Monday 14 April 2003

No Saddam cult

When we watched the toppling of the statue, I said to my wife that the Iraqis would be well advised to keep the pieces. They would surely become valuable. I needn't have worried: the free market did its stuff.
No sooner had the symbols of his repression been smashed and broken in the streets of the capital, than they were being traded on the internet.

One Baghdad entrepreneur, wise to the soaring value of such memorabilia, was offering a "genuin [sic] peace of Saddam statue", on the trading site Ebay, starting price £10,000.

Good for him (assuming it really is "genuin").

But why does the Scotsman journalist write that a "strange cult of Saddam Hussein lives on"? When the Berlin Wall fell, I wanted to be there. Three weeks later I was able to take a day trip from London and I returned home with a large chunk that I removed from the wall. I wasn't taking part in a communist "cult"; I was celebrating its destruction.