Sunday, July 20, 2014

History will judge, oh - and airplane crashes.

Now that tragedy has struck again for Malaysian airlines after the first disaster of #MH370 (the current one is the downing of one of their planes #MH17 over Ukraine), I was really - and I mean really - eager to see how Malaysian transport minister Hishammuddin Hussein was going to handle this one. Tough luck, in a country not exactly known to be a full democracy, Hussein was actually discharged from his post.
Considering he was also the minister of defence (and from what I understood still is), he is also - no, no, nothing to do with corruption and nepotism - the cousin of Najib Razzak, the prime minister. So going as far as discharging him from his post truly speaks volumes about how bad the situation was and the ultimately bad job he did.
So it's interesting that Mr. Hishammudin has been so vilified by the way he handled the crisis of thr #MH370 would end up saying "I think history will judge us well" about the situation - other people who used a variant of this sentence include George W. Bush with "History will ultimately judge [...] I am a content man" and Fidel Castro "history will absolve me"(so basically he is in good company - or a bad one, depending on how you look at it).
(C) Plantu
It reminds of the Plantu caricature published after the Soviets downed a Korean Airlines Boeing in 1983 after "detecting signs of an aviation tragedy" the Soviet fighter planes decided "to put an end to the flight". Which could be one of the first uses of the "preemtive attack" doctrine history will judge George W. Bush on.

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