Helmintholog

There is a video going around (I’ll not link to it) apparently made by British mercenaries in Iraq. It’s shot out of the back of a moving truck/SUV which is driving down the fast lane of a dust-coloured concrete dual carriageway. There is quite a lot of civlian traffic in the inside lanes. Sometimes other cars are visible in the fast lane behind; whenever this happens a gun fires from the right of the camera position. You see the muzzle sometimes, and sometimes ejected cartridges jerk across the screen.

There’s one sequence where a white Mercedes comes fast round a bend, so he couldn’t possible have seen the mercenaries riding ahead, and the firing goes on until the Mercedes lurches abruptly to the right and crashes into the rear quarter of a car in the slower lane. Both vehicles stop. The doors of the car that was crashed into open. Two men get out and run across the remaining traffic for the verge. For some reason. I had expected to see them rush back to help the wounded or dead people in the car that had hit them after being machinegunned by the British mercenaries. I don’t know why this struck me as more terrible than the murders themselves but it did.

Even worse was something you couldn’t see at all: the whole video sequences — and there were three or four scenes, obviously carefully edited — had been given a soundtrack, of Elvis singing “Mystery Train.” And I suppose there is more chance that the perpetrators will be done for copyright infringement than for war crimes.

One of the minor consequences of the present catastroophe is that it lets us lose the Cold War in retrospect. I mean that for generations it has been an article of faith among liberals, conservatives, decent socialists, and everyone who was not a paid Communist hack that the Moscow show trials were an evil farce, and that none of the accused were guilty of anything more than losing a power struggle. Yet they confessed. That was the evidence against theim, their full and detailed confessions, extracted after months of interrogation.

Up until now, we have always dismissed this as the consequence of torture. But now it turns out that they weren’t tortured at all. All of the “variety of unique and innovative ways” methods of interrogation that the CIA uses are not torture. So they weren’t torture, either, when the KGB used them.¹ And the information that the KGB got from them must have been every bit as accurate as the information that the CIA is getting out of its prisoners. Bukharin really was working for British intelligence all along.

I am going to have to find the Gulag Archipelago and roll it through the scanner in order to stand up this parallel exactly — but if you want to read it yourself, there’s a relevant passage here.

And if you still can’t believe that Bukharin worked for British intelligence, in collaboration with the international Trotskyist conspiracy, come to Downing Street on Sunday. Wear black; we’ll be in mourning.

¹ I know this makes them a little less unique, but how many forms of sleep deprivation, hunger, thirst and mock execution can you come up with?