Afternoon:
15°c
Only a few weeks ago, we were laughing ourselves hoarse at what WikiLeaks had to tell us about Colonel Gaddafi. Those foxy female bodyguards! His tracksuits and his hair-plugs and his kerr-azy moustache! That guy! Did you know that he once left several tonnes of depleted uranium on an airport runway? And he holds all his meetings in, like, a tent?
Only a few weeks ago we were Googling to find out if Galyna Kolotnytska, the "voluptuous Ukrainian nurse" Gaddafi was said to go nowhere without, lived up to her billing. Whaddaguy.
This weekend, troops loyal to everyone's favourite wacky dictator were firing into crowds, killing more than 200 unarmed civilians. The Colonel's moustache wasn't looking so funny on the streets of Benghazi yesterday. "Britain's alliance with Libya turns sour" was the downpage headline.
So what happened with Gaddafi? When did the Government suddenly decide he was someone we should do business with? Nothing, after all, changed. WPC Yvonne Fletcher was still dead. The Lockerbie victims were still dead. Gaddafi's internal opponents still feared his torturers. But at some point we decided that it was water under the bridge. Let's stop going on about all that old stuff. Boooring!
So Tony Blair's government started flogging him arms and buying oil from him; and the general conversation rehabilitated Gaddafi as a comic character. He wasn't the first it has happened to. Think of Turkmenbashi, with his rotating golden statues and his bonkers poetry; or of stack-heeled, bouffy-haired Kim Jong-Il, singing "I'm so rone-ery!" in Team America: World Police.
Peter York did a book called Dictator's Homes a couple of years ago: a Hello!-style album of funny photographs of the kitsch ways in which despots did up their front rooms. My dear, the vulgarity! It seemed to epitomise the way sophisticates end up occluding what they know about very bad men by making a joke out of them.
Of course, to make bogeymen look absurd is the proper task of ridicule. But by making them cartoony, we also risk making cartoons of the people who suffer under them. We risk forgetting why they are bogeymen. From the student with his bust of Lenin and his Che Guevara T-shirt to the hipster wearing the Chairman Mao wristwatch, the ironic appreciation of foreign mass-murderers is a sort of connoisseurship.
It makes trinkets of monsters - bringing a version of them into our self-enclosed world as an accessory, and driving out the need to imagine what it is to live in theirs. It's strange how shallow and silly we can be, in other words, when we're being sophisticated. Remember those 200 dead Libyans, not getting the joke. Might be possible to be too sophisticated, hey?
Another slap for Fergie
Anyone who's put together a guest list for a wedding knows what agony it is. But, where possible, it's wiser to tolerate people you don't really want there for the sake of kindness.
Multiply that by 10 for a Royal Wedding. So if, as reported, the couple's 1,900 guests won't include Auntie Fergie, that seems to me to curdle a happy occasion with spite. What on earth did they say?
"Sorry: we'd love for you to be there but it's just so tight on numbers"? If there's room for the King of Bahrain, it looks a bit perverse to exclude the Duchess of York.
* "Fluent in finance" was how Barclays once described itself. No kidding. Thanks to a clever tax-avoidance strategy, the bank has been forced to admit, it paid only one per cent in corporation tax on its 2009 profits of £11.6 billion. So does this mean our best hope of clawing some tax out of them is now by encouraging giant bonuses - so at least we'd get the income tax? If so, there's still a little room for improvement in the system.
Make the law and stick to it
I'm all in favour of giving prisoners the right to vote. It's not as if enfranchising convicts will result in a landslide election victory for the Give All Prisoners Nice Currant Buns Party, is it? But whatever your view on the matter, it's just dumb to applaud defiance of European law as "a rare victory for common sense".
You either sign up to a treaty or you don't. We signed up to this one: and if we want to withdraw from it that case needs to be made in toto. Regarding a body of law as a tapas menu where you pick and choose what suits you sets a precedent that's the opposite of common sense. It's exactly that way of thinking, in fact, that put all those prisoners in jail in the first place.
Reader views (4)
"the ironic appreciation of foreign mass-murderers"
I actually agree with your overall point but would argue that the examples you have given are wrong, selecting revolutionaries, such as Lenin and Guevara, from a more ideologically split past is a mistake, I feel your point would be better illustrated with other comical world leaders, Tony Blair’s other friend George W. Bush would be a prime example of a wacky leader who has killed not just 200 but hundreds of thousands.
The real problem is that if the West didn't deal with the mad despots of this world we would have no dealings in the middle-east what-so-ever.
There are few democracies in OPEC: Algeria (President elected with debatable 90% in a disputed election), Angola (No more presidential elections and division of power removed), Ecuador, Iran (do I need to write anything here?), Iraq (See Iran), Kuwait (Monarchy), Libya (Gaddafi), Nigeria (Unelected President), Qatar (Monarchy), Saudi Arabia (Monarchy), the United Arab Emirates (Monarchy) and Venezuela (Hugo Chávez).
So only one non-questionable democracy there, we had either continue regime change on a bigger scale (though Iraq is not a great example) or invest in electric cars.
- Michael, Maidstone, 25/02/2011 15:22
Report abuse
I find it amusing that anyone should think Gaddafi will give up control of Africa's largest oil reserves without a fight. He's simply taken his gloves off, is all. His attempt (and near success) to 'rehabilitate' himeself with the world over the last few years proves, if any proof is needed, that the oil is more important than the rep. They'll have to carry that not so nice little man out in a body-bag.
- Rogan, Irving, 22/02/2011 03:53
Report abuse
Why haven't the Royals invited the Duchess of York? What is this big hatred they seem to have of her based on? Having betrayed the husband? Who hasn't done it among most of the royals?
They hate her because she knows a bit too much and I don't think she is afraid of anything.
It is very mean to invite her daughters, plus Camilla, all the Sultans and dodgy princes of many not so democratic countries and leave the poor woman out of the list .
Do you remember the story of the Sleepig Beauty?
Do you think the International Press will overlook this faux pas?
I agree with the article in This is London. When there is a family wedding, it is better to invite just all the family and avoid possible, much more serious problems in the future.
I find the current attitude despicable . It has put me off the Royal Wedding completely. Good luck to everybody. For my part, I won't bother with it unless the attitude changes.
Talk about bad manners...
- Lala, London U K, 21/02/2011 20:23
Report abuse
How about giving those who haven't broken the law the right to vote on whether or not they want Europe to make our laws?
- John Smith, London, 21/02/2011 17:10
Report abuse
