Daniel Greenfield article: The
Unexpected Snake

Posted: 13 Apr 2010 08:11 PM PDT

The Farmer and the Snake

A Farmer walked through
his field one cold winter morning. On the ground lay a Snake, stiff and
frozen with the cold. The Farmer knew how deadly the Snake could be, and
yet he picked it up and put it in his bosom to warm it back to
life.

The Snake soon revived, and when it had enough strength,
bit the man who had been so kind to it. The bite was deadly and the
Farmer felt that he must die. “Oh,” cried the Farmer with his last
breath, “I am rightly served for pitying a scoundrel.”

The
Greatest Kindness Will Not Bind the Ungrateful.

The moral of this commonsense fable of
Aesop's from a mere 2500 years ago is that doing good to evil will only
result in more evil. Aiding those who kill only brings more death, not
life. It is human nature to think that people will return good for good
and evil for evil. This kind of thinking perversely leads some to assume
that if they are being treated evilly, then they must have done something
evil to deserve it. This logic is routinely used by the left to argue that
Islamic terrorists are simply paying us back in the same
coin.

However the problem with assuming that good is repaid for
good, and evil for evil, is that it presumes that all peoples, all
cultures, all ideologies and religions are equivalent. That they all react
in the same way and with the same motives, treating others as they are
treated. It furthermore assumes that evil exists because evil has been
done to someone else.

In September 1 1939, W.H Auden responded to
Hitler's invasion of Poland by penning the lines;

Those to whom
evil is done / Do evil in return

Since then those same lines
have been routinely taken up by liberals eager to pen their own
apologetics for evil. In the wake of another early September, September
11th, Auden's poem was re-embraced once again by liberals penning essays
explaining why we were the real terrorists.

But while it is easy
enough to dismiss W.H. Auden as naive, snakes don't always look the way
you expect them to. Particularly snakes who take refuge in the mind of
man. Auden was more snake than farmer and his words were the snake-words
of one scaly creature excusing the evil of another.

Auden you see
was a
Communist. And in September 1939, the USSR and Nazi Germany had
an agreement. An agreement to carve up Poland. And W.H. Auden was no
pacifist. The man who two years earlier had penned the line, "The
consious acceptance of guilt in the necessary murder" in his poem
Spain, when referring to the Soviet atrocities in Spain, was not a
pacifist. He was one of the snakes.

And those who today go on to
quote "Those to whom evil is done / Do evil in return", to excuse
and justify terrorism are they the farmer or the snake? On the surface of
it, there is no clearer or simpler justification of evil than these lines.
After all they presume that anyone who does evil, has been first sinned
against. And while that may not entirely render them guiltless, it clearly
spreads the guilt around and adds a touch of white paint to the murderous
figure in the center of the room.

The irony is that while Auden himself later in life repudiated
the poem for its justification of evil, those who quote it and its
sentiments refuse to do the same. Because the idea behind it is just too
appealing. Too compelling to give up. And so we return to the farmer and
the snake again. Why does the farmer pick up the snake? Is it naive pity,
or is there something in the farmer that draws him to the snake? Is there
something in those who feel so much pity for evil that draws them toward
evil.

The dichotomy between the farmer and the snake may not be so
simple after all. Because even an idiot knows better than to shelter a
snake. Nor does a snake appeal to any normal person as a creature that
needs sheltering. Is it only misguided pity that draws a man to shelter a
snake, or something else entirely. Because the very idea that good will be
repaid with good and evil with evil has something else lurking in it as
we've already seen. The farmer's logic can be read both ways, the naive
man who genuinely expects that only good can come of good until he dies of
that sort of thinking, or the evil man who believes initially that he is
safe from the snake because the snake's evil as his own, can only come as
the result of some external force. For the farmer to act as he does, he
must believe that the snake is not evil, and such a belief is the province
of the very naive or the very evil.

And so we return to September
1, 1939 again. To Hitler's tanks riding into Poland. To the inability to
describe evil as evil. And we return to September 11, 2001 as well. And to
so many other days. To free countries beleaguered by an enemy within its
own borders, by the snakes they have taken to them, kept warm and perish,
poisoned by their bites. But the curious thing is the sight of all these
farmers lovingly clutching handfuls of poisonous snakes to them,
proclaiming how wonderful they are, and shouting down anyone who would
warn them about the poison. That deadly poison.

But as Aesop
already knew some 2500 years ago; The greatest kindness will not bind the
ungrateful. Virtually every civilized country affected by Muslim terror,
has responded by trying to make life better for Muslims. But no matter how
much they warm the snake, it still bites. The snake will always
bite.

Only the fool or the sociopath genuinely believes that evil
is returned only for evil. That snakes will only bite you, if you bite
them first. That if you warm them and cuddle them, they will warm and
cuddle you in turn. Things that are poisonous bite. And Islam has been
carrying around poison in its fangs for far too long to expect events to
go otherwise.

Was the farmer's crime, pity or identification with the snake?
Just as Auden to some degree identified with Hitler's stormtroopers. As
Israel's Labor Prime Minister Barak said that if he had been born a
Palestinian Arab, he would have become a terrorist as well. That of course
is the snake speaking from inside the farmer. The voice of the snake that
says the only difference between us and evil men, is that they have
suffered and we have not. That sees not a moral continuum, but one in
which deprivation releases and justifies our worst impulses. Legitimizes
the poison.

That is the problem of the farmer who believes that
inside he is really a snake, and the snake who believes he is really a
farmer. For if there is no difference between good and evil, but that
those who do good have had good done to them, and those who do evil, have
had evil done to them-- then we can welcome in the snakes and it will be
alright. Because we are all snakes inside. And it is only by warming
snakes, that we change that. This in essence is the worldview of
liberalism. This is the key to much of its madness. And so they pick up
the snake, and are bitten and die, wondering why their worldview which
seemed so right, proved to be so wrong. And we die with them. For the
farmer has carried the snake home, made a nest for it, and filled his home
and the homes of his neighbors with snakes. And as a post-mortem it may be
hard to know where the farmer began and where the snake ended.