Storm Track Appeasement: Heard Animals and the Left

A while back I wrote a post on Sheepdogs, Wolves & Sheep that compared the Left with sheep and those in our society that keep them fat and happy and protected from wolves. Mark Helprin writing in The Claremont Review of Books contributed an opinion piece using another animal comparison. His piece entitled “Herd Animals” described the Left as having a heard – or collective – instinct that prevents them from facing threats to their community.

The nature of one’s reaction to aggression against one’s country will often
be determined by whether one sees the polity primarily as individuals who must
struggle with the imperfection of being bound into a collective, or as a
collective that must overcome the circumstantial imperfection that it comprises
individuals. For wildebeest thundering across a plain in Africa, it takes a
village. The herd defends itself by sacrificing a miniscule
proportion of its number and moving on. If the herd were to turn upon the
jackals preying upon it, the jackels would be pulverized almost instantly.
Nonetheless, if the price for the escape of ten thousand is the sacrifice
of only a few, this is how it is done when the collective is paramount.

There is a comparison here to the school shootings of today. When a lone gun man enters a school, the collective cowers under their desks and wait for the hunter to pick them off one by one. If the males in the group, understanding that a gunman can be overpowered by numbers, attacked the government and sacrifice a few for the collective, such incident would reduce the causality count among the prey. But they don’t, and all and not just a few are subject to being victims.

But animals like bears, tigers and lions, that wander individually or in
small groups, know that their survival depends upon how they fight, and
their willingness to fight is so well understood that they are seldom attacked,
whereas to a predator a herd in flight is a living contradiction to the maxim
that there is no FREE LUNCH…

When The Left bends to America’s
enemies it may not be a result of cowardice or betrayal, but of loyalty to
the omelette so single-minded that it precludes consideration of the
eggs….

Former House Speaker Newt Gingrich delivered a speech at the American Enterprise Institute where he referenced a book called ‘Troublesome Young Men’ which is a study of the younger Conservatives who opposed appeasement in the 1930s and who took on Chamberlain.

It's a very revealing book and a very powerful book because we tend to look
backwards and we tend to overstate Churchill's role in that period. And we tend
to understate what a serious and conscientious and thoughtful effort appeasement
was and that it was the direct and deliberate policy of very powerful and very
willful people. We tend to think of it as a psychological weakness as though
Chamberlain was somehow craven. He wasn't craven. Chamberlain had a very clear
vision of the world and he was very ruthless domestically. And they believed so
deeply in avoiding war with Germany that as late as the spring of 1940, when
they are six months or seven months into they war, they are dropping leaflets
instead of bombs on the Rohr, and they are urging the British news media not to
publish anti-German stories because they don't want to offend the German people.

The Chamberlain world view was one of the British omelet
sacrificing, if necessary, the individual British eggs. Even on the eve of World
War II where most people knew war was upon them, the Chamberlain Brits were
concerned about publishing anti-German stories fearing that they might offend
the German people.

Sounds a lot like today? Huh? Chamberlain had the same problem we have today. He couldn’t bring himself to see that it was an ideology not a country or a people that was the enemy. We’re making the same mistake today by not embracing the concept of Islamo-fascism or Islamism as the enemy and not any one particular Muslim country or group.

And you read this book, and it makes you want to weep because,
interestingly, the younger Tories who were most opposed to appeasement were the
combat veterans of World War I, who had lost all of their friends in the war but
who understood that the failure of appeasement would result in a worse war and
that the longer you lied about reality, the greater the disaster.

And they were severly punished and isolated by Chamberlain and the
Conservative machine, and as I read that, I realized that that's really where we
are today. Our current problem is tragic. You have an administration whose
policy is inadequate being opposed by a political left whose policy is worse,
and you have nobody pre pared to talk about the policy we need. Because we are
told if you are for a strong America, you should back the Bush policy even if
it's inadequate, and so you end up making an argument in favor of something that
can't work. So your choice is to defend something which isn't working or to
oppose it by being for an even weaker policy. So this is a catastrophe for this
country and a catastrophe for freedom around the world. Because we have refused
to be honest about the scale of the problem.

Absolutely correct. Those that worship at the altar of pacifism will only bring down upon us all a terrible price for peace at any cost. Or to quote Robert Heinlein, “Pacifism is a shifty doctrine under which a man accepts the benefits of the social group without being willing to pay -- and claims a halo for his dishonesty.”

When will the pacifist ever learn that peace is not the absence of war, but the presence of justice.

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