John Derbyshire on the recently released British sailors:
15 British Agressors [sic] must be EXECUTED.” That was the placard being held up by some beetle-browed Iranian outside the British Embassy in Tehran. Well, I don’t entirely disagree. I certainly think that those British captives who have let themselves be put forward on Iranian TV, that woman wearing a headscarf, and the young man apologizing to the Iranian gangster-rulers, should be court-martialed for dereliction of duty when they get back to Blighty, with shooting definitely an option.
[…]
Where is John Moyse?
[…]
[A] British soldier of the East Kent Regiment,… Moyse was captured by the Chinese during the Second Opium War of the late 1850s. Taken before a Mandarin, he was ordered to kowtow, but refused. He was thereupon clubbed to death and decapitated, and his body thrown on a dung-heap. Sir Francis Doyle wrote a poem to celebrate Moyse’s defiance of the enemy.
Christopher Orr responds: “Yes, it really is a shame that so few people these days are willing to be beaten, killed, and mutilated for the sake of national honor and a good poem.”