High life | 5 November 2011

New York


According to Virgil, Libyans are ‘a people rude in peace and rough in war’. The old boy wrote this a couple of thousand years ago, so we have to cut him some slack. And he was obviously not speaking about the present rabble. As far as I’m concerned, most Libyans are human biohazards. The media have played up their fighting abilities, but it’s all show and boast. Afghanis they are not. The Libyans were the only trophy the great Italian army ever won down south, the Abyssinians having held them to a tie.

About 45 years ago, Count Volpi di Misurata invited me to lunch in Monte Carlo and told me over oysters and champagne that his father had won his title on the battlefield. When I told my dad this, he laughed out loud. ‘Volpi was Mussolini’s finance minister and a very rich man, and the closest he got to a battlefield was when his wife and the relatives he left out of his will squared off in his house.’

Old dad, like many Greeks of my generation, never took Italians seriously where fighting was concerned. They gave us an ultimatum, John Metaxas refused it, they attacked us, and the next thing they were running for their lives across Albania towards home begging for help from the Wehrmacht. We know the rest. But they did beat the Libyans, and Virgil must have been drinking when he called the Libyans rough. Rough in manner, yes, rough against the weak, yes. But let’s not make them out to be some kind of Spartans.

Did Gaddafi get what he deserved? Of course he did. The Queensberry rules do not apply for monsters like him. My concern is not the way he died — like a coward in a sewer pipe — but the remaining Gaddafi filth who have so much moolah and are trying to buy their way to safety and comfort as I write.