How ridiculous can you guys get [Mark Steyn]

Not far from me, in the small Coos County town of Stark, is an old German POW camp. Camp Stark was basically a logging camp with barbed wire. With so many of its men in uniform overseas, the Brown Paper Company agreed to take German prisoners in order to keep its logging operations going. The detainees arrived in the depths of a White Mountains winter and were not impressed by the huts. There were wire-mesh screens on the insides of the windows, so that even when you opened them up you couldn’t stick your hand out. The Germans pointed out that this was in contravention of the internationally agreed rules on prisoner accommodation, and insisted that the screens be removed immediately.

The camp guards looked at each other, shrugged and said, ‘Sure, if that’s what you want.’ The deep winter snows melted, and eventually it was safe to open the windows. A week later, black fly season arrived — the black fly isn’t New Hampshire’s state animal but it ought to be — and thousands of the little fellers swarmed in through those big inviting apertures to chow down on all that good Aryan blood. There was a reason for the screens.

I mention this to make two points: 1) there are things that are unforeseen by international conventions; 2) let’s talk about the weather. The British, if you’ll forgive a gratuitous racist generalisation, seem to be remarkably obtuse about matters meteorological. Perhaps this is a natural consequence of living in a country where it’s 54? and overcast all summer and 53? and overcast all winter, and the only divergence from that temperate constancy was missed entirely by your famous Mr Fish. But at least in the old days Britons were ignorant but fearless: you were the mad dogs and Englishmen out in the midday sun. Now, after four months of cowering at the impending arrival of the entirely mythical ‘brutal Afghan winter’ — as I write, it’s 55? and sunny in Kandahar — Fleet Street’s media doom-mongers have moved seamlessly on to the horrors of the brutal Cuban winter: oh, my God, how will these poor al-Qa’eda boys — you know, the ones who could supposedly hole up in the Khyber Pass eating scorpions all winter making a fool of those ignorant Americans — how will these fearsome warriors survive the Caribbean nights and the hordes of malaria-infested mosquitoes?

And this time it’s not just the usual America-haters at the Guardian and the BBC but the likes of Alice Thomson, Stephen Glover, Alasdair Palmer, Matthew Parris, my most esteemed Telegraph and Speccie colleagues: ‘They are kept in cramped outdoor cages, open to the elements and the attentions of possibly malarial mosquitoes,’ notes Mr Glover. ‘I mind the shark cages, with their concrete floors open to the elements and the 24-hour halogen floodlights, left near mosquito-infested swamps, so the prisoners can catch malaria when some already have tuberculosis,’ frets Miss Thomson.

I don’t know whether Alice or Stephen have ever been to Disney World. Doesn’t sound like quite their bag, but you never know. Disney World is in the middle of a swamp, and, if you use the employees’ exit and turn right rather than left and then on to the dirt track and into the swampy groves, you’ll find within minutes the windscreen’s full of squished, bloody bugs. Yet when you’re on the other side of the fence, waiting in the hot sun for two hours to go on a 60-second ride, there are, amazingly, no bugs. Find me a mosquito in Disney World and I’ll guarantee you it’s an animatronic attraction. A local girl up here ran off to Florida and hooked up with some guy who worked for the Mouse. At their Disney wedding, he told me that, among his responsibilities, he was part of the crew who bombed the perimeter at the crack of dawn each day with industrial-strength bug spray. The same procedure is being carried out at Guantanamo: the camp is sprayed with mosquito repellent.

As for malaria, that seems to have been conjured entirely out of Miss Thomson’s head. There is no malaria in Cuba. None. Risk of contracting malaria: zero per cent. And before you Fidel groupies start putting that down to the wonders of the Cuban health system, do you know who eliminated malaria from the island? The United States Army, after the Spanish–American War and by draining swamps and introducing bed-netting and (here they come again) window screens.

So there’s no malaria, and a small risk of mosquitoes. As for the ‘cramped outdoor cages’, they are, in fact, the factory version of Bloody Mary’s exotic hut on the tropic isle of Bali Hai in the current West End production of South Pacific. They’ve got roofs, with eight-foot ceilings — not exactly a Kensington drawing-room, but hardly ‘cramped’. As for those concrete floors Alice disdains, all I can say is that a few years back I jacked up my old barn and poured a concrete foundation, and there are truly few more pleasurable sensations on a hot summer’s day than putting one’s bare feet on cold, shaded concrete. So these ‘shark cages’ have sloped roofs and cool floors. Granted, they have no walls. If they did, they’d be sweatboxes that would likely kill you — unless, of course, you installed air-conditioning, which, as we know, you British types find frightfully vulgar.

Nonetheless, according to an ITN report carried on PBS over here, these poor prisoners will have to ‘endure the searing heat’. Actually, these beach huts are perfectly designed for one of the most agreeable climates on earth — a daytime high in the mid-eighties and an overnight low in the low seventies, with a wafting breeze caressing one’s cheek. My advice to Fleet Street is to steer clear of weather for the rest of the war. The merest nudge of the thermostat is enough to send excitable reporters rocketing from one extreme to the other, like the old cartoon of the shower faucet with only the tiniest calibration between ‘Scalding’ and ‘Freezing’: Kabul in the sixties is the ‘brutal winter’, Cuba in the low seventies is the ‘searing heat’.

So take it from me, Don Rumsfeld’s Club Fed huts are cool in the day and balmy at night. They’re a lot more comfortable than the windowless ‘concrete coffins’ of Belmarsh in which your terrorist suspects are banged up 22 hours a day. True, it’s a shame they have to have wraparound wire mesh to spoil the view, and there are no banana daiquiris from room service, but the idea is (in case you’ve forgotten) that they’re meant to be prisoners. And, unlike the three-to-a-cell arrangements in, say, Barlinnie, the Talebannies each have a room of their own, so they won’t be taking it up the keister from Butch every night. They get three square meals a day, thrice-daily opportunities for showers, calls to prayer, copies of the Koran, a prayer mat — all part of a regime the Mirror calls ‘a sick attempt to appeal to the worst redneck prejudices’.

It’s correct that, for hygiene purposes, they were shaved, which was ‘culturally inappropriate’. But then, if the US wanted to be culturally appropriate, they’d herd ’em on to a soccer pitch and stone ’em to death as half-time entertainment. As to whether or not they are prisoners of war, there is a legitimate difference of opinion on their status: you can’t ask them for name, rank and serial number, because the last two they lack and, if Richard Reid is anything to go by, they keep a handy stack of spare monikers. This is new territory. But surely the Fleet Street whingers must know, if only from the testimony of their fellow Britons among the inmates, that there is no ‘torture’ (the Mail on Sunday), not even by the weather.

Still, my colleagues may be heartened to know that Britain’s getting far more attention for its anti-Americanism than it did when it was backing Bush 100 per cent. I drove from New Hampshire to Montreal the other day and, on both Vermont and Quebec radio, I heard references to the ‘British-led international protests’ against Guantanamo. ‘British-led international protests’ is a much more convincing formulation than the ‘American-led international coalition’. Your side really has got a coalition: Britain, Mary Robinson, the EU, UN, Red Cross. And it’s making quite an impression: many people over here had no idea quite how ridiculous you are. You’re shocked by us, we’re laughing at you.

In fairness, instead of coasting on non-existent diseases and wild guesses at the weather, the always elegant Matthew Parris at least attempted to expand Guantanamo into a general thesis. ‘We seek to project the message that there are rules to which all nations are subject,’ he wrote in the Times. ‘America has a simpler message: kill Americans, and you’re dead meat.’

This caused endless amusement over here. As the Internet wag Steven den Beste commented, ‘By George, I think he’s got it!’

Mr Parris is right to the extent that there are varying approaches to terrorism. You can take the dead-meat approach, or you can do the British thing: hunker down, fight a defensive war, inconvenience your citizens by shrinking the slots on pillar boxes and eliminating the rubbish bins at railway stations, insulate your political leadership so that the terrorists have nothing to do but blow the legs off grannies and schoolkids, and then after three decades pack it in, give the blood-drenched thugs the red-carpet treatment at the Palace of Westminster, and make them ministers of a Crown they don’t even deign to recognise. That playbook wouldn’t sell here. If Omagh had happened in, say, Wisconsin, the government would not allow Martin McGuinness to keep his secrets about the perpetrators merely because they had such a high regard for his talents as education minister.

‘My difficulty is not with America as America, but with Washington as a hoped-for coalition partner,’ Parris continues. ‘Partnership in foreign policy is not in their nature.’ There’s a very good reason for that. Partnership implies the burden is shared more or less equally. If I bought twenty quid’s worth of shares in The Spectator and started swanning about bitching that Conrad Black didn’t treat me as a partner, he’d rightly think I’d gone nuts. The British in their time were at least as ruthless about such realities as the Americans are today. For example, in September 1944, in one of the lesser-known conferences to prepare for the postwar world, Churchill and Roosevelt met in Quebec City. They had no compunction about excluding from their deliberations the Canadian prime minister, Mackenzie King, even though he was the nominal host. There’s a cartoon of the time showing King peering through a keyhole as the bigshots settled the fate of the world without him.

And guess what? Militarily speaking, Canada was a far bigger player back then than Britain is today: the Royal Canadian Navy was the world’s third biggest surface fleet, the Canucks got the worst beach at Normandy, but hey, why bore you with details? In those days that still wasn’t enough to get you a seat at the table. So what exactly is it that Britain brings to the table today? The RAF did nothing in Afghanistan. The Gurkhas sat out the war in Oman. In the end, the only non-American contribution was a few brave British and Australian SAS men fighting alongside US Special Forces. We honour them for their service and their courage. But they weren’t strictly necessary, and in return the Pentagon had to put up with not just that idiot speech from Admiral Boyce but a lot of anonymous MoD pillocks sneering to the Daily Mail about how Washington should let our chaps handle the show because frankly these Yank special forces have always been an absolute shower and should just stay out of the way. Do you realise how pitiful this sounds? The way things are going in the prisoner round-ups, it looks like the major British participation in the war has been on the al-Qa’eda side.

‘America has simple gods and likes to keep her Satan simple, too,’ declared Matthew Parris. ‘In Salem it was once witches. In Senator Joe McCarthy’s heyday it was Commies. Now it is al-Qa’eda.’

Just for the record, the Salem witch trials were conducted not by citizens of the United States but by British subjects. As for Senator McCarthy’s heyday; well, there were a lot of Commies around: in short order, they’d seized half of Europe, neutered much of what was left, and had become the dominant influence on the Third World’s political class. Suppose America had followed the rest of the West and elected a détente sophisticate like Helmut Schmidt or Pierre Trudeau, whose first act upon retirement from office was to take his young sons to see Siberia because ‘that was where the future was being made’ — in 1984! The world would be very different today, and not to my liking. The West won’t work if every country’s Canada and every leader’s Trudeau. The only thing that enables Belgium to be Belgium and Norway to be Norway and Britain to be Britain is the fact that America’s America — for all the reasons my Spectator colleagues deplore.

Mark Steyn is full on in this article. Take that you whining wusses in the UK. Get up off your kneepads.

Amen.

Salem was a British atrocity!

"Cultural 'respect'" would demand that we chop off half the Talibans' heads and stone the rest of the bastards to death!

Kill Americans and you are dead meat!

My God!

First time in nine years there's a President, God bless him, in Washington -- and an Administration -- and Our Most Hallowed House is White again!

And Mark Steyn rocks!

As to whether or not they are prisoners of war, there is a legitimate difference of opinion on their status: you can’t ask them for name, rank and serial number, because the last two they lack and, if Richard Reid is anything to go by, they keep a handy stack of spare monikers. This is new territory. But surely the Fleet Street whingers must know, if only from the testimony of their fellow Britons among the inmates, that there is no ‘torture’ (the Mail on Sunday), not even by the weather.

Outstanding article thanks, Travis.

>>>But then, if the US wanted to be culturally appropriate, they’d herd ’em on to a soccer pitch and stone ’em to death as half-time entertainment.

Dang. For the first time I just became PC. I do so think we should be sensitive and honor their customs, even if it puts us out a bit.

Which playoff game needs a new halftime act?

patent

From the National Post:

Mark Steyn
Mark Steyn's writing on politics, arts and culture can be read around the world. In Canada, he can be read in the National Post. In the United Kingdom, he is a columnist for the Daily and Sunday Telegraphs and North American correspondent and film critic of The Spectator. In the United States, Mark appears in The Chicago Sun-Times and is also theatre critic of The New Criterion. His latest book, Broadway Babies Say Goodnight, was published to critical acclaim in London and somewhat sniffier reviews in New York.

Us Brits aren't having a "collective snit".

The Mirror (one of the rags mentioned in the article) had a phone in vote to see if their readers agreed with the Mirror's critical tone.

The result

Support U.S. :17,000
Support Mirror :1,700

Today the Mirror printed another article asking "will this change your minds?" (apparently not...)

Don't take media comment too seriously, it doesn't reflect most Brits opinions.

Its funny I have counted countless threads on this subject, of course the British press got it wrong they took what the Americans portrayed at face value.

I know prisoner handling done it for real and on countless exercises, they released photos of the processing stage, the stage where the captor puts the fear of god into the prisoner.

Hmmm I wonder why ?.

Was it part of some psyops I ask myself to also put the fear of god into potential terrorists. This is what's waiting for you, oh by the way you journalists its not real wink nine wink.

Look at us we are hard wink wink if any of those journalists were on the ball they should of known the photos were all bluff and no substance, except being civvies they took them at face value in fact they thought the Americans were harder than even the Americans were trying to portray.

Prisoners and psyops never work.

Um, is this even English? Check just to the right of the semicolon key; the apostrophe is under the quotation marks. You also seem unsure where sentences end and new ones begin sometime. Perhaps we could find you a grammar site.

Um, is this even English?

"Um" is definitely not English.

Check just to the right of the semicolon key; the apostrophe is under the quotation marks.

Semi-colons are used to separate independent clauses. Unfortunately the first clause used here does not represent a complete thought, and is therefore not an independent clause. The whole sentence would be better written as: "Check just to the right of the semicolon key, and you will find the apostrophe under the quotation marks."

You also seem unsure where sentences end and new ones begin sometime.

Ending the sentence with 'sometime' is weak. Your statement would carry more weight without it. The use of the word 'seem' further weakens your argument. Also, he does know where sentences end, as he shows by putting a period there. He doesn't know where they should end, or at least doesn't care. I would recommend rephrasing the sentence in this fashion: "You are also unsure of where sentences should end and new ones begin."

Perhaps we could find you a grammar site.

Perhaps this sentence should end with a question mark?

Sorry to be so picky, but I can't help but disapprove of people who feel that they should stifle someone's opinion simply because they are not trained to be a copyholder for the New York Times.

When I read some of the rules for speaking and writing the English language correctly...I think--Any fool can make a rule. And every fool will mind it. --Henry David Thoreau

Perhaps this sentence should end with a question mark?

No, it shouldn't have, because it was a statement, not a question. As for the rest of your post, there's a difference between conversational (but correctly spelled and punctuated) grammar and business English.

I could find six or seven other reasons to stifle Byron, but I had too much trouble trying to decipher his incoherence to know where to begin.

You’re shocked by us, we’re laughing at you.

Thanks for the ping! I love Mark Steyn and thought this line summed it up for me, until the next sentence when he quotes the write Parris who snidely remarked "...kill Americans and you're dead meat." As if there were any other possiblilty!! HAH! Steyn can sure set them straight.

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