On death penalty

Saddam Hussein was hanged, and the liberals (especially in Europe) howled with outrage, because "civilized societies do not condone death penalty."  (I have a strong feeling that, had it been George W. Bush who were hanged, it would have been met with silence, if not outright approval by the very same people...) Aside from the many attrocities carried out on orders from one of the most ruthless dictators in recent history, here's a list of penalties that were metered out by Saddam's "justice system":

• Cutting off ears for desertion


• Cutting off hands for theft (fingers for less valuable goods)


• Breaking the spines of liars (in a very literal sense: with a cement block dropped on people's backs)


• Pushing homosexuals off of tall buildings


• Beheading with a sword (al-Bashar) for espionage, treason, and smuggling

To the mind of a European "sophisticate" hanging this monster was an act of barbarity...  Hearing this I can't help but feel Shadenfreude at the decline of Europe - a civilization this wimpy does not deserve to survive. Ralph Waldo Emerson wrote: "Nature has made up her mind that what cannot defend itself shall not be defended". This applies to human societies as well. I just finished reading Mark Steyn's "America Alone", a very witty and very depressing book that points out the demography-driven inevitability of the transformation of Eutopia into Eurabia within a few decades. When the islamic masters take over the liberal institutions of Western Europe - after their population will have become majorities in their European host countries - they will not display the same squeamishness about harsh punishment for offenses far more benign than those  of Saddam.

I do feel somewhat conflicted about the death penalty, but for very different reasons: the way it is administered in countries such as the US, it is far too delicate a procedure, with the opponents now arguing that even the sanitized execution by lethal injection is too "cruel", as it does not kill instantenuously, letting the condemned feel a little bit of the agony of dying. And why shouldn't they? Why should we be so timid about inflicting pain on people like Cary Steiner, who in February 1999 in a Yosemite Park lodge sodomised for hours the 15-year-old Juli Sund, after having strangled her mother and a 16-year-old Argentinian girlfriend, and then drove her (and the two bodies) to a secluded spot in the park, and slit her throat? Or the Belgian electrician Marc Dutroux, who kindapped and sexually molested several young girls, whom he kept in a concrete-lined, sound-proof dungeon in one of his houses. Two of those girls, both 8-years-old, starved to death in this dungeon between February and March 1995, when Dutroux was held in jail for car theft. These "people" deserve much worse fates than a few minutes of "agony" after a lethal injection or a quick, nearly painless death by hanging. It seems that a life imprisonment might be a tougher penalty than this. We don't allow terminally-ill patients to end their lives and suffering, and yet we're offering an easy way out to "people" whose cruelty makes your blood curl. It makes no sense at all.

10 years without America

Abandoning Iraqis to be slaughtered by their fellow muslims sounds heartless and un-American, and it probably is. Yet in all honesty I can't say that I care very much. If history is any guide, our sacrifice will not earn us much gratitute, and whetever little there will be, it will be short-lived. Just consider history as recent as the Kosovo war. If it weren't for the American initiative and leadership, the Europeans would have kept watching the Serbs "ethnically cleanse" Kosovo, until not a single moslem would have been left alive in the province. Did this win us any "brownie points" in the so-called "islamic world"? Don't bet on it. In Europe then? You must be kidding.

One could argue that the sacrifice in Kosovo wasn't that big. We just bombed the Serbs relentlessly for weeks, with almost no risk to the NATO forces, so it was just a matter of paying for the bombs. Well, maybe, but we might have done nothing at all - after all, Kosovo was of no strategic significance to the United States. And what about the II World War, where the sacrifice was enormous? Judging from the anti-Americanism so prevalent in Western Europe these days, someone not very familiar with the XXth century history would likely conclude that the USA must have been the occupier, and not the liberator. The Poles have less hatred toward the Russians, who tried for 200 years to forcibly assimilate a big chunk of Poland, and then, from 1945 till 1989 practically turned the whole country into a "17th Soviet Republic", than the French or the Germans now openly express toward the United States.

I wish we granted that troll Hugo Chavez his wish ("Yankees go home!") and went home, indeed. Let's give the Europeans the chance to defend themselves. (It is going to be quite a funny spectacle to watch them do it. Any tinpot dictator half as arrogant as Yugoslavia's Milosevic will be able to wrap them around his finger. They'll eventually adopt sharia as their law, in the hope that the jihadists will stop sending suicide bombers into European cities.) Let's have the UN continue to deal with the genocide in Sudan in the same brave and decisive way it's been doing so far (i.e. not doing a damn thing). Let's allow North and South Koreans to be finally re-united ander the enlightened leadership of the Great Leader Kim Jong Il.

There was a movie last year in the US entitled "A Day Without a Mexican", showing a fictionalized collapse of most basic services in this country as a result of all the Latino workers (legal and illegal) not being there to perform them. Wouldn't a movie "10 Years Without America" be far more interesting, not to mention scary? It's not hard to imagine the mayhem unleashed, were the United States to disengage from the world's affairs and let the chips fall where they may. That's what many around the world seem to be clamoring for - why not give it to them? Just for ten years. And then come and clean up the smoldering mess. I'm certain of one thing: the anti-American liberals in Europe and elsewhere would not survive such a world. That's "poetic justice" for you.

That cesspool of crime, Europe

Dymphna in Gates of Vienna looks at crime statistics of the US and of the "Old Europe":

[...] let’s compare the crime rate in lawless New Orleans with the crime rate in, say, the city it was named for: Orléans, France. In New Orleans, the per capita rate is given in the hundred thousands. Thus, according to this report, the 2004 rate for New Orleans, for all crime, was 6,110.3 per 100,000 population.

[...] Everyone knows Europe is more evolved than America, more sophisticated, more law-abiding – they sure have plenty of laws to abide by, don’t they? The European species is more restrained, civilized, blah blah, than the crude Homo americanus vulgaris.

Heh. Orléans’ crime rate is 109.24 per thousand people. In our terms, that translates to 10,100 per hundred thousand. So, extrapolating further, Orléans, France, has roughly sixty seven percent more crime than Mayor Nagin’s soggy fair city.

Germany, France, and the UK have - and have had for a while - significantly higher (and growing) crime rates than the US, where the crime has also been sharply declining for years. Interesting, isn't it?

On Spanish appeasement

After what happened in Spain I'm gonna go into headscarf making business... The French are trying to play hardball with their Muslims at the moment, but once a few bombs go off in Paris they will too - like the Spaniards - put their tails between their legs and go for appeasement. Pretty soon women in "old Europe" will be advised by their governments to wear headscarfs so as to be "sensitive" to their Muslim neighbors. Already the French police are turning a bling eye to the "culture" of rape and intimidation in the Muslim slums near Paris, where girls who act "western" are punished with gang rapes. Isn't this so typical of Western Europe, where the prevalent mode of thinking seems to be: "feed the crocodile, so it will eat you last"? It happened with fascism and now is being repeated with islamofascism... I feel sorry for Poland that it is about to enter this club of totally fucked up nations.