Nobody Expects The Spanish Inquisition

A little under two thousand years ago some narratives claim (as people like George W Bush and Tony Blair believe, and want us to believe too) that the sanhedrin gedola or "Great Council" in Jerusalem tried, on the charge of sedition, Yoz Asaf, a.k.a. Issa bar Yussuf, a.k.a. Jesus the Messiah a.k.a. The Christ.

Yoz Asaf was found guilty and sentenced to death. But Mosaic law forbade observant Jews from killing. So the 71 men of the Assembly -- twenty-four Sadducees, twenty-two Pharisees, twenty-two clerks and the High Priest -- handed him over to the occupying army for execution.

The result was Christianity.

Now the traffic is heading in the other direction. In effect, the self-intoxicated pietist Bush and his moist-eyed sanctimonious friend Blair, handed Saddam Hussein over to the similarly obliging puppet government of Nouri Maliki which, in an act of marvellous symmetry, hanged Saddam at dawn on the day of the Eid of the Hajj -- in intention, if not in theology, an equivalent of Christmas.

But they went one better. They released videos of the noose going around Saddam's neck. The BBC chose to publish stills from this obscene footage on their website (which is compulsorily funded by a tax on television-ownership, non-payment of which is punishable by imprisonment).

(You might expect a link here. No.)

Obscene, because it demeans us as much as Saddam demeaned his own people.

Obscene, because the pictures of a man seconds from his own death surely appeal to a repugnant, quasi-erotic voyeurism in us all.

Obscene, because it depicts the raping, in public, of the assertion that a civilized nation does not inflict the death penalty.

Obscene, because it is a visual relic beyond price for those who would establish Saddam as a martyr (can we even imagine how Christians would fetishize a video of the crucifixion?).

Above all, because, in the fluid test of British law, obscene because it has a tendency to deprave and corrupt the viewer.

Bush and Blair, for all their pietism, are seemingly depraved and corrupt beyond redemption. Bush lied about Iraqi involvement in the September 11th attacks on Manhattan; Blair... do we need to say more than that Blair is having a lovely holiday in the Miami Beach fuck-pad of a Bee Gee?

You know, Bee Gee? As in "Stayin' Alive"?

Comments

[Yoz]

If you're trying to freak me out, it won't work.
Rising from the dead (again) will be a neat trick if he eventually pulls it off, but getting yoz.com off me will be harder. I don't care how much of a mensch he is.
(Happy New Year, anyway.)

[Matti Kinnunen]

Well put. Being in EU, the UK should have tried its utmost to prevent the hanging. I have not yet seen Mr. Blair's comment, but I am afraid he will echo his master.

I am glad that the EU in general still opposed the hanging.

By the way, thanks for "Big babies". It opened my eyes a bit wider.