Loved this to bits, wonderful repartee'

Read this full article if you can, its just brilliant. I am so jealous, I can never be quick like this!

Look who's sneering

One of the most childish and irritating of retorts has become a setpiece of diplomatic repartee
Geoffrey Wheatcroft
Tuesday October 16, 2007
The Guardian

Of all human instincts, not even the urge to say "I told you so" is stronger than the response called tu quoque: "Look who's talking." To judge from children, it is innate ("Cathy says you took her chocolate," "Yes but she stole my doll"), and we don't grow out of it, to judge by politicians in one country or another who are positively addicted to the tu quoque

There has just been a real collector's item. France has led calls for pressure to be put on the Burmese junta at the security council and through the EU, where foreign ministers discussed the issue yesterday. As part of the push it has tried to enlist a recalcitrant Russia which, conscious perhaps of Chechnya, has no great wish to be seen criticising anyone else's internal affairs. Hence a Russian minister's response that the next time there were riots in France he would refer the matter to the UN.

This reply was at once childish, irrelevant, and probably very gratifying. Even those who bridled at Nicolas Sarkozy's conduct during the banlieue riots two years ago - when he said that the rioters were racaille, or rabble, who should be blasted away with high-pressure hoses - can scarcely suppose that comparing this with what's happening on the streets of Rangoon is like with like, but the "look who's talking" is rarely susceptible to reason.

Then again, the tu quoque biter is sometimes bit, and the French have their own talent in this regard, as Sarkozy's predecessor, Jacques Chirac, showed. When the Americans were yet again instructing the EU to admit Turkey, Chirac said this was no more Bush's business than it would be his to tell Bush how to deal with Mexico. In a way it wasn't a bad point, but it didn't really address the pros and cons of Turkish admission.

All this has a very long history. Gladstone was the most high-minded, and sometimes self-righteous, of Victorian statesmen, and liked to lecture foreign rulers such as Prince Schwarzenberg about Austrian misrule of subject peoples. Schwarzenberg was quick-witted enough to make the obvious retort: Ireland. The British were always vulnerable to the charge of hypocrisy when they proclaimed the merits of parliamentary democracy while expanding their empire, until the Americans conveniently took over the role.

During the war, when Roosevelt chided Churchill about the Raj, Churchill had his own tu quoque to hand: the fate of Native Americans. And when an American made a sneering remark about British colonial conquest in the early 19th century, a British diplomat retorted: "That would be about the time of the Mexican war, wouldn't it?"

By the time the US was entering its own hegemonic age, the evils of communism and colonialism were denounced by idealistic meddlers of the type Graham Greene depicted in The Quiet American, but they were always liable to be reminded of Jim Crow and the lynch mob.

A further refinement comes when tu quoque turns into ignoratio elenchi, the term in logic for refuting a proposition that has not been advanced, and if that sounds recondite, you can be sure you've heard it in practice. ("You were drunk again last night." "And your mother's an ugly cow." The latter statement may be accurate, but it does not address the former proposition.) When reporting from Johannesburg 25 years ago, I well remember how, if you mentioned conditions in the townships to well-meaning white South Africans, they would say "But have you seen the slums of Nairobi and Addis Ababa?", to which the answer was: "Yes, actually, but we weren't talking about Addis or Nairobi, we were talking about Soweto."

In Soviet Russia this was so much a part of official rhetoric that it was turned into one of the classic jokes associated with the (in every sense) legendary Radio Armenia station. A caller-in asks the programme's political expert "What is the average wage of an industrial worker in the US?" After a very long pause the answer comes: "They kill negroes."

But nowhere is the tu quoque so popular as in the endless, exhausting debates about the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. When I reluctantly took part as a witness in The Moral Maze (a programme that has always irritated me, from its name on), Michael Gove, the bumptious columnist turned Tory MP, thought he was ambushing me by asking: "Tell me, why is Israel so much more criticised for what it does in Gaza than China for what it does in Tibet?"

Stifling the reply "What an effing silly question you tiresome little tick", I muttered something about how the answer would take too long, but anyway two wrongs don't make a right. And yet, although we're meant to be taught that early on, the inner child will always want to retort: "Look who's talking!" wheaty@compuserve.com

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