‘They go as they come’: why scoundrels will always fail

One of the simplest yet most meaningful quotes about the life of miscreants, traitors and bandits, comes from Mustafa Kemal Atatürk, a man who incidentally had a good rapport with the Soviet Union under Lenin.  Atatürk said, “They go as they come” and so it is true with all the friends of the world.

The world is rife with injustice but as someone who views life optimistically in the long term, I do believe that eventually those who live by the sword shall fall on that same sword. It happened to Yeltsin, a man who came from nowhere and returned to such a place when he died in illness and ignominy, after having destroyed Russia.

It happened to Nixon who after decades of political corruption, was forced to leave office because of the Watergate scandal. Tony Blair campaigned to take the socialism out of the Labour party and to turn himself into a figure of admiration. Now Labour are led by a traditional socialist and Blair is loathed by those on the left and right.

Indeed, the Sword of Damocles hangs over all and the higher the position one sits, the closer to the dangling sword’s tip one’s head is. This is what happened not only to Hillary Clinton but to Huma Abedin, about whom I’ve recently written.

Both women came from a swamp of pure greed which caused them to forego moral conduct in both their professional and personal lives. Both women sought power for the sake of it, not out of a sense of duty to the people, not out of a sense of patriotism, not because they wanted to bring the world closer to a state of peace.

Cicero once wrote that, “A nation can survive its fools, and even the ambitious. But it cannot survive treason from within”. The Clintons and Abedin represent both the folly of ambition and the perils of treason. America and the world almost did not survive. But they fell and they fell hard.

Many people in their own lives feel that the weight of the world’s injustices, is simply too great for them to handle. They want to give up. Poor schools, a wage-slave economy, the degradation of culture and the poison of lies which they have to deal with, makes them feel they ought to give up and give in.

If there is a lesson to be derived from the US election for such people, it is to as Churchill said ‘Never surrender’.  The Clintons and Abedin came from a dark place, a swampy place, a place where honour does not exist and honesty is an alien concept. But they are gone. They have gone as they came. So too do all scoundrels.