Neocolonial Unrealpolitik

As thee know, Mr. Bones, the WASP God Folk used to annoy politically grown-up Old Euros almost beyond endurance with their Gladstonianity, the solemn pretence that nobody had ever been Pharasaïcally in earnest about human events before their own immediate ancestors evolved. [1] This brain disease has survived the GOM and even, rather notoriously, come to flourish in the North American colonies. Hath not Graham Greene vouchsafed us The Quiet American?

Now nothing in the world brings out the shallow unrealism of the Gladstoniator than the following sort of misbehaviour amongst the LBW, Lesser Breeds Without:

... kicked and punched ... then the beating continued ... the torture included kicking and punching; beating all over the body with chains; cigarettes extinguished behind his ears; stripped of his clothes and doused in cold water; subjected to electric shocks ... lasted for 30 hours... evidence of that in the form of bruises, swellings and cuts all over ....

It is definitely not cricket that these people are playing! Even a heartless Old Euro could make that preliminary analysis, however. Gladstonianity proper only commences, in my judgment, when the analyst begins to flatter herself that these are not Cricket People, that ‘torture’ is an instrinsic part of the whole breed’s lesser withoutness.

If one is only concerned to laugh at the bozos, their ne plus ultra must be that "Gentlemen don't read one another’s mail" of 1929 from H. L. Stimson of the militant extremist GOP. No neocomrade, that specimen! On the other hand, his palæocomradely credentials are so exaggerated that they look kinda bogus even if they were not. It is impossible for this keyboard to believe that all the GOP geniuses, let alone all the Big Management Party’s base-and-vile under Engineer Hoover were anythin’ like as Britified as H. L. Stimson pretended to be. Presumably this is the usual syndrome according to which Saskatchewan and Kankakee attempt to rival Mayfair and wind up lookin’ silly because they lay it on far too thick. A trowel is Britwise acceptable -- the universe possesses M. D'Israëli's authority for that point -- but a dumptruck is too much.

Naturally the above scrimmage was not a game of any sort for the scrimmagers. What was going on?

Dr. Cartoonoclastes anthologises and twistifies as follows:

... one of the purposes of this torture was to extract from him a confession that he had been motivated to do this by one of the parties or one of the militias. They brought a video camera to record his confession of this. Under pressure of the torture, his brother asked them to [have him] sign a black [sic, perhaps for ‘blank’?] piece of paper, and they could then write on it what they liked. But Maliki's guards, who were supervising the torture, rejected that, and insisted on a videotaped confession!" Meanwhile, Aswal al-Iraq reported that "Iraqi Prime Minister Nouri al-Maliki on Sunday said that investigations [!] have revealed that a man involved in the “slaughter” of several Iraqis was behind the shoe-throwing incident, but he didn't say who or from what group. (The Iraqi government site quotes Maliki's remarks to journalists extensively. He said Zaydi had expressed his regret to him [Maliki] in a letter, and had named the person who instigated him to do this, a person Maliki said "is known to us as a cutter of throats..." Maliki talked about the Iraqi tradition of respect for honored visitors, independence of the judiciary, the need to avoid stirring up fitna, and so on and so forth). That isn't all. Maliki went on to say (according to the Aswat al-Iraq summary) that whoever encouraged or asked al-Zaydi to do this is "either an opponent of the political process in Iraq, or they are opposed to the new political situation entirely."

That silly bang [!] belongs to Cartoono the Magnificent, naturally. Far be such punctuation as that from the present keyboard! It marks the low-water point of his shallow Gladstonianity: the customer is solicited to suppose that only wicked sectarians would conduct themselves so unsportsmanlike under pretext of conducting ‘investigations’.

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[1] I suppose the happy evolution must have been supposed to have happened in or around the year of religionism 1100/1688. Of course in reality the accession of Victoria would be far more like it.