When Not to Interfere with an Enemy (real or imagined)?
Napoleon famously said that “Never interrupt your enemy while he’s making a mistake; it’s bad manners.”
Here is a reparaphrasing of the above saying:
“never interfere with an enemy while he’s in the process of destroying himself.”
However, there is also a time or occasion when not interfering with your enemy (real or imagined) is good for you in a positive sense as it makes you feel better after ridding you some of your acute problems without even being aware of it.
That is why a wise enemy is considered better than a friend who is foolish.
Foolish friend, in spite of all the goodwill that they can have for you, may inadvertently become the cause of trouble for you as is evident from the following story:
“Once there lived a gardener whose only treasure and joy in life was his garden full of flowers and fruit trees. He had not married an thus had no family neither any friends. However, sometimes he would get weary or bored of being lonely and desire someone’s company to talk to. Ultimately, he decided to go out into the world in search of a suitable companion to kill the boredom. While wandering in a nearby jungle, he soon came face to face with a bear, who, like the gardener, was also in search of a companion. Soon they both became good friends and started enjoying each other’s company.
After some days, gardener invited the bear to come into his garden and served him fruits, nuts, and honey. When the party was over, the gardener lay down to take his afternoon nap. Meanwhile the bear stood by driving off the flies from his face. And this became a daily routine.
One afternoon it happened that an unusually large fly alighted on the gardener’s nose. The bear drove it off, but the stubborn fly would return to the same place again and again. The bear also remained consistent his efforts to drive it away, but in a few moments it would be back on the gardener’s nose. The bear now was filled with rage. In his fit of rage he thought beyond that of punishing the fly and seized a huge stone. He then hurled it with such force at the gardener’s nose that he killed not only the fly, but the sleeping gardener.”
Moral:
It is better to have a wise enemy than a foolish friend.
There are also many other stories about the friend’s frivolity or dim-wittedness, but hardly about the enemy’s wisdom.
Today, I came across an interesting information about “anting” in the birds that shows how a wise or presumed enemy can even be benevolent to you, instead of being harmful.
But first, it would be useful to understand the term “Anting.’
According to a website, Birds.com, Anting is a form of bird behavior during which birds rub insects, usually ants, on their feathers and skin.
Anting can take on different forms. Some birds will pick up ants in their beaks and rub the ant over their feathers, after which they eat the ant; while others will open their wings and lie down over an active anthill and allow ants to climb up onto them.
Another research tells us that American crows will stand on anthills and let the ants climb on it. Then, the bird will rub the ants into their feathers. This behavior is called anting and is used to ward of parasites. Ants can also cause birds to get drunk from the formic acidreleased from the ant’s bodies.
A wise enemy also, sometimes, behaves like ants.
Here is a real life anecdote form China that will make my point more than evident:
Smash Sparrows (or Four Evils) Campaign
When Mao Zedong came into power after the 1949 revolution, he wanted to end poverty and ensure food security in China. Thus a series of five year plans was initiated under the leadership of Chairman Mao in the 1950s. In theory it was an attempt to update the country’s agricultural economy and create a truly modern communist state.
The first five years phase that ended in 1956 was a success. Therefore, in 1958, Mao launched the second Five Year Plan the Great Leap Forward.
Mao wanted to identify the causes behind the low agricultural yield and was told, by some unscrupulous elements, that the Eurasian tree sparrow (Passer montanus), was very much detrimental to his country’s agricultural output since they ate grain.
Some reports tell us that Zhou Jianren, a Chinese biologist had written an article in “Beijing Daily” titled “No Doubt that Sparrows are Pests” so they should be annihilated to increase the agriculture output.
Thus Mao ordered everyone to kill the sparrows.
It is said, Mao ordered to kill flies and rats and mosquitoes too, as part of a larger campaign aimed at eradicating the pests responsible for the transmission of pestilence and disease: the mosquitoes responsible for malaria; the rodents that spread the plague; the pervasive airborne flies; and the sparrows responsible for low agriculture output. However, people mostly chose to kill the sparrows only, because, this innocent creature seemed to be an easy target.
Sparrows were allegedly accused of consuming up to 4 kilograms of grain each per year.
It was decided that peasants should intimidate the birds to make them fly away in fear. Sparrow nests (wherever they were found) were torn down, eggs were broken, and nestlings were killed.
From March 1958 to November 1958, as some reports claim or allege, about 2 billions of sparrows were killed. That severally damaged the balance of the bio-system.
Initially, the campaign did improve the harvest. But by 1960 it was found that sparrows also ate crop eating insects more than seeds so the campaign against sparrows ended. By this time, however, it was too late. With no sparrows to eat them, locust populations ballooned, swarming the country leading to the Great Chinese Famine around 1960 in which around millions of people died of starvation.
According to some estimates, from 1960–1962, thirty million people died of starvation in China, more than any other single famine in recorded human history.
Ultimately, the Chinese government stopped the smash sparrows campaign and imported 250,000 sparrows back into China from the Soviet Union.
Moral:
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References:
i) https://www.birds.com/blog/anting-behavior-in-birds/
ii) https://www.livescience.com/52716-crows-ravens.html
iii) https://www.asianstudies.org/publications/eaa/archives/chinas-great-leap-forward/
