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The Great Pretender 05/25/03: (Information Clearing House) Sometimes, you wish that Charlie Chaplin was still around, then he could make a movie playing Tony Blair, replete with white, Armani shirt, parading and pontificating around the planet, full of puffed-up self-importance and self-righteous indignation at anybody who challenges his arrogant assumptions. Don’t you just wish! Then you get to thinking about the interplay between people and events and to what to degree are we shaped by history and to what degree do we, in turn, shape it? Vast forces are at work. After all there’s a lot at stake. Yet one still has to ask the question, to what degree are events shaped by individuals and what are the connections? Now you may feel that this is not a question worth asking in the current situation. If it wasn’t Blair it would be some other ambitious opportunist, eager to dump whatever ethics, ideology (if any) they had in the pursuit of power, a place in history or whatever. All of which is true of course, but it still begs the question – does one focus on the policies or the person and to what degree are the two intertwined? Men like Bush and Blair are at the centre of a complex web of forces and surrounded by structures which have their own, inexorable inertia. Big Business, state bureaucracies, a host of vested interests which propel and in turn are propelled by events and objectives. Yet nothing is inevitable. Things change whether those with power like it or not, sometimes to their advantage and sometimes not. As Blair’s web of lies disintegrates, the cynics say ‘what difference does it make? He (Blair) has all the power, what can I do?’ Yet the reality is that events do change because people force the changes. Perhaps not often it’s true but to take one contemporary example, the anti-war movement, with all its weaknesses, could not be ignored, it was just too large and too all-embracing. It did force the UK government to alter, if not its strategies, at least its tactics. Tactics moreover, which have come back to haunt Blair, forcing him to make ever more extreme and risky decisions to justify the unjustifiable. As lie compounds lie, his ‘credibility’ comes under question, which in turn, can be used to ask what led him to make such decisions in the first place? What drives the government’s policies and consequently Blair himself? As I pointed out in an earlier essay (http://www.informationclearinghouse.info/article3559.htm), the corporate/state media draws the line at asking the critical question: what are the reasons? Questioning Blair’s ‘credibility’ is simply a way of disconnecting Blair from the web of connections, from history itself, from his role as an agent of history. Simply questioning Blair’s ‘credibility’ is a method for sidestepping the reasons as to why he is no longer credible. Personalising events through Blair himself is a sleight of hand that enables the appearance of analysis to take place but without the substance. Taking the next big step, asking why Blair is no longer credible is also the weakness of the propaganda machine, and it’s why, rather than say, ‘what difference can I make?’ one must say, I’ve made a difference – what must I do to make a bigger difference? Blair’s credibility is challenged because the reasoning underpinning government policy has come unstuck. The more Blair bleats, the more vulnerable he becomes. Now is the time to take the offensive, when the government is at its most vulnerable. When Blair angrily says "We are too busy to find weapons of mass destruction" whilst the US is sending in 1400 people to find them, you know he’s in trouble, he’s on the defensive. He has run out of excuses. And as more and more information on just what kind of a con job the USUK pulled on us hemorrhages from ‘sources’ all too willing to stay quiet during the ‘good times’, but now the ‘alliance’ is coming unstuck, are revealing what we knew all along, that all the ‘evidence’ was a complete fabrication. What we need to do now is challenge the state and its complicit media as to the real reasons for the invasion, and indeed for USUK’s global strategy. ‘All that’s solid melts into air’ As we can all see, the situation in Iraq is becoming increasingly untenable. All pretence underlying the ‘reasons’ are dissolving. ‘All that’s solid melts into air.’ Unwilling or unable to bring any kind of order to post-invasion Iraq is revealing more than the media or the state is willing to contemplate. That underlying the invasion is not only utter contempt for the opinions of our electorates but also utter contempt for the Iraqi people, just as USUK showed its utter contempt for the people of Afghanistan. But there is a big difference in the way Afghanistan has been presented in the media, although even this is now changing as the countries wrecked by the USUK imperialist agenda pile up around the planet. For although the leaders of the alliance might like to pretend that it’s 1903 not 2003, the world has changed and changed irrevocably. Military power, even of the most devastating kind has its limits. It can destroy but it can’t build. One can maintain a pretence for only so long. And Blair, it transpires, is the US’s weak link. A war, which from the beginning had shaky foundations, was built on a fault line, which if shaken enough, threatens to bring the entire edifice down. No amount of wriggling, no amount of breast-beating (or brow-beating) will solve the fundamental contradictions that are being revealed. Attempts to recreate the ‘Age of Empire’ as Thatcher learned to her cost, are bound to fail. Copyright © 2003 William Bowles. All rights reserved. You have the right to republish under the following conditions: Please request permission from the copyright owner first; please supply the copyright owner with the URL or publication of the reposting site; do not alter or remove the contents, including this copyright notice.
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