Envy

by G. Murphy Donovan (June 2024)

Jealousy is the tribute mediocrity pays to genius. —F. J. Sheen

Unlike formal education, wisdom is acquired from experience and socialization. Virtues like morality and civility are learned, sometimes earned, by contact with others. Most people absorb values, or biases, from their immediate family. If family doesn’t set the tone or the boundaries, all bets are off. Family and friends are the true primary schools that no public or private school, no matter how well-intentioned or well-funded, can replicate.

Today, we see children behaving badly at expensive public and private school campuses across the land, if not the globe. The toxic behavior of children in the West today is clearly fallout from the demise of the nuclear family. Values are mocked in America as if the foundational unit of all societies didn’t matter any more. And for America, maybe family doesn’t matter. We shouldn’t be surprised then that totalitarian political monocultures like the China and the Muslim world are eating our lunch at every turn.

The meme of the moment for America’s youth is the Gaza war, more specifically, opposition to Israel’s attempt to deal decisively with Hamas and the PLA (nee PLO), two sources of Islamic terror that have bedeviled Israel since 1948.

The Gaza quagmire, like Ukraine, is a war one side cannot afford to lose and the other cannot win.

Ethnic, religious, and racial bigotry play a role in both conflicts. Russophobia and antipathy towards Russian church orthodoxy surely played a role in Ukraine’s foolish attempt, with NATO sponsorship, to bait the Russian bear with a coup in Kiev. The Islamist attack on Israel was born of similar hubris and surrogacy; some might say Palestine’s death wish.

Martyrdom in Arabia today is, after all, a pillar of Muslim political doctrine. Ironically, in both conflicts, things are not going well for Ukrainian fascists or Palestinian Islamists. No surprise then that former provocateurs, if not aggressors, are now playing the victim.

Both Ukraine and the Arab world also share a history of rabid anti-Semitism.

Russophobia and anti-Semitism now cast long shadows over US domestic and global politics. National and religious biases have vintage pedigrees and common roots in envy—especially when the social disease is a pathogen like racial or religious hate. If you don’t believe racial hate and envy play a role in Eastern Europe, you haven’t been following James Clapper’s arc. The Director of National Intelligence once suggested that Russians were “genetically predisposed” to political pathology.

In truth, after the Soviet Union fell, NATO expected the Russian Federation to follow. When the Russians abandoned Marxism, resuscitated Christianity and thrived under capitalism, anti-Russian bigotry replaced the old anti-Communist rhetoric. Russian success after the fall of Communism was not part of the EU/WEF utopian mirage.

Apparently, Washington and Brussels had no plan “for the day after” the Russian Federation succeeded.

Envy is second only to pride in the cannon of deadly sins. Aristotle though envy to be pain at sight of another’s good fortune. Aquinas thought jealousy had three phases: lowering another’s reputation, joy at another’s misfortune, and finally grief and hatred for another’s success. Bertrand Russell said envy was the most potent source of unhappiness.

When the Warsaw Pact and the Soviet Union collapsed, Brussels and Washington couldn’t take yes for an answer. Moscow’s attempts to rejoin Europe were rebuffed and NATO imprudently expanded to fill the Warsaw Pact void. When the new Russian Federation thrived anyway, NATO, especially the US, could not accept Russia’s millennial good fortune.

So here we are again in Europe where neutrality is no longer an option—and the Cold War is now hot.

It’s as if no one in the West learned anything after 1945. Surely no one remembers that when it comes to defeating political or religious fascism, no country makes a better ally than Russia. Without Russia, a victory against the German/Italian fascist axis in Europe might have been impossible.

More recently, it took the US over ten years to find and kill Bin Laden. ISIS and the Taliban still abide and the West still lost Afghanistan—and maybe Pakistan. The Russians hunted down Shamil Basayev (aka Abu Idris) in less than a year and Muslim Chechnya was pacified and is still in the Russian orbit. In contrast, NATO dismantled Yugoslavia and created two new Muslim neo-theocracies, Kosovo and Bosnia, in the heart of Europe.

As we speak, open borders in the EU are proving to be the worst utopian failure in the history of political follies. The Ummah is now doing to Europe and America what could never have been done by force of arms.

The migrant jihad is the new crusade.

Today in the Levant, Jews know that there is no moral or cultural equivalence between Islam and Judaism in spite of the many ludicrous testimonials about shared prophets. The very idea that Jews, Christians, and Muslims are united by prophesy or Abrahamic culture is the very definition of whistling in the dark, a triumph of hope over bitter historical experience.

The war between Islam and the rest of us is 1400 years old. The Arab and Persian worlds hate Jews today for the same reasons German Nazis hated Jews in the 20th Century. Success summons the green eyed monster. Ironically, Islamists march under a green flag globally.

Israel is a beacon of enlightened civility midst a jungle of failed autocrats. Israel is a democracy, home to eight million educated, tolerant, successful, and cultured citizens. Israel is also host to two million prosperous Israeli Arabs; the kind of ethnic and religious tolerance you do not find anywhere in Arabia or the Muslim Ummah. For the most part, women are just chattel, human livestock, in any majority Muslim society.

Unfortunately, Israel today, is literally a pearl cast among jealous swine. In such a neighborhood, “mowing the lawn,” if we can mix several metaphors, necessarily morphs into scorched earth.

Realpolitik demands that the necessary always trumps the desirable. Wishful thinking and bleeding hearts are not allies in existential combat. The moral high ground is irrelevant for the vanquished.

For Israel, the options in Gaza are few and the worst choices will always be dictated by necessity. Urban warfare is never pretty. Israel needs to worry about the task at hand, the unconditional surrender or absolute defeat of Hamas.

The vicissitudes of “the day after” will be clear enough if Hamas is allowed to survive. A Palestinian state would be the final nail in Israel’s coffin—and a harbinger of what is to come for Europe, America, and the civilized world.

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G. Murphy Donovan writes about the politics of Intelligence and national security.

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