I've often wondered what it must have been like in the 1930s, indeed in history classes I have been required to wonder what it was like. An underlying thought is that it is such a very distant experience from today. All those regimes and empires breaking apart under the shifting of technological and economic change, all those long-suppressed cultural fractures re-opening, all those pre-enlightenment believers with their potted ideologies and vision that it is right to act as they have acted on their beliefs.
Blair made it all very close yesterday. Elderly and obsessed, eyes bulging from his painted face, hands waving in brownian gestures of frame, number, limitation, accusation and control, Blair listed proudly the wars he has instigated and fought and those yet to come in pursuit of his theory of the world and how it works. Kosovo, Sierra Leone, Afghanistan, Iraq, soon - Iran. He was ready with rebuttal even before any sane objection that his wars might be thought somewhat disparate in origin, in geography, and irrelevant to the United Kingdom: an interlinked, global imperative leaves nowhere, no-one and nothing beyond the scope of progressive governance. Any rejection of the discipline of its institutions, at whatever level, any intellectual or practical practice in opposition to its approach, is an attack upon the whole. Certainly the institutions are at times rudimentary and must then be circumvented temporarily until more appropriate structures are built from ad hoc (or capital A capital H ad hoc, as he repeatedly stated) usages are set in place.
On he orated in that post-informational communication style - y'know, erm, let me just say, before answering that I want you to think of this.......with only the 'key messages' in plainspeak: it was unpopular but it is right; it killed a lot of people, yes, so?; Iran is my next war.
Chilcot and the commission members turned on his taps and out of his Blairmouth gushed a torrent of elderly, diseased, conviction in whose name he has killed and maimed horribly entire regions, countries, peoples. Including our own.
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Blair has been rewarded for his wars by the interests which have benefitted from them.
Blair reminds me irresistibly of Berlusconi: narcissistic, corrupt, an unpunished criminal, authoritarian, populist, a fascist.
The only difference is that Berlusconi bought a Parliament, while Tony Blair sold it, but both enriched themselves from the transaction.
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