Saturday, October 29, 2005

Everybody remembers that one

As we know, the President of Iran has called for Israel to be wiped off the map. The usual suspects have their pat response:
"I have never come across a situation in which the president of a country has said they want to wipe out another country. That is unacceptable."
The unacceptable seems to have been accepted quite a lot. There is quite a number of countries that I can think of that have been wiped off the map. Among them (I will post more when I think of them) are the following - spot the ones that have been wiped on again:

Carthage (146 B.C)
Poland in the nineteenth century.
Apartheid South Africa (non-apartheid S.A. is still there but the bantustans should be shaded in differently these days!)
The Soviet Union
North and South Rhodesia
Tanganyika and Nyasaland
Austria-Hungary
Schleswig-Holstein, Prussia, Saxony, Hanover, Bohemia, etc.
Aragon, Castile, Catalonia, etc.
Czechoslovakia
Mercia, Anglia, Northumbria and Wessex
Burgundy
The Confederated States
Macedonia, Montenegro, Croatia, Serbia, Slovenia
The Ottoman Empire
Savoy


Some of these we don't miss; others, like Poland, were an international disgrace. But they only remember the first one.

Now I don't think Israel should be wiped off the map. After all, if it were, where could the Palestinians have right of return to? But that's not what is on offer; what is more likely is the bombing of Iran.

What Blair is thinking, what Bush is thinking and what the president of Iran is thinking are all subjects for speculation in later posts. But this is the moment of prestidigitation, when the fork is being bent on the belt buckle and the threat of genocide is being conjured out of thin air to distract us from seeing it done.