Do you find yourself staring at the television and pining for a good leader — a person who will rise and make the world right again? Do you long for a Mandela, a Churchill, a Gandhi? Then grow up. Our political debate. increasingly focuses on a search for an elusive Messianic leader. This is the opposite of rational politics. This search for leaders is based on a desire to return to childhood. It is difficult and disturbing to try to figure out what is wrong in the world, and how to put it right. How much more tempting to simply snuffle out somebody who you think is good. and assume they will sort it all out. But this discourages us from. figuring out solutions for ourselves then going out and campaigning to make them happen. Every civilising advance in history — from workers’ rights to women’s rights to gay rights — was won because ordinary people banded together and agitated for it.There is a bigger danger still. It is that, in finding a “good” leader, we then blindly follow them into dark and fetid places. Nobody needs to be reminded of [Mandela’s] stunning heroism in the fight against apartheid. But because they were so awed by that, most South Africans followed him unquestioningly as he perpetuated economic apartheid. People who are heroic in one respect can be fools or monsters in another. who now remembers that [Gandhi] killed his wife, and told Europeans to allow the Nazis to conquer our continent? The British jailed Gandhi and his wife Kasturba in 1942, and she soon developed bronchial pneumonia. [But] Gandhi believed “Western” medicine was immoral. He said she should drink muddy water from the “Holy” Ganges instead. he told her she would “bankrupt [his] faith” and hers if she took penicillin. So she died. Six weeks later, Gandhi himself got ill with malaria — and glugged down the “Western” medicine happily. What about Gandhi’s nemesis, Winston Churchill? Today we only remember his heroic opposition to Nazism. But while he was against gassing and tyranny in Europe, he was passionately in favour of it for “uncivilised” human beings whose riches he wanted to seize. In the ‘20s, Iraqis rose up against British imperial rule, and Churchill thought of a good solution: gas them. He wrote: “I do not understand this squeamishness. I am strongly in favour of using poisoned gas against uncivilised tribes.” .Don’t misunderstand me. There are no perfect leaders, but there are always better and worse ones. I would have backed Gandhi against Churchill, and Churchill against Hitler — while always condemning their flaws.Excerpted from a comment by Johann Hari in ‘The Independent’
