Saturday, 10 April 2010

Denis MacShane Is A Cant

As is evident here. Is this the same Lech Kaczynski whose party's alliance with the Tories at Strasbourg caused MacShane to bang on, and on, and on, and on, and on about "anti-Semitism", "homophobia", "climate change denial", blah, blah, blah?
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8 comments:

  1. Vincent11 April 2010 at 03:28

    I'm sure the crash - and the consequent wiping out of Poland's governing elite for the second time in 70 years - was pure coincidence.

    And in other reports today from The New York Times, Katyn's victims committed mass suicide; Alger Hiss and the Rosenbergs were patriotic Americans all; FDR read the riot act to Stalin at Yalta; Hollywood is run by and for Inuit; and no lay psychopath has ever invented a clerical sex abuse charge out of thin air.

    If anyone above the age of five believes all that, would he or she like to step this way so as to buy the Brooklyn Bridge?

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  2. Channuse11 April 2010 at 08:11

    Yes it is, but MacShane recognises, as you evidently don't, that the magnitude of yesterday's disaster is such that normal political differences should be completely suspended while Poland is still in a state of shock. Which is something also clearly recognised by my Polish friends, few if any of whom were fans of Kaczyński, but whose genuine distress has been impossible to conceal.

    The fact that you've decided that it's appropriate to score cheap political points at such a time reveals considerably more about you than it does about MacShane. Blah blah blah, indeed.

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  3. Anonymous11 April 2010 at 15:58

    There is a difference between what one might say of a living opponent and someone who has just died in tragic circumstances.

    This would seem obvious to anyone else.

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  4. David Lindsay11 April 2010 at 17:30

    MacShane's best course of action would have been to have said nothing.

    Vincent, I have no doubt that this was a tragic accident, albeit one made possible by putting all that many important people on the same plane, using such an old and dilapidated aircraft, and so forth. If the world is a conspiracy, then it is a remarkably unsuccessful conspiracy.

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  5. Channuse11 April 2010 at 20:49

    MacShane's best course of action would have been to have said nothing.

    Not at all - it was a very moving eulogy, and I'm very glad he wrote it.

    And it was doubly appropriate for MacShane specifically to write it, partly because of his former role as Minister for Europe, but mostly because he is himself part-Polish - his real name is Denis Matyjaszek.

    Under the circumstances, he seems by far the best qualified of current Labour MPs to write something on the disaster, and I think he did a fine job.

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  6. R. J. Stove12 April 2010 at 08:19

    Mr Lindsay, I see nothing in Vincent's remarks (or anybody else's remarks) to indicate a belief that "the world is a conspiracy".

    But Communism most certainly is (not was, is) a conspiracy; and Russia is another conspiracy. Not all our sorrow at the murders of the last Tsar and his family should blind us to the fact that Russian Bolshevism was, when all's said and done, Tsarism on steroids.

    We know this not only from the memoirs of foreign observers like France's Marquis de Custine and England's Lord Frederic Hamilton in the 19th century, but from any contemplation of Tsarist rule. The secret police, the often insane murderous plotting for murderous plotting's sake, the state-worship, the snivelling professions of guilt by the defendants at "trials", the conscription of religion into one more government department (to be patronised or viciously suppressed according to circumstances): these were all present in Tsarism at its worst, though, of course, it took the 20th century to turn them into an industrial-strength form of democide.

    Whatever faults the late Polish president had (an unpleasing chauvinism, for one), he was, along with his brother, the first Polish leader in post-1989 history who seriously declared his intention to read the riot act to the Communist toadies still infesting Poland's elite. He was also a complete opponent of sexual revolution. Now the former could perhaps be forgiven by Russia; the latter cannot possibly be forgiven by Russia, or by any Western country with abortion statistics as staggeringly high as Russia's.

    So he had to go. And now he has. Among those others who had to go - because they perceived the fundamental continuity of Russian gangsterism pre-and-post-1917 as well as pre-and-post-1991 - I'm sure the name "Anna Politkovskaya" rings a bell.

    Moreover, I find it strange that no-one except myself has mentioned the death, also in a plane crash, of vehemently anti-Communist Prime Minister Sikorski in 1943. Another accident, no doubt.

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  7. Ken12 April 2010 at 11:56

    Yeah, yeah, yeah: man with unpronounceable name gets whacked in Soviet era plane. It happened to Samora Machel and a Central African leader whose name I forget. Third worlders lover their cheap, Russian gear.

    The only interesting thing about this is if it turns out to be true that the president was screaming at the pilot to land in spite of orders from the ground to divert.

    Other than that who cares?

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  8. David Lindsay12 April 2010 at 12:37

    Oh, no, he was an important figure. And Poland is an increasingly important place.

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