Who can't handle the truth?

The headline to this piece, by Priyamvada Gopal, is "Why can't Britain handle the truth about Winston Churchill?" 

The piece itself is entirely predictable and not worth your time. Gopal says, in a nutshell, that if you start to mention Churchill's "views on race or his colonial policies ... you’ll be instantly drowned in ferocious and orchestrated vitriol", and that this fear of seeing Churchill for Who He Really Was "is tied to a wider aversion to examining the British empire truthfully, perhaps for fear of what it might say about Britain today". Blah blah blah - you've heard it all before.

Let's say that Gopal is right and Churchill was indeed an appalling person. I think her thesis is that she would be able to handle that truth and it's only the fragility and short-sightedness of those around her, lacking in her courage and clear vision, that makes it difficult for them. I'm sure she's right that she could handle that truth - in fact, I'm pretty sure we could all handle it. 

But there is a much more interesting possibility here, a possibility raised by the headline to her piece. 

The phrase "you can't handle the truth" comes, of course, from the film A Few Good Men. The film is primarily a courtroom drama (A Few Good Scenes, the wags called it), and the line is delivered in the final climactic courtroom scene. Let's look at a bit of background to see what the line is all about.

The line comes from the angry mouth of Colonel Nathan Jessep, memorably played by Jack Nicholson. Jessep is a senior US Marine. He serves in the US base on Cuba. He, and the men under him, face death every day. (Yes, I know - they are the US marines and on the other side of the wire there is just a bunch of Cubans, but just go with it for the moment.) 

Jessep is a Bad Man, but he has the good fortune of being the creation of Aaron Sorkin, so he gets more than A Few Good Lines. (I quote below from the revised third draft of the script, which I found online. It's close enough to the final version for our purposes.) Jessep says things like "whoever wrote that memo has never served on the working end of a Soviet-made Cuban Ml-Al6 Assault Rifle" and "We follow orders or people die. It's that simple", while his associates say things like "I like all you Navy boys. Every time we've gotta go someplace and fight, you fellas always give us a ride". 

Jessep is contrasted with Danny Kaffee. Kaffee is a soft (he's in the Navy but he doesn't like boats!), liberal, Harvard-educated lawyer. When Jessep talks to Kaffee, he gets to say: "You see, Danny, I can deal with the bullets and the bombs and the blood. I can deal with the heat and the stress and the fear. I don't want money and I don't want medals. What I want is for you to stand there in that faggoty white uniform, and with your Harvard mouth, extend me some fuckin' courtesy."

That's all good drama. But what about the "truth"? 

The plot revolves around the illegal and fatal punishment inflicted on a young marine called Santiago. Kaffee's achievement is to prove that Jessep ordered that punishment, which Kaffee does by goading Jessep into boasting that he did indeed order the Code Red (as the punishment is cinematically called). 

But in the middle of all that pat plot development, Kaffee claims that he is entitled to the truth, whereupon Jessep delivers the truth that, so he says, Kaffee cannot handle:

"Son, we live in a world that has walls. And those walls have to be guarded by men with guns. Who's gonna do it? You? You, Lt. Weinberg [another softy]? I have a greater responsibility than you can possibly fathom. You weep for Santiago and you curse the marines. You have that luxury. You have the luxury of not knowing what I know: That Santiago's death, while tragic, probably saved lives. And my existence, while grotesque and incomprehensible to you, saves lives. (beat) You don't want the truth. Because deep down, in places you don't talk about at parties, you want me on that wall. You need me on that wall (boasting). We use words like honor, code, loyalty...we use these words as the backbone to a life spent defending something. You use 'em as a punchline. (beat) I have neither the time nor the inclination to explain myself to a man who rises and sleeps under the blanket of the very freedom I provide, then questions the manner in which I provide it. I'd prefer you just said thank you and went on your way. Otherwise, I suggest you pick up a weapon and stand a post. Either way, I don't give a damn what you think you're entitled to."

The film immediately proceeds to the arrest of Jessep, all the characters coming to realise that the right thing to do is protect people like Santiago, and everyone (except Santiago and Jessep) living happily ever after. Roll credits.  

But Sorkin gave Jessep too many good lines for us to dismiss him so easily. What if Jessep was telling the truth? He certainly thought he was. The characters in the film couldn't handle it: having goaded Jessep into confessing, they exult in his downfall and then go on their merry way. They were not really interested in the truth beyond its value for them in the game that is high-stakes litigation. 

We are not characters in a Sorkin legal drama and so we ought to give what he says a little more attention. Jessep tells us that the only reason we get to live our lovely life full of good things - think of this as you kiss your children goodnight and tuck them up in bed, plant bulbs in your garden in the hope of spring flowers, practise your scales, some yoga or the law, bake bread or break bread, worry about the environment or just give your neighbours a friendly wave - is because we employ a set of bad men to man the wall that separates the tranquil garden of our lives from the evil and chaos that lie beyond. We have the "luxury of not knowing" exactly what they get up to, but if we were to look closely then what we see would be "grotesque and incomprehensible". We sleep "under the blanket of the very freedom [they] provide", so we are complicit in their evil: we should just say thank you, and go on our way. 

To put it another way, perhaps it is not simply that the people who in fact defended the UK in WWII were baddies, as Gopal suggests. Perhaps they had to be baddies. 

So: is that the truth? Was Jessep the man who saw clearly, while the shallow, flimsy, pretty men who walked around him were the ones who averted their gaze, clutched their pearls and sneered their Harvard sneers? 

I certainly hope not. But hoping is not necessarily enough. As I mentioned, A Few Good Men itself is set in the US base in Cuba, which is to say: in Guantanamo Bay. From a post-9/11 perspective, that's not a bad setting for a drama exploring the outer edges of what the civilised world is entitled to do to protect itself. Sure, we all abhor what goes on there. And yet ...

Or we can follow Gopal back to World War II. I'm sure you'll tell me that the bombing of Dresden, or even of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, was not necessary for the protection of the free world. Fine. I won't argue with you. But surely you won't try to suggest that it was not necessary to ally with a moustachioed authoritarian dictator who oppressed his people on an industrial scale and then subjected half of Europe to his tyranny? Maybe the Georgian with the moustache was less bad than the Austrian, but let's not forget that his troops - our side - committed war crimes. Just pull the blanket of freedom around you a little tighter; say thank you and go on your way.

And we can go further than that. It was a matter of pure luck, so far as the UK and the rest of the free world are concerned, that the ideologies of the two dictators were that way round. Had matters been otherwise - had expansionist Communists been the ones who threatened the UK - then we would have fought a hot war against the German Soviets while allied to Russian Nazis, promptly followed by a Cold War fought against fascism, all the while considering ourselves to be the good guys. One can imagine some differences between that alternative world and our own (one that springs to mind is that our Cold War spies would have gone to Oxford rather than Cambridge), but are they really important ones? We did what it was necessary to do; and we would have done what would have been necessary.

I won't say that Jessep was telling the truth. But it's worth wondering whether he might have been. And it's worth wondering whether if that were the truth, we could handle it. Could we handle knowing that it is necessary that those who protect us, those who allow us to build us the various bright worlds that we either love or desire, are bad? 

The situation is not like that in the Le Guin story The Ones Who Walk Away From Omelas, in which a wonderful and joyous society is, in some mysterious but undeniable way, dependent on the misery of a child. Some people, refusing to be complicit in the suffering of the child, can walk away from Omelas; but none of us can walk away from civilisation tout court. 

I suspect that there is something in the British psyche that thinks it could handle this truth; something, indeed, that finds this truth so plausible as to be almost attractive. I refer, for example, to the way in which the tabloid papers are rather too keen to take the part of British servicemen accused of atrocities abroad. Perhaps they are just keen on selling papers. Or maybe they are simply giving the benefit of the doubt to Our Boys over the lawyers who accuse them (and I would support that). But we also have Henry V (hero!) killing his prisoners and Churchill (him again!) proposing shooting the Nazi leaders quietly rather than trying them at Nuremburg. The celebration of the SAS storming the Iranian Embassy has notable undertones of delighting in the unrestrained, extra-judicial applicaiton of brute force. And then there is our everyday speech: all's fair in love and war, we say, or (admiringly) well, he doesn't take any prisoners, does he?, in each case casually endorsing war crimes.

No, on reflection, I suspect that if Jessep turned out to be right then most of us would be able to handle the truth. We would say thank you most politely to the Jesseps who man our walls, and go on our way; indeed, we might well shake their hands and buy them a drink first. 

But it might be harder for the likes of Gopal. Whether the free world requires Jesseps to man its walls, it certainly requires someone. And the stricter you make the requirements for those within those walls - the more you insist on any plausibly achievable version of the post-colonial, anti-white-supremacy, racially-progressive world that Gopal would like - the bigger those walls become, and the more likely it becomes that we are required to lean on some big, strong men prepared to do things that we are not. Well done to Gopal for asking the question. But I'm not sure she'd like the answer.