Snake-Charming the Dragon
The schizophrenic response to radical Islam that characterizes many on the Left puts me in mind of an episode from the fascinating science-fiction novella written by the comic Russian author, Mikhail Bulgakov, in 1924. It is a tale of an experiment gone terribly wrong, the fatal eggs of the title giving rise to a swarm of giant serpents. The story is a singular mix of horror and humor, and also a sly satire of communist social engineering; but the one scene that struck me as perfectly symbolic of the modern appeaser class is this one:
One Alexander Semyonovitch Faight (who has midwifed the disaster through incompetent meddling) is on his way down to the pond for a swim, carrying a towel and his flute. On his way, he notices something stirring in the brambles. The “something” ultimately turns out to be a monstrous snake, that rises out of the weeds to the height “of a Moscow power pole”, its eyes gleaming with fathomless malevolence. Faight, paralyzed with fear, vaguely remembers something about the Indian fakirs and their snake-charming skills, takes out his flute, and begins frantically playing the waltz from Eugene Onegin. It is not, however, his music that saves him, but the sudden appearance of his wife, who had been following Faight down the path. The snake immediately sweeps in her direction and devours her (in a scene that is particularly grisly).
The imagery, of course, was not intended by Bulgakov to represent the West’s reaction to Islam, but it is, nonetheless, a fine twist on the notion of appeasing the crocodile in order to be eaten last. And the mental picture of a Jack Murtha or Harry Reid, piping their shrill, but feeble, tune in the face of a savage and implacable enemy, somehow just seems so . . . right.
Topics: other
Posted by Paco at 6:27 am on Tuesday, August 28, 2007
3 Responses to “Snake-Charming the Dragon”
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August 28th, 2007 at 10:36 am
Related: St-Exupery on Dancing for the Boa Constrictor.
August 28th, 2007 at 11:47 am
The left has always been in favor of weakening ourselves in the interests of community formation. If we and our enemies are equal in strength, rational considerations will determine behavior. One place where this breaks down is the assumption the enemy is rational. Hitler was not, neither is radical Islam.
August 28th, 2007 at 5:54 pm
I think it is more than the left thinking everyone will be rational. While the left pretends to value all cultures (except their own, of course), they really have no respect for other cultures. Being collectivists, their ideal is one giant collective Will seated in the collective of all mankind. This ideal is no respecter of the individual, except as a cell in the greater organism. Any individual who doesn’t see himself as a mere cell is like a cancer that must be removed before it infects the other cells (hence the historic mountains of corpses built by every single state that bases its politics on this notion of the nature of society).
For the left, the nature of any one culture doesn’t matter in the over-all scheme of things. This is why the left doesn’t consider what happened to so many individuals after we left Viet Nam important. Mounds of corpses and slavery are just historical blips on the way to utopia. They don’t really believe that it matters what particular form statism takes, as long as it gives lip-service to the morality of the left: all political value is placed in the state, and the individuals are merely cogs in the wheels of the state. Under this belief system, Islamism is perfectly acceptable–indeed, it is to be preferred to the capitalist system, which depends on the liberty of the individual to function.
It is the Enlightenment idea of individualism which states that political value is vested in the rights of the individual, which in turn is based on the recognition that each individual owns his own life and cannot be considered the property of the state, that must be wiped out. This is why the left sees the capitalist countries (actually there are only countries that try to mix capitalism and socialism to various degrees) as the essential enemy, not the fascist Islamic theocracies. It is always our own sins that must be damned in any confrontation with the collective. The enemy is every individual who has the courage to stand up and proclaim that he is not the property of any state, any man, or any man’s god.
Their own philosophy blinds the collectivsts to the nature of, and their own danger from, the enemy.