Blissful naiveté

The science had been done, the results recorded. It remained only to be seen who would benefit: the Russians or the Americans! The means by which the knowledge was gained might be of some concern, but neither side were going to undo the learning.

Just imagine that scene in Paperclip, when the Syndicate meet at 46th Street, New York, at 7:09 am:

1st Elder/President: This is a serious mistake. Eleven million innocent people have died.

2nd Elder/Vice-President: Can this be traced?

This is in no way meant to be flippant on such a serious matter. But how else do we think about the conversations that must have taken place, the decisions made that brought over 1500 German scientists to the United States after World War II? How could the budding superpower build its future on the bodies of so many dead?
It’s difficult sometimes to understand the machinations of the mighty, until you realise they are no more human than ordinary folk!

It is one of the great insights of Paperclip to show the Syndicate as made up of mere mortals; men who, on the one hand, are so powerful they ‘invent’ the future, while on the other lack the good sense to destroy the evidence! Men who, when the need arises, can order death indiscriminately, yet still show distaste for the death of one innocent woman. We convince ourselves that such men are not ordinary because, if they were, then we too might, under certain conditions, be capable of unspeakable acts. Think of Brigadier Reginald Dyer giving the order to fire upon unarmed and peaceful protestors in Amritsar, India, on 13 April 1919. Think Charlie Company’s massacre women and children at My Lai on March 16, 1968. 

Maybe because we distance these people, disown them, hide our gaze from their atrocities and thereby disable our comprehension, we leave ourselves defenseless against the forces that turn ordinary people into monsters.

Before I did 7½ in prison, I spent just over 5 years as a Seminarian, studying for the Catholic priesthood. I did four years in two houses in London and just over a year in two houses in Africa: one in Zambia and one in Tanzania. Even before seminary, and all these years later, I’ve always been a tad absolutist in my personal sense of right and wrong. For the longest time, I could see in black and white but was blind to the gray areas. I mention this only because, having left my cozy little life in the North of England to live in the big, bad city in the South, I encountered too many people who live in gray to ignore.

One Sunday night, sitting with a couple of guys who lived under the bridge at the Embankment tube station, one decided we should go for a walk. As you come out from under the bridge and turn right into Northumberland Ave, you’ll pass the Playhouse Theatre on your right and, if you go far enough, Great Scotland Yard and the Nigeria High Commission on your left. If you leave the station from the river side and turn right you’ll find yourself heading straight towards Big Ben and the Houses of Parliament. But Westminster in those days wasn’t what it is now - I recall seeing only one armed police officer in the four years I lived in London.

Anyway, this night I went for a walk with two homeless guys, blissful in my naiveté.
Let’s call him John. John decided we needed cigarettes. So we searched our pockets and found enough for a packet of fags. Luckily the guys knew where the nearest off-license was and so we went to buy cigarettes. I didn’t see anything, wasn’t aware of anything, except John buying the smokes and his mate wandering aimlessly around the shop. In a matter of minutes we were on our way back to the Embankment. Once safely ensconced in the cardboard, John’s mate whipped a bottle of whiskey from the inside of his jacket.

I was horrified. And, yes, I did actually say we must take it back! I think that was the best laugh John had had in a long time. But theft is theft and my black and white view of the right and the wrong could not be assuaged - until the bottle was opened and offered in my direction. 

I awoke the next morning with only a slight hangover and not a single dent in my moral view of the world.

My point with this little anecdote is simply that it is easy to step outside even our own personal sense of right and wrong. How much easier is it to step outside the abstract?

I never had to justify the whiskey to myself. It just suddenly became the right thing to do. Of course, the next morning, safely back in seminary, I knew it was wrong, but I was no longer under those conditions and nobody else knew. “Can it be traced?"