Samizdata

I’ve been reading how some NGO’s are worried whether the al Qaeda prisoners held at the Guantanamo Naval Base are being given “culturally appropriate” treatment. They were upset the US military shaved off prisoner’s lice-infested beards. The Horror! And not to mention the mortal fear Americans might commit nightmarishly inhuman tortures like… Allah Forbid! providing a side portion of Bob Evan’s spicy pork sausage for breakfast!

This got me to thinking. In 6 months or a year the trials will be over and it will be time to send the lot of them to their patiently waiting Houris. We really should be culturally sensitive about how we go about this. We wouldn’t want to insult the Muslim Street now would we? So… I’ve a suggestion that should satisfy everyone’s requirements: we send them to Yankee Stadium for a good old fashioned stoning! What could possibly be more culturally appropriate? After all, they do it to women in Saudi Arabia don’t they? So doesn’t that make it an appropriate death for terrorists?

Instead of rocks, we’ll use baseballs. After all, this is an American-style stoning we’re talking about here. Baseballs are also better because each person can write witty little messages on them. It’s really, really hard to print legibly on your average rock.

There are problems of course. Where do you come up with a couple hundred thousand baseballs? And what do you do for people who are just too far away? But these are problems I’m sure good old Yankee ingenuity and mass production can solve.

First toss at tickets must of course be reserved for the family and friends of the victims. Remaining tickets would be auctioned, with all proceeds going to the New York Fire Department and charities they endorse. Why, the Fraternal Order could build an Historically Correct (HC) memorial statue with only a fraction of the money raised!

Imagine the cheers as President Bush throws the first baseball! Just to be inclusive Hillary or Bill (depending on which one can throw a baseball) get to throw the second ball. (The reasons why they can’t cast the first baseball should be obvious even to the retarded). Even more money can be raised by auctioning off a few other early throws. Grandma’s get to take turns on batting practice machines with laser sights. Think of the fun of smacking your favorite al Qaeda in the gob with a Bob Feller fastball! Imagine what new meanings will be injected into quaint old Bronx colloqualisms like “In your ear!” or “Up your nose!”

The mind just boggles at the possibilities.

Hawkish G.I. pundit Sgt. Stryker replies to my views on Steven den Beste’s article. His remarks are essentially an expansion on Steven’s thesis and amount to a quite accurate detailing of what is the received historical wisdom from the American point of view. I don’t really have any grouse with Steven’s assessment of why the US rightly tends to ignore European views, it is his historical analysis I disagree with and the same applies to my views of Sgt. Stryker’s. It is quite a lengthy post so I will only address what I think are the most egregious bits.

1. There wouldn’t be any Poles, Chechs and Hungarians were it not for Wilson’s supposed, “trashing all vestiges of the potentially stabilising old order.”

That is a gross misreading of the nature of the late Austro-Hungarian Empire… it was not called the ‘dual Kingdom’ for nothing: the Hungarian part jealously guarded its Magyar identity and Imperial areas of administration from Austria. Likewise the Czech and Croats and Slovenes and Slovaks may have been administered from Vienna or Budapest but were always quite distinct ethnic groups within the Empire.

2. You seem distraught that these peoples lived under 50 years of Communist rule; yet having them live under the rule of a foreign Hereditary Monarchal Empire is just fine with you because it would bring stabilization. Yet the Communists, for all the wrongs they committed, did stabilize Eastern Europe. All those Eastern Europeans were for all intents and purposes under the domination and influence of a non-democratic foreign power. So what, I ask, is the difference between Communist foreign domination and Monarchal foreign domination that makes the latter more pleasing to you and the former an abomination?

You presuppose that a democratic-republic is by definition a preferable state to that of a monarchy with local government. Your views were of course shared by Woodrow Wilson, but not me. Britain evolved into a true democracy quite successfully, but an attempt to force the pace resulted in the proto-fascist Commonwealth of Oliver Cromwell. Democracy works where it evolves naturally, which is why in the long run I am so pessimistic about Europe now. The Great War was just a territorial dispute and did not truly become an ideological one until the arrival of the Americans. The rise of fascism was as a result of unstable alien democratic regimes being forced on nations that did not even have traditions of being independent nations, let alone democracies and for that Woodrow Wilson was the prime mover. It was hardly surprising that democracy in the 1920/30 was a fiasco in much of Eastern and Central Europe as it was imposed rather than evolved. The last echo of Woodrow Wilson’s folly was the recent Balkan Wars.

It was not even the American military involvement in the Great War that was so damaging but Wilson’s disastrous ‘Fourteen Points’. If the USA had been content to assist crushing the Central Powers in response to its U-boat attacks and then go the hell home, history might have been very different and probably not worse. I would take the Hapsburgs and Hohenzollerns over the Nazis any day.