Originally published at: https://boingboing.net/2018/11/19/in-loving-memory-of-saddam-h.html
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I admit, I kind of lol’d briefly. I do not understand why.
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Very disturbing. That font was never meant to be set in all upper case.
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I spit my coffee out on the computer screen.
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Someone thought they were being funny but were horribly wrong.
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And they used those damn one-way screws, too.
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The lesser war criminals get park benches. The major guys, they get the presidential libraries and such.
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I remember seeing the name “Muhammad Ali” on the back of a jazz album as a teenager, and realizing the Muslim world has it’s own “John Smiths”, so it could be some other Saddam, but the dates kind of suggest a prank.
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Banksy
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I was a little kid in Kuwait when the Iraqi army invaded. No one in my family is Kuwaiti, and as Americans, the immediate family was evacuated relatively soon after. (Though not before the Iraqi army totalled my father’s car). But based on our closeness to the conflict, my cousins and I continue to refer to him sardonically as “Uncle Saddam.” Upshot being that I find this hilarious.
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Given the…less than stellar…quality of Freedom™ available in Iraq after the fall of the Hussein administration I’m not sure we can safely rule out barbed sincerity as a motive and immediately assume some sort of snark.
If you could get them off the record I’d wager that a fair percentage of the Coalition of the Willing would agree with the sentiment; much less the population who got stuck living(or not) with the mess.
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Those people
Should leave this island
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Saddam Hussein is apparently on of the most common Arab names in that region of the middle East.
Part of it is Arab naming conventions aren’t the same as European ones. The distators name was Saddam Hussein Abd al-Majid al-Tikriti. And a whole bunch of different names may be westernized as Saddam Hussein.
But yeah those dates.
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Hussein is a patronymic, but Hussein is a common name (I’d rank it with Josh maybe, just on casual observation.) So Saddam Husseins are a tad thinner on the ground than they’d be otherwise. Interestingly, I’ve gotten conflicting evidence about the name Saddam.
Weirdly, Thackston, a well-regarded language scholar, alleges that Saddam was named Hussein at birth and that Saddam is a name he came up with for himself in the style of Stalin. But the ever reliable Wikipedia states his father’s name was Hussein–which fits with Arab naming conventions. My father’s name is my middle name, and if you ever visit an Arab country and fill in immigration info, there is a space for “father’s name” for this reason. You might be even be referred to as “Amanda Joseph Smith” or “Amanda Joseph” for this reason–though immigration officials tend to be more savvy about naming conventions being different around the world.
If I came up with a replacement name for myself, I’d call myself [Replacement name][Father’s name], not [Replacement name][Old name]. Don’t know what Thackston was smoking. That said, a lot of Arabs in western countries use the complexities of Arab names to create less objectionable names. I knew an Iraqi guy whose father’s name (what would normally be his middle name) was “Jihad.” He skipped to his grandfather’s name so it wasn’t all over every ID he would have to present to various US authorities who may or may not have been educated on common Arabic names and their meanings. Point being that if my real name was Saddam Hussein, I’d (likely) figure out how to go by something else if I lived in the UK.
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Maybe Saddam Hussein is a common Muslim name? It doesn’t strike me as outside the realm of possibilities, though it does rather strain credulity. Just a liitle bit.
A 50/50 white vinegar/distilled water mix works better for LCD screens!
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Ah. Memories of Manfred and I swiping our ‘favorite’ prof’s office door nameplate and screwing it to a stall door in the nearest men’s room. Those were the days.
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I did too - it seems like the kind of thing you’d see Obvious Plant do.
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