Bernie and Ruth Madoff

NEW YORK—According to Virgil, Libyans are “a people rude in peace and rough in war.” The old boy wrote this a couple thousand years ago, so we have to give him some slack. 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 or so ago, Count Volpi of 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 this to my dad, 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’d left out of his will squared off in his house.”

Old dad, like many Greeks of my generation, never took Italians seriously as fighters. They gave us an ultimatum, John Metaxas refused it, they attacked us, and within moments they were running for their lives across Albania toward 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 as some kind of Spartans.

Did Gaddafi get what he deserved? Of course he did. The Queensberry rules do not apply to monsters such as him. My concern is not the way he died—like a coward in a sewer pipe—but for the remaining Gaddafi filth who have so much moolah and are trying to buy their way to safety and comfort as I write. Saif is a marked man and will most likely flee to Zimbabwe, where his father’s twin—only worse—will welcome him while picking his pocket.

The two I’d like to see face justice are Hannibal and Aisha, both the embodiment of evil and moral dilapidation, both as cowardly as they come and known to torture defenseless women servants. Hannibal had his heavies cuff them and beat them, even when abroad. His wife disfigured a tea server for life by dousing her head with boiling water after the poor girl dropped a cup. But these repellent monsters have access to billions, and one doesn’t have to look far to see what lengths governments will go to welcome billionaires no matter how much blood they have on their hands or how crooked they are. Just look at our very own Tony Blair or the American tycoons who until now genuflected before them.