Dog in the manger politics.

Rebecca West was a remarkable Englishwoman with a keen eye and penetrating mind. In 1937 she took a trip through Yugoslavia and the result was a 1,158-page book from which the following excerpt is taken.

History always has its winners and losers. The Finns fought heroically and with great skill against a Soviet invasion intent on improving the defenses of Leningrad and, natch, taking over all the rest of Finland and turning it into a dirty little Soviet colony with the obligatory extermination of the educated, the capable, and the decent. In the face of overwhelming Soviet military force, the Finns suffered terrible casualties and were forced to cede large areas of their country, which are under Russian control today.

The Finns do not, however, thereafter go around beheading Russians who had no part in the attacks on Finland and present-day Finnish politics are not dominated by ignorant men deformed by hatred of Russians. The Finns, in short, made the best of a bad situation, adapted to unchangeable reality, and effected the best revenge of all by living well.

The Irish made destructive internecine politics into an art form but at least had no desire to create "the rubble of hate and prejudice and malice" around the world. Other borders have shifted and deaths been endured as a result of "unfair" imbalances in technology, material wealth, or population, or as a result of simple dumb luck. But those borders are for the most part quiet and stable.

Except where Islam is a factor. E.g., Israel, Kashmir, Lebanon. Is there ANY border that Saudi Arabia, Iran or Syria respect?

The Muslim fanatics -- and large numbers of sympathizers -- make clear their desire to trash whatever they have to around the entire world in order to bend infidels to their will and draw them into the black hole of seventh-century ignorance.

This passage from Ms. West's book is an apt description of modern Arab and Persian politics, from which all sweetness and light have been extirpated.

Where in the Muslim world is there tranquility, pleasure, generosity, art, and abstract thought? Anyone who engages in the latter risks his or her life. The stunningly brave and insightful Wafa Sultan has thrown down the gauntlet before the Muslim creepgentsia and now will surely garner a multitude of calls for her extermination. It follows as the night the day that her security will now be in question.

Head-to-head debate, unacceptable; assassination and intimidation, Solution Numero 1.

Modern Islam brings to mind the old joke about Irish alzheimers -- you forget everything except your enemies. Modern Islamic politics are mired in hatred and revanchism and they are driven by men fascinated to have discovered somewhere in the Koran a resonant truth of some kind that validates every other Koranic jot and tittle, every Mohammedan call for the subjugation or extermination of infidels, every support for unchallengeable male privilege.

The rage smolders on, whether based on the memory of long-defeated caliphs, knowledge of the world's indifference to Muslim thinking, or the unavoidable recognition of the military and social superiority of people whose education does not require the memorization of even one verse of the Koran:

. . . [B]ut there had sounded [in that exchange at the dinner table], for an instant, the authentic wail of poverty, in its dire extreme, that is caused by a certain kind of politics. Such politics we know very well in Ireland. They grow on the basis of past injustice. A proud people acquire a habit of resistance to foreign oppression, and by the time they have driven out their oppressors they have forgotten that agreement is a pleasure and that a society which has attained tranquillity will be able to will be able to pursue many delightful ends. There they continue to wrangle, finding abundant material in the odds and ends of injustice that are left over from the period of tyranny and need to be tidied up in one way or another. Such politics are a leak in the community. Generous passion, pure art, abstract thought, run through it and are lost. There remain only the obstinate solids which cannot be dissolved by argument or love, the rubble of hate and prejudice and malice, which are of no price. The process is never absolute, since in some lands some people are born with the inherent sweetness which closes that leak, but it can exist to a degree that alarms by the threat of privation affecting all the most essential goods of life . . . .

An afterthought: Ms. West speaks of "some people [who] are born with the inherent sweetness which closes that leak." It is the absurd claim of treasonous multiculturalists that ALL persons in any culture have that inherent sweetness. We know from simple observation that even in our own culture this is an absurd claim. Yet it is the inherent demand of multiculturalists that there be no raising of a defense to the yellow-eyed curs of this world. One generous, enlightened person in the bunch and he is Everyman.

Black Lamb and Grey Falcon. A Journey Through Yugoslavia. By Rebecca West, Penguin Books, 1984, p. 81-82.