Machiavelli on Modern Leadership: Why Machiavelli's Iron Rules Are As Timely And Important Today As Five Centuries Ago by Michael A. Ledeen

Author:Michael A. Ledeen
Language: eng
Format: mobi, pdf
ISBN: 9780312263560
Publisher: St. Martin's Press
Published: 2007-03-31T14:00:00+00:00

ENTERING INTO EVIL

Machiavelli is commonly taken to be saying that the ends always justify the means, but he does not believe that. Quite the contrary. He simply recognizes the reality that there are times when a leader must accept dreadful responsibility in serving the common good.

We all know this to be true. Consider the story of Henry Tandey, a British infantryman in the Duke of Wellington Regiment in the First World War. On September 28, 1918, Tandey participated in an attack against enemy trenches near the small French town of Marcoing. The British carried the day, and as they advanced, Tandey cautiously peered into a trench. He saw an enemy soldier, a corporal, lying bleeding on the ground. It would have been easy for Tandey to finish off his enemy, as he had killed many that day; Tandey had played an heroic role in the battle and later was awarded the Victoria Cross, the highest wartime decoration, for his great courage. But he felt it was wrong to shoot an injured man, and he spared the corporal’s life.

In 1940, during the Nazi bombardment of Coventry, where Tandey worked as a security guard at the Triumph automobile factory, he gnashed his teeth. “Had I known what that corporal was going to become! God knows how sad I am that I spared him.” The corporal was Adolf Hitler. Tandey’s humane gesture had led to the deaths of millions of people and, in a bitter irony of military destiny, had placed his own life at the mercy of the monster whose life he could have taken.

Murder is surely evil, yet every reasonable person will agree that the cause of good would have been greatly advanced if Henry Tandey had killed Hitler in that trench. History abounds with examples of good actions furthering the cause of evil. When Jimmy Carter was president, he was so appalled by the assassinations that had been carried out by American officers and agents that he issued a stern executive order forbidding the practice. This had the unanticipated consequence of favoring the forces of evil, because we could not go after individual terrorists. We could either ask foreign governments to arrest the terrorists for us (not bloody likely!) or take massive action against a larger target (like a terrorist military base or training facility), thereby greatly increasing the odds of killing innocent civilians. In his moralistic attempt to make murder less likely, Carter made it more likely, by both our enemies and ourselves.

Lying is evil, yet the success of the Normandy landing— D-Day—during the Second World War was greatly aided by feeding false information to the Nazis, so that they expected an invasion at a different time and in a different place. Not a mere white lie, this was an enormous deception, with a magnificent result. Lying is essential to the survival of nations and to the success of great enterprises, because if your enemies can count on the reliability of everything you say, your vulnerability is enormously increased.

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