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The Idiotic One on Serbia

Friday, 8th June 2007

I've resisted mentioning The Idiotic One for a while, but I can do so no longer. Here he is on his favourite topic:

[S]ince the US sponsored coup-d'etat against President Milosevic in 2000 and the decapitation of the Serbian Socialist Party, life has become much harder for the people of Serbia... But of course, the enforced changes of October 2000 were not about improving the life of the majority of Serbs. They were about installing a quisling government that would line up obediently to join the EU and NATO and sell of [sic] the nation's assets to foreign capital.

The Idiotic One (aka Neil Clark) wrote an article for the Guardian recently about Bernard Kouchner's position on the Iraq War without first troubling to read - or even being capable of reading* - such specialised, technical and obscure material as the previous Friday's edition of France's leading newspaper.

Yesterday's post displays similar perspicacity. Four years is clearly insufficient for facts to permeate his brain:

A controversial privatisation arranged by the sometime British foreign secretary Lord Hurd with Slobodan Milosevic unravelled yesterday when the Serbian government said it was buying back a hefty share of its national telecommunications network from Italy. The Serbian prime minister, Zoran Djindjic, said Belgrade was buying back the 29% stake in Telekom Serbia sold to Telecom Italia in 1997 in a deal mediated by Lord Hurd, then deputy chairman of NatWest Markets. Although there has never been any suggestion of impropriety on Lord Hurd's part, the deal attracted fierce criticism. It presented Mr Milosevic with a $1bn (£625m) windfall a year before his campaign to drive Kosovan Albanians from their homes and at a time when as Serbian leader he was facing down huge protest demonstrations in Belgrade.
The Guardian, 30 Deecmber 2002

How did he ever get to teach at Oxford Tutorial College?

*Do read this from my old blog - I think it's very funny, if I say so myself:

I tried googling his nonsense-phrase "C'est ne pas France" in inverted commas to see if he might have got it from somewhere. It's difficult to believe, but there is literally not a single hit. This means that every single person who has ever written a word of French that has ended up on the internet is less stupid than Neil Clark.

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Joshua

June 8th, 2007 10:43am

I think this is all a little bit unfair. Formerly, when a mere three or four thousand people a day had access to these ideas at your old blog, the damage to Neil Clark's reputation was rather minimal. Now the situation is very different for your blog at the Speccie is read by countless thousands including the editors of many leading newspapers. Who in her or his right mind is going to hire Clark to write one of his hilarious pieces on such matters as eating out in Brussels on 50 pence a day or the joys of rationing in 1940s Britain after reading one of your devastating attacks? This distresses me. It is upsetting to think that on the salary of a lowly school teacher Clark will no longer be able to add to the gaiety of nations by suing wealthy bankers in this or that county court for hurting his feelings. More importantly, Clark's wife has been beavering away for many years now on what is quite possibly the most eagerly awaited book of the decade, at least by The Hungarian Communist Party. If he is no longer able to support her how will she finish it? If you are not persuaded by these arguments then at least show some rachmones. As the great Frankie Howerd often remarked: "Oooh noo, please, it's wicked to mock the afflicted!"

Bob Doney

June 8th, 2007 4:13pm

Clarkie, N has a piece on the Guardian's Comment is Free at the moment, about Clarkie, Ken as it happens. He manages to get through all of four paragraphs before he has to mention "uber-neocon commentator Stephen Pollard.....". Is there something personal going on here we should all be aware of?!