there another kind?), is the fact that it involves either sleight of hand, trick equipment or … the ability to force a result seemingly out of nowhere. Landman does not explain how it comes that the student in the above film selects the philosopher that he has in mind. Nor does a prime minister explain how it comes that they have been elected to that office. They declare the victory, deem it a mandate for their manifesto, and then treat the manifesto as disposable, as the case may arise. The inherent unfairness in many elections comprising the fact that more people do not vote for the leader than do vote for them gets elided over. The internal battles between party factions likewise.
The decision left to people to decide between ideological issues, as David Owen put it, is presumptuous in the extreme, and not a little hypocritical. The British prime minister in 1965, Harold Wilson, had rebuffed Rhodesia’s colonial government precisely on an inability to reconcile ideological issues (including excluding Rhodesia’s prime minister from a dinner at Buckingham Palace after the funeral of Winston Churchill, with the Queen intervening by sending an equerry to fetch Mr Smith from his hotel room, to the visible irritation of Mr Wilson). It was Wilson and Smith’s inability to decide between their own ideological issues that led to Rhodesia’s Unilateral Declaration of Independence later in 1965. Just how did Dr Owen think the newly installed electorate of Zimbabwe would decide their ideological issues between Marxism and democracy? In the end, thanks to Mugabe, they got both.
Everyone always gets both. If one man/one vote truly worked in deciding between ideologies, then there would be peace and harmony the world over. It is the inability of minorities to acquiesce in ideological decisions that makes a mockery of democracy in the first place. And it is the primordial importance of democracy that makes the righteous minority cheat to achieve its victories, be they deserved or no. Whether the decision be taken ideologically or by dint of quirks in the electoral process itself, or because people vote according to what adverts they see on television or hear on the radio, the mere fact that free, fair elections frequently result in a change of colour of government come the next election is itself evidence that people don’t properly know how to choose between ideological differences anyway. Sorry to err towards Hobbes, but autocracy at least has the benefit of not changing the wallpaper every five years.
If magicians have long since figured out how to force apparently random audience members to make specific choices from a given range of possibilities, how can we delude ourselves into even entertaining the prospect that any election is going to be free and fair? Politicians ask the electorate a question in an election: they ask them to decide between ideologies. Now, there may be some who get an answer, and then prod further: “Are you sure?”, and that can be enough to change the answer. But there are others who know the answer beforehand. That’s why they ask the question.
One of the single worst things for democracy is predicting the future. It’s like a jury in a court room hearing inadmissible evidence. In the court room drama The Verdict, from 1982, Paul Newman plays a lawyer pursing a claim for damages against two doctors who allowed a patient to die because of a supposed error in the admission form. Newman finds the nurse who admitted the patient, who disputes what was written on the form, accusing her superiors of lying by altering the number she wrote. “How do you know they are lying?” asks defence counsel. “Because I kept a copy of the form. Here it is.” Of course, the unadulterated form cannot be adduced in evidence, and is excluded. But the jury’s already heard it.
Or we see the vast differences between promised investments, which smoothen the path of a leader to claiming they are working wonders for the nation’s economy, whereas large amounts of the sum claimed are never produced, or have already been attributed in the past or are for current, as opposed to capital, expenditure. The debunking of the claim gets lost in the noise: it is the blustered announcement that takes the headline and, after that, no one is interested in the correction. That’s why the bigger the lie, the more readily it’ll be believed.
The French don’t allow polls to be conducted on the day before their elections. Isn’t that a little naive? People will be influenced by the poll the day before an election, but not by the one conducted two days before? If that is actually scientifically true, then maybe they should conduct twenty polls on the day before an election, and not ban them altogether. If politicians want people to decide between different ideologies, then that should be based on the ideologies and not on how many other people are in favour of or against an ideology, surely, Dr Owen?
When Todd Landman guesses correctly that the student is looking at the page on René Descartes, it’s impressive. I dunno how he does it. But I do wonder if he could have done it if he’d left the book in the room and gone outside and left anyone there to pick it up and select the desired page without Landman having seen a thing and without him knowing which student had done it. Just how do you think algorithms can pinpoint things that interest you from so little information about your Internet movements? Probably, like me, you don’t have a clue. But that’s also information that gets Palestinians killed by drones. You may not object to Amazon knowing what to try selling you, but when it comes to grenades being fired at you as you walk down the street, perhaps you’re a little more concerned. Never say never.
In the end, a little knowledge is a lot of knowledge if it’s handled right. So, tell me: how much knowledge do you have to have in order to decide between ideologies? Or do we just go with the flow? And if we do, is that the flow of money, or the flow of ideologies? Because, when most people vote, it’s not because of the money they have, it’s because of the money they want. And to get the money they want they need to choose an ideology. So, the money that is flaunted and deployed in the big push to get people to vote is money the actual voters will themselves never see, but rather they will be sold an ideology that persuades them that it will bring them money. And does it ever?
In a true democracy in which the have-nots have the same one vote per one man (and woman, let’s not forget), you will by definition arrive at a situation where the have-nots have enough and will stop yearning for the money of the haves. Think about that—it cannot be otherwise. Every pendulum tends towards equilibrium. Oh, yes, there will be some selfish people who want everything, but that’s not most people, they will count for nothing, because they are so few as to not win an election. Most people want enough. Many people are actually frightened of being rich. When the masses have enough, they will not pester the super-rich. Democracy will have worked, until the next time the super-rich seek to get richer. And that process depends on one man/one vote actually working, without us needing to force it, like Robert Mugabe did. It is more than an idea; it is an ideology. But it’s not an ideal: it’s an ideology that will work if we let it take its natural course without dishonest interference.
For money to be defeated by ideas, ideas need to gain greater currency than money. Just as folk will abandon the dollar when they lose faith in it, in order to store value in the form of gold, so those who have few dollars and cannot afford gold will abandon their faith in the dollar and invest themselves instead in ideas. Especially those who now realise that an investment in dollars does not bring them progress; whereas an investment in ideas will.
It’s in a detective story that you must follow the money. In an election, you must follow the idea.
There is an old joke among Glasgow lawyers: What do you call a Glasgow man wearing a suit? The answer is: The accused.
By Government of Zimbabwe, taken by Joseph Nyadzayo as Presidential Photographer - Government of Zimbabwe, Public Domain, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=168455990.