...When will the Ents of Europe awaken?
Europe, the War on Terror, and the world of J.R.R. Tolkien
-When will the Ents of Europe awaken?
By now everyone, thanks to the wonders of moviemaking, has been re-introduced to the imaginative world of J.R.R. Tolkien’s (1892-1973) The Lord of the Rings trilogy. Populating his world of Middle Earth richly with humans and elves to hobbits and dwarves which have become the staple of the fantasy genre but it is his use of the Ents which I consider intriguing and relevant to this discussion. The Ents, guardians of the forests of Tolkien, were tree-like creatures, covered with mossy bark and moved at an agonizingly slow pace all the while nursing themselves with tales of past glory as their numbers waned in their isolation. And when they did debate important issues, it became an excruciatingly longwinded diatribe. Unable to reproduce themselves let alone comprehend the growing evil outside their peaceful forest, carefully keeping to themselves they avoid reacting to the offenses of the tree-cutters and forest burners-they assumed they’d be given a pass from the upheavals of Middle Earth.
But with the sudden addition of two irritable hobbits, the nearby evils of timber cutting, industrial devilry and mass murder become too much for the Ents to tolerate. They at last awaken (literally) to the growing dangers they so easily turned a blind eye on for so long. In one of the most memorable points in The Two Towers, the Ents outraged over the crimes for which they have ignored go on the offensive….they go to war. In the aftermath of the battle at Isengard, they are amazed at the great power they still wield in destroying Saruman’s fortress.
Tolkien, writing in a post-imperial Europe (Britain to be exact) bled white from stopping Prussian militarism and Hitler’s Nazism, only then to be shocked at the rise of the more numerous, wealthier & crasser Americans, and lets face it we are, such specters were haunting. Indeed, there are reoccurring variants of the Ent theme throughout his novels from the dormant Riders of Rohan whose king was exorcised from Saruman’s control only to rally the realm’s dwindling cavalry to recover lost glory and save the West to the very hobbits themselves. The latter, protected by the slurred “Rangers,” live blissfully unaware that radical changes in the world have brought evil incarnate to their very doorstep. To their amazement, they discover that of all people a hobbit rises to the occasion, and really does stand up well when confronted with apparently far more powerful and evil adversaries. From the oath-breaking Dead who come alive to aid the King, Aragon, and honor their once broken pact to the now fallen and impotent High Elves who nevertheless stepped up to the plate in the “final hour” to reaffirm their commitment to the old alliance.
Tolkien always denied a symbolic motif or any allusions to the contemporary dangers of appeasement or the leveling effects of modernism. Even today, scholars quarrel over whether he was lamenting the end of old England, old Europe, or the old West in the face of the American democratic colossus, the Soviet Union’s unrelenting tentacles, or the unchivalrous age of the bomb. The notion of decline, past glory, hard choices and 11th hour reawakening are without a doubt everywhere in this respected English writer’s Lord of the Rings. Is it even slightly possible he was on to something?
More to the point, does the Ent analogy work for modern-day Europe? The comparison may seem silly, but before you laugh, remember that the current Western military tradition is European in its roots. Today the continent is unarmed and weak, it’s militaries left to wither on the vine by both an irrational leadership and uncaring populace but deep within its collective mind and spirit still resides the ability to field technologically sophisticated and highly disciplined forces….if the continent were ever to really feel threatened. One lone murder has begun to arouse the Dutch; what would 3,000 dead and a collapsed Eiffel Tower do to the French? Or how would the Italians take to several commercial airplanes rammed into the Dome of Saint Peter? We are nursed now on the spectacle of Iranian mullahs, with their bought weapons and foreign-produced oil wealth, humiliating a convoy of European delegates begging and cajoling them not to make bombs, after all they did ask nicely….or at the very least to point what bombs they did make towards Israel and not Berlin, Paris, London or Rome, etc. But, thankfully, it wasn’t always the case and may not always be.
One only has to look to the Netherlands as a litmus test for Europe. Having none of the historical baggage of Spain or Greece towards Islam, the Dutch were the poster children for the new liberal Europe, excessively open and unrestrictive. The Dutch were so eager to unshackle all from the Church, from its class and gender constraints, and from any whiff of its racist or colonial past they jumped head first without a pause of consideration. For a Muslim immigrant, Amsterdam and the country as a whole were bout the most hospitable foreign host one could imagine thus it was far safer for radical Islamic fascists to damm the West openly from a mosque in Rotterdam than for a moderate Christian to quietly worship in a church in Saudi Arabia, Iran, or Algeria to name a few. And yet we learn not just the Netherlands has fostered a radical sect of Muslims who kill and bomb, but , far more importantly, that they will do so after years of residency among, and indeed in utter contempt of their Western hosts.
Things are no less humiliating — or dangerous — in France. Thousands of unassimilated Muslims mock French society. Yet their fury shapes its foreign policy to the degree that Jacques Chirac sent a government plane to sweep up a dying Arafat. But then what do we expect from a country that enriched Hamas, let Mrs. Arafat spend her husband's embezzled millions under its nose, gave Khomeini the sanctuary needed to destroy Iran, sold a nuclear reactor to Saddam, is at the heart of the Oil-for-Food scandal, and revs up the Muslim world against the United States?
Only now are Europeans discovering the disturbing nature of radical Islamic extremism, which thrives not on real grievance but on perceived hurts — and the appeasement of its purported oppressors. How odd that tens of millions of Muslims flocked to Europe for its material consumption, superior standard of living, and freedom and tolerance — and then chose not merely to remain in enclaves but to romanticize all the old pathologies that they had fled from in the first place. It is almost as if the killers in Amsterdam said, "I want your cell phones, unfettered Internet access, and free-spirited girls, but hate the very system that alone can create them all. So please let me stay here to destroy what I want."
Turkey's proposed entry into the EU has become some weird sort of Swiftian satire on the crazy relationship between Europe and Islam. Ponder the contradictions of it all. Privately most Europeans realize that opening its borders without restraint to Turkey's millions will alter the nature of the EU, both by welcoming in a radically different citizenry, largely outside the borders of Europe, whose population will make it the largest and poorest country in the Union — and the most antithetical to Western liberalism. Yet Europe is also trapped in its own utopian race/class/gender rhetoric. It cannot openly question the wisdom of making the "other" coequal to itself, since one does not by any abstract standard judge, much less censure, customs, religions, or values.
So it stews and simmers. Not to be outdone, some in Turkey dare the Europeans, almost in contempt, to reject their bid. Thus rather than evolving Attaturk's modernist reforms to match the values of Europe, the country is instead driven into the midst of an Islamic reactionary revival in which its rural east far more resembles Iraq or Iran than Brussels. So the world wonders whether Europe is sticking a toe into the Islamic Middle East or the latter its entire leg into Europe.
Everyone gets in on the charade. The savvy Greeks discovered that they didn't want to be tarred with the usual anti-Ottoman obstructionism and so are keeping very quiet about their historic worries (legitimate after a near 400-year occupation) as a front-line state. And why not, when EU money pouring into Turkey might jumpstart the Eastern Mediterranean economy and lead to joint Greek-Turkish deals? With the future role of NATO and the 6th Fleet undetermined, is it not better to have the Turkish military inside the tent than for poor Greece to have a neighbor's ships and planes routinely violating Hellenic air and sea sovereignty — while it waits for the Danish air force or the French army to provide a little deterrence in the Aegean or Cyprus?
Of course, we are amused by the spectacle. Privately, most Americans grasp that with a Germany and France reeling from unassimilated Muslim populations, a rising Islamic-inspired and globally embarrassing anti-Semitism, and economic stagnation, it is foolhardy to create 70 million Turkish Europeans by fiat. Welcoming in Turkey will make the EU so diverse, large, and unwieldy as to make it — to paraphrase Voltaire — neither European nor a Union. Surely Morocco, Algeria, and Tunisia will wish to get in on the largess. Were they not, after all, also part of the historical Roman mare nostrum, and did they not also enjoy long ties with France and Italy?
So, to our discredit I suppose, we are enjoying Schadenfreude after our recent transatlantic acrimonies: Europe preached a postmodern gospel of multiculturalism and the end of oppressive Western values, and now it is time to put its money (and security) where its mouth is — or suffer the usual hypocrisy that all limousine liberals face. The United States has its own recent grievances with the Turks — its eleventh-hour refusal to allow American troops to come down from the north explains why the now red-hot Sunni Triangle never saw much war during the three-week fighting. Recently a minister of a country that gave rise to the notion of 20th-century genocide slurred the United States for resembling Hitler, who in fact was an erstwhile Turkish near ally. Still, our realists muse, how convenient that Europe may carry the water in bringing Turkey inside the Western orbit and prevent it from joining the radical Islamic fringe. Knowing it is in our interest (and not necessarily in the Europeans') and will cost them lots and us nothing, we "on principle" remonstrate for the need to show Western empathy to Turkish aspirations.
But gut-check time is coming for Europe, with its own rising unassimilated immigrant populations, rogue mosques entirely bent on destroying the West, declining birth rate and rising entitlements, the Turkish question, and a foreign policy whose appeasement of Arab regimes won it only a brief lull and plenty of humiliation. The radical Muslim world of the madrassas hates the United States because it is liberal and powerful; but it utterly despises Europe because it is even more liberal and far weaker, earning the continent not fear, but contempt.
The real question is whether there is any Demosthenes left in Europe, who will soberly but firmly demand assimilation and integration of all immigrants, an end to mosque radicalism, even-handedness in the Middle East, no more subsidies to terrorists like Hamas, a toughness rather than opportunist profiteering with the likes of Assad and the Iranian theocracy — and make it clear that states that aid and abet terrorists in Europe due so to their great peril.
So will the old Ents awaken, or will they slumber on, muttering nonsense to themselves, lost in past grandeur and utterly clueless about the dangers on their borders? As well as within!
Stay tuned — it is one of the most fascinating sagas of our time. Wonder if there's a trilogy of novels in this?
..........Couchman............