Thursday, January 25, 2007

More on Con

After yesterday's post on the man, I've just noticed that Con Coughlin is under investigation by the Press Complaints Commission. It'll be interesting to see whether anything comes of that.

I failed to mention yesterday that Con's article just happened to appear the morning after Bush's State of the Union address. It too was hostile towards Iran.

Unsurprisingly, my comment on his "blog" yesterday didn't make it past the moderators. It was only a question about his sources.

There is, however, a textbook screed on "appeasement" (by Sun Tzu of all people) just where my comment should be. It was written roughly half an hour after I posted my comment but that might just be a coincidence (Note - that isn't sarcasm, it may very well be a coincidence). Here it is in any event:
Hey no big deal all we have to do is talk. All we have to do is to look back at history. Remember he who does not know history will repeat it.

On 29th September, 1938, Chamberlain, Adolf Hitler, Edouard Daladier and Benito Mussolini signed the Munich Agreement which transferred to Germany the Sudetenland, a fortified frontier region that contained a large German-speaking population.

In March, 1939, the German Army seized the rest of Czechoslovakia. In taking this action Adolf Hitler had broken the Munich Agreement.

Now we have Mahmoud Ahmadinejad (Hitler) and Kim Jong il (Mussolini) of N Korea playing the same game all over again.

Now you think we should all hold hands and sing "Kumbaya"….It looks like the lights are on but no one is home. Ignorance is bliss.

”If you know the enemy and know yourself, you need not fear the result of a hundred battles. If you know yourself but not the enemy, for every victory gained you will also suffer a defeat. If you know neither the enemy nor yourself, you will succumb in every battle.”
Sun Tzu (6th–5th century B.C.), Chinese general. The Art of War, ch. 3, Axiom 18 (c. 490 B.C., ed. by James Clavell, 1981).

Wake the hell up before you find yourself and your family simply ashes blowing in the wind.
Crikey. That really is top class string pulling there.

Fortunately, FlyingRodent recently reminded me that Larry had looked into the history of appeasement in some detail.

One other point worth noting. I couldn't help but notice that Con didn't manage to get anyone from the government to provide a quotation on his "story" for today's paper. In fact, the only politician Con managed to find to quote today was Conservative MP James Arbuthnot. He apparently found the report "deeply disturbing".

So did I mate but probably not for quite the same reasons.

1 comment:

Not Saussure said...

When people start talking about 'appeasement' and drawing historical parallels, I can't help but wonder why they don't draw the obvious one. Sir Anthony Eden, was, after all, was better placed than most people to know about it, having initially, as Chamberlain's Foreign Secretary, supported his concilliation of Hitler and then having resigned when Chamberlain started to make overtures to Mussolini. That's why, having convinced himself Nasser was an Arab Mussolini and that we mustn't try to concilliate him he got into the biggest British foreign policy disaster before Iraq; and how fortunate it was that those hamburger-eating surrender monkeys in Washington managed to pull the plug on the débâcle before it went too far.