JOHN CHUCKMAN

POSTED RESPONSE TO A COLUMN BY CHARLES MOORE IN THE TELEGRAPH

“In our generation, Blunt’s equivalents are the intellectual apologists for Islamist extremism.”

A truly ignorant statement.

No one “apologizes” for Islamist extremism, but many try explaining it rationally in the face of a flood of Islamophobic garbage from folks like Charles Moore.

Blunt assisted in the giving away of state secrets.

His acts, in fact, closely resemble the acts of people like Israeli spy Jonathon Pollard who seriously damaged the security of the United States out of his belief that Israel was entitled to any secret the United States had.

Adding that kind of line to a piece like this is not analysis and it is not intellectually honest but is propaganda of the lowest order.

JOHN CHUCKMAN

 

POSTED RESPONSE TO A COLUMN BY CHARLES MOORE IN THE TELEGRAPH

Oh, I wouldn’t go so far as saying that.

Starting a war which ultimately killed a million people and set a society back for at least a generation ranks pretty high in my book of crimes.

If I wanted to be flip, I could say Tony’s greatest crime was heeding George Bush, but I think that falls in the category of mental illness, not crime.

I think too we should never forget how opposed the British people were to Bush’s evil idea. London had the world’s greatest peace parade.

But Tony managed to manipulate and crawl and lie his way to dragging Britain into that pointless mass killing.

JOHN CHUCKMAN

 

POSTED RESPONSE TO A COLUMN BY CHARLES MOORE IN THE TELEGRAPH

This is a truly silly review which fails on its own terms. I haven’t read the book, but nothing said here confirms the title of the review.

Indeed, Charles Moore, through his use of parentheses after quotes or assertions only indulges in exactly what he accuses the author of.

If you have a critical point to make you do not need a nudge-nudge, wink, wink.

Histories, even great histories, are full of judgments.

Just read Churchill or Gibbon or Tacitus.

It is always the responsibility of critical readers to examine several books on a subject of interest to get a feel for the variation in assessment of a period or individual.

Just as witnesses at a trial can each give different accounts of something they actually saw, so it is most certainly with history or biography. The “truth” is only ever vaguely indicated in a cloud of doubts and differing assessments, much the way, at the sub-atomic level, the Uncertainty Principle makes it impossible to define at once all the variables of a particle.

I should have thought that fact elementary for anyone claiming to have such a grasp of history that he can call an author “ignorant.”