............................
AND HERE WE COME TO THAT ABOMINABLE:
.....(pre-UK general election 2006 - updated slightly Jan 07)
There now follows…
A deadly-serious topical note:
Take a moment to just scroll down the list on Bill Blum's site:and observe the scarcely conceivable US legacy over recent decades. I wonder if there are any on this list that the UK government - that is, OUR representatives - openly criticised?
While you're there check out his latest essay (and earlier ones too) by clicking on the date - see the mass of red dates under 'ANTI EMPIRE REPORTS' - and subscribe also for free emails of the reports, as for instance as well with:
http://www.informationclearinghouse.info
Both these important sites show the facts of what US/UK politicians (ie, business representatives) are actually doing to our world. And that's apart from the ongoing massive destruction of the atmosphere they're responsible for.
What, though, is the very worst thing a government can do? I mean truly, on the grand scale of things? Right, destroy the environment as they're doing. But what next? Plunging their citizens into poverty? Slamming them up and torturing them? Genocide? Well, I suppose that's pretty serious. But how about slaughtering half a million ordinary civilian people in another country, people who were otherwise going peaceably about their daily lives just as you and I are doing now? And how about in addition, the permanent maiming and traumatising of hundreds of thousands more? And then the razing to the ground of millions of homes, even whole cities? Can you think of a worse crime a government can commit? Remember, the victims of this brutal and criminal foreign (UK) government act had no say in what supposedly provoked such an attack.
In my meagre opinion, anyone who in this election voted Tory or Labour is either a brute or an ignoramus - or both. Antiwar Labour MPs who failed to resign from the party are hypocrites - unless they regard genocide less significant than other issues. But it is precisely these two parties who would leap, at the slightest excuse, to commit further atrocities beyond what they jointly already have committed. Never mind what reason they concoct - anyone who supports either of these parties is guilty: they either don't know, or don't care about anything that really counts in this world. What's more, we pay our politicians, surely, to do everything within their power to avoid war and death - not, as has happened, to do everything possible to cause it. The invasion was a free choice. No-one was under attack from Iraq or even threatened - and we all knew it.
Imagine: if only a handful of other governments behaved as the current Labour government has; imagine how the world would be right now - everywhere submerged in blood, war, terror, bombings, shootings - people the world over would be, like Iraqis now, in fear of their lives, living in rubble, turmoil and despair. There would be nowhere to escape to. The air and soil would be laden with depleted uranium. Cancers - as in Iraq - would abound; generations would be affected; possibly it would lead to a kind of hiatus in, if not a termination of, the entire human enterprise - perhaps even the very existence of humankind. And it would be our middle-class rulers to blame. Can any country afford a war-happy government?
The following six short paragraphs are extracts from a pre-election article by John Pilger in 'The New Statesman' 21.4.05. The complete article can be found at http://snipurl.com/e5ye :
"By voting for Blair, you will walk over the corpses of at least 100,000 people, most of them innocent women and children and the elderly, slaughtered by rapacious forces sent by Blair and Bush, unprovoked and in defiance of international law, to a defenceless country.
"By voting for Blair, you will be turning a deaf ear to the cries of countless Iraqi children blown up by British cluster bombs and poisoned by toxic explosions of depleted uranium.
"By voting for Blair, you will turn away from the tens of thousands of children left to starve in Iraq by his and Bush's invasion. On 30 March, the United Nations Commission on Human Rights heard that malnutrition rates among Iraqi infants under the age of five had almost doubled since the invasion - double the number of hungry children under Saddam Hussein.
"By voting for Blair, you will be affirming that liars triumph. Blair is a liar on such an epic scale that even those who still protect him with parliamentary euphemisms, like Robin Cook and the Guardian and the BBC, now struggle to finesse his perjury.
"By voting for Blair, you will invite more lies about terrorist scares in Britain so that totalitarian laws can be enacted.
"The ballyhooed 'boom' and 'growth' in Britain have been booms for the rich, not for ordinary people. With scant media attention, the Blair government has transferred billions of pounds' worth of public services into private hands under the private finance initiative (PFI)."
I would add to this that Blair will regard Labour's re-election as an endorsement of his heinous activities, and will probably now sell us out completely to Washington - if he hasn't already. Blair has behaved like a psychopath - nothing dents his confidence, he is arrogant to the limit.
Winning this election can only boost the Con Man's power-lust and bloodlust for more collusion in invasions and slaughter: Iran, Syria, N Korea… etc. It may be true that by allowing him to commit atrocities, it is those close to him who are chiefly responsible, but they're all in it together: the cabinet, junior ministers, the lot. And quite apart from this there is the huge cost of committing the massacres and horrors in Iraq - £6bn has been quoted - that's more than £100 for every person in the UK. Then there's the even greater cost of the immense handouts of our money to his business pals in PFI schemes. Add to this the danger to civil liberties in watering down the Magna Carta, and on, and on… too tedious to list. The only way to get rid of this abysmal menace and replace it… the only way a decent Labour Party stands a chance of being resurrected… is to utterly annihilate the existing counterfeit version. This has not happened.
The more 'Labour' MPs defect from their bogus party, and the sooner the Labour Party is completely purged of its higher and middle ranks, the better it will be for us all - war-mongering Tories included, because of the now grey mush of same-policy Labour/Tory programmes and propaganda. And this can only happen if Labour ceases to be the government.
In spite of all this, whichever party wins (Tory or Labour), BIG BUSINESS - as usual - will be the all-time victor. (The CBI approves both equally) Which means, the losers are… yep, you've guessed it. Same old story… ad infinitum.
How many people would baulk at the suggestion that Blair has actually been jointly employed since the mid-nineties by, say, the Duke of Westminster (or similar) and friends, and the neocons in Washington; and that his mandate to effectively reverse the huge Tory defeat of 1997, together with a virtual destruction of what was once the Labour Party, has been accomplished? Does that sound remotely plausible? Well, if there's any truth in this - and it seems likely - then it's really quite an achievement, no less than spectacular! Hitler would have applauded with relish - joining the unprecedented succession of standing ovations Blair received in Washington, an occasion that was as deserving as a republican convention of being labelled a 'Corporate Orgy' of first rank.
Eight years ago, in May 1997, a couple of weeks after Bair became PM, Gore Vidal wrote a poignant item in 'The Nation'. In it he described the reactions of a crowd of aristocratic acquaintances of his who had met on the day after the election in a big plush Park Lane hotel. Nearly thirty years earlier, he reflected, he had done precisely the same thing and watched the response to the election of Harold Wilson as Labour Prime Minister. Back then, the little legion of wealthy clientele in the hotel lounge was devastated; they almost wept. As representative of the rich ruling class, big landowners, investors in industry, etc, they had good reason to be unhappy - though as it turned out Wilson scarcely touched them in any significant way.
The story Vidal tells of 1997 is very different. This time the little band of super-rich flourished their glasses of champagne in very good cheer and drunk to health of the New Labour PM. Did they know something we didn't? Was there in fact a conspiracy between Blair and his closest, together with the ruling class and Washington - to decimate the credibility of the Labour party (in the circumstances of a completely discredited Tory party at the time)? And was it the intention in the same stroke to slyly continue Tory policy in every sense (as indeed they did, quoting 'fiscal prudence' and other hollow excuses)?
So there Blair stands, the ultimate traitor, steadfast, sanguine, sadistic, and - together with his side-kicks - reinvigorated. And there stands us, the gullible, ignorant, venomous mass, poised to hoist him once more onto our shoulders and adorn him with flowers - the psychopath extraordinaire. Power again, and again the monster stands ready and eager for battle, for enriching his friends, and most of all, perhaps, for yet another round of genocide!!! (First Serbia, then Afghanistan, then Iraq… where next???) And, of course, for whatever else his bosses in Washington - or now at The World Bank - command.
