Questions below are simply a few suggested subjects for debate

Truth is buoyant – it will surface at some point and become obvious to all. 

• Chinese proverb

For Aristotle, there was a wisdom that brought people closer to divine rationality, ‘sophia’. This wisdom was for thinking about questions such as the nature of the divine, ethics or the function of the state.

• William Bates

I think the subject which will be of most importance politically is Mass Psychology… Its importance has been enormously increased by the growth of modern methods of propaganda. Although this science will be diligently studied, it will be rigidly confined to the governing class. The populace will not be allowed to know how its convictions are generated.

• Bertrand Russell

***

Bertrand Russell was writing before the days of the internet.

There are few targets that offer more scope for sneering than the manner in which the affairs of man have been run. People hark back to mythical Golden Ages during which things allegedly were done better. We are going downhill, so the inference goes. The idiocies and cruelties of yesteryear paradoxically are fair game at which also to jeer. The good old days or bad old days range from Dickensian London and cricket on the greensward with pie and ale, to the Divine Right of Kings. People concoct with confidence their preferred bottom line of the overall Balance Sheet.

If there is good and bad in man and good and bad men everywhere how come the Masters of the Past seem so overloaded with sinners rather than saints? Is there something in the very idea of running large areas that encourages scum to rise to the surface – or not? So many of the shibboleths of the past and the dubious systems of governing people have been outed as hollow.

Almost everywhere in the affairs of man are to be seen instances of manifest injustice, from the caste system in India to the unfairness of there being nations at such different levels of prosperity, from rampant corruption to religious intolerance, the list is endless. Spitefulness and argumentation in high echelons are often, not always, an indicator that things are going well – if there is no major internal or external problem, people tend to manufacture one. If there is an internal problem the attention of citizenry is diverted to outfacing an external problem. The degree of acceptance of circumstances into which history has pigeon-holed us in an unjust balance is so familiar that it can pass unremarked or with a resigned comment.

As with over-arching political systems, so with the choice of personalities to run them. One is up against a seeming impossibility of getting it all right in terms of our systems. Minds are full of self-contradiction, our emotions adulterated by flawed considerations. Many observers of international events realise that the elite who truly sees the nature of fundamental problems is small. It may approach to a statistical constant.

An order of society that proceeds from our thinking is likely to be a higgledy-piggeldy, flawed process.

To get it all right – assuming this is possible – every underlying assumption has to be as right as far as is humanly possible, not just most of them. Allow in one major defect and a mosaic can be shattered. Communism for instance, it can be said, is a wonderful idea and in line with Christianity; there are only two major problems, some would say: it does not adequately take account of human nature on a large scale, and it can be hijacked by a fallible dictator. Tell that to the current Chinese Leadership and it’s massed following.

There may come a time when the world cannot afford near misses.

Are we to give up on trying to produce the right answers and just hope that the world muddles on its own sweet way with or without the intercession of a kindly Providence?

Do we do our best to augment the possibilities for maximising the chances of success?

***

A start is made on this large subject by suggesting that the following extract is not sent:

Extract of an open letter from ‘Impassioned Idealist of South London’ to World Leaders

‘….What matters more, the trappings of office, clambering aboard Air Force One, jauntily stepping out in front of the Russian Praesidium to applause, or your fellow man who will come to judge your reputation. Think and look before you leap! An abyss is said to await us all. What is all this stuff about putting up your name in lights and then in marble? You want to be remembered? Remember Shelley’s Ozymandias part of whose broken statue, aeons after it was sculpted, protrudes from desert sands, its fate all but lost beneath the next and the next event in the unforgiving Present. Tell all the latterday empire builders that their labour to enlarge their already huge territories does not make for the happiness of a single individual but causes untold suffering. ‘Your place in the history books’ may not be as you expect of future generations when the goalposts of humanity have moved beyond your present conception of them. So be careful, please, Mr World Leader, because as is said of a people in the bible, you know not what you do. And the fact that all around you are people willing to subscribe to your notions because they have a personal vested interest. This should give you cause for pause…’

***

There is no solution that will work in all cases. The most that can be hoped is that the Ultimately Non-Useful is driven down as far as possible not that the possibility of error is likely to be eradicated. We know things are going to go wrong but at least we can try and reduce the likelihood of this happening.

A start can be made by a groundswell of thinking that many of the concepts that have held sway over millennia may have not been all they are cracked up to be. Combine this with a common meeting ground of leaders who hear sensible vox populi and there may be a way to at least a hope that there exists a light at the end of the tunnel

The plan below is very far indeed from an exhaustive one. In some instances, the ideas mentioned below are already promulgated. This approach could be buttressed, say, by respected deliberative institutions advocating charters to further incorporate them into government Mission Statements. It may be that these ideas are not a fit subject for legislation other than in statement of principles. The cavil as of now that too much leeway is allowed to a laissez faire approach. A coordinated official sanction could be given to putting the ideal principles into practice.

***

IDEES FIXES FOR GOVERNANCE THAT MAY BE REVISITED?

Give Peace a chance

• John Lennon

If man is a microcosm of the cosmos, so governance systems are a macrocosm of man?

Why have the charming people of Myanmar been saddled with an oppressive regime? If that question is posed, a start could be in underlying assumptions behind a direction of affairs that most of those involved accept. What geist or genie is operating as a Deus ex machina? As with a man individually, so with the factors actuating governance in general. The problem can arise from the wrong men being in charge of government rather than from what is wrong with a system. Striking down bad governments and systems, conversely, can be akin to cauterizing the symptoms of a malaise rather than going to the heart of the problem.

The off-putting ‘outcrops’ that infuriate revolutionaries who can point to instances of manifest injustice can often enough be sliced off. Too often this being accomplished the new façade that is erected is hailed as a ‘blissful dawn’. What seethes beneath it in the darker niches and crannies of the communal human mind? This may seem an esoteric question but the facts are out there to see. The panoply of Tsardom was swept away and what followed? Stalin! The Russian secret police morphed into the KCB. In terms of the society, the Russian bear had a haircut and looked respectable. Its nature was changed no more than the tiger, in the proverb, can change his stripes. The French revolution and the guillotining of a King resulted in the enthronement of an Emperor, Napoleon. Much did change though the French monarchy was restored but the actuating springs of French culture remained. To this day, manning the barricades is an unconscious nod at a gallic equivalent of conservatism. The Chinese dispensed with a ‘Little Emperor’ and went on to replace him with a much bigger version but under the guise of a different name and a new ideology. The underlying thrust of the culture was much as before the apparent sea-change. One has only to look at the country’s iconography and art; there is now as previously a profusion of sculpture and painting depicting hard-at-work peasants, at one with beasts of burden. Unlike in Russia there are few tractors typifying earlycommunism; the Chinese seem to prefer looking at men with cattle drawing carts with pails of milk, and so on.

There is no logical explanation of anti-Semitism which defies the experience e of the disproportionate benefits given to the world by Jewry – if with dishonourable exceptions – and many are the bars in law to its rearing its head, but it persists.

There is something in the subconscious of the community mind perhaps that lies in its soil irrespective of all the forests above being cut down. The seeds, once planted, are hard to eradicate. A hard, long look at what is to be done at this deep level is not on anyone’s agenda. Perhaps a start on this tricky area could be made with systematic thought about what is best in terms of a global culture incorporating what works best?

The Great Departed lay their too heavy dead hands on our thinking.

1. The fact that ‘The Great Departed lay heavy hands on our thinking’.is easily said but few people seem to question how to fence with the results in terms of day-by-day politics. True, people tax the Irish with allowing the weight of their history to affect their perceptions in how to deal with the world but take China: the Chinese want to take revenge on the West for what they see as the ‘Century of Humiliation’. In living memory, the Japanese perpetrated horrors like the Rape of Nanking and by any comparison, the way that Lord Kitchener put down the Boxer Rebellion was like laying on a vicar’s tea party. Yet it is the West rather than the Japanese who are Number One Bugaboo to the current Chinese leadership. Propaganda may play a disproportionate part in it’s considering what is at stake but non-objective history is too obviously prone to hijacking for perceived current purposes. With Putin in Russia, Xi in China, and Erdogan in Turkey – said to have a vision of recreating an Ottoman empire – the question of ‘Who benefits?’ is shelved. Are those respective territories not already large enough? What single individual benefits from their further increase? Putin and Erdogan are already said to be the two richest individuals in the world. There can be a schadenfreude involved or perhaps a motive of outright revenge, one perhaps dignified in their minds by some sort of a supposition that this was what they were born to do? Useful motives of leaders of benefit to their countrymen are not a factor to downplay but the Machiavellian type of politician arguably is to be shunned. His techniques may have their value if harnessed to the right cause but the assumption too often is that the ends justify the means.

True, it is far from the first time that over-historical thinking makes policy. Alexander the Great, burning down Persepolis, was said to have enjoyed cocking a snook against the Persian god-king, Darius, who came up against Sparta a couple of generations before. Stories of past feuding or ill-doing by our standards surely still play too great a part in general thinking. It seems too frequently accepted – if not in so many words – that battle is joined against passed generations who lie in their graves, beyond caring. Why has the Constitution of America to be interpreted according to how it is conceived the Founding Fathers would think about amendments? Surely that in itself is a false premiss when so much in the world has changed?

The overworked importance of ideology and outdated thinking

Fashion is not restricted to clothes and when ideas become fashionable they are just as resistant to objective criticism as the length of skirts. That is why all economic ideas need to be freely discussed and judged against the facts of real life.

• H.R.H. The Duke of Edinburgh

***

It is assumed that the flag-bearers of First World civilisations are the repository of the right sort of wisdom to lead nations; this could be more questioned as a basic tenet.

Democracy (see section below) and Communism are entrenched systems but why not, instead, look to the roots of both and cherry-pick what is most valuable instead of fighting the corner just of one or another accepted creed? An Afghan Lorja Jurga in which there is no ‘vote’ in the ballot box sense but tribal approval for decisions is arguably a representative form of democracy than the electoral system in that part of the world? Communism can work – on an Israeli kibbutz. The naturalist, David Attenborough, saw in his travels through the South Pacific that the best adjusted society, in which happiness was conjoined to hard work, was …on Tonga. Perhaps Tongans have something to teach us?

It is accepted now that ‘primitive’ tribes may well have an understanding of what the ecosphere needs than those schooled in more scientific traditions. What jungle headman participates in key conferences on reversing Climate Change?

If education is such a key to thinking about the present, then re-education should have more part to play in how people think. Are the tenets of Islam so good a guide to geopolitics? Politicos, thinking of future generations, might put genuinely fencing with the so-called truths of the past higher on the priority list. How to ensure that the practical men who know and understand the problems of high office are not seated below the armchair academicians in the pecking order or the tribespeople of other cultures. Each may have a valid part to play at the table where these decisions are made.

Principles that could loom larger in governmental thinking

1. Subsidiarity

It is too easy to blame governments for ills in society. In a population of millions and a raft of issues in contention. It is facile to blame a smallish knot of people with overall responsibility. They are far too dependent on myriads of individuals carrying out their duty. The EU principle of Subsidiarity in reality goes beyond the EU.

Direction is one thing; individual decisions down from the chain of command are another. General Sir Mike Jackson in Bosnia in 1999 refused to block the airport from Russians defying orders from the Commander, Wesley Clarke which could have led to his dismissal…and the beginning of World War 111. The same could be said of the US submarine commander who was ordered to fire on incoming Russian ships to Cuba in the Bay of Pigs crisis. Leaders are very often the figureheads who take credit and the blame for the decisions of others.

Where there is a problem that demands collective action internationally it makes sense to have in play the right institutions, endowed with teeth not just with the fine-sounding words, for the purpose. A one-world government should not just be a pipe-dream but a goal.

2. Objectivity is essential

This principle is enshrined in law; why not in government.

Communiqués from the United Nations are worded to convey the impression of deliberations as in a court of law. Magisterial objectivity is what they sound like. Too often, no doubt, decisions in fact are the outcome of a naked haggling between interest parties or nations. Justice and objectivity may be desirable as impressions to make but it would be good if this façade was more readily seen through and that every effort should be made to trying to ensure that the reality does reflect these worthwhile totems. If this is not done, the decisions of the UN are called into question as people increasingly realise that it is the wealthy of influential nations who bring the others along with them in their decisions. It is another way of saying that Might is Right rather than that good sense and Justice have prevailed which undermines one of the foundations of the system..

3. Amicable cooperation between rulers

We should all hang together or assuredly we will all hang separately

• John Wilkes

The best lack all conviction, while the worst are full of passionate intensity

• W.B. Yates

***

Has the pendulum swung too far in one direction? If right-thinking colleagues are divided among themselves and not on good terms, trouble brews.

The Conservative party of Iain Duncan Smith went off for weekend bonding sessions; Peers from the House of Lords recently went on a retreat to rekindle their thinking as well as their personal relationship in a positive way. In Davos, financiers of the world gather together to exchange views. The fact is that leaders talk among themselves. There arguably is a natural fellowship among notables. Shimon Peres told of his first greeting to the Prime Minister of Indonesia, a country with more than 700 languages: “How are you getting on in your Tower of Babel?”¹ The slogan of British Telecom, ‘It’s better to talk’, may have a relevance beyond that of attracting commercial custom.

It seems so obvious as an aim that people who should co-operate should get on with one another. In practice accusations of venality and corruption so often stigmatise the natural and worthy aim of cooperation. If you scratch my back, why should I not – within reason – scratch yours? A conclave of bishops votes in camera after discussion to select the best of their number as the Pope. The experts in a field getting on together and debating sensibly in an amicable fashion are preferable to the jostling mob or biased media or the vociferousness of a determined minority or constituency where entrenched lobbies exert disproportionate influence, sometimes with disastrous results.

4. Morality

A presumption that is often made and attributed to Nicolo Machiavelli from The Prince is that the imperatives of geopolitics are a thing apart from the morality of individuals. Hence the tongue-in-cheek description of a diplomat as ‘An honest man sent abroad to lie for his country!’. The ends are said to justify the means and so forth. Is it the right or the long view?

It is contended elsewhere in this paper that there may be such a thing as a communal spirit or Geist and that there can be a soul or spirit of a whole people and that the DNA of a group of people can be altered by its experience, just as that of an individual can be altered. It is contended further that a way of treating world history is to see it as a gigantic sociological experiment from which to learn lessons. There inevitably will be differing interpretations of each event as well as ignorance of much of the secret or private history that went into decisions. Was Machiavelli so right when suggesting to The Prince that the ways of geopolitics and the mindset of rulers should be shorn of the ordinary constraints of morality? What of the long view? There is a case for saying that his influence has been among the pernicious of theories to corrupt the thinking of statesmen.

The almost universal verdict on the bloody debacle of the imperial British army in 1842 when a Dr Brydon almost alone survived the massacre of tens of thousands of British soldiers by the Afghans is that the ferocity of Afghan fighters ensured that Afghanistan is ‘the graveyard of empires’. Military tangles, so the verdict goes, with this hardy race are fraught with peril. Is there another lesson, one that does not seem to have been learned, from the episode? The British Governor of Kabul, Elphinstone, was given the assurance of safe conduct by the Afghans. His unarmed retreating column was picked off mercilessly by Afghans on the Khyber Pass from behind cover. What cowardice! How cruel! The short-term objective of the Afghans might have been gained – though the British returned with a vengeance in the 1870s. Such is generally agreed. But what if the troubles afflicting Afghanistan in 2021 stem in part from the manner in which Afghans dealt in the past with their fellow man? Cruelty and cowardice are second nature to them, it can be argued, hence they fall on themselves and destroy their own country? Or take the ultimate destruction that befell the Maya of South America. This was a people of death cults and proclivity for human sacrifice; Aztecs sacrificed 80,000 people to inaugurate one pyramid. Did it all pay off in the end or were they paid out in like coin? A result of their cruelty was that many of their own people supported the Conquistadors with leaders like Montezuma encouraging the Spaniards. Peter of Russia who delighted in made-to-order torture chambers goes down in history as ‘the Great’ founder of modern Russia. His name rather than that of the Marquis de Sade might have labelled the conduct that today we now call ‘sadism’. Did something of his nature spill over into the subsequent regimes of Russia with their KGB and Cheka which oppressed the people? Who can dismiss out of hand the idea that morality has no part of play in the ongoing life of a nation and is divorced from geopolitics? Is it not time that these underlying assumptions were revisited?

5. Fitness for office of principals

Better a good man in charge of a bad system than a bad man in charge of a good system.

• John Coleman

The best hope for humanity getting together and uniting in a common cause is if, say, ‘Mars attacks’. A common desired community purpose often produces the right result.

Global communication systems help expose much mustiness of mind. Recognising a trend as dubious in one context can cause it to be questioned in another. There are siren voices and the best usually to be done is to make a habit of putting on mental ear muffs and try to think out clearly what is of genuine value. Often common sense, that uncommon commodity, is the best guide. Some trends may need midwives to coax them into the spotlight of attention where they can be seen for what they are.

It does not seem so much to ask that sensible people are the helm of affairs. President Gorbachev is an example of the right man coming through despite a system weighted against it. Who is to talk and with who? The right person in the right place can make the difference to getting the right outcome. Mr Gorbachev rose through the ranks of the KGB but, in power, he saw reason and acted in defiance of his own establishment. Stalin won through to control of the communist party by dint of polishing off his rivals and this conversely illustrates the dangers of getting it wrong. The right policies may be all very fine but expending thought on those chosen to implement and how best it might be brought about is not a study that has gained traction in any of the think tanks devoted to running affairs better. No one says this is an easy challenge.

It is not as though institutions are not capable of producing the right man for the top jobs. The Oxford academic, Jonathan Steinberg, opined with sense that there are three European institutions that over several generations succeeded in manufacturing a special human type: the Jesuit Order, the British public school and the Prussian General Staff. Sparta of old produced an entire citizenry to order for purposes of its defence. Some might say that the training of Arabian princelings is exactly of the wrong sort to foster the right qualities for those taking power. Their grooming for power apparently on occasion took the form being told to sit in a circle when young and with a servant in the middle of the circle whose job it was to pick up the orange skins the youngsters threw into the middle. There is no underestimating the effects of education and right-thinking principles may have on the governments they eventually head.

The problem is the difficulty of ensuring fitness for office of principals not the obvious desirability of such an outcome. In the war-torn Afghanistan of today, there have been no end of good blueprints to set things straight over two decades. What went wrong, leading pundits say, is that the wrong men took the top jobs. More time could have been spent in analysing who would the true and best friends of the West and their own countrymen when push came to shove as opposed to the lip-service that has been paid to high-flown principles.

We are coming round to the idea that the grand presumptions, the wishful thinking, of our leaders sit ill with feet of visible clay, courtesy of modern means of communication. We are dealing with human beings beneath the varnish or mystique. There used to be an idea in British politics that ‘anyone who wants high office is not fit for it’. In Ancient Rome, consuls were barred from making profit through their office.

It seems a fair bet that some leaders are prone to the Asperger’s syndrome. Putin is a case in point. Can anything be done about the fact that the sociopath mentality, so damaging to people other than those who have it, can turn out to be a useful passport to business and political success? Isometric personality tests are increasingly norms for applicants for big business and on the increase as guides to appointing CEOs; why should these guidelines not be applied to leading councillors of government? What are the prejudices that people have that may incline them to make decisions not in the line of what is needed for office? Why is it often felt that the fact that a candidate for office is a time-server …is this necessarily an adverse comment on someone? If he has few prejudices of his own, he may be more inclined to implement the prejudices of his voters.

It is helpful to see that the ploy of approaching faceless institutions for abstract causes rarely is effective in getting decision-makers on side. In 2015 the Annual Review of Psychology published an article called Emotion and Decision Making exploring the assumption that emotions are the dominant driver of most meaningful decisions in life; it is but one example of a worthwhile theory. Know with whom ye come to deal is a good principle and, if so, another is to try and ensure that the right type of people are there for you to deal with.

The fate of millions or people can rest on decision-makers yet we can judge of them by personal qualities that are irrelevant to their decisions. It is what a man does that matters to the people not what he does in the time he bunks off.

Some tendencies including nowadays ‘fake news’ or unthought-through opinions may be adrift of worthwhile, organised, properly discussed and agreed principles about many things that matter. TV unfairly cuts people down to size, making high deliberation look much like the doings of a ‘soap’ opera to the detriment of a sensible consensus among voters.

Human justice too often was learnt in the school playground. There are many signs that we go on with those lessons through life. The bombers of Hamburg in WW2 may have exacted retribution on the bombers of London except for one thing: the innocent often suffered not the perpetrators.

Where feasible there could be a typical ‘On Approval’ period before the Green Light is given to those embarking on the role of leadership. Possible corrections to a basic attitude that may not have been picked up could be reconsidered and reviewed. As in our own bodies there are warring internecine elements to be guarded against. The ‘enemy within’ is often the enemy of those within.

Is it not as if the principle of attempting to impress upon leaders the repercussions of their perhaps errant ways has never been recognised; or that nothing has ever been done about this possibility. It has just never coalesced into a considered and generally accepted prescription that makes sense and could be implemented. That said, it is not as if such ideas never had traction…

A Roman general accorded a processional Triumph through ancient Rome, cheering bystanders lining his route, had a ‘lictor’ at his side charged with constant reiteration in the general’s ear of the warning ‘Remember that you too are mortal!’. Not a good idea if he got too big for his boots! Medieval monarchs had jesters at court so that at least someone was licensed to tell the King the truth about what was afoot. Practical reminders proliferate in our era of the pitfalls to dictators and lesser all-powerful rulers who fall prey to both Acton’s warnings: ‘Power corrupts and absolute power corrupts absolutely’. Forget Ozymandias, it surprises how frequently that tyrants fall into a trap whose snare is hubris. Angela Merkel, the successful German Chancellor, works in a workaday office, not in lavish surrounds. She does not want her head turned by the splendours of opulent surroundings. Consider all the many examples of leaders with overweening ideas who came to grief: the 40 year jail term meted out by Americans to General Manuel Noriega, drug-runner par excellence of Panama, or Iraq’s Saddam Hussein cowering in a rabbit-like pit he was reduced to calling home before heralds of US executioners winkled him out or Libya’s Muammar Gaddafi, summarily executed; or Ratko Mladic, condemned for decades to continue fighting the bad fight in a glare of adverse international publicity, or General Galtieri, bested by the Iron Lady, or Hitler blowing out his brains in Der Bunker or Stalin dead at 54 with his enforcer Molotov dancing a jig of joy by his deathbed. The list is lengthy, grisly and condign. It is arguably the operation of the lore of Karma. Eichmann had to listen to testimonies of his victims. Why wait till the end of the day, too late, for the best searchlight onto the consequences of actions rather than regale responsible parties with as many of them as possible while chance offers? This principle could have been put in hand while the controversial acts were in full swing. Those are extreme examples but the cautionary tale applies equally to jacks-in-office. True, in these times hostility to men at the top of the tree is more in-their-face but any form of over-insulation has its risks.

Given that ‘knowledge is power’, if there is a will to assess the characters of people for high office at least in some circumstances, a sensible and educative norm surely could be found. CEOs, as mentioned, undergo psychometric testing, sometimes by a DISC analysis (Dominance, Influence, Stability, Compliance). It helps other people to know if their character profile is suitable for the job. To know if someone will be a steady hand at the tiller or be over-compliant to rules – a leader type as opposed to a stop-gap choice – all could be useful to know; to know is often to understand if the practitioners of the arts of politics or diplomacy are s up to the job. The Chinese, it is understood, think it particularly important to ‘Save Face’ so this facet of character is to be factored into dealing with them. Americans can be mocked for strutting the world stage like Western ‘B’ movie actors but sauce for the goose is sauce for the gander: Americans had that sound track playing to them during formative years so they can equally be understood for acting according to their own preferred prototype. Gauging this correctly may help other diplomats to deal with them. Suppose it to be true that President Putin is autistic it may help both diplomats and party members anticipate his reactions. If the German High Command in WW2 knew earlier of Hitler’s putative mentally degenerative condition would not that have been helpful to his commanders? Psychological profiling has its uses; the taxonomy of character is well-advanced as a science; why not put it to use if and where possible when needed?

In some cases, it would only take a slight shift in general proceedings. Power-brokers could sit in on, say, a couple of hours a month to hear intelligent views on some of the repercussions of their activities and decisions from those affected. Commentators – a Brains Trust or Council of Elders – can help counteract honeyed words of time-servers. It would be serving up to leaders a fuller emotional bouquet of what they are about. Henry II did saw the point at issue, salving himself by submitting to the scourge so as to atone for Beckett’s murder. In Victorian times if one wanted to get the scutterbuck of what went on Above Stairs, the thing was to ask the servants. Autres temps, autres moeurs! Mrs Thatcher was thought an iron and uncompromising lady in Cabinet but it was another thing altogether in Finchley; there she listened intently to what her constituents told her.

A healthy dose of humour can a sense of proportion. A sycophantic Nazi sympathiser once wrote to the German chancelry asking if he could name his new-born daughter ‘Hitleria’, only to be told ‘The Reich wishes to encourage martial virtues so we suggest that you name her after our preferred gun, ‘Lugerella’ No doubt the lesson was taken to heart. In the unlikeliest of routes, also, the best path to useful information be found. A complete picture needs all the pieces of a jigsaw and an accepted and acceptable aid to learning on the job would have a spin-off value in that it could garner politicos a few kudos. We are all human at the end of the day and we should try and ensure that the right type of man is chosen to be a leader rather than so often be the fall-guys of systems that may have much to recommend them but which fall short in this particular.

1^ In Genesis, dwellers in a tower to Heaven babbled in so many tongues they did not understand each other