Hunting Heads

Strange are the benefits of technology. And stranger still are the uses to which it’s being put.

Let me tell you what happened.

This morning, my assistant sent me, by WhatsApp (if you don’t know what that is, well, it’s a cellphone messaging service) two videos. One of my regular patients had sent them to him. And someone else had sent them to him. 

This is what the videos showed:

In the first, a plump young woman (who looks rather Filipino to my eyes) in a pink top and blue jeans is kneeling on the ground while a masked man with a knife stands behind her. He then, not to sugar-coat it, hacks off her head and holds it up to the camera.

I don’t know where the video is from. It certainly does not look as though it is from Iraq. I suppose there is a chance it could be a drug cartel at work in Mexico, los Zetas maybe. There is some talk in a language I don’t know. Could be Spanish. No habla Espaňol, seňores, Not Arabic, for sure. I don't speak Arabic either but if that is Arabic I'm Florence Nightingale. 

The other video is clearly ISIS – or, perhaps, one of the gangs of cannibal headhunters so beloved  of Barack Obama – at work in Iraq or Syria. It begins with masked men pouring bullets into the bodies of bound prisoners lying on the ground. And then a young man is pinned to the ground – facing up towards the camera – and his throat is hacked with a knife till his head comes off. 

Yes, both these people are alive while this procedure is being performed. The girl twists and writhes, and while the young man is pinned too securely to do any such thing, tears leak from his eyes and then – right at the end – his eyes open wide and look up at the camera while his blood bubbles in his throat.

Both videos are vomit-inducing, and it’s difficult to imagine just what kind of psychology – except, maybe, the utterly psychopathic – would benefit from watching them. If they are a recruiting tool, they would only be of use in weeding out those who aren’t dribbling sociopathic monsters.

Ronald Thomas West, who was once a US Special Forces soldier, has this to say about the Mexican drug cartels:

“the Zetas international drug cartel have sometimes introduced themselves with rolling severed heads into nightclubs frequented by their rivals .. oh, and have decapitated a ‘bakers two dozen...”^[Source]

The cannibal headhunters of the so-called Free Syrian Army were doing this kind of thing long before the Islamic State began hogging the attention of horrified Western TV addicts.

But, actually, it goes back a while before even that.

Just in the allegedly enlightened 20^th Century, as far as I know:

In the Second World War, the Gorkha mercenaries serving in the British Indian Army would raid Japanese positions across the quiescent Myanmar (then Burma) front in 1942-3, cut off the soldiers’ heads, and bring them back (vide Field Marshal William Slim, Defeat Into Victory). Later on, in the First Chechen War of 1995, Chechen “freedom fighters” – beloved of the Western media, and whose commanders are now sheltered in Britain and the US – would routinely decapitate teenage Russian conscripts they captured. In 1995, too, Pakistani Al Faran terrorists cut off the head of Norwegian hostage Hans Christian Ostrǿ in Kashmir. And in the ongoing conflict in Ukraine, EUNazi stormtroopers from the Azov brigade have been known to cut off people’s heads. At least one account I read claimed the some of the units of the Novorussian resistance retaliated by chopping off the heads of Ukrainian soldiers they captured.

Headhunting is hardly anyone’s monopoly.

I suppose it is possible that the videos I watched were meant as some kind of recruitment tool. If so, they certainly would work excellently as a filter to weed out anyone who isn’t a full-blown psychopath. But for any normal human, they would be what West calls “the art of intimidation”.

It’s hardly surprising that the Wahhabi form of Islam, on which the jihad state of Saudi Arabia is based, grew out of intimidation of conquered peoples; they were given a choice of being massacred or converting to Wahhabism. A few gruesome massacres had a salutary effect on everyone. The Wahhabis, and their modern proxies the Islamic State, knew exactly what they were doing.

If the rest of us find it merely vomit-inducing, that’s just too bad for us, as far as they’re concerned.

Note: 1. I could have posted the videos on this article, or other headhunting images. I chose not to. If that disappoints anyone, I am not sorry.

2. Both videos show that actual decapitation by knife is a messy affair and produces ragged, uneven neck stumps. If anyone still believes the James Foley video is genuine, a look at these would be a good lesson.