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May 03, 2004
The Skinny on Kofi Annan
Via Samizdata, Brian Micklethwait gets it right :
A similar error of false adoration was made by the more elderly admirers of Kofi Annan, when younger, with that other African Holy Man of severe actual unholiness, Julius Nyerere. As with Nyerere, it is hard to tell what proportion of Annan's catastrophic blunders to attribute to sheer stupidity, and how much to actual wickedness. I suspect a combination of the two in the form of a murderously stubborn stupidity, which combines intellectual mediocrity with an immoral unwillingness to admit to error, possibly all floating in the same delusions as those that engulf the minds of his worshippers, but perhaps caused by mere vanity.
Go read it all as there's more.
May 3, 2004 in Current Affairs | Permalink
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Comments
Tim
Many thanks for this response.
Two grammatical blemishes, one mine, one yours. Yours is that I don't, unlike all others with "thwait(e)" at the end of their names, have an e at the end of mine. Micklethwait. The other is that there is a stray "his" inserted towards the end of the bit you copied and pasted. It is now corrected in the original.
If you want to make these two changes and delete this comment, good. If you have a rule about not changing postings, on account of this being the thin end of a much nastier wedge, via the insertion of such words as "not" and "effectively", and ending in Stalinist airbrushing of history - I would totally respect that.
We are allowed a little cleaning up and ADDENDUMing at Samizdata, but it's up to us not to go too far with it. On the other hand, we aren't allowed to say it's or aren't, which I regret.
Posted by: Brian Micklethwait | May 3, 2004 3:16:13 PM
