Tuesday, November 25, 2008

What Would Joseph Stalin Do?

Faced with intractable problems like Somali pirates, we must ask ourselves: how much do our much vaunted Peace and Love values mean to us? Must we really be full-time Liberals? Maybe we need to inject a little Uncle Mustache into the proceedings.

Sometimes when contemplating seriously fucked up situations like this, I ask myself, what would Joe Stalin do? Love him or hate him, that was a man who could make the tough decisions. He could cut right through the bullshit and achieve permanent solutions to complex problems within five or ten years. Somali pirates? Negatively impacting Uncle Joe’s world? Let’s see.

It can’t be so hard to identify the villages that the pirates come from. Why not take entire villages into “protective custody?” Move them lock, stock and barrel to somewhere, somewhere less comfortable, somewhere far away, somewhere cold, somewhere non-Muslim. They’ll be shipped back when “it’s safe,” i.e., when there’s no more piracy. The pirates, in Uncle Joe’s unilateral world they’d all be shot in the back of the head within moments of being taken into custody.

These guys don’t have much to lose. Just look at their clothes, and their old, banged up AK-47’s. And those boats! What a fleet of wrecks! The question is, how can we give them something to lose? How can we make them beg us to forgive them, make them demand execution in return for something that we can give them, or take away?

Old Joe Steel would identify lots of entire countries these days that needed to be processed out, broken up, done away with. Entire cultures that needed to be trans-acculturated to another place, or places, preferably in another time zone, teach them another language and sentence them to death if they speak the old one, give them a new culture and make sure that they like it.

So what I really mean is, thank god Joe and his friends are gone, and let’s always remember that however bad things seem to be, they could be much, much worse.

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