WISDOM FROM DAVID WARREN

Anyone not reading David Warren's columns should start doing so now. Warren writes for the Ottawa Citizen, and publishes his essays at his own website. He writes on political and social issues, and he writes very well. Mr. Warren's latest contribution discusses the hanging of Barzan Ibrahim al-Tikriti:

Barzan, the late half-brother of Saddam Hussein, was also his intelligence chief. Think for five seconds what that might mean. Among Barzan’s own victims were those he fed feet-first into wood-choppers. And he was able to do such things repeatedly, without the slightest complaint from officials in Italy, France, Turtle Bay, or elsewhere. Now finally he is brought to justice, and the world’s glitziest whited sepulchres suddenly recover their capacity for moral outrage. And all it took was the miscalculation of a ratio between neck diameter and body weight. (Perhaps a metrication error, confusing pounds and kilos.)

As usual, Mr. Warren gets it exactly right:

Extreme sentimentality, on behalf of infamous monsters, is what we have come to expect from the post-rational species of liberal, whom I term a “gliberal” to distinguish him from the real thing. For them, only the side of justice can err. They are indifferent to the victims of injustice. By subtle degrees, they even come to identify with the perpetrators of horrible crimes, though they wouldn’t dare commit such crimes themselves. One cannot understand them without meditating deeply on the nature of the demonic.

He also ties together Europe's sentimentality and its blindness to its own interests:

The mystery deepens. Turning the newspaper page, we find that, under demented Kyoto arrangements, Germany’s Dresdner Bank is now brokering an arrangement by which European companies will pay 15 billion euros to the corrupt and autocratic Russian state monopoly, Gazprom, in return for “carbon credits” to continue selling oil and gas to European customers on the open market. This money in turn will help Russia’s dark, authoritarian regime to invest further in its ability to hold Europeans who depend on Russian heating oil through the winter to ransom when it has political demands.

They start by opposing capital punishment. They end by insisting on hanging themselves.

Read.The.Whole.Thing. And bookmark his site for future reference.