Fintan O'Toole Quote
In a double-page spread in 1999, the Daily Mail ran a large photo of fake Nazis from ’Allo ’Allo! with a think-piece headlined ‘In the week that Germany kept the old feud alive by illegally banning British beef: Why it’s a good thing for us to be beastly to the Germans.’ It was written, not by some hack but by the distinguished historian Niall Ferguson. He found a way to argue both that the ‘war’ with Germany was entirely phoney and that it was nonetheless worth continuing because it was somehow in Europe’s best interests. While conceding ‘The reality is that we have more in common with the Germans than with any other European people’, Ferguson managed to conclude that ‘bad Anglo-German relations were (paradoxically) a good thing. To be precise: it would really be rather bad for everyone else in Europe if Britain and Germany did strike up a firm alliance.
In a double-page spread in 1999, the Daily Mail ran a large photo of fake Nazis from ’Allo ’Allo! with a think-piece headlined ‘In the week that Germany kept the old feud alive by illegally banning British beef: Why it’s a good thing for us to be beastly to the Germans.’ It was written, not by some hack but by the distinguished historian Niall Ferguson. He found a way to argue both that the ‘war’ with Germany was entirely phoney and that it was nonetheless worth continuing because it was somehow in Europe’s best interests. While conceding ‘The reality is that we have more in common with the Germans than with any other European people’, Ferguson managed to conclude that ‘bad Anglo-German relations were (paradoxically) a good thing. To be precise: it would really be rather bad for everyone else in Europe if Britain and Germany did strike up a firm alliance.
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About Fintan O'Toole
In 2011, O'Toole was named by The Observer as one of "Britain's top 300 intellectuals", despite not being British nor living in the United Kingdom. In 2012 and 2013, O'Toole was a visiting lecturer in Irish letters at Princeton University and contributed to the Fund for Irish Studies Series.