Bananas and Republics by Ron Unz
LewRockwell.com, May 14, 2004

I must grudgingly admit that our Iraqi Adventure seems to have become in some respects a fascinating and invaluable educational experience, nearly on a daily basis.

For example, today’s morning papers revealed that one or more of the prison images being shown to our august Senators and Congressmen depicted scenes of Iraqi POWs sodomizing themselves with bananas, a fact which led one Republican lawmaker to darkly suspect that the action taken was not entirely voluntary, and “was probably coerced somehow.”

This suggestion seems quite speculative to me. From what I’ve vaguely heard, sodomizing one’s own self with a banana for the video cameras is something of a national pastime, not merely among Iraqis but for Muslims in general. In fact, one might even suspect that the Iraqis thus shown were actually being rewarded for their especially helpful cooperation with American interrogators.

Still, if I am wrong and the shrewd Congressman correct in his suggestion that the acts shown were somehow connected with the interrogation process, it seems to indicate the increasingly multiculturalist influences operating upon our neocon masters. After all, from what I have read in the history books, although both the Stalinist and Trotskyite factions of the international Communist movement were notoriously prone to torture, the techniques they followed tended to be rather simple and even somewhat puritanical, and I’ve never heard of a single Communist regime anywhere that ever used bananas for self-sodomy. Just as David Brooks has similarly suggested, perhaps we are seeing a sign of the emergence of the BoCos, namely Bohemian Communists, otherwise known as neocons.

Admittedly, another possible explanation is simply that Soviet-style agricultural policies left it absolutely impossible to procure even a single banana for interrogation purposes.

On a practical note, I would caution visitors to this website that useful techniques and inventions once discovered tend to rapidly propagate throughout the world. Any of you who fear that you might someday be subjected to interrogation on suspicion of “anti-government agitation” or even that most fearsome charge of “hate thought” should therefore consider immediately obtaining a good supply of bananas and commencing your practice sessions forthwith, since although I have heard that the experience is quite enjoyable, it is also said to be rather something of an acquired taste.