The American Taliban should not be pardoned
Ed West is in favour of mercy — but not for a Californian member of the Taliban
2 January 2009

As the Bushes pack the last of their belongings and agonise over whether to take the fridge, the family of John Walker Lindh have pleaded with the outgoing president to commute their son’s 20-year sentence as a final gesture of mercy. Lindh, also known as the “American Taliban”, was captured by US forces in Afghanistan soon after their invasion and is serving a 20-year stretch for treason.

Lindt came from a comfortable, if slightly bohemian, middle-class Californian family. He grew up in a free and forgiving society and so, like so many young men in the West, came to despise it, and sought to follow a more manly way of life. After first becoming a “wigger”, a self-hating white fan of hip-hop music, he then turned to Islam’s lunatic wing.

Lindh was dealt what Cecil Rhodes called the winning cards in life, but he threw them away to join a religious fascist movement.

“John made a mistake in joining the Afghan army at a time when their government was controlled by the Taliban,” his parents said, as if he did not know what he was doing, and Afghanistan was a Nordic-style democracy when he asked for the recruitment application.

I’m in favour of mercy – to those young Afghan and Arab ignoramuses pressured into becoming bombers. They should be released as soon as they have been educated in literacy, history and Western freedom – that same freedom that Lindh was trying to deny their fellow countrymen. Why should Lindh get off while they linger?

During the Cold War far more media coverage was ever given to the American victims of Joseph McCarthy, dozens of whom lost their jobs because of their beliefs, than to the foreign victims of Stalin and Mao, millions of whom lost their lives for theirs. That same view, that American lives are worth far more than Third World ones, still dominates American liberal thought today.

***

If the North-West Frontier Province is the last stronghold of Bin Laden then north London, my neck of the woods, is probably the last holdout of Marxism. In N1 this week a group of Cold War throwbacks will celebrate the 50th anniversary of the Cuban revolution with a “CHElebration New Year party”, organised by a company that makes pretentious football shirts for students.

I’ve never understood the whole Che Guevara icon thing. He was obviously good-looking, but so was Ted Bundy, and he killed fewer people, and was probably better company.

Why is it acceptable to wear a T-shirt with Che and not, for example, Ernst Röhm, or Franco? A few years back David Beckham got in trouble for having one of Eichmann, which a fan had, bizarrely, sent him as a present, but what’s the difference? Admittedly Eichmann killed far more people, but as the saying goes, it’s not a competition.

Guevara himself ordered the deaths of hundreds of people, and carried out many murders himself. He was a brutal man who, by his own admissions, got a kick out of violence (and like most middle-class Argentinians of his era despised the dark-skinned Caribbean people he came to liberate).

The organisers of the London party call him “an icon, a means of identifying with the anti-establishment, a unique mix of the revolutionary ideals and pop star celebrity”.

Che stopped being anti-establishment the moment he pointed a gun at an unarmed man. The real appeal is that inside every rebel is a tyrant, and it is the whiff of tyranny and violence that attracts people raised in complacent democracies to Che the butcher, not the tedious Marxism that he cloaked himself in.