Frankness and friendship
As William Blake once said, "Always be willing to speak your mind and a base man will avoid you." On Monday, in a piece in the The Guardian called "Friends disunited", Michael Ignatieff, looked at what speaking one's mind does to friendship in a time of war. Ignatieff, marched against the Vietnam war, and he doesn't like President Bush's domestic policies, but he supports the attack on Iraq because he believes that the country would be better off without Saddam. And this has had an impact on his friendships:
"Recently, 14,000 'writers, academics and other intellectuals' — many of them friends of mine — published a petition against the war, while condemning the Iraqi regime for its human rights violations and supporting 'efforts by the Iraqi opposition to create a democratic, multi-ethnic and multi-religious Iraq'. But since they say that 'the decision to go to war at this time is morally unacceptable', I wonder what their support amounts to. Their balancing act amounts to a pat on the head to Kanan Makiya and all the Iraqis risking their lives to create a decent society. They don't want a pat on the head. What they want is a rapid and decisive American victory."
Does anyone seriously believe that 25 million Iraqis would not be better off if Saddam were overthrown, asks Ignatieff? For him, the issue is not that overthrowing Saddam by force is "morally unjustified", the issue is whether the risks are worth running, and he concludes:
"But the fact is that America is neither the redeemer nation, nor the evil empire. It isn't always right, but it isn't always wrong. Ideology cannot help us here. In the weeks and years ahead, the choices are not about who we are or what company we should keep nor even about what we think America is or should be. They are about what risks are worth running, when our safety depends on the answer, and when the freedom of 25 million people hangs in the balance."
This is a time for making hard choices and the bottom line for Michael Ignatieff is that one should not take moral decisions to make friends.
War has traditionally divided families and ended friendships, and this conflict is going to be no different in that aspect. Candour can be costly and it's easier to keep one's mouth shut, but the truth will out and when it does friendship is put to the test. It's painful but sometimes necessary.
Diarist of the day: Brian Cox, 26 March 1990"[rehearsing a production of King Lear] In the afternoon, the fruit game exercise: everyone chooses a fruit with not more than two syllables, we sit in a circle and one person walks round on the outside, telling a story trying to say the name of each fruit and repeat it a second time before the person whose fruit in mentioned can say it three times. For me these games reflect a bourgeois English childhood which means nothing to me and I'm not sure of their value here."
