The Enemy of My Enemy is My Friend




Closing the Hevajra empowerment mandala, HH Dagchen Rinpoche at Tharlam Monastery, Boudha, Kathmandu, Nepal
Closing the Hevajra empowerment mandala,
HH Dagchen Rinpoche at Tharlam
Monastery, Boudha, Kathmandu, Nepal
Flickr-User: Wonderlane

Back in early 1982 I gave a 47th Street diamond dealer, let me call him Shmuel, a check for $32,000 for a packet of diamonds. This was one transaction among dozens and dozens of similar ones over the course of a few months totaling more than a million dollars. Then sometime during the summer of that year Shmuel called me to announce that he was going over their books and that $32,000 was still due on one particular invoice.

I responded that I paid that bill and that I would send him a copy of the cancelled check for that amount and that exact date. Now I have never figured out exactly what the problem was with Shmuel but he didn't want to hear it and sent two goombas to collect the money.

So in walk these two bruisers, let me call them Tony Bagodonuts and Vinnie Notfuhnuthin, and show me a bill for $32,000 and threaten me that I have 24 hours to come up with the money. When I showed them the cancelled check they weren't impressed and mentioned that they came down for money, not for cancelled checks.

So I called Sal A., a local guy to help me educate these goons in the science of civilized business practices. Sal and the two bill collectors had a sit-down where Sal vouched for my version of the deal. The result? The $32,000 bill was thrown out but I had to come up with two grand as a settlement fee for the time Tony and Vinnie spent coming down to visit me. If I didn't have a guy like Sal in my corner, these two goombas would have done some unpleasant things to me to collect the 32 grand.

Sal, if I haven't mentioned it before, used to be a Mafia loan shark who himself used to break bones collecting bad debts, but was now retired and a former business partner of mine . Now why would I seek the aid of a person who, to put it mildly, was not a nice, decent human being?

The answer is simple, Sal could deal with my problem precisely because he was a bad guy. I suppose I could have gone to a priest from a Mulberry Street church and asked him to pray for me that my adversaries receive clarity of vision and understanding so that they'd see I didn't owe the money. OK - I'm joking.

In the real world, governments do the same as I did. During World War II, for example, the Allies supported Josip Broz Tito, the commander of the Partisans in Yugoslavia, who helped in the fight against the Axis powers. Tito was not a nice guy and was involved with significant violations of human rights. But what should the Allies have done, hired Buddhists to present a mandala to Hitler's military to help induce a trance of peace upon them?

There are some people who believe that one should only make deals with saints. Saints, however, do not kill your enemies.

In response to my paean to Ronald Reagan, reader John Luddell was disappointed that I would write a tribute to a person who supported a terror group. To be exact here is the comment he left:

Wow. The guy who supported, financed, trained a group of terrorist in Central America, responsible for the torture and murder of thousands of women and children. Just wow.

I replied:

If America during the 1930s had a Ronald Reagan he would have authorized the funding of the Widerstand or anti-Hitler version of the contras. Would more Germans including women and children have died as a result of such funding? Yes. Would fewer allies have died? Yes as well. However years later someone like you would have criticized such actions as supporting terror.


Mr. Luddell is wrong of course. Ronald Reagan did not support the Contras because he wanted them to torture and murder women and children. He supported the Contras as a part of his larger strategy against the Soviet Union. That is, to provide military aid to any group that would bring down Soviet-supported, Cuba-inspired communist governments.

American policy at that time was to counter any movement that could destabilize Central and South America.

A few years later, that support and other parts of the strategy against the Soviet Union came to a successful conclusion with the downfall of the Iron Curtain. And the world is better for it.

Mr. Luddell would like us to beleive that the Sandinista government at that time was run by innocent, law-abiding Franciscan monks and in further comments he wrote: '[H]ow would a country with 3 million people have "destabilized Central and South America"?'

My dear Mr. Luddell, don't you read any newspapers? Don't you realize that ISIS, a group of less than 40,000 (NOT 3 MILLION) has destabilized the entire Middle East and almost the entire European Union by forcing the migration of millions of Syrian refugees?



### End of my article ###

Bloggers: For non-commercial use you may repost this article without asking permission - read how.













Related Posts with Thumbnails

View My Stats
qr code