220 Global Ethics for Leadership
whether it is suppressing something, and will later see this to have been
a falsehood.
16.3.2 Breaking the Law
"I have never broken the law!" I was convinced of this for a long
time. But then I reflected critically, and a dark spot came to mind from
my past on the Federal Council:
After a prisoner on leave murdered a Girl Scout, I issued a general
ban on leave for prisoners. I achieved my political aim of calming the
political uproar and an outraged media. For this purpose, I broke the
law, because I neither had the power to do this nor was there a legal ba-
sis for this action.
16.3.3 Cruelty
Can even cruelty, as Machiavelli explicitly kept repeating, be legiti-
mate in the interests of the state even in our democracies? Or is it in fact
more accepted than we realize? Torture by the United States has been
portrayed in films for many years, and this is not only approved of by
the public, they yearn for it. In Germany, a police officer threatened a
kidnapper of children with torture to find where the supposedly surviv-
ing boys had been hidden. The court decided to waive punishment. It
sparked an ethical conflict that Machiavelli would have answered much
more clearly: torture is justified by a good cause, and the threat of it
certainly is.
16.3.4 Cunning
Cunning is accepted as statecraft without further ado. It is seen as
reprehensible only if the intended purpose is not accepted. The politician
who is a "cunning fox" (Machiavelli) is respected and admired. Even
today, such a politician will seize Fortuna with both hands, as Machia-
velli puts it figuratively. So I deliberately introduced, immediately after
the serious accident of 2001, the traffic management system for trucks in