Mowgli and Kaa in “The Jungle Book”
Friday
Following the Brussels attacks, President Obama observed that ISIS is “not an existential threat to the United States.” He was roundly attacked by the usual suspects for his remarks, but I understand why he said this. He was resisting our all-too-common penchant for hysteria.
Indeed, some believe that the attacks are a sign of ISIS’s weakness, not of its strength. As ISIS continues to lose large swatches of its “caliphate” (40% of its Iraq territory and 20% of its Syria territory since its peak in 2014), it is turning its attention to soft targets in Europe to rebuild its image.
In this way, ISIS makes me think of the Bandar-Log in Rudyard Kipling’s Jungle Book. The Bandar-Log are the monkey people, a parasitical race that wants attention Here’s how Baloo, Mowgli’s bear teacher, describes them:
“The Jungle-People put them out of their mouths and out of their minds. They are very many, evil, dirty, shameless, and they desire, if they have any fixed desire, to be noticed by the Jungle People. But we do not notice them even when they throw nuts and filth on our heads.”
He had hardly spoken when a shower of nuts and twigs spattered down through the branches; and they could hear coughings and howlings and angry jumpings high up in the air among the thin branches.
To inflate their sense of importance, Kipling writes, the Bandar-log have a saying– “What the Bandar-log think now the jungle will think later.”
The Bandar-Log, like ISIS, find a way to get noticed, however: they do something dramatic, stealing Mowgli. At that point, the Jungle People must respond:
Baloo woke the jungle with his deep cries and Bagheera bounded up the trunk with every tooth bared. The Bandar-log howled with triumph and scuffled away to the upper branches where Bagheera dared not follow, shouting: “He has noticed us! Bagheera has noticed us. All the Jungle-People admire us for our skill and our cunning.”
The parallel between the Bandar-log and ISIS is not perfect since ISIS is more hierarchical whereas the monkey people are modeled on 19th century anarchists. I considered comparing ISIS with the Red Dogs in a later Mowgli episode, who have the top-down organization of the European communists. But the Red Dogs don’t crave publicity the way that the Bandar-log and ISIS do.
Kipling provides us some necessary cautions about fighting the Bandar-log. Baloo and Bagheera enlist the aid of Kaa, the great python, but unfortunately this is comparable to hiring an authoritarian fascist to solve your social problems. Kaa turns the monkeys into an undifferentiated mass and then slaughters them.
The problem with failing to differentiate, of course, is that the innocent are swept up with the guilty. Donald Trump wants to kill the families of terrorists and ban all Muslims from coming to the United States. Ted Cruz wants to “carpet bomb” the Middle East, civilians be damned, and to indiscriminately patrol American Muslim neighborhoods:
“Begins now the dance—the Dance of the Hunger of Kaa. Sit still and watch.”
He turned twice or thrice in a big circle, weaving his head from right to left. Then he began making loops and figures of eight with his body, and soft, oozy triangles that melted into squares and five-sided figures, and coiled mounds, never resting, never hurrying, and never stopping his low humming song. It grew darker and darker, till at last the dragging, shifting coils disappeared, but they could hear the rustle of the scales.
Baloo and Bagheera stood still as stone, growling in their throats, their neck hair bristling, and Mowgli watched and wondered.
“Bandar-log,” said the voice of Kaa at last, “can ye stir foot or hand without my order? Speak!”
“Without thy order we cannot stir foot or hand, O Kaa!”
“Good! Come all one pace nearer to me.”
The lines of the monkeys swayed forward helplessly, and Baloo and Bagheera took one stiff step forward with them.
“Nearer!” hissed Kaa, and they all moved again.
Mowgli laid his hands on Baloo and Bagheera to get them away, and the two great beasts started as though they had been waked from a dream.
“Keep thy hand on my shoulder,” Bagheera whispered. “Keep it there, or I must go back—must go back to Kaa. Aah!”
“It is only old Kaa making circles on the dust,” said Mowgli. “Let us go.” And the three slipped off through a gap in the walls to the jungle.
“Whoof!” said Baloo, when he stood under the still trees again. “Never more will I make an ally of Kaa,” and he shook himself all over.
“He knows more than we,” said Bagheera, trembling. “In a little time, had I stayed, I should have walked down his throat.”
Once you see the enemy as an undifferentiated mass, you become the same. Rightwing parties are on the rise in response to ISIS, with unthinking followers prepared to blindly endorse whatever their demagogic leaders propose (walk down their throat). As Trump boasts and some of his followers confirm, he could “shoot someone and not lose voters.”
Think of Obama as Mowgli, putting his hand on our shoulders to keep us from an unthinking mass reaction.
Will we heed him?
Further thoughts – In an article today, Amanda Taub of Vox makes similar observations as she examines how Cruz is ramping up his anti-Muslim rhetoric:
But in making these statements, Cruz isn’t just revealing his own bias. The truth is that there’s something much bigger going on, and it’s actually much more disturbing than one politician’s personal animus.
The real issue here is why this strategy works for Cruz and other politicians like him — why it resonates with voters. And the answer, at least in part, is that this is a perfect example of the kind of authoritarian leadership that a large constituency of American voters craves.
That’s frightening, because it speaks to a much scarier truth behind Cruz’s scary statement: that this kind of demonizing of American Muslims isn’t just a problem with specific American politicians like Cruz or Trump. Rather, it’s a problem with American politics — and that means that it will stay with us long after this election is over.