Sooner or later...

 ...one has to take sides. If one is to remain human.

The stand out observation from Fowler in The Quiet American. It seems clear enough, and yet the narrative around it dunks it into a big bowl of ambiguity, for Fowler betrays a friend who has sided with indiscriminate murder for a 'higher cause'  and yet, not so much in the background, there is also the issue of the would-be bride this friend has snatched from him.

Graham Greene repeatedly took sides in the troubled nations he felt drawn to, predominantly the sides where the Catholic clergy were also tempted to lay down their cards. The more charismatic, otherworldly or downright feral these churchmen were, the better, the author apparently surmised. 

Fowler might have been a clear avatar for Greene and his experiences as a Times correspondent in French Indochina, yet his creator turns out to be a man who was always reluctant to put any loyalty above his loyalty to friends.

And in taking sides, he often seemed unsure of his default position, echoing E.M. Forster who once said that if he "had to choose between betraying my country and betraying my friend, I hope I should have the guts to betray my country."

Greene faced a watered down and somewhat indirect version of this choice with his former boss Kim Philby. Others were disgusted by the deaths that apparently resulted as a consequence of the information passed by this member of the Cambridge Five to his KGB handlers, specifically those of hundreds of Albanian rebels. 

Convinced that relationships with individuals always trumped those with groups, he maintained a correspondence with Philby even after his defection and made an interesting, if disingenuous point about Intelligence work, stating that its primary purpose was to sow distrust amongst one's enemies (gaslighting!) and not the gathering of information — and so outing Philby as a mole had been counter-productive, he insisted, because it made the Americans distrust the British. 

Greene always distrusted the Americans. Whenever he wished to draw attention to the persecution of free expression in places like Cuba or the USSR, he got in a dig at Uncle Sam, for he would have hated for anything he said to be made use of as propaganda in the Cold War.

And even though Greene was always acutely sensitive to suffering, even (and perhaps especially) that of strangers, he would occasionally fall into the moral equivalence fallacy when talking about the crimes of the East and West.

In that he has seemingly no end of contemporary analogues.

Philby in Moscow

In geopolitical conflicts there often appears to exist a clear faultline, but in practice this will sometimes turn out to be rather like the frontier here at La Mesilla, with a substantial gap between the formal Mexican and Guatemalan frontier posts. 

And it's very much a case of 'Mind the Gap', For this is the groupthink space that the loudest, most ideologically-demented people from both sides of the divide wish to inhabit, and they will consistently mis-portray it as "the moral high ground". 

Within my observations in the previous post on the Galician uprising of 1846, what in effect occurred was a pair of antipodal insurrections which cancelled each other out.

The educated Polish nationalists saw themselves as revolutionaries and freedom fighters and the rustics as reactionary savages, yet the latter saw themselves as 'imperial' peasants resisting (ultimately rather savagely) the feudal revanchism of their lords.

And we know this because both sides had vociferous would-be history ordainers in the aforementioned wild space between the dotted lines. Their goal is to disguise the multi-vectoral nature of the argument.