Qibya 1953, Mitla 1956, Sabra , Shatila 1982. What was the secret of your success in the military and in politics, Abu madhabih? Oh yes, your enthusiasm for massacring prisoners of war and innocent civilians. They called you the King of Israel - you must have modelled yourself on King Herod. They called you the Lion of God, a title you shared with Usama bin Ladin.

So farewell then, President Kaczyński. Who will be blamed for your death? Communists, Liberals, Jews, queers? Now you are a great statesman instead of a nasty little bigot. If only you had predeceased John Paul II, then you would have been canonised within a couple of years. Jaka szkoda!

So farewell then, Irving Kristol
you lied
and lied
and lied.
Then you died.

I forgot to comment at the time on the passing of former Detective Sergeant Challenor of the Met. who slipped off the hook three weeks ago. The Challenor case was a big deal back in the sixties; that and the Sheffield Rhino Whips case - heady days!
Challenor had a proud career in the CID, blithely fitting up anyone he didn't like. He was, for some reason, particularly vindictive towards people with disabilities and people of a Mediterranean appearance. Possibly this was connected to his wartime experience in Italy as a POW.
Challenor slipped up when, at a political demonstration, he nicked one Donald Rooum, a peace activist, along with some others. He charged them with possession of offensive weapons, to wit, carrying bricks about their persons. Rooum refused to roll over, did not cooperate, i.e., avoided all contact with the magically manifested brick, and so was able eventually to prove his innocence. In the course of doing so he exposed Challenor as a bent copper, more than that, a nutter out of control.
None of which fazed the judge, who found Rooum not guilty but refused his application for damages. He also found some other poor joker guilty on the same discredited evidence from the same discredited copper. The Met. of course was not interested in delving into Challenor's murky past; too much perversion of the course of justice, too many compromised coppers.
But the genie was out of the bottle and some sort of action had to be taken. Challenor was declared to be a bad boy, but a nut case (true), therefore unfit to stand trial for his many crimes. He was committed to a mental institution, and after a few weeks, quietly released, later to obtain a job in the legal system (no kidding!). We may assume that he received a full pension for his contribution to the maintenance of law and order. After all he was never found guilty of any offence.

Addendum: after writing the above I took a look at wikipedia to see if there was anything on the Challenor case there. I found the linked article. Reading it I learn that I was too dismissive of the Metropolitan Force's response to the affair. Though Challenor got away with his crimes three other tecs were jailed.
I also learn that "doing a Challenor" became police parlance for retiring on grounds of illness to avoid investigation. If memory serves there was a lot of that about at the time of Operation Countryman and during the Stephen Lawrence investigation.
Wikipedia also has an article on Donald Rooum.

So farewell then, President General Suharto, you have put down your panga and left the butchery to others. You climbed to power over a half a million corpses - or was it a million? I don't suppose you knew or cared how many. But Washington loved you for it, you were their son of a bitch. They watched with pride as their protégé killed and tortured and looted. That you were a collaborator with the Japanese during their occupation was of no consequence. You were capable of much more than treason and you proved it. Aceh, East Timor, the list of atrocities is endless. But whatever else you were you were not a Communist. And you would always do America's dirty work, except for that time when you were doing Japan's dirty work.

So farewell then, Boris Nikolaievich, you served your masters well; Washington, the World Bank, the kleptocracy. Now you will have a state funeral, but your friend Berezovsky won't be able to attend. The Western Media will sing your praises, with a few indulgent references to your "colourful" behaviour on the public stage. They'll forget that you were a Stalinist hack until the day it was possible to hold power without a party membership card. On that day - not one day before - did you tear up your party card before the world's cameras. Communist one day, anti-Communist the next, a truly Pauline conversion. From then on you changed hats frequently - dictator in the cause of democracy; bagman for the Mafiya; licenced clown of of global politics. Then the Russian people had had enough, and you were gone.

"Yeltsin has taken the opportunity to imprison & torture socialists who have a far longer record of opposing stalinism than he has, who were indeed imprisoned by the Communist regime when he was part of that regime, & who now profess the views in opposition to both stalinism and Yeltsin, that they always held." ("The Two O'Clock Knock Now Comes at Three", a Syndicalist Bulletin publication, October 1993). So old Borya was consistent in one thing, belonging to a ruling class that persecuted socialists.

So farewell then, Maurice Papon, mass murderer. They tried you for collaborating with the Nazis in rounding up Jews for their death camps. You did it, but you walked free. That was some hold you had over the politicians and the judiciary. I suppose, like Hoover in the USA, you knew all their dark secrets. I could say you knew where the bodies were buried, but that seems inappropriate for a killer who preferred to dump his victims' corpses in the Seine. All those dead North Africans fished out of the river and nobody dared ask how they got there. Yes, you certainly wielded great power, and you used it like a true fascist.

Richard and Judy, venality personified. Once again caught in flagrante delicto, their grasping hands in the pockets of their viewers. Will they be punished? Of course not. I'm betting Channel4 will give them a rise as compensation for their embarrassment, as if people of their sort ever felt embarrassment.

I suppose my remark about eunuchs in yesterday's post could be taken as sexist. I'm never quite sure which words are in and which are out. I'm still wondering if it's OK to use the word Spaniard nowadays. Everyone seems to say "the Spanish". There's a lot of similar terms I'm wary of: has Somali become Somalian? Must Croats and Bosniaks now be Croatians and Bosnians? I'm sure there must be a handbook of correct terms I can consult, but I haven't found it yet.
But back to the eunuchs' female colleagues. "Blair's Babes" they were once called condescendingly, but that was before most of them voted for the barbarisation of Iraq. Blair's bomb-happy harpies is a bit of a mouthful. Brian Sedgemore's description of them as Stepford Wives is a fair equivalent of eunuchs, I suppose.

So farewell then, Saddam Hussein. You were an ardent advocate, and practitioner, of capital punishment. What fitter way to for you to go?
A pity though that Saddam's successors were unable to eschew his methods and make a clean break with the past. What, give up torture, imprisonment without trial, judicial and injudicial murder? Not while their American masters encourage the use of the old and tried methods of government by despised puppets.
One problem, now that Saddam has gone, who will replace him as the embodiment of evil for Fox-ridden Americans? They need a hate figure and Usama seems to have left the building. Ahmadinajad! Give him a snappy name and he'll fit the bill. A five-syllable monicker is too much for any Anglophone.

So farewell then, Pinochet - asesino, ladrón, hijo de puta. We mourn the thousands you murdered, but for you we feel only contempt. You evaded justice in a most cowardly way.You seized power in a cowardly way, bombing the presidential palace from the air. Did you ever in your life act like a man?
We remember also your British friends, Thatcher, Lamont and Jack Straw, a man whose reputation for cowardice vies with yours.