The Belgian newspaper "De Standaard" is for Belgium what "Le Monde" is for France or the NYT for the US. It pretends to take a neutral stance in politics, but with every passing year this claim is becoming more laughable. Today, Monday 25 August 2008, "De Standaard" hit a new low with an article on Mrs. Thatcher's declining mental capabilities. The former "Iron Lady" increasingly suffers from dementia and has to be reminded every day of the death of her husband Dennis, deceased now already five years ago. By contrast, she remembers every detail about her eleven-year long tenure as PM of the United Kingdom. A lot has been said about Mrs. Thatcher's successful economic record, but the single most important feat which marked her early years was unquestionably the 1982s Falklands War, which shook the British out of the dreadful lethargy in which they had sunk after the Suez Crisis. Take a close look at the bottom paragraph of the "De Standaard" article:
De IJzeren Dame is een door dementie aangetaste, verwarde vrouw geworden. Maar over de elf jaar dat ze op compromisloze wijze haar land leidde, de steenkoolmijnen sloot, de Falklandoorlog begon met Argentinië en een bomaanslag van het Iers Republikeins Leger (IRA) overleefde, weet de eerste en voorlopig enige vrouwelijke premier van het Verenigd Koninkrijk nog alles.
Translation:
The Iron Lady has become a confused, demented woman. But on those eleven years during which she held the reins in her country, shut the coal mines, began the Falklands War with Argentina, and survived an IRA bomb attack, the only female PM of the UK still knows all.
Time for a reality check. Two excerpts from the book "Forgotten Voices of the Falklands" by Hugh McManners, Ebury Press, 2007.
- John Pole Evans, Falkland Islander:
"Whilst the shooting was going on, we lay on the floor in the centre of the house, the safest place. Tanks came in along the road at the back of the town. We were in the second row of houses back down the hill from the road. Some of them fired into the town through the houses, and pieces of house landed on our roof. We could hear helicopters and planes overhead, but didn't get up to look out the windows.....
The first lot of Argentines came banging on our house door and my dad got up and opened it. They only came into the back porch and didn't search the house at that stage, but wanted to know who we were and what we were doing."
- Commander Robert Denton Green, Intelligence Staff Officer to CINC, Fleet HQ, Northwood:
"I didn't sleep for thirty-six hours after the Argentine invasion. We were really struggling. There was a complete panic. I was briefing the Admiral, plus we had to keep the Soviet threat monitoring going as well. We asked all the companies who'd supplied the Argentines with ships and weapon systems to come clean on exactly what they'd provided, which versions and modifications. Our dossier on their order of battle started with data from the publication Jane's Fighting Ships, and all the aviation weeklies and magazines."
April 2, 1982. Argentinian Amtraks in the streets of Port Stanley, the capital of the Falkland Islands. The small garrison of some forty-plus Royal Marines of Naval Party 8901 never stood a chance against the overwhelming military might of the Argentinians. Yet De Standaard wants its readers to believe that Margaret Thatcher, an unashamedly rightwing Head of State, began the war. Deliberate misinformation by the left. Ponder that.
At 43, I have seen, heard and read it so many, many times. Like poison which is secretly administerd in small doses to a person to lethal effect much later on, downright lies and dubious assumptions are cleverly hidden in the fabric of seemingly neutral stories, as part of a process that spans decades. In the end, you get a readership that subconsciously has soaked in over the years a multitude of untruths, and has as a result formed itself a worldview that fits the agenda of our moral betters: The Left, which in Belgium, like in other western countries, is disproportionally overrepresented in television, radio and the written press. Their perfidious lies are enthusistically echoed by their idiotic lackeys from the entertainment industry. "De Standaard" may claim it is neutral, but that is a flat lie just like the ones their stories abound with. It is a leftist rag through and through, and with this latest blatant example of rewriting history they confirm the credo of that famous socialist now long deceased, Dr. Joseph Goebbels: "A lie repeated a hundred times becomes the thruth". Somewhere, everywhere, young naive people, not very critical, read "that Margaret Thatcher began the Falklands War". They will take it for granted. In the same breath, "De Standaard" will remind them that Margaret Thatcher was also an evil rightwinger, because she took the jobs of poor miners. This is how the notions warmonger/inhuman/conservative are blended together, in a stealthy way like here, or in a vulgar, crude in-you-face way like with that performance by the world's biggest SLUT Madonna, who freely links images of McCain, Mugabe and Hitler. And you wonder why young people vote leftwing?
The above example is but one item in a long list of deliberate lies, and as we have seen the tactic used is slipping it in between statements which are otherwise true - Thatcher did crack down on Arthur Scargill's miners' union, and she was the target of a dramatic IRA bomb attack in Brighton - therefore the reader assumes what is in between those statements must also be true. This is an old trick, and one which was indeed used by the Nazis also. Sometimes however the hatred is such that there is no time nor willingness to apply literary multicam and the editors in question are almost tripping over their own words to get their message across. The ensuing results, detectable by repeated and/or attentive reading, would even be funny, were they not so quintessentially tragic. One such event was the publication of two columns in De Standaard, one by Ine Roox and the other by an editor using the initials "esn" (probably Evita Neefs), in the days following the July 7 bombings of the London underground. As some readers may recall, on July 8, 2005 De Standaard first published the following report by Roox, the newspaper's UK correspondent at the time:
I encircled in red first the correspondent's name, and then the paragraph wherein she introduces a certain "Norma":
Norma from Leicestershire would remain only one day in London. It panned out differently. Yesterday evening she didn't get out of the city anymore. "Never again I set a foot in London", she says flabbergasted. "I am still shivering all over." When she arrived in Kings Cross station yesterday morning, twenty minutes earlier a bomb had exploded there. "They were cordoning off the station. Everyone was evacuated." recalls Norma.
And so on. Norma is then allowed to describe how she saw aid workers help out people with blackened faces, how whe heard that many victims lost arms and legs etc. Then a businessman has his say, and then it's Norma again:
Norma shakes her head. "This could be expected. Nobody likes that rotten war in Iraq. Nobody likes Blair. We did not support that war! In my eyes Blair is the biggest terrorist in this country."
Whereupon that last citation is repeated again, printed in a bigger type as if to emphasize something really, really important. However, in her haste to convey Norma's message to the world, Roox, intentionally or not (in which case it's a Freudian slip), writes "Voor mij is Blair de grootste terrorist in dit land" - "For me Blair is the biggest terrorist in this country" instead of "In mijn ogen" - "In my eyes" - the words used by the woman from Leicestershire. Above you see just the clip, courtesy of Luc Van Braekel, and you can make out the key phrase in the upper right corner of the bigger photo preceding the clip. It is placed there prominently - no reader may miss it.
Now enter De Standaard editor "esn", probably, as we have already said, Evita Neefs, a woman frothing at the mouth whenever she hears a word commencing with "A" and ending on "merica". The day after Roox' piece, the following profile of the British PM appeared:
The two focal points in this article are the header "De grootste terrorist" - "The biggest terrorist" and a photo of a grim looking Tony Blair, conveniently placed immediately to the right of the word "terrorist" - thou shalt not miss the connection. And then it comes, see the text encircled in red:
"Een woedende man in het zwaar getroffen Kings Cross Station noemde hem gisteren in een gesprek met deze krant al "de grootste terrorist van allemaal"."
Translation:
"An angry man in the heavily hit Kings Cross Station called him [Tony Blair - MFBB] yesterday in an interview with this newspaper already "the biggest terrorist of them all"."
There you have it. It is not difficult to imagine "esn" frothing at the mouth when she entrusted this crap to the paper, for he or she must have been so elated by hearing some dumb cunt call the PM a "terrorist" that, not getting enough of using the word again and again, she forgot Norma's gender. But then of course, De Standaard being made up of progressive, enlightened and sophisticated individuals, swapping genders is probably not frowned upon so much as by us stupid, uncouth, archaic and definitely unintelligent rednecks.
The issue that deserves our immediate attention is, I would wager, an immediate and forceful rebuke of such outrageous statements and insinuations. But perhaps the bigger issue at hand is a broad and thorough investigation into "the nature and the causes" of such and inherently sick intellectual attitude. Compare it to first tackle the symptoms, but then try to root out the origin of the mal. Take this into account. For good or bad, a country participates in a war meant to oust a tyrannical regime and exclude the possibility that this regime develops WMD and/or harbors islamic terrorists willing to use them. As a citizen of that country, you can agree or disagree with the stance of your government, and, you can even decry or protest the fact that the terrorist attacks are indeed the result of the intervention of your country. In se, this is true of course - if Britain had not participated in the liberation of Iraq the bombs would most certainly have exploded in another country which did. Of course, a reasoning like that is either an exercise in futility or an act of cowardice, because in a world in which the biggest global threat is islamic terrorism, ultimately no one is safe, whether you stand in the front row or not. But we may even forgive our less gung-ho citizens this Chamberlainian attitude.
However, once we have gotten there, the ways of the Chamberlains and the Churchills among us should converge. Once that you are in it, you are in it, and under normal circumstances even the biggest coward should have no problem to discern who the bad boys are, and who the guys around which to gather for the retaliation, even if it is from the rear, even if it is to come up with an alternative strategy.
Here is where we can detect what is totally fucked up - excuse me for the mot - in our present postmodern, post christian, post everything societies.
We have in our midst, and not just in our midst, but in all kinds of important posts and functions and channels, a certain influential kind of people who are unable to identify evil, even when they trot in the guts of a dismembered person who the moment before was sitting next to them. Rescue personnel scrape the blackened remains of commuters from underground walls, and instead of at once recognizing the heinous, unbelievably evil nature of the enemy we are facing... those petty "intellectuals" trip over their words in their haste to call their own leader.... the biggest terrorist!!! This is not normal anymore , and apart from protesting the outrageous lies and accusations, we - the normal ones - must address this very, very serious, and apparently deeply rooted major malfunction. There is something rotten, not just in the State of Denmark, but in all western states, and it bears serious scrutiny. As we approach a pivotal election in the leading nation of the West, indeed in the leading nation on the planet, it is more important than ever that the voices among us who basically advocate self-destruction, are answered. I do not say silenced, because to do so would mean to compromise a key western value. Silencing opponents is something for leftists, and we can never allow ourselves to stoop to that level. We must simply trust that if we bring on the basic, honest arguments and tell our children the West's stories and histories, not just the highlights, but also the things we can't indeed be too proud of, they will be able to see that in spite of the warts, there's more than enough to be immensely proud of.
Hat tip for the article with the Thatcher allegation Luc Van Braekel.
MFBB.
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