The Sickening Glorification of Criminals

John Derbyshire is feeling ill from contemplating John Gotti’s funeral:

These tributes from neighbors and reporters turn my stomach, though. They are so keen to tell us about Gotti’s personal qualities: his courage, his loyalty, the warmth of his family life. I don’t doubt that it’s all true. So what? Human beings are social creatures, and our virtues are only praiseworthy when they are socially positive…. I am certainly willing to believe that John Gotti was fearless, loyal, a devoted husband and father. There is no doubt, though, that from the point of view of free citizens in a free republic, enjoying liberty under fair laws, Gotti was a very wicked man, who died unrepentant in his wickedness. Bronze coffin? If the law required that we be interred in a style appropriate to our contributions as citizens, John Gotti would have gone to his mausoleum in a trash can.

“[F]rom the point of view of free citizens in a free republic, enjoying liberty under fair laws, Gotti was a very wicked man…” Well, no doubt that is true. My goal in this essay is not to offer a defense of John Gotti. However, Derbyshire clearly means that Americans are “free citizens in a free republic, enjoying liberty under fair laws.” Is that also true?

At first glance, Derbyshire seems to be making four contentions. As we shall see, that is merely a rhetorical device, as they all come down to the same thing. Let’s look at them more carefully.

Are Americans “free citizens”? Butler Shaffer reminds us that, in one sense, the only person who really can restrict your freedom is you. Factually, you cannot turn over control of yourself to anyone else, and the realization of that truth leaves you, in a meaningful sense, free. As Bob Marley put it, “Emancipate yourselves from mental slavery / None but ourselves can free our minds.” We can agree with the sentiment while still holding that there is another meaningful dimension we can call political freedom, and that even a liberated mind may not make us politically free. And after all, if Derbyshire meant only our inherent nature is free, then his statement is a mere tautology: all people everywhere are free.

So how might we categorize political freedom? As Hayek famously put it, we are free when we live under the rule of law. “This, however, is true only if by ‘law’ we mean general rules that apply equally to everybody…. a true law… should especially not single out any specific persons or groups of persons” (Constitution of Liberty). In that, I think he was correct. But he failed to realize, or perhaps only realized quite late in life*, that the institution of the state is incompatible with his dictum. That is because a state, at the very least, collects taxes, and tax laws inevitably divide the citizens into tax payers and tax recipients, to whom the laws apply differently. Employees of the state, for one, are always tax recipients, and the idea that they pay taxes is an accounting illusion fostered by having the government note a certain extra amount of income for state employees (their withholding), which it merely never pays them.

Derbyshire might answer that while Americans do not have complete political freedom, relatively speaking they have more than most people. We can grant his point, while insisting that it does not change the fundamentals of the situation. A slave who only has to work two days a week for his master is still a slave. He is still a slave even if his master allows him a range of occupations for his servitude. The master may try to convince him that he is not a slave by pointing to the slaves down the road, whose master makes them work seven days a week and gives them no choice of occupation. Certainly, most people would prefer to be owned by the first master rather than the second. But they would still be slaves if owned by either.

The rest of Derbyshire’s line is just saying the same thing in different ways. What can a free republic be but a republic made up of free citizens? “Republics” do not act; people do, and freedom only applies to agents. Don’t free citizens, by definition, enjoy liberty? And aren’t fair laws exactly those that don’t unjustly deprive anyone of their liberty?

The fact that we are not free citizens, in the political sense, but subjects of the state, is not unconnected to the praise of Gotti. Consider another vicious murderer, lauded in the very magazine for which Derbyshire wrote his Gotti piece:

[Winston] Churchill, a talented amateur painter, brought an artist’s perspective to bear on war. The selection of broad themes (a word which he used often in both contexts) and the marshaling of detail to support those large ideas formed an important part of his war statecraft as much as it did of his palette. Painting cannot be done to hard and fast rules or to a rigid schedule; it must be adapted to the scene before it; and room must remain for creativity and adaptation to shifting lights and the artist’s own flashes of insight – such artistic truths applied no less to Churchill’s war leadership than to his essays in oils.

Now, when it came to murder, Churchill made Gotti look like a piker. And at least Gotti probably only ordered people killed who snitched or were in a turf war with his “family,” in other words, combatants. When Churchill ordered the fire bombing of Dresden, in order to impress Stalin with Anglo-American military might, the city was without military targets and was inhabited mostly by women, children, and the elderly. Even rescue vehicles coming to help the survivors of the first wave of planes were targeted for destruction.

So Gotti was a murderer with a sense of style, while Churchill was one who killed artistically. Other than the fact that Churchill killed perhaps tens or hundreds of thousands times as many people as Gotti, the praise sounds pretty similar.

And it occurs to me that Hitler was handy with a brush as well. He was also pretty nice to cats and Aryan children. Perhaps NRO will run an article on the many overlooked charms of Adolf.

What about another mass murderer, Harry Truman, who melted a few hundred thousand Japanese non-combatants in the closing days of World War II? National Review praised a book touting him as one of the heroes of the Cold War. National Review favorite Condoleezza Rice named him as her “person of the century.” The fact that he was a “plain-spoken” man has been noted with admiration. (Gotti was probably fairly plain spoken as well.)

What justifies the praise these cold-blooded killers receive? Robert Kagan nicely captures the “morality” of all worshippers of state power. Reviewing Kagan, David Gordon says, “We learn from Machiavelli, [Kagan] holds, that in foreign affairs morality must take a back seat to self-preservation.”

Why wouldn’t that apply to inter-Mafioso affairs, as well? What is a Mafia family but a sort of mini-state? And it’s the results of one’s actions, not the means one employs, that matters, right? Gotti was just a realist, in the best tradition of Churchill or Truman, doing his utmost to advance the interests of his group. He was able to make the “tough choices” when he had to. Why shouldn’t he be praised as they are?

The counter-argument that Churchill and Truman were heads of “legitimate states” is merely circular. What makes them legitimate but the legitimacy of their actions? Democracy certainly doesn’t: Would Gotti’s crimes have been OK if he had been elected don?

In the end, Churchill was knighted, and Truman is often championed as one of America’s greatest presidents. When we bestow honors upon and build monuments to mass murderers, it shouldn’t be too surprising that people are willing to shower a little praise on a minor killer.

* I say perhaps late in life because I have heard that Hayek told a group of students, in the late seventies, “If I were a young man today, I would probably be an anarchist.”

June 21 , 2002