“I know, and you know that the world is chalk full of good people, great minds and so on. Many of our greatest minds have been demonized, ostracized and locked up, their best ideas and inventions – burned. I would say the days of keeping to ourselves must be put behind us. Not only must we insist that the best people have a say in everything: Public policy, health, environment, social welfare etc., but we must be our best possible selves as well.
We can not remain isolated in our imaginations any longer. We must be voices. We must find a way to be heard lest our silence sentence us to servitude”. Wilson
The Rarity of Great Men
by, William Pfaff
http://www.williampfaff.com/
Alessandria, Italy, October 16 ,2009 – The world hungers for great men to liberate them from their griefs. They rarely arrive, and even more rarely are they appreciated at the time for what they are, usually being deprecated or opposed or mocked by their contemporaries, and left to the historians to rediscover. Gratitude, if it ever comes, ordinarily comes too late.
Or it comes prematurely, and inauspiciously. The Nobel Peace Prize given Barack Obama was a naive expression of that need for greatness. The American president, actively engaged in perpetuating the great war against terror and the Talibans — Mr. Obama has naïve dreams too – should have had the insight to decline the award politely, as inappropriate, as did Henry Kissinger’s North Vietnamese fellow-laureate, Le Duc Tho, when the two jointly were named for the 1973 Peace Prize.
The Europeans know that they will soon be badly in need of a great man of their own. They are at a critical point in their construction of European Union. It now seems reasonably sure that the Lisbon Treaty, reforming the terms of EU governance, will finally be put in place.
With Irish and Polish agreement to the Treaty during the past few days, and despite last-ditch opposition by the Czech president, confidence is justified that in the end a way will be found to appease or brush aside the uncooperative President Vaclav Klaus, whose public opinion does not follow him in his opposition to the treaty, and to save both the treaty and David Cameron, prospective prime minister if the Conservative Party wins the next election in Britain, from the Tory Europhobes.
When, and if, the treaty is ratified, Europe will be in need of its George Washington. It was the former French president, Valery Giscard d’Estaing who said that, head draftsman of the European Constitution that France and Holland voted down. (One may think that he had a certain candidate, himself, in mind.)
Europe will have a very hard time finding their George Washington – or his female counterpart. The reason is that Europe will then incorporate not the present 27 presidents of the member states, but at least 28 – so as to include its George Washington.
Europe’s president will like to see himself, and be seen elsewhere, as the leader of Europe. But he will be seen by the European national presidents as their creature, elected to do their bidding.
Neither the Chancellor of Germany, nor the leaders of Europe’s two nuclear powers and UN Security Council permanent members, France and Britain, regard their national interests adequately represented by a European president.
The great are hard to discern because the greatest of them do not act from ambition but from moral conviction, an infrequently encountered quality in political circles. My remarks in this column are inspired by where I am, which is a conference on the problems presented to the world in the twentieth-anniversary year of the fall of the Berlin Wall.
The sponsor is the World Political Forum, an organization founded by the man who caused the Berlin Wall to fall, Mikhail Gorbachev. President Gorbachev was not present, having been detained by the need to be in Moscow.
The group’s attention was mainly on what may follow in our world, in which Communism has collapsed and the Cold War is only embers (although some do blow on them).
Capitalism is in distress, and now widely distrusted in the form that it has assumed in recent years in the United States — and internationally as well, to the extent that the American form has been exported by means of American-promoted globalism. Many of the European participants seemed almost to assume U.S. capitalism as dead as Communism. The Americans present cautioned them.
Aside from the organizers, the one who did speak of President Gorbachev was, appropriately, a Russian academic and political figure, Grigori Yavlinsky, Founder of the liberal Yabloko party and a former presidential candidate in Russia.
What he said was simple and eloquent. It was that both we and history must not forget that this one man, on his own initiative, asking no one’s permission or approval, freed some 400 million people from a system of oppression that had cast a shadow over the lives lived within this political system, and under its influence, for some 70 years.
No one caused him to do this. Many opposed him, fearing the consequences of what he was doing. He did it because of his – and one would think, his wife’s — conviction that to do so was an urgent moral necessity and a moral obligation that rested upon himself as the individual in possession of the power to do so. He was thus a great man.