Anticant in a comment picks up my previous posting about the dilemmas facing a civil servant when s/he suspects (or ought to suspect?) that the people at the top are pursuing a seriously flawed or even morally wrong:
Of course it is impossible for honest people to function comfortably within a system where those at the top are not paragons of virtue – and who is? Many decisions are inevitably messy compromises. Not every such issue can be blown up into a resignation matter. But what do you do when you begin to suspect that those at the top are either wrong in their assessment of the public interest, or are actually crooked?
 
The classic case is the position of honourable civil servants and diplomats in Germany in the early months after Hitler came to power. I’ve studied this in some detail, because the question of why the Nazis obtained and held the support of so many presumably decent Germans, especially professional people, is crucial to understanding the structural weaknesses of democracy.
 
So if you had been a German diplomat under the Weimar Republic, what would you have done in 1933 and 1934, as dictatorship was established and the nature of the Nazi government became clear?
 
The Germany case is striking in that it featured people at a high level of civilisation dutifully obeying instructions which got steadily more grotesque (see also the way many French people sidled up to the Nazis). 
 
I hope that I would have seen the way things were heading and resigned. But at what point would I have concluded that the situation was not only bad and getting worse but also probably irreversible without a total calamity? Would I also have fled the country and joined some sort of opposition?
 
How brave are we all when it comes to it? Is there some sort of survival gene in us all which works towards looking away and keeping our heads down in cases of trouble? In the wider scheme of things, may that in fact help the human species to survive?
 
These also are psychological-cultural issues in play. After so many decades of democracy there are norms of restraint somehow hard-wired into the way UK civil servants and indeed politicians behave. The grisly and erratic behaviour now emanating from this government is remarkable because it is so extreme and peculiar in terms of our long political traditions, both featuring facile selfishness at the personal level when it comes to playing with expenses and based on no obvious coherent framework of wider moral or political principles at all.
 
So I disagree that democracy has the sort of ‘structural weaknesses’ Anticant claims. Maybe human nature in general (and certain national cultural tendencies) have such weaknesses, but then maybe intelligent pluralism and old-fashioned British-style restraint and good manners are the best possible ways to contain them.
 
The UK ‘Craig Murray’ case is in a way harder to assess than the Nazi case. Why? 
  • First, the immoral behaviour concerned is far less extreme than the Nazi case (waterboarding dozens of people is bad, but it is just not as bad as exterminating millions in gas chambers or executing thousands of prisoners at Katyn, nor is it on a ‘slippery slope’ down to that horrible place).
  • Second, the pressures on the government to behave itself (media, NGOs, blogosphere, internal procedures, YouTube, the threat of leaks, maybe even ultimately prosecutions after the next election and so on) are far higher than anything the Nazis had to reckon with. That Ezra Levant piece shows how citizens faced with arbitrary rule in a democracy can fight back hard.
These two factors combine to give civil servants pause for thought, even if they are unhappy or revolted by their top leadership. They know that these days there just are plenty of checks and balances built in to stop things spiralling totally out of control, and that in due course the odious people in the odious government concerned will move on, through a new election or from public pressure or otherwise.
 
In these circumstances, is it really best to resign in a Murrayish cloud of sparks or to stay in the system, working one’s way upwards confident in the expectation that one’s decent principles will be applied on a wide and important level?
 
Not so easy?