The Triumph Of Evil

by Theodore Dalrymple (Sept. 2008)

The second time I was arrested was at the border of Honduras and El Salvador, on the Honduran side. I was driving a pick-up I had bought in Guatemala, and was on my way to Sandinista Nicaragua. I had a lot of books with me that I had bought in San Salvador, at a bookshop called La Catedral del Libro (the Cathedral of Books), and the Honduran border guards immediately concluded that I must be a very dangerous person.

Although El Salvador was commonly supposed at the time to be a vicious dictatorship, La Catedral del Libro had such an eclectic mix of books that it could scarcely have been more various had El Salvador been the purest of liberal democracies. Works by Marxist guerrilla sympathisers were cheek-by-jowl with Mi Lucha, Mein Kampf, by Adolfo Hitler, and (I remember this very well, for I had not heard of such a thing before), Cafemancia, the art of telling the future by coffee grounds.

with truncheons. Of course, not long before they might have beaten anti-communists, had they dared demonstrate. The crowd broke and ran towards one of Tirana’s few hotels.

I rushed out myself to take photos of what was happening and found myself soon in the iron grip of a policeman. He was like a weight-lifter and I have never felt such strength. He bundled me into the back of a police pick-up with a cage, oblivious to my protests, those of a spoilt brat, that I had a plane to catch (which was true), and therefore could not afford the time to be arrested. Even had he understood English, I do not think he would have relented just because Austrian Airlines waited for no man.

Another three onlookers were bundled into the pick-up besides me, one of whom turned out to be an Albanian intellectual with good English. The cage was locked, and we were driven, sirens blaring, through the not very busy streets to the police lock-up.

We were bundled out of the truck, and I was given a bash on the back with a truncheon just to encourage me not to dawdle. We were all locked into a small whitewashed cell. From there we could hear the police beating someone in another cell, his animal cries of pain rending the air. It was a horrible sound, but it did not surprise me. I assumed that this was the kind of thing that went on in Balkan police stations, and perhaps not just Balkan ones.
 
To my amazement, and relief, it worked. No doubt they were so astonished by this ridiculous foreigner that it took their breath away. They went silent.

Fortunately for me, some of my friends, with whom I had dined with an important government official the night before, saw me being arrested and called on the government official to intervene. This he quickly did.

– At the moment of my release I had faced an acute dilemma. What of my fellow-prisoners? Now that the whirligig of time had brought in his revenges, should I use my position to refuse to accept release until they too had been released. After all, they were guilty only of having done what I had done, namely watched the demonstration. I knew nothing of them, but I certainly did not want them to get the treatment clearly being meted out in the police station.

Once I was released, I did make sure before I left Albania that representations were made to the high official about my three co-detainees, and in fact they were subsequently released, I believe without event. But still I could not quite get it out of my mind that, even if accepting release had been obviously the most sensible thing to do, and that I was of more use to my fellow detainees outside the cell than in, I had accepted it for the wrong reasons: out of a mixture of selfish relief and cowardice. True enough, I had only a split second in which to decide, but on this one occasion when my situation required and enabled me to make a stand, I had failed.

Since then, I have found it a little more difficult to say exactly how I would behave if I had to live in an evil tyranny. My behaviour in the cell in Tiranan had been sensible, perhaps, but hardly heroic. I am not the stuff from which, for example, a Solzhenitsyn is made. I am too attached to my ordinary existence for that, and too afraid of the worst that can be done to me.

Of course, the question of how to behave under an evil tyranny is one that much of the population of Europe in the Twentieth century had to decide. In France, to take only one example, millions of people had to decide whether just to get on with their lives as best they could, join the resistance or take advantage of the new dispensation to get on in life. Even today, the interpretation of the ubiquitous black-marketeers under the Occupation is much disputed: were they ruthless predators concerned only for their own good, were they quietly undermining the occupiers (who were trying to extract as much economic surplus from France as possible, which diversion of goods on to the black market reduced, thereby improving the lot of ordinary Frenchmen), or were they in fact assisting the occupiers by making the whole system viable, which it would not have been without the black market? Or were they all of these things at once?

The first time I was asked, I said that I would reply only on condition that the person who asked would answer two questions. The first was what kind of person would answer such a question. The second was what kind of person would ask it. My appraiser got the point at once and laughed nervously. He told me that it was all nonsense, that nobody took any notice of it anyway. But then I asked him what kind of person took part unprotestingly in processes that were worse than merely a waste of time.

This helps to explain why the professional management of public institutions is so dangerous and corrupting. What is needed is amateur (though not of course amateurish) management.

 

To comment on this article, please click here.

To help New English Review continue to publish original and thought provoking articles like this one, please click here

If you have enjoyed this article and want to read more by Theodore Dalrymple, please click here.