| Friday, April 11, 2003 |
18:05 - The Legacy of General Woundwort
http://www.mirror.co.uk/news/allnews/page.cfm?objectid=12838556&method=full&siteid=5
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It's not my fault that I'm so evil
It's society... society!
You see, my parents were sometimes abusive
And it made... a prick of me!
In the dusty playground the chanting children's voices grew louder and louder, ringing inside the head of a dark-haired boy who stood alone by a crumbling school wall.
"Bastard, bastard, bastard," the children spat.
The boy tried to run but the taunting continued - just as it did most days for him in the village of Al-Ouja near Tikrit in north central Iraq.
But on this sweltering hot summer's day the six-year-old had had enough.
The lonely, taciturn child slowly bent down, picked up an iron bar lying on the ground then slashed it through the air towards the other children.
The rag-tag group of boys ran off in fear. And Saddam Hussein first learnt the power of terror.
As one of the commenters at The Command Post suggested, this might well become a cautionary tale for parents to paraphrase to their bullying youngsters. "You want to grow up like Saddam Hussein?"
Even Hitler didn't gain the ignominy of being reduced to a tale to terrify or entertain children. Even today he's still a name that people avoid saying in polite company or in front of kids, and maybe-- like General Woundwort in Watership Down, who did become such a cautionary tale-- his legacy wouldn't have displeased him. Saddam, who was already on the way there (thanks to Parker and Stone, though I had no idea they were apparently quite accurate), now seems to stand an excellent chance of suffering that ultimate humiliation.
Good. Unless, like Woundwort, he would have gotten off on it.
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