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| The Shire strategy | |
| 2007-09-15 | |
Underneath his neo-medievalism, Tolkien preached realism. He wrote, “It will not do to leave a live dragon out of your plans if you live near one.” That is, the dragon, red in tooth and crescent, is lurking. It cannot be ignored. Nor can we ignore the painful reality of a genuine fifth column in the West. This summer, Gordon Brown’s government concluded that 1 in 11 British Muslims—almost 150,000 people living in the United Kingdom—“proactively” supports terrorism, with still more rated as passive supporters. And this spring, a Pew Center survey found that 13 percent of American Muslims, as well as 26 percent aged 18-29, were bold enough to tell a pollster that suicide bombing was “sometimes” justified. These Muslim infiltrators, of course, have potential access to weapons of mass destruction. So what to do? Call the ACLU? The United Nations? That won’t work. Just as the Roman Empire’s dream of universal dominion once collapsed, leaving the peoples of Europe to create new institutions for their own survival, so, today, any thought that the United Nations could save us from ruin has evaporated. The Blue Helmets have fallen, and they can’t get up. At the same time, at a level just below the UN, the vision of an ever-expanding European Union, to include all the states touching the Mediterranean, has happily collapsed. Now it seems certain that even Turkey will never be admitted. Increasingly, people see that in a world of transnational terrorism, the key issue is not figuring out a common agricultural policy that unites Denmark and Cyprus, but rather a common survival policy for Europa, from the Pillars of Hercules to the Ural Mountains. So we must look to older models for hope and survival—models more faithful, more fighting, more fertile.... | |
| Posted by:lotp |
| #3 *happy sigh* I do love when you think aloud, Ptah. |
| Posted by: trailing wife 2007-09-15 22:28 |
| #2 *sigh* The guy is a liberal idiot using Tolkien's work in the same way that liberals always have perverted other people's works to further their own ends. The "Shire Strategy" he's advocating is for the West to Build Walls and Hunker Down. Someone truly familiar with the triology would realize that that was King Theoden's strategy at Helm's Deep: THAT didn't work out. What is ironic is that, although the Hobbits would have agreed that a "Hunker Down" policy would have been their preference, the destruction of the One Ring required that a few brave Hobbits NOT HUNKER DOWN IN THE SHIRE. The presence of Hobbits outside of the Shire was necessary, not only to save the Shire, but also the entire West. If one is inclined to press the analogy, then The Scouring of the Shire (left out in the movie) that actually delivered the Shire was instigated and led by those Hobbits that DIDN'T stay in the Shire, which seems to imply that those fighting Islam outside of America will return to deliver it. The author deliberately conflates The One Ring with Universalism, Nuclear weapons, or anything else that would truly prove decisive against the enemy. What he does NOT advocate is direct confrontation with Islam, casting it as if it was one of Tolkein's Races of the West, rather than an entirely separate set of races led by Sauron, intent on destroying the Races of the West. The fatal flaw of keeping the ring to use against Sauron was that, in using it, they kept Sauron alive. They had to destroy the ring, not to make Sauron give up his mad dreams of world domination and adopt a "live-and-let-live" attitude, but to DESTROY SAURON himself. The shire survived, not by hunkering down, but through the West's determination to achieve total victory. Part of the problem with the ring was that its appearance deceived the people around it: just because it looked like a ring, they thought it was JUST a ring. All the other rings served their wearers, why not this one? The problem was that so much of Sauron was in the ring that the ring became the master: that was the only way Sauron could make sure the ring could not be used against him. Even the Elrond Council was in the dark about how powerful the Ring was, thinking that its power would not affect a Hobbit, a race that did not receive the other rings. What IS the equivalent of the ring today? Actually, I think there is no such thing, being a side-effect of trying to apply Tolkien's tale too broadly or literally: The Islamic equivalent of Sauron would be the Caliph, but there is no Caliph, so the analogy falls down there too. To my mind, the Ring is whatever the Enemy desperately requires to hang on and eventually win. Not destroying it, but trying to use it on your own behalf merely keeps the Enemy alive, if subdued. Using the Ring against Sauron may have appeared on paper as a Good strategy, but it was the enemy of the Best Strategy: destroying it, and Sauron, forever. This is not to say that Tolkein's tale does not hold lessons for us. It does: There ARE some things worth fighting for, and your homeland is one of them. Active Offense is better than Passive Defense. Fighting the enemy Over There is better than fighting the enemy Here. There is no substitute for Total Victory. And there are no shortcuts to True Victory. |
| Posted by: Ptah 2007-09-15 20:57 |
| #1 A World order based on Tolkien---now I've seen everything. |
| Posted by: gromgoru 2007-09-15 12:20 |