[PEN-L:34200] The Third Reich of our times

[Louis Proyect <lnp3@xxxxxxxxx>]

BLAIR IS A COWARD
John Pilger
Daily Mirror Wednesday 29 January 2003

William Russell, the great correspondent who reported the carnage of
imperial wars, may have first used the expression "blood on his hands"
to describe impeccable politicians who, at a safe distance, order the
mass killing of ordinary people.

In my experience "on his hands" applies especially to those modern
political leaders who have had no personal experience of war, like
George W Bush, who managed not to serve in Vietnam, and the effete Tony
Blair.

There is about them the essential cowardice of the man who causes death
and suffering not by his own hand but through a chain of command that
affirms his "authority".

In 1946 the judges at Nuremberg who tried the Nazi leaders for war
crimes left no doubt about what they regarded as the gravest crimes
against humanity.

The most serious was unprovoked invasion of a sovereign state that
offered no threat to one's homeland. Then there was the murder of
civilians, for which responsibility rested with the "highest authority".

Blair is about to commit both these crimes, for which he is being denied
even the flimsiest United Nations cover now that the weapons inspectors
have found, as one put it, "zilch".

Like those in the dock at Nuremberg, he has no democratic cover.

Using the archaic "royal prerogative" he did not consult parliament or
the people when he dispatched 35,000 troops and ships and aircraft to
the Gulf; he consulted a foreign power, the Washington regime.

Unelected in 2000, the Washington regime of George W Bush is now
totalitarian, captured by a clique whose fanaticism and ambitions of
"endless war" and "full spectrum dominance" are a matter of record.

All the world knows their names: Bush, Rumsfeld, Rice, Wolfowitz, Cheney
and Perle, and Powell, the false liberal. Bush's State of the Union
speech last night was reminiscent of that other great moment in 1938
when Hitler called his generals together and told them: "I must have
war." He then had it.

To call Blair a mere "poodle" is to allow him distance from the killing
of innocent Iraqi men, women and children for which he will share
responsibility.

He is the embodiment of the most dangerous appeasement humanity has
known since the 1930s. The current American elite is the Third Reich of
our times, although this distinction ought not to let us forget that
they have merely accelerated more than half a century of unrelenting
American state terrorism: from the atomic bombs dropped cynically on
Japan as a signal of their new power to the dozens of countries invaded,
directly or by proxy, to destroy democracy wherever it collided with
American "interests", such as a voracious appetite for the world's
resources, like oil."

full: http://www.mirror.co.uk

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