Treason

Meanings and Motives

Eric Carlton

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2019
• Print ISBN: 9781138362550
• eBook ISBN: 9780429777707
• Topic: History
• Subtopic: World History
• Index: History

First published in 1998, this volume is a historical and comparative study of treason, whose aim is to clarify and categorize the diverse and often mixed – even confused – motives which underlie treason, both at its conspiracy and implemental stages. Its approach is to use case studies ranging from classical society to modern cases of treachery to examine this complex issue. Some of the case studies will have a familiar ring, but others will not be so well known, as the book is not merely a popular recitation of spy stories. Rather, it is concerned with the nature of treason, and offers some theoretical pointers to treason as a social and psychological phenomenon.

The text demonstrates that, while in common speech the term 'treason' has pejorative connotations, it is, in fact, a multi-faceted phenomenon which merits much closer investigation.

Chapter One
Treason: Are there any Relevant Theories?

Always bearing in mind that one man's traitor is another man's patriot (West: 1995) we need to ask at the outset of our discussion whether there are any theories which will enable us to understand better the phenomenon of treason. Is there anything in the biological and social sciences that will help us to reach some kind of plausible explanation? As a preliminary, I think we can confidently discount biochemical theories. The gene-for-everything mentality hardly extends to treason. Even those with a strong biological bent are usually prepared to concede that behaviour is determined by a combination of natural (genetic) proclivities which are then fostered or otherwise by socialization factors. To maintain otherwise is to indulge in the kind of reductionism that is both misconstrued and unscientific.

What then of the social sciences? If we take sociology first: what has this relatively young and rather imprecise discipline to offer us? Let us consider first of all the notion of socialization. After all it is not unreasonable to suspect that a person's upbringing may have something to do with subsequent deviant behaviour. When sociologists talk about socialization, they are referring to a particular aspect of the nature-nurture controversy which vitiates all behavioural studies. Can we best explain behaviour in terms of development and growth (nurture) or in terms of inherent, genetic characteristics (nature)? The issue is, needless to say, still unresolved. The pendulum swings erratically depending on fashion and the social science discipline concerned. The concept of socialization is nurture-oriented and denotes the process whereby individuals are moulded to the requirements of society. We are all shaped to fit the patterns that society requires, and indoctrinated with the norms and values that society endorses. The process is inevitable, and it is also largely unconscious. No one can avoid it - it is just not possible to go unmoulded. So when some people decry what they see as interference and insist that they just want to be themselves, this may have no objective meaning. We are all products of society whether we like it or not. So, for example, although the wearing of clothes is entirely determined by temperature (nature), what we wear, how we wear it, and who we wear it for, it is really all part of the conforming process (nurture).

It follows that deviant acts or acts that are deemed to be deviant may be attributed to parental influence or lack of it, to education, media examples, peer pressure, or some other social factor during a person's formative years. Some acts of treason seem to come down to the question of identity. How do people see themselves in relation to others? For instance, if they are of mixed nationality, to whom do they owe allegiance? It should surprise no one that in 1938-39, the Sudetan Germans living in Czechoslovakia appeared to many Czechs as collaborators because they applauded the Nazi takeover of their country; they wanted to be part of the Greater German Reich. Similarly in Denmark in 1940, those Danes who lived in North Schleswig regarded themselves as Volksdeutsche and were eager to support the German occupiers of their country. Many were already members of Nazi-type organizations, and as the war progressed numbers of them volunteered for service with German military units. Upbringing, of course, was the key. They saw themselves as German, so, ipso facto, they were Germans. But to the majority of the population their allegiance should have been elsewhere; their all too willing collaboration constituted a form of treason.

There is a very strong tendency in sociology - inherited largely from Marxism - to use 'class' as a heuristic device to enable us to comprehend a multitude of social phenomena; class is seen as a conceptual skeleton key that will open the doors of our understanding. That 'class' exists no one can doubt, but to what extent the superimposition of our respective model of class concurs with the objective structures of society is a matter of debate. Different theorists tend to see class in different ways. What exactly is 'working class', 'middle class' and so forth? By what empirical criteria are they to be judged? It goes without saying that if we are prepared only to use hard economic criteria (à la crude Marxism) there are still difficulties. And if we agree that this is too narrow and that we must extend the range of criteria (as Max Weber, for instance) to include those factors that go to make up 'lifestyles', then we really do have problems. And what if we introduce such factors as race, religion and gender to enable us to cope with social differentiation. The mix becomes unimaginably complex and increasingly amorphous. So perhaps we had better start again.

If we link the notion of class to that of social deprivation it might be rather more helpful. It hardly needs to be said that many of those who have committed acts of treason have done so for money. Whether or not we can in any way 'excuse' betrayal on the grounds of economic deprivation is very doubtful. After all, most people at the lower end of the financial scale do not resort to treason to supplement their bank balances - but then most people have neither the privileged information nor the opportunity to do so. A rather more subtle inducement to commit treason is the enhancement of prestige, a need which can be said to arise from status deprivation. The well-tried distinction between ascribed and achieved status is relevant here. There is little doubt that some individuals harbour resentment against those who have done little or nothing to merit rewards, say through inheritance, or those who have received rewards which hardly seem to be commensurate with the effort expended to get them. Prestige, of course, is a socially acquired or socially approved 'endowment'; it has to do with outward recognition something which is hardly characteristic of the traitor (unless it is given after retirement as was the case with the British spy, Kim Philby, who was rewarded by his Russian masters after he had been forced to defect to Moscow). But there is an interesting variant to this - which, incidentally, also applied to Philby, and which will also be taken up again in our case studies - and that is the phenomenon of the 'secret life'. There have been traitors who don't seem to require outward acknowledgement of their deeds whether that acknowledgement takes the form of adulation or notoriety. They don't need public recognition, but what they crave is self-satisfaction. They can admire themselves and perhaps pride themselves on their cleverness and cunning, and the fact that what they have done - or are doing - is known only to themselves. Philby, for example, even when drunk - which was not infrequent - never betrayed his 'other self' even to close family or associates.

The abiding problem with deprivation theories generally is that they can be made to cover any and every contingency. In one well-known typology of deprivation (Glock and Stark: 1965) for example, the writers identify:

1. Ideological deprivation, the need for a sense of purpose.
2. Ethical deprivation, the need for recognition and achievement (that which we have already designated status deprivation).
3. Organismic deprivation, a term applied to those who are all too conscious of their physical deficiencies.
4. Social deprivation, the need for friends and companionship.
5. Intellectual deprivation, which relates to those who are very aware of their insufficiency of education, and concerned about their general lack of knowledge.

This sort of thing is useful as a form of categorization, but it is open to a number of objections (Carlton: 1995b, pp. 57-8). It is the kind of list that can be abbreviated or extended at will. Each of the categories is concerned with perception; how we see ourselves and how we think others see us, as well as how we see others - all of which has a considerable bearing on the problem of treason. But the difficulty is one of definition. By relative standards we are all in some way deprived. It therefore becomes impossible to specify the degree or extent of deprivation. Unless we employ firm empirical criteria - not easy in matters of perception - we are dealing with factors which cannot be quantified or tested. It all becomes very much a matter of interpretation. Much depends on which sociological school is involved. Some favour the systems approach where roles or identities are assigned by social consensus, while those who incline to the action approach designate the actors as referents, thus the emphasis is on inward evaluation.

It is at this point that belief becomes all-important, and constellations of beliefs are often intellectualized as ideologies. The person who engages in traitorous activity may well be motivated by a consuming ideology, and it is this set of beliefs that compensate for a sense of deprivation of some kind. It may be that the sense of deprivation concerns that which is material in that a person has an overwhelming need for more and better possessions, or it may be spiritual in that what he requires is an enhancement of hope. This discontent may be retrospective in that it relates to the past, perhaps in terms of blocked mobility, or it may be prospective in so far as he has limited expectations and anticipates a bleak future, or - very commonly - it may be circumspective to the extent that when he looks around he is all too conscious of the fact that others have more than he does. Nevertheless, it can be argued that deprivation may be seen as 'good' in that its discomforts bring a sense of well-being because they are endured as a sort of discipline. This 'bed-of-nails' mentality can consequently be regarded as beneficial because in an inverted kind of way it brings a sense of self-actualization.

It has already been indicated that the biological sciences have a limited explanatory value as far as behaviour is concerned. Anyway, it is probably incorrect to locate an action in any one determinative mode. The various sciences can only provide us with a number of complementary perspectives, though sometimes we have to think in contrasting rather than complementary terms. For example, the visual sensitivity of the eye is extremely highly developed (nature), it is said to be able to distinguish about 3 000 different colours. In crime detection it is possible (as Interpol) to 'reconstruct' many thousands of different faces for identification purposes, yet people are quite incapable of expressing or describing the precise differences in verbal terms. This latter facility, language (the nurture element), is still open to some refinement. If - and only if - we could account for deviance or any other kind of act in purely biochemical terms, then behaviour becomes incomprehensible to us. If it was irrefutably established so that we could accept it in the same way that we can accept, say, the liquefaction of a metal at a particular temperature, we could receive it as 'fact', but in human terms we still don't understand it. This is a point forcibly made by Max Weber when he writes of verstehen, usually translated as interpretative understanding. Scientific facts we tend to accept as facts, but we don't understand them from within, as it were, in the way that we understand, say, irrepressible laughter or the tears of a grief-stricken person. So if we want to get just a little closer to what it is that makes a person behave as he/she does, then we could do worse than see what the social sciences - limited as they may be - have to say which may bear on the problem. And here we take the word 'social' to encompass the whole environmental context in which an action takes place, and the cultural pressures and forces that help to shape behaviour.

In any study or treason, the question of motivation is crucial. And when it comes to motives the matter of awareness is paramount. In sociology, much of the work on motivation and explanation goes back to the writings of Weber who was concerned with the understanding of human action. As we have seen, he thought that this was very much a matter of interpretation, and he didn't believe that it was conceptually 'containable' in terms of laws, as per the physical sciences. He says that understanding can never be defined, only characterized. There is self-evident understanding which is the immediate apprehension of observed behaviour, for example, when we see a person scanning the road in a main thoroughfare before attempting to cross to the other side; and there is understanding in terms of motivation. It is this attribution of meaning within a given social context that most concerns us here. The sequence is therefore:

1. Understanding that gives meaning to social behaviour.
2. The context which provides the motive.
3. Meaning and motive then supply a rational explanation.

But immediately we can see the snags. Our knowledge of the circumstances in which our interpretation is made can be false for a number of reasons:

1. Motives may be concealed, that is to say conscious motives may appear to be obvious at first, but may actually obscure ulterior motives.
2. Similar patterns of behaviour do not necessarily imply similar or even like motives, and need not have the same meaning.
3. Behaviour - and this is so often the case with traitorous behaviour may be the result of conflicting impulses all of which can be understood but the relative strength of which is difficult to determine.
4. People may employ a variety of means in order to attain their ends, and although the means are chosen rationally, the ends or objectives of the action may well have been chosen non-rationally.

If we now turn from sociology to psychology, we find that studies of human motivation are fraught with difficulties. All humans are subject to reflex (autonomic) responses in given situations; for instance, the brain may command composure in a dentist's chair, but this doesn't stop the sweaty palms problem for some people. Or, again, when required to make a public speech, stammering can be a transparent sign of nervousness. Obviously, some actions have very clear motives. There are discernible reasons for them. So if I ask my students why they are at university, they will tell me that they are studying for a degree. But if I ask them why they want a degree, the motives may be far from clear. Motives are mixed, and no single one may be dominant. In fact, there may even be some uncertainty on the issue. Studying for a degree may not actually be directly relevant to any career prospects, and may very well be bound up with matters of status. The desire for esteem - to be well thought of, especially in relation to particular 'others' - is both amorphous and universal.

Motives cannot only be contused by the individual concerned but can also be misunderstood by others. In instances of treason or presumed treason, onlookers and other interested parties, and even students of the case, may be either baffled by the circumstances or led - perhaps quite inadvertently - to the wrong conclusions. A particularly interesting example is that of Leopold III of Belgium. The king came to the throne after the tragic death of his father in a climbing accident in 1934. He was energetic (he acted as his own Foreign Minister) and popular, and some years earlier had married a well-liked Swedish princess. Much to the disappointment of his French and British allies, he made it clear that even in the face of growing German belligerency he was going to take a neutral line, a policy that seems to have been very much in keeping with the public mood. People recalled that Belgium had been occupied by the German military for much of the First World War (1914-18), but what the Allies had called 'gallant little Belgium' had not been particularly well treated once the war was over. The Nazi leadership applauded Leopold's decision; no doubt pacifism fitted in very well with their plans, the fewer able opponents they had the better. This was capped by a cynical guarantee to respect the inviolability of Belgian territory which Germany made in 1937.

When war broke out in 1939, Belgium reiterated her neutrality and nothing happened - for a while. In May 1940, Hitler launched his attack against the Low Countries; The Netherlands fell in four days, and Belgium capitulated after 18 without consulting the Allies. They were simply incidental casualties of Hitler's overall Western strategy. The Dutch royal family fled to England (ironically, the Queen's German son-in-law, Prince Bernhard was an officer in the SS), but Leopold decided to stay on with his people. This was almost certainly misconstrued by the British who condemned Leopold's unilateral decision to capitulate as treachery. The French removed his name from the Legion of Honour, and his action was even repudiated by his own government who declared the King 'legally and morally unfit to continue his reign' (Littlejohn: 1972, p. 146). Some people, however, saw it as a noble and humane act, a militarily defensible decision in order to obviate unnecessary slaughter. It would have been better for Leopold if he could have been seen as a prisoner of war, but his subsequent - and fateful decision to visit the Führer was seen as an endorsement of the Nazi conquest and occupation of the country. It is now thought that this interview may have been arranged so that Leopold could secure better conditions for his people. Whether this is a post facto rationalization we will probably never know, all that we do know is that it got him nowhere - Hitler gave nothing away.

During the occupation Leopold married for a second time in conditions which suggested that he was being given preferential treatment. Once the war was over, many collaborators were duly punished, but Leopold who had moved from Germany to Switzerland decided not to return immediately. In fact, it was five years before he came back, only to be effectively rejected by his people in favour of his son. Whether he should have followed those of his government who sought refuge in Britain in 1940, is still a matter of debate. His motives were almost certainly mixed. Probably he was never sure, and it could well be that one day history will reassess him as one of those victims of war that has been seriously misjudged.

It is on the question of motivation that the Psychodynamic school of psychology (i.e. Freud et al.) make great play of the unpredictable influences of the unconscious mind. The assumption is that our mental activity is largely governed by unconscious processes of which we are normally unaware. These may reveal themselves in dreams, slips of the tongue and so forth, which may be insidious and embarrassing. But then - so it is argued - we cannot be responsible for that which we cannot control. Perhaps we owe much to the Psychodynamic theorists for pointing out these factors, after all, there are many things in our experience, taste, preference, attraction and repulsion, among many, which we cannot readily explain. It is only when others - the practitioners - purport to be able to explain these things to us that we become slightly edgy. So often, the explanations seem to relate to something in infancy of which we have no clear recollection or which we have forgotten altogether. How can the practitioners be so sure that being forced to kiss the cold lips of dear Aunt Jane in the funeral parlour turned Fred into a necrophiliac? It is all too easy to ascribe a person's current neurotic behaviour to some vaguely perceived sexual component. The whole problem of the psychoanalytical ritual is that it is just as likely to impose explanations as to reveal truths.

Many neo-Freudians and others of a similar ilk have departed from the ways of the master, and have spawned numerous sub-schools, so we have to ask if the Freudian approach generally is any more than a series of often valuable insights inflated into a general theory. How much is actually supported by research and how much are we dependent on the therapist's report? It is all too simple, especially as far as treason is concerned, to 'find' an incident in anyone's past which will seemingly account for their current behaviour. It is a 'read-back' method which is fraught with problems. As a ...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title
• Copyright
• Contents
• 1 Treason: Are there any Relevant Theories?
• 2 Treason and Resentment: The Macedonian Conspiracies
• 3 Treason and Divided Loyalties: The Late Roman Republic
• 4 Treason as Fiction: Hernando Cortes and the Conquest of Mexico
• 5 Treason and Ambiguity: The Monmouth Rebellion
• 6 Treason as Negotiation: Denmark and the Policy of Measured Expediency
• 7 Treason and Accommodation: Dutch Collaboration under Nazi Pressure
• 8 Treason and Political Misjudgement: The Case of the British Free Corps
• 9 Treason as Appeasement: Great Britain 1938-41
• 10 Treason and Disillusionment: The Case of Count Ciano
• 11 Treason as Attribution: The 'People's Democracy' in Hungary
• 12 Treason and Opportunism I: The Double Defection of General Fromm
• 13 Treason and Opportunism II: The Desertion of SS General Fegelein
• 14 Treason and Ideology: The Tensions of the Double Life
• 15 Treason as Disloyalty: The Un-American Activities Phenomenon
• 16 Treason and Assassination: Turbulence in Latin America
• 17 Treason and Material Reward: The CIA versus the KGB
• 18 Treason and Blackmail: Sex, Scandal and Betrayal
• Excursus
• Postscript
• Bibliography
• Index