Why do you lock your front door? Why are minorities oppressed? Why do armed forces have to protect your nation? Two words: Bad guys. And what should be done with the bad guys? 2131 words:
Maybe the bad guys should lose their control. Maybe they should lose their positions of power. Maybe they should be killed. The important thing is we can’t let them win.
Article written by Zachar
As Vice President-elect Kamala Haris recently said, “Don’t let the bad guys win. When they are spewing hate, when they are trying to divide us, let us remember our strength… no one should be made to stand alone in their fight.”
It’s a great line for a comic book or a Disney movie. But are the world’s problems really going to be solved in a fight between the good guys and bad guys?
The Bad Guys Problem
If you’ve fantasized about living in a world without bad guys, you wouldn’t be the first. History is full of examples of trying to get rid of the “bad guys” to make things better for the rest of us. The first example that comes to mind is Pol Pot’s plan to make Cambodia a really great place. He called this utopian Cambodia, “Democratic Kampuchea.”
Pol Pot was the Prime Minister of his Democratic Kampuchea / Cambodia from 1975 to 1979. Like so many national leaders before and after him, Pol Pot had the dream to make his country great again. So cliché. A big part of his plan required “eradicating the bad elements of society.” In other words, getting rid of the bad guys.
Pol Pot spent four years going after the bad guys. In the process, a quarter of Cambodia’s population was killed and Cambodia wasn’t any better off… to say the least.
Pol Pot’s plan would’ve been more effective if his country were in a Disney film. In Disney films it only takes the elimination of one or two people to make the land great again. Not so in the real world. In the real world, eliminating people doesn’t make the land great again, even if a quarter of the population is eliminated.
There are countless more examples of leaders doing their best to get rid of the bad guys to make the land great again, yet lands are rarely (if ever) made great by societal purification. Rome didn’t become great again after the assassinations of Caesar, his friends, nor his rivals. The Soviet Union didn’t become great after the death of Lenin, nor did the incarceration of millions of supposed enemies of the state make the Soviet Union a better country. Getting rid of the “bad guys,” whatever the circumstances, rarely benefits the cause of the perpetrator, especially if their cause is to make their society better.
A few bad Apples
What if instead of trying to get rid of all the bad guys in your country, you got rid of the 50 worst bad guys who are currently in power. Things would have to get better for the country. Right?
This is what the US thought about Iraq in the early 2000s. For a long time, Iraq was seen from outside countries as kind of backwards and horrible because a select group of “bad guys” was running the country. George W. Bush thought that if he could “get the bad guys,” Iraq would blossom into the Middle East’s first majority-Arab democracy.
So, America invaded Iraq, purged Sadam Husein and his friends from the Iraqi government and watched in horror as the country imploded into a civil war as quickly and violently as a star going super-nova.
The new civil war suddenly created a lot more bad guys. The original project to get rid of 50 bad guys turned into a desperate attempt to get rid of an ever-increasing, ever-quickening stream bad guys. It was like completing level one in Tetris and then skipping ahead to level twenty.
An even clearer example of “bad guy eradication” going array is the 2001 American invasion of Afghanistan. At first, things went exactly as planned. The US (with NATO) was able to beat the “bad guys” in less than three months.
The Taliban surrendered in December 2001 with the stipulation that they would be allowed to live. The George W. Bush administration, thinking the world would be a better place if the bad guys weren’t allowed to live, decided to continue fighting the Taliban until they were all killed rather than accept their quick surrender.
Seven years later, still having not killed all the bad guys, the Obama administration fought the hell out of the Taliban in a massive troop surge. Obama even killed Osama bin Ladan: bad guy #1. Today, almost 20 years after the invasion and after all those bad guys have been killed, it is the US who is surrendering in Afghanistan.
The world isn’t a children’s story. When your plan to change the world is based on fighting bad guys, there is no happily ever after. The conclusion is endless.
“The Witch is Dead”
I’ve been giving examples of what happens when getting rid of the bad guys doesn’t work. Surely there have been times when getting rid of bad guys has worked. Like that time in the Wizard of Oz, when things became a lot better for the munchkins when the Wicked Witch of the West melted. History does have examples of the land getting better after the bad guys have been eliminated, but not in the way you’d think.
Remember Pol Pot and Democratic Kampuchea? In a plot twist, it turned out that Pol Pot was the bad guy all along. Yes, Cambodia was better off once Pol Pot had to flee. Just as everyone was better off once Hitler killed himself, or when Stalin died of a stroke. But there’s more to it.
Did Cambodia, Europe, or the Soviet Union look like this after the villains left?
As you’d imagine, these places looked more like this either physically or psychologically.
In Disney films it’s easy. When the bad guys are out of the picture, the land becomes perfect again. Disney films are like this because subtlety would get in the way of a child’s understanding of the story.
However outside of children’s stories, the bad guys are connected to our world in the same ways as the good guys. When we eliminate them, they leave holes in the fabric of society in the same way the good guys leave holes when they disappear. Maybe the bad guys aren’t missed very much when they’re killed, but they still leave holes.
If someone told me that a drone strike took out Jafar from Aladdin, I’d think, “OK great. Now Agrabah is safe and sound forever.” But when I heard the news that Saddam Hussein had been killed, I flipped out because with Saddam Hussein gone, there was now a really big hole in the Middle East, and only chaos was going to fill it. Saddam Hussein is not Jafar. Baghdad is not Agrabah. The real world is not a Disney Film.
Exceptions
Maybe trying to kill all the bad guys in Iraq and Afghanistan (and later Libya) was a bad idea, but are the Nazis or ISIS an exception? I would say yes, if an army is successfully blitzkrieging through countries with genocidal goals then the world has an obvious moral obligation to put a stop to it by any means possible.
On the other hand, the Nazi’s and ISIS’ originated in countries that had been labeled as “the bad guys” for decades. That was the original problem. In the case of the Nazi’s, Germany had been label the “bad guys” since the end of the First World War.
Even though World War One had many complex causes, the blame for the war was entirely heaved onto Germany because they were the losers and they couldn’t do anything about it. The truth was that the Allies were scared of Germany becoming strong again, so they labelled Germany the “bad guys” as justification for heavy penalties they put on Germany, which were designed to keep Germany weak.
Luckily after the Second World War, the Allies had learned from the disaster of labelling Germany the “bad guys.” After beating Germany the second time, the Allies took the opposite route. They labelled their former enemies as friends and put a lot of effort into rebuilding the countries they had just destroyed. As a freedom-loving American writing this article in Germany, it’s safe to say that things worked out better the second time.
No single person exemplifies this point more than Wernher von Braun. Braun was a German Nazi who not only successfully designed rockets that indiscriminately killed thousands of civilians across Europe, but also slave labour was used to build these rockets. In fact, more people died making his rockets than were killed by them.
Wernher von Braun later worked at NASA as the chief architect of the Saturn V rocket. This was the rocket that enabled the United States to reach the moon first. To this day, the Saturn V rocket is considered the greatest rocket ever built. It was the only rocket ever made that could bring people to the moon.
There is no question that Wernher van Braun was a bad guy, but if he had been made to serve the justice he deserved, the United States would not have been the first to the moon.
Conclusion
In researching this article I came across a letter that Gandhi wrote to Hitler. In it, Gandhi wrote, “If you attain success in the war, it will not prove that you were in the right. It will only prove that your power of destruction was greater.”
To put my own take on this, punching a fascist in the face isn’t going to change their ideology, just as much as them punching you isn’t going to change yours. On a national level, putting your resources into fighting the bad guys will not show that you are the good guys, it will only show that your country can destroy more.
In the 1960s the United States weren’t the good guys because they hired Wernher van Braun to make the best rockets. They were the good guys because they hired Wernher van Braun to make the best rockets and then used them to go to the moon.
Thirty years after the last man walked on the moon, the United States declared a new war. Bush called it, “The War on Terror” but he might as well have called it, “The War on Bad Guys.” Brown University conservatively estimates that the War on Terror has resulted in 1.5 million deaths and 37 million refugees. As of 2020, the US has paid $6.9 trillion and American troops have been fighting in 14 countries. This war has never had a foreseeable conclusion.
Could you imagine if in the 20 years this war has been faught, we (the United States) and its allies did what they did after World War Two? What if we spent our resources on supporting the people of former enemy governments, rather than trying to eliminate an endless stream of bad guys?
What if we used our science and technology, which is so good at killing bad guys, to kill global warming instead? What if we focused on giving Afghans futures instead of weapons? What if we listened to the problems of other nations and used our might to help them solve their problems? What if we listened to the problems and fears of the people in our own country? How good would our nation be then? How great would our nation be?
How to Change the World
All of us have seen some form of injustice and have asked ourselves what we could do about it. Then we remembered that we have to work, have to take care of our families, and enjoy life when we can. How can we have the time, energy, and money to change the world? Maybe it’s easier to be angry at the bad guys than make the world a better place.
However, changing the world isn’t as difficult as may seem. All we have to do is have a mindset that is more focused on building than attacking. Instead of seeking out the trouble-makers and injustices, seek out the solution-finders and builders. Look for people that will support you rather than focusing on those who did you wrong.
On an individual level this will improve your life, on a group level, this will improve your group, and on a societal level, this will improve your society. It might mean connecting with people that you wouldn’t naturally connect with, but if you’re working with builders and solution-finders, then the world is going to become a better place.
Baghdad to Mars 