BREAKING: Tony Blair shot & wounded!
Long Pole | 31.08.2010 22:56 | Analysis | Iraq | Terror War
I can't remember!
So goes the line when the guilty are forced to face the truth.
In a few days, Tony Blair, self styled 'man of history' and 'wartime leader', will release his memoirs called 'A Journey' (the title had to be changed from 'THE Journey' at the last minute).
Nobody knows what the book will contain but absolutely everybody knows what it will NOT contain.
What it will not contain is an explanation for Mr Blair's role in misleading the British Parliament and, more seriously, the British people over his governments persistence for the case for going to war in Iraq. It will not contain any mention as to why his government, despite a huge public outcry, refused to re-adjust its position over Iraq in the face of very serious threats of withdrawal of political and public consensus. It will not contain any real explanation for why he spent four years defending his actions as Iraq cartwheeled into misery. It will not contain an apology.
It will not contain anything other than a belligerent, clumsy, contrived and morally distant attempt to reassemble what slivers remain of his dismembered reputation.
In short, his book will contain nothing of any moral or sympathetic substance which will help the vast majority of the British or Iraqi people understand why he rigidly pursued and defended the case for war, even as the original case fell apart, millions of Iraqi's fled to neighbouring states, hundreds of thousands were slaughtered and the sovereign state of Iraq collapsed before the world eyes.
Instead, what we will get is public relations soap opera transcribed into 'media friendly' food for the masses and TV script screenplay. What we will get is an amalgamation of populist culture mixed with mass death, terrorism and self regarding out-of-date individualism.
After the deaths of over 100,000 Iraqi's, after the destruction of the countries infrastructure and decapitation of its underlying societal cohesion (however distasteful that may have been for Mr Blair and his acolytes) we will be rewarded for our inherent sense of public justice for the national good with a 'version of history' that will be bitter on the tongue. It will be history gilded with a patina of guilt, resentment and hatred for his enemies, wrapped in a sham indifference to those who have brought him low. It will be a vanity version of his part in 'our' story, painted with TV makeup and a salesman's smile with a cynical dependence on false optimism.
Already, the pre-publicity knife throwers are out. Blairs 'media assassins' are positioning themselves to slice up the inevitable reaction with their colouring pencils. Black is white, white is black. Bad is good, good is bad. For a criminal to mark his place in history, he must make the world a criminal first. How else is his reputation to survive?
From the very start, Mr Blair has perpetually swapped the word 'I' for 'you'. From the very start, Mr Blair has always justified 'his' decision making by crudely and oddly suggesting 'you' would have done the same!
You would not have done the same.
This simple fact, in and of itself, is why his 'journey' was needed at all.
Mr Blair releases his book and uses all the modern techniques of actor, entertainer, publicity agent and TV persona to pole axe the distant public into confused moral concussion just long enough to rob them blind. His assurances that payment for the book is to go to the British legion is simply marketing technique, that the British legion are 'bound' to accept. You'd be surprised to learn, that the Royal British Legion has very heavy debts on its books! It is not a healthy organisation. Very little of the books sales will ever arrive in the bank accounts of a soldier who is facing the daunting prospect of spending the rest of his life as a cripple.
And the protests?
In 2003 the Labour controlled opposition group, the STWC, rallied against Mr Blair under the slogan 'Not in my Name'. But in their name it was. The STWC are Labour and always have been, they hate only one thing more than the crime of war itself, and that is that a serving member of their beloved Labour party should become a criminal of that very same war. Mr Blair has always been tremendously grateful to them for their service to their party, he has always relied on them for that.
Small wonder then, that the books release should occur just as the STWC support base has completely collapsed. At no time since 2003, has the STWC made any serious attempt, whatsoever, to bring charges against Mr Blair despite all the money it has collected from the public. This the organisation that were most vociferous in their calling him a war criminal. From the very start, the STWC have acted to protect Mr Blair by taking charge of anything that may have genuinely threatened him, and the wider Labour party, and then set about carefully rendering it completely ineffective. If there is one thing the British public cannot stand, it is foul-mouthed socialist's marching through the streets screaming abuse and dictating the terns of reason. And the STWC, the Labour party and the SWP know it!
In political slang, the term is 'total control'. Its primary tactic is 'crafted aversion'.
It is a modern ideology borne of tactical necessity and its underlying structure is based on a curious mix of media infiltration, psychology and political science. At its heart is a poisonous brew of degradation of the public spirit and assassination of the public conscience. It depends on one thing more than anything else, poaching of the limelight.
Mr Blair will not be here in the UK when this toxic carcinogen is placed on the shelves of the book stores. He will be in the United States in his role of Peace Envoy. A role given to him by international concerns more worried about a British PM being charged with the supreme crime of waging wars of aggression, and who look beyond domestic party loyalties here in the UK, so much so, that they are willing to give him his very own pot to piss in.
But Mr Blair has pre-recorded an interview with Labour loyalist Andrew Marr, a BBC employee and another acolyte. In it, he will continue to cling to 'his story' and will continue to place his 'individualism' above and beyond the hundreds of thousands of the dead, maimed, crippled, injured and displaced. He will continue to place himself above and beyond his crimes, our failures and the national good.
Much of what he will say will be heavily dependent on the public recollection of now distant events. Gone will be his fight to stop his war plans from collapsing, gone will be his determined efforts to confuse and sidestep members of his own cabinet from voicing their concerns, gone will be the rigid determination to 'see it through'. Instead, the old supposed wounds and so-called animosity between himself and partner in crime Gordon Brown, will be reopened as tactic with yet more mileage in it.
Yes, Gordon Brown too. The party comes first.
So here we are, all of us together, little Englanders.
I can't remember?
So goes the line when the guilty are forced to face the truth.
So goes the line when the guilty are forced to face the truth.
In a few days, Tony Blair, self styled 'man of history' and 'wartime leader', will release his memoirs called 'A Journey' (the title had to be changed from 'THE Journey' at the last minute).
Nobody knows what the book will contain but absolutely everybody knows what it will NOT contain.
What it will not contain is an explanation for Mr Blair's role in misleading the British Parliament and, more seriously, the British people over his governments persistence for the case for going to war in Iraq. It will not contain any mention as to why his government, despite a huge public outcry, refused to re-adjust its position over Iraq in the face of very serious threats of withdrawal of political and public consensus. It will not contain any real explanation for why he spent four years defending his actions as Iraq cartwheeled into misery. It will not contain an apology.
It will not contain anything other than a belligerent, clumsy, contrived and morally distant attempt to reassemble what slivers remain of his dismembered reputation.
In short, his book will contain nothing of any moral or sympathetic substance which will help the vast majority of the British or Iraqi people understand why he rigidly pursued and defended the case for war, even as the original case fell apart, millions of Iraqi's fled to neighbouring states, hundreds of thousands were slaughtered and the sovereign state of Iraq collapsed before the world eyes.
Instead, what we will get is public relations soap opera transcribed into 'media friendly' food for the masses and TV script screenplay. What we will get is an amalgamation of populist culture mixed with mass death, terrorism and self regarding out-of-date individualism.
After the deaths of over 100,000 Iraqi's, after the destruction of the countries infrastructure and decapitation of its underlying societal cohesion (however distasteful that may have been for Mr Blair and his acolytes) we will be rewarded for our inherent sense of public justice for the national good with a 'version of history' that will be bitter on the tongue. It will be history gilded with a patina of guilt, resentment and hatred for his enemies, wrapped in a sham indifference to those who have brought him low. It will be a vanity version of his part in 'our' story, painted with TV makeup and a salesman's smile with a cynical dependence on false optimism.
Already, the pre-publicity knife throwers are out. Blairs 'media assassins' are positioning themselves to slice up the inevitable reaction with their colouring pencils. Black is white, white is black. Bad is good, good is bad. For a criminal to mark his place in history, he must make the world a criminal first. How else is his reputation to survive?
From the very start, Mr Blair has perpetually swapped the word 'I' for 'you'. From the very start, Mr Blair has always justified 'his' decision making by crudely and oddly suggesting 'you' would have done the same!
You would not have done the same.
This simple fact, in and of itself, is why his 'journey' was needed at all.
Mr Blair releases his book and uses all the modern techniques of actor, entertainer, publicity agent and TV persona to pole axe the distant public into confused moral concussion just long enough to rob them blind. His assurances that payment for the book is to go to the British legion is simply marketing technique, that the British legion are 'bound' to accept. You'd be surprised to learn, that the Royal British Legion has very heavy debts on its books! It is not a healthy organisation. Very little of the books sales will ever arrive in the bank accounts of a soldier who is facing the daunting prospect of spending the rest of his life as a cripple.
And the protests?
In 2003 the Labour controlled opposition group, the STWC, rallied against Mr Blair under the slogan 'Not in my Name'. But in their name it was. The STWC are Labour and always have been, they hate only one thing more than the crime of war itself, and that is that a serving member of their beloved Labour party should become a criminal of that very same war. Mr Blair has always been tremendously grateful to them for their service to their party, he has always relied on them for that.
Small wonder then, that the books release should occur just as the STWC support base has completely collapsed. At no time since 2003, has the STWC made any serious attempt, whatsoever, to bring charges against Mr Blair despite all the money it has collected from the public. This the organisation that were most vociferous in their calling him a war criminal. From the very start, the STWC have acted to protect Mr Blair by taking charge of anything that may have genuinely threatened him, and the wider Labour party, and then set about carefully rendering it completely ineffective. If there is one thing the British public cannot stand, it is foul-mouthed socialist's marching through the streets screaming abuse and dictating the terns of reason. And the STWC, the Labour party and the SWP know it!
In political slang, the term is 'total control'. Its primary tactic is 'crafted aversion'.
It is a modern ideology borne of tactical necessity and its underlying structure is based on a curious mix of media infiltration, psychology and political science. At its heart is a poisonous brew of degradation of the public spirit and assassination of the public conscience. It depends on one thing more than anything else, poaching of the limelight.
Mr Blair will not be here in the UK when this toxic carcinogen is placed on the shelves of the book stores. He will be in the United States in his role of Peace Envoy. A role given to him by international concerns more worried about a British PM being charged with the supreme crime of waging wars of aggression, and who look beyond domestic party loyalties here in the UK, so much so, that they are willing to give him his very own pot to piss in.
But Mr Blair has pre-recorded an interview with Labour loyalist Andrew Marr, a BBC employee and another acolyte. In it, he will continue to cling to 'his story' and will continue to place his 'individualism' above and beyond the hundreds of thousands of the dead, maimed, crippled, injured and displaced. He will continue to place himself above and beyond his crimes, our failures and the national good.
Much of what he will say will be heavily dependent on the public recollection of now distant events. Gone will be his fight to stop his war plans from collapsing, gone will be his determined efforts to confuse and sidestep members of his own cabinet from voicing their concerns, gone will be the rigid determination to 'see it through'. Instead, the old supposed wounds and so-called animosity between himself and partner in crime Gordon Brown, will be reopened as tactic with yet more mileage in it.
Yes, Gordon Brown too. The party comes first.
So here we are, all of us together, little Englanders.
I can't remember?
So goes the line when the guilty are forced to face the truth.
Long Pole
Comments
Hide the following 12 comments
misleading title you cheeky bugger
01.09.2010 12:49
disappointed
Not read the book and yet jumping to conclusions?
01.09.2010 16:46
Go and troll somewhere else, or write something that has a fact in it.
islam
O-mazing
01.09.2010 16:50
Remember him? The big nasty man that gassed lots of Kurds etc.etc.
Funny how quickly people forget history
doo-lally
"I don't like your book, you should of wrote it like this."
01.09.2010 17:34
If you don't like it, write you own bloody book!
cardinal
Odd comments by apologists
01.09.2010 20:06
Remember him?"
Yes. He's the guy we're supposed to hate so much, that we can turn a blind eye to the mass murder that took place in hunting him down.
Charles
Mentalist commentators!
01.09.2010 21:15
I haven't read Mein Kampf but my mind is still made up about Hitler. Funny that!!
T
christ almighty
02.09.2010 00:20
Saddam Hussein dictatorship has been estimated to have killed more people that the US did.
If Saddam was still in power he would still be killing and accumulating more deaths.
I very much doubt that anyone, even you, could of stopped Saddam without a big war.
If you could of, why didn't you put up your hand at the beginning?
I think a lot of people hated Saddam before we were told to hate him. He wasn't a very likable chap.
Whose side are you on exactly? Saddam's or Tony's?
And don't say 'neither'. That just means you would of sat back on your heiny doing nothing.
That would make you no better than the Nazi's just sitting in their prison camps doing nothing and being complacent rather than fixing the problem. Fuck Saddam, at least there wont be any repeats of the Al-anfal.
doo-lally
@t
02.09.2010 00:43
Yes, and he had to kill a lot of people to get Hitler out of power as well as Saddam. Funny that!
doo-lally
The kindness of the western powers
02.09.2010 07:03
Any proof of that, doo-lally?
Remember this one?:
"When asked on US television if she [Madeline Albright, US Secretary of State] thought that the death of half a million Iraqi children [from sanctions in Iraq, during the 1990s after the first Gulf War] was a price worth paying, Albright replied: “This is a very hard choice, but we think the price is worth it.”
Remember Rumsfeld shaking hands with Saddam?
Hitler was invading other countries when britain went to war with Germany - Saddam was accused of having WMDs that could be deployed in 45 minutes.
""On the basis of what we do know now, I still believe that leaving Saddam in power was a bigger risk to our security than removing him." - Blair's latest bollocks
rolleyes
Poor quality defenders, Blair is finished.
02.09.2010 09:13
Saddam Hussein dictatorship has been estimated to have killed more people that the US did.
If Saddam was still in power he would still be killing and accumulating more deaths.
I very much doubt that anyone, even you, could of stopped Saddam without a big war.
If you could of, why didn't you put up your hand at the beginning?
I think a lot of people hated Saddam before we were told to hate him. He wasn't a very likable chap.
Whose side are you on exactly? Saddam's or Tony's?
And don't say 'neither'. That just means you would of sat back on your heiny doing nothing.
That would make you no better than the Nazi's just sitting in their prison camps doing nothing and being complacent rather than fixing the problem. Fuck Saddam, at least there wont be any repeats of the Al-anfal. "
Where to start, there is so much wrong here.
Post evidence that Saddam Hussein killed anywhere near the number of people you falsely (and rather desperately) claim he killed. The trouble with 'estimates' is they are frequently complete bollocks, especially when those 'estimates' derive from Nato member countries or the 'media'. I mean this, evidence.
You see, the US and UK have a long history of using the media as a war chariot while they are planning their invasion and military 'campaigns'. The media are used to demonise and despotise our enemies. Saddam Hussein wasn't unpleasant because he killed people, we in the UK don't object to that sort of thing, he was unpleasant because we couldn't control him and he was a nuisance for the economy. After 9/11 Bush and Blair spotted the opportunity to remove him and took it. Bush led the way and Blair supported him fully knowing that this was all about regime change. WMD was always a joke.
The immediate post 9/11 environment was one in which the public could be counted on to be completely hysterical so Blair and Bush dismissed the legality of the invasion as unimportant. Blair actively undermined anybody who correctly stated concern over the venture. And he has rigidly defended this 'illegality' ever since.
It is the biggest joint political strategic and tactical misjudgement of the modern political era. The reputations of both the US & UK have never, in recent history, taken such a sustained and damaging blow to their credibility. It will decades before we recover.
For the Iraqi's, well 100,000 people are dead. Almost certainly more. Many of those almost certainly despised Saddam Hussein. Many were children, many women, many just appalled that their towns and villages should suddenly be overrun by soldiers itching to kill something as revenge for 9/11.
What do you think would have gone through the minds of those Iraqi's when they realised that the US and UK were only there to slaughter the population, so the american people could take pride in believing they themselves had been looked after?
Imagine if it were you! What would be going through your mind? I'll make this a tad more difficult. I'll give you two seven year old's, a daughter and a son. Now imagine that those soldiers don't give a shit about you or your children. What is going through your mind?
Who's side am I on?
Well I'm proud to say I'm on the side of reason, decency, fairness, honesty, genuine righteousness, equity and of course justice. Because of this I naturally despise the likes of Saddam Hussein, Tony Blair, George Bush et al. If I had my way they would be incarcerated under the mental health act and would be receiving treatment for the psychopathy that they clearly suffer from. In my world, they would be mental health patient service users not political leaders.
Whatever way you look at it, Mr Blair is a liar, a cheat, a fraudster and a murderer.
The tragedy of it is that there are still a tiny minority that cling to the idea he couldn't possibly be any of those things, that they couldn't possibly have been fooled, that Britain couldn't possibly have allowed this.
The truth hurts.
The only people who will defend these two psycho's now, are other psycho's!
Blair belongs in Jail, every minute he is free diminishes us all.
Charles
mmmm
02.09.2010 17:12
If you had your way they would be incarerated.... Brilliant
Guess what? Saddam Hussein might of said something like "No thanks, I'll stay here. I enjoy my life of killing lots of people, so I choose to ignore you."
I think your plan falls overs at that point.
Being "reason, decency, fairness, honesty, genuine righteousness, equity and of course justice" is good, but it not enough. Its called wishful thinking. Someone has got to fight and stop the bad guys. Thats what heros are for, men with courage and conviction who act and lead other, whilst other people just hand-wring and dither and wait for someone else to take action.
Hitler's regime was killing millions. To incarcerate him, we had to completely invade his country.
We sent our people to die fighting against his people who also died. Millions died. It wasn't nice, but it needed to be done. Basically, using logic and reasoning would of not worked on Hitler.
When are the left going to realise that some people will only answer to violence.
Was Winston Churchill a war criminal? Of course he wasn't, yet he ordered the bombing of German cities, killing many innocent civilians and workmen.
The only mistake England and France made was being too cowardly to deal with the problem fast enough. France had one of the biggest armies and could of easily took out German on its own if they went on the offensive.
If we just sat back and let Saddam continue his atrocities, those atrocities would be on our doorstep with state sponsored terrorism. FUck that, not even worth the risk in my books.
doo-lally
Time gentlemen please.
03.09.2010 10:03
If we just sat back and let Saddam continue his atrocities, those atrocities would be on our doorstep with state sponsored terrorism. FUck that, not even worth the risk in my books."
A common defence tactic used in defending Blair is to equate the invasion of Iraq and removal of Saddam Hussein with the second world war. The tactic seems to be lending credibilty to the invasion of Iraq by hijacking the reasoned and tested credibilty of World War Two. These two conflicts are not remotely comparable.
And your last paragraph clearly demonstrates that your logic is based on the defence of 'regime change'. This is highly illegal in the UK and highly illegal under International law.
Your defence of Mr Blair is circular and ends with an indictment.
A previous commentator rightly points out that Mr Blairs defenders are in woeful shape and are really floundering now. Correct it seems.
It appears this matter should indeed be tested in a court of law.
T