I’m hoping to get at least a couple of posts out of Joe Hung’s Monday column in Taiwan’s China Post, because I think it’s got a lot of interesting stuff to chew on. Here I’ll discuss responsibility of political leaders. Dr. Hung admits that Chiang Kai-shek bears some responsibility for the 2/28 Massacre, but it’s unfair to have him shoulder the lion’s share of the blame:
Generalissimo Chiang — he was not elected president yet in 1947 — certainly was responsible for the 2/28 Incident, for he was then head of state and head of government at the same time. But he wasn’t either the chief culprit or the murderer, as some government-provided historians painted him to be. The Gimo didn’t order the slaughter. It was carried out by troops so ordered by their commanders. One example suffices. Innocent people were summarily executed under martial law. At least one city in Taiwan saw no such execution[s], because the commander who had to enforce martial law didn’t order his troops to arrest people and shoot them to death. He was Maj. Gen. Su Shao-wen, who set up his command in the city of Hsinchu. Under no orders to shoot and kill, General Su did not even impose a curfew. In fact, the people of Hsinchu lived totally unperturbed for two weeks, while soldiers were on a killing spree in some other parts of Taiwan.
If I understand this correctly, ONE of Chiang’s commanders behaved honorably during the affair, ergo Chiang was innocent. By that logic then, Erwin Rommel’s boss wasn’t a "chief culprit" during the Second World War. Because after all, even those who fought Rommel spoke admiringly of him.
(Furthermore, if I’m not mistaken, there is no paper trail showing that Hitler ever explicitly gave orders for the Holocaust. So in that respect, he was like the Gimo, in that he didn’t order the slaughter. Therefore, Hitler was innocent too, Q.E.D.)
With that reductio ad absurdum out of the way, I do think that Hung raises an interesting question here. Evil leaders can have subordinates that behave honorably, and decent leaders can have subordinates that behave less than honorably. When a subordinate commits crimes in an official capacity, how are we to judge the relative responsibility of their superiors? Is it a case of an unscrupulous subordinate betraying the intentions of a decent leader, or of an unscrupulous subordinate faithfully executing the policies of an immoral one?
Obviously, the case is trivial if explicit orders are issued from on high. Absent those, judgment becomes trickier. What of implicit orders? Plenty of mob bosses make "suggestions" that their underlings hasten to fulfill; a godfather’s guilt is none the lesser because his orders weren’t spelled out in black and white. But on the other hand, vague statements, or ones made in moments of anger, are sometimes misinterpreted. Henry II didn’t want St. Thomas Becket assassinated, but his exclamation, "Will no one rid me of this troublesome priest?" led some of his knights to that unfortunate conclusion.
Doubtless someone schooled in law could think about this more systematically, but for me, judgment should be based on at least two factors: information and incentives.
First, information. As the now-cliched statement goes, "What did the president know, and when did he know it?" As I wrote in an update to a March 13th post:
[Johnny Neihu] expresses astonishment that Chiang could not have known what his subordinates were doing in Taiwan around the time of the 2/28 Massacre:
Unaware! Chiang was a control freak who distrusted his subordinates so deeply that he countermanded his generals mid-battle. At one point he held 82 government posts simultaneously, including chief of the government, army and party, plus — rather bizarrely, the presidencies of the Boy Scouts and National Glider Association. To believe that he could have been "unaware of conditions on Taiwan" is pushing it just a little.
…Neihu’s list DID jog my memory about something else – that Chiang’s army was based on Leninist lines, with each unit having both a military and a POLITICAL officer. The job of the latter was to spy on the former, to make certain he was loyal. If it looked like the military officer might be mutinous, the political officer was authorized to put a bullet in his head.
It’s therefore hard to imagine Chiang not being aware of the situation in Taiwan with all of those political officers floating around, each one of them regularly reporting back home.
If someone wants to make Chiang’s case, then I think the onus is upon them to explain how he was unaware of his subordinates’ misconduct despite the existence of the pervasive intelligence apparatus that he instituted in the first place.
Secondly, whether a leader is responsible for a subordinate’s malfeasance depends upon the incentives the leader presents his people with. What incentives did the leader give for ethical conduct, and what disincentives did the leader give for unethical behavior? It might be instructive here to see how similar uprisings due to KMT misgovernance were handled in China prior to 2/28, and how the people responsible for restoring order were rewarded or punished. That is something beyond my own purview. However, it is my understanding that some of the most brutal commanders of the 2/28 Massacre were later promoted. That, of course, is particularly damning. To reward a subordinate is generally taken as a sign that one approves, not disapproves, of their actions.
Although this discussion was mostly about political leaders, the thinking here is more generally applicable to leaders in other areas as well. CEOs of major corporations, and owners of small businesses. For the sake of illustration, suppose a pizza deliveryman runs down a pedestrian while driving unsafely. What would a jury want to know before pronouncing judgment on the owner of the pizza parlor?
Many things – mostly related to information and incentives. Was the restaurant owner aware of the deliveryman’s driving record? Did he make an effort to learn about that record? Did the owner make unreasonable promises to customers about the speed of delivery? Did the owner explicitly tell his deliverymen to break speed limits, or observe them? And regardless of those explicit instructions, did the owner have a policy of punishing or rewarding deliverymen who drove unsafely?
Notice that they probably wouldn’t be too interested in whether the owner could produce some OTHER deliveryman who HADN’T hit anyone.
Imagine this for a second. A jury would want all of this information, about a PIZZA PARLOR OWNER whose employee had killed or injured a SINGLE pedestrian. Yet lower standards apply in the case of Chiang Kai-shek, accused of being responsible for the deaths of 28,000 during the 2/28 Massacre. According to Dr. Hung, we’re not supposed to use our own minds and consciences to even THINK on the matter:
But history demands understanding, not judgment. History is a dialogue between the past and present.
Regarding that – history and judgment – Theodore Dalrymple had this to say in a recent critique of Tony Blair’s record:
Strictly speaking, history doesn’t absolve, or for that matter, vindicate, anybody; only people absolve or vindicate, and except in the most obvious cases of villainy or sainthood, they come to different conclusions, using basically the same evidence.