On Stupidity and "Certified Great Men"

More than five years ago, Joseph Stromberg, in a piece about discredited anti-gun authoer Michael Bellesiles, wrote an article that included a lot of mocking of the idea that all of history is dependent not on the decisions of the masses, or on impersonal forces that come about as the emergent properties of societies, but rather through the actions of "Certified Great Men."

Indeed, there is a tendency in punditry to assume, at least in rhetoric, that particular individuals are the sole cause for certain occurrences that determine the course of history, particularly when things go wrong; we hear about whether someone would shoot and kill Hitler as a boy to prevent him from coming to power, with the apparent assumption that Hitler alone caused the rise of Nazism and that he was an indispensible cause of World War II and the Holocaust, and not in any way a product of cultural forces and whatnot that might have produced another just like him were he not there.

This is particularly true for those who want to start a democratic "crusade" based on the idea that freedom and democracy are the "natural state" of humanity. Obviously, to assume such requires some explanation for why in so much of the world humankind engages in the exotic and perverse practice of dictatorship, oppression, etc.

The naturak assumption is that somehow an evil dictator is preventing the people's natural desire to be like us from coming to pass.

In this vein is Ralph Peter's latest little article, with the rip-roaring line:

Saddam didn't just ravage the physical infrastructure — he wrecked the moral infrastructure, too. The recovery will be long and often painful. But the patient wants to get better, something that's easily lost amid skewed headlines.

This, of course, assumes that Iraq was just like us, or at least was in the embryonic stages of developing into a western society, prior to the takeover by Saddam.

Of course, John Derbyshire, the loveable old curmudgeon, sets things straight, quoting some sources on pre-Saddam history:

"[Shia and Kurdish cities] have consequently experienced one atrocity after another in a succession of attempted coups and uprisings, massacres, assassinations, and communal bloodletting...In 1963, a group of Baathist army officers tortured and assassinated General Qassim. This was done on Iraqi television..."

That wicked Saddam, ruining all that fine moral infrastructure!

Thanx and a tip o' the hat to Lawrence Auster.

That is all.