<$BlogRSDUrl$>


Loser's Guide Loser's Guide

 Loser's Guide to Life

Monday, December 11, 2006

In the Observer ... 

Britain stops talk of 'war on terror':

Foreign Office has asked ministers to ditch the phrase invented by Bush to avoid stirring up tensions within the Islamic world ...

The shift marks a turning point in British political thinking about the strategy against extremism and underlines the growing gulf between the British and American approaches to the continuing problem of radical Islamic militancy. It comes amid increasingly evident disagreements between President George Bush and Tony Blair over policy in the Middle East.

Oooh, never mind Mr Bush, did they clear this with “Instapundit” and other morons? Because they can be such martinets.

I can even remember when various engineers and bores with weblogs kept referring to something they were pleased to call the “GWOT”, or “Global War on Terror”, and they liked to talk as if it were some sort of quantifiable entity, requiring real sacrifice. For their part, the borebloggers would be manning the keyboards and sniffing out heresy or insufficient enthusiasm in the media.

I could be mistaken, but I believe even the term “cold war” was originally used by Khrushchev as a rhetorical device and never achieved the status of official buzzphrase in the Soviet Union. It was meant to be a criticism of US and western policies towards the Soviet Union, a way of claiming that they were too aggressive. Yet some people in the west were quick to seize on it: “Yes! A Cold War ... that is exactly what we are about.” Some people just like the word “war” and the mere idea of it.

Labels:



0 Comments:

Post a Comment


Watching TV is a good way to tear yourself away from the computer.