Blair's Forgotten Victims- John Pilger

[chlamor]

Blair's forgotten victims

John Pilger, The New Statesman

April 21, 2005

A familiar, if desperate media push is under way to convince the British people that the main political parties offer them a democratic choice in the general election on 5 May. This demonstrable absurdity became hilarious when Tony Blair, leader of one of the nastiest, most violent right-wing regimes in memory, announced the existence of "a very nasty right-wing campaign" to defeat him. If only it was that funny. If only it was possible to read the "ah but" tributes to a "successful" Labour government without cracking a rib. If only it was possible to read warmongers bemoaning the "apathy" of the British electorate without one's laughter being overtaken by the urge to throw up.

Truth can be subverted, but for millions of decent Britons the subversion is over, and the penny has finally dropped. For that, they have Blair to thank. On 5 May, they will silently go on strike against a corrupt, undemocratic system, as they did at the last election, producing the lowest turnout since the franchise, including barely a third in some constituencies. Others will come under extraordinary pressure to put aside considerations of basic morality and vote for this "successful" Blair government. They - allow me to change that to you - ought to be aware of what this will mean for your fellow human beings.

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. That conservative estimate is the conclusion of a peer-reviewed Anglo-American study, published in the British medical journal the Lancet. It is the most reliable glimpse we have of the criminal carnage caused by Blair and Bush in Iraq, and it is suppressed in this election "campaign".

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. These unseen victims of Blair and Bush - including Iraqi women who have developed rare "pregnancy cancer", and children with unexplained leukaemia - will not be your concern. According to one of the military experts who cleaned up Kuwait after the 1991 Gulf war, Blair and Bush have created "another Hiroshima" in parts of Iraq. You will be voting to endorse that.

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[oblivious]

1. How could anyone possibly vote for a known instigator of mass murder!

[SweetLeftFoot]

2. Blair's foreign policy

Blair stopped the bombs in London and set off a few in Baghdad. Most Brits will take the trade off.

[Briar]

4. What bombs in London?

Only Bush (and "Tommy" Friedman) expect people to accept that fighting the Iraqis has stopped the terrorists.

[SweetLeftFoot]

7. Ahem

The giant truck bombs the IRA used to devastate central London and Manchester in 1996 and 1994. The smaller bombs aimed at civilian targets they used from 1972 until that date. Blair used negotiation (and common sense) to stop those.

[ikri]

3. When the choice is Blair vs Tory

Its pretty easy.

Blair may be a lying SOB who's actions have caused the deaths of thousands of innocent civillians.

But when the only real alternative to Labour is the Conservatives (who would have gone to war too, don't forget) then the only option is to vote for Blair.

Outside of a small area around the south east of england, the Tory party decimated large parts of the UK with their policies whilst they were in power. There's a huge proportion in the UK who might hate Blair, but we hate the Tories more.

[Briar]

5. You suppose there is a difference between Bliar and the Tories

In fact Bliar has destroyed the real alternative to Thatcherism, and adopted Tahtchism for himself, so that makes him worse in my eyes.

[nightfire]

6. A little "backstory" on Blair and his tory tendencies

Blair's poll prospects
www.dawn.com/2005/02/12/op.htm#4

The perpetual struggle for the "soul" of the British Labour Party was placed on hold in the posh Granita restaurant in 1994 in a legendary deal struck between rivals Tony Blair and Gordon Brown as to the terms of their leadership of Labour, an internal struggle viewed as wasting energies better focused on dumping the Tories. The expedient agreement, which was dramatized in a British television 2003 drama entitled "The Deal," installed Tony Blair as leader with Gordon Brown as his conditionally loyal sidekick, and paved the way in 1997 for the business-chummy New Labour programme in an election that the party would have won in a breeze no matter who led it.

Brown evidently agreed to back Blair's leadership contingent on Blair stepping aside for him after no more than two full terms as prime minister. Brown always had a bit more sympathy for the so-called old Labour values of social justice than does Blair, who is disdainful of anything that smacks of socialism. But Brown was hardly averse to giving the managerial neo-liberal agenda Blair championed a try to regain office after 18 years.

One big drawback, as Labour Party maverick and former cabinet minister Clare Short observes in her new book An Honourable Deception? is that a ruthless win-at-all-costs New Labour vanguard "has little idea what it wants power for, and because it focused on winning media approval tends to drift steadily in a direction approved by the Murdoch press."
But power the New Labour wing of the party took, and kept through a second term, despite cosying up to big money interests, who are not the bosom buddies of average Labour voters. Still, for all Blair's starry-eyed belief that "private" is wonderful and "public" is lousy, the party, if under considerable pressure, provided some real domestic improvements, although by no means everything that old line Labour members dream of.

Meanwhile, the Tories are behaving like a pack of reactionary clowns no one wants anywhere near the reins of power and the third party Liberal Democrats - often to the left of Labour on social issues - are not yet a formidable threat. So, for all the flak Blair deservedly incurred for his obstinate foreign policy decision to follow American President George W. Bush's cruel crusade into Iraq in 2003, he still stands to win a third term handily this May (the likely election date), though at the likely cost of anywhere from a third to a half of his 150-some seat majority. . . .