What If?

We guinea pigs are great philosophers. Humans think we are just little furry bush chocolate factories. The vegetables, hay and pellets go into the sharp end where the eyes are and in a matter of hours are transformed into tiny glossy brown sausages that pop out of the end where most animals keep their tail. However, while all this is going on inside us we have plenty of time for thinking.
 "And just what do you guinea pigs think about? I hear you ask.
 "Mind your own business." I hear Badger reply, but then Badger has always been a very private individual. He cherishes his privacy above all other things, apart from his feet and basil that is. In fact he's so protective of his privacy that he even keeps his address secret from himself in case he accidentally tells someone. If that happens he's convinced he'll have paparazzi cameras shoved through the bars of his cage at all hours.

Personally I am only too happy to share my thoughts with lesser beings like humans in the hope that they might learn something and will eventually strive to be a more civilised species. Mostly I sit and ponder "What if?" For example. What if Adolf Hitler's dad had worn a condom? There probably would have been no World War Two, and apart from circumventing the holocaust in which six million innocent Jews died horrible, barbaric deaths at the hands of Nazi thugs, the lack of a Second World War may have had other positive results too.

For example, Jews from all over the world would not have been so keen to travel to Palestine to build a Zionist state. The colonial British rulers would not have been in a considerably weakened state and could have prevented the hundreds of thousand of illegal Jewish immigrants from entering. Many of  whom had no link to Palestine whatsoever, other than the fact that they were Jewish. A war of independence then ensued and many young Jews became terrorists in the fight against their British rulers. But remember that one man's terrorist is another man's freedom fighter and these days the word "terrorist" is most often associated with the Palestinian cause.

Meanwhile the Palestinians themselves were being marginalised and pushed out of mainstream society into what I suppose can be called ghettos along the West bank of the River Jordan and the Gaza Strip and the new Israelis acquired more and more of their land by both fair means and foul, as in fact they continue to do to this day.

Then in May 1948 the British, in a frightful huff buggered off home with their bat and ball and left the Arabs and the Jews to fight it out for themselves. A fight which for all intents and purposes continues to this day, though it is a little one-sided. The Israelis have sophisticated modern weaponry and the Palestinians have dodgy rockets that are more likely to kill the firer than the target.

Later, despotic leaders of neighbouring Arab states made huge tactical errors in declaring their intention to destroy Israel. As just an average guinea pig I can only imagine that these declarations were aimed primarily at their domestic audiences, for their own people were downtrodden, brutalised and pretty much without hope. That always spells danger for others as conscience-free dictators try to distract their citizens from their own dire plight with rhetoric and in some cases ill thought out action such as the Yom Kippur War in 1973 and the Six Day War in 1967, when forces from Syria and Egypt tried and failed miserably to invade Israel.  Actually I'm not surprised they failed, even as late as the early 1980s the Egyptian army was pathetically under equipped. My female staff and the rest of her group of overland travellers were arrested on the Egyptian side of the border with Sudan when their truck got lost and crossed the border at the wrong spot.  Suddenly they found themselves surrounded by a platoon of men in pyjamas and thongs. (Here I should point out that thongs in Australia are what other (normal) people call flip flops. My female staff was not arrested by a man wearing skimpy underwear. Not visibly anyway. Maybe he was wearing them under his pyjamas.) My point is that this was the Egyptian army. They had no uniforms and no boots. They had rifles, but who knows if they had any ammunition. Luckily my female staff and her friends didn't find out.

They were taken to a guard house and kept there under arrest over night. The next day an officer arrived wearing cleaner pyjamas than the rest of the platoon and the group leader explained why they had crossed the border in the wrong place. The officer asked where they were heading and the group leader told him they were going to see the ruins at Abu Simbel. Obligingly the officer offered to take them, which he did and my female staff's tour group were escorted around the ruins by a group of men in striped pyjamas who were dragging their rifles through the desert sand in a bored to tears sort of way. Why am I telling you this? To demonstrate that the Egyptian Army could not organise an orgy in a brothel let alone successfully invade a better equipped nation.

Now, I've never really understood America's uneven handed approach to Middle East politics. Actually, that's not really true. At least, I have my own theory as to why America favours Israel so strongly. There are two reasons. Number one is the obvious fact that there are a lot of wealthy Jewish people in the USA and wealth means lobbying power. Which is also why someone as obviously insane as my male staff can enter any old Texas gun show wearing a "LEE HARVEY OSWALD WAS A JOLLY GOOD CHAP" tee-shirt and a "TIMOTHY MCVEIGH RULES" baseball cap, say "Wibble!" to the security staff and still walk out with a Glock stuffed down the front of his trousers. Secondly - guilt. America felt such guilt at entering World War Two more than two years late, and even then primarily because she was attacked herself rather than any concern over what was happening on the rest of the planet.

That guilt, the feeling that perhaps they could and should have done more to prevent Hitler wiping out six million Jews has since led them to favour Israel's cause over that of the Palestinians' for many years. May I also remind you that America has not always taken such a dim view of terrorists either. Remember the Irish Republican Army and how many innocent people they killed? Well, without the flow of Irish American money the IRA too would have been running around in pyjamas and thongs. Not pleasant on a January morning in Belfast. Successive American governments did very little to try to stem the flow of money and arms to these thugs.

So, what has all this got to do with Adolf Hitler's dad failing to put a bit of rubber on his todger?
If he'd just gone down to the chemist shop that day and picked up a packet of three there would have been no Adolf Hitler. No Adolf Hitler means no Second World War. No Second World War means no Holocaust. No holocaust means no great influx of illegal immigrants to Palestine and less chance of conflict there. No holocaust also mean no collective American and allied guilt. No guilt means a more even handed approach to Middle Eastern politics. A more even handed approach means less resentment against Western nations from Arab states and that in turn means less of an Islamist terror threat. Maybe there would have been no 9/11, no 7/7 London bombings, no Iraq war, no need to occupy Afghanistan and finally, most poignantly perhaps. Drummer Lee Rigby's little daughter might have grown up to know her Daddy.

Oh and by the way, if those cowardly lowlife scumbags who ran down and hacked Drummer Rigby to death think they will be met in heaven by seventy two virgins when they eventually pop their newly converted Islamic clogs I'm afraid they are in for a nasty shock. My in depth guinea pig research (a dream) has revealed that the nice folk who translated the Koran to English  made a very unfortunate error. Seventy two virgins should read seventy two viragos -  a loud, violent, and ill-tempered woman; scold; shrew. And these chicks are pretty pissed off about the way male dominated Islamic societies have treated women over the years, and they just can't wait to meet these heroes.

BADGER'S FOOTNOTE
I bet Mr Hitler had bunions, corns, athletes foot, planter warts and ingrown toenails. No wonder he invaded Poland. I would have done the same thing.