At The Council of Elrond Aragorn says:
Quote:
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If simple folk are free from care and fear, simple they will be, and we must be secret to keep them so. That has been the task of my kindred, while the years have lenghened and the grass has grown.
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This seems a clear allusion to the Dunedain policy of policing outside Bree and
the Shire (and more?)by keeping out threats while those protected were
unaware of their efforts or the extent of possible dangers.
Question: was this a wise policy? I'm not sure myself. You can see plusses and
minuses to this policy. Hobbits did fend off wolves in the Long Winter and orcs
(led by the Bullroarer) at the Battle of Greenfields, and, of course, The Scouring
of the Shire. With Ranger assistance they could have been a significant local force, but.....
1) might this new military presence have drawn attention to them?
And 2) More pertinent to Aragorn and the Dunedains' philosophy, might this have changed the very nature of hobbits and their land (in Vietnam War terms
"destroying the village [philosophically, not literally] in order to save it"?
An analogy could be the U.S. since the onset of the Cold War (c. 1948). Before
that the U.S. seemed to have an almost hobbitish inclination to shun the rest of
the world and turn inward after a war. But with an increasing belief in the
importance of a strong standing military [long before 9/11] and attachment to
what Eisenhower called the "military-industrial complex" seems to have come a
marked decrease in toleration for dissent and other views (such as pacifism),
which Tolkien noted in one of his Letters (about Tom Bombadil?) was an
admirable concept, if not always a feasable option. This is not to say that
military preparedness (and even in rare cases preemptive action)
may be necessary, but consider the absence of any real argument
questioning an essentially strongly militarized political diplomacy of the U.S. in
the world (including both Democratic and Republican expressed views, although
I personally consider the Democratic views more nuanced and less extreme).
Another example of military power use seeming to coursen outlooks could be the
British, French, Belgian (and others, including the U.S. in the Philippines) seeming
to become inured to using military force in their colonies (and for that matter, the
Dunedain of the Second Age in Middle-earth--- the latter an example of "all power
corrupting")?
If a similar result to some of the above would have eventuated in the Shire
then were the Dunedain correct? Although it seems instinctively that it would have been more advisable to have acquainted hobbits and Breefolk more with
the reality of the political situation in the late Third Age. And Bree, for one,
seemed remarkably unprepared to deal even with a modest increase in
refugees. Was any realistic alternate policy available?
P.S. This isn't intended as a political diatribe, just using what seem to me to be
possibly relevant examples to illustrate the theme considered (how should a
relatively weak polity be assisted).