Sep 02 2010

Tony Blair is Certifiably Nuts

(9AM EST – promoted by Nightprowlkitty)

I just listened to this interview and can now say what many, me included, have thought all along, not only about him but as to our own previous administration, he’s certifiably crazy! I mean that in the so called World View, especially of righteousness, he just spoke. What’s going on has Nothing to do with any religious ideology but does for those who want to use that as their excuse, boy do they got some splanin to do at the pearly gates. He seems to Not Understand that humans going into others countries and Destroying Them as that Kills and Maims Tens of Thousands plus and Millions of Refugees is Not going to create Rage and Hatred, not only in those countries but from others on the planet. He and like are beyond nuts, Way Beyond!!

Tony Blair On War, Globalization And ‘My Political Life’


2 September 2010 – This week, Knopf will publish A Journey: My Political Life, Tony Blair’s memoir.

NPR’s Steve Inskeep had a conversation with the former prime minister of the United Kingdom, focusing on the war in Iraq, globalization, and Blair’s political career.

Inskeep asked Blair for a “word or a sentence or a phrase” that would describe how he feels about the war in Iraq, some seven years after it began.

In the interview, as in his book, Blair chose to say that he has “a deep sense of responsibility,” which prompted this exchange: {read more}

Listen to the full discussion below but it’s also broken into sections of different issues at the site link above.

3 comments

    • jimstaro on September 2, 2010 at 16:45
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    Intellectuals have responsibilities in times of war and militarization

    September 1, 2010 –  In a series of articles in the Harvard Crimson, published in March 2008, student muckraker Lois Beckett reviewed similar questions of responsibility and accountability, but extended them to the role of intellectuals in times of war, specifically the U.S. invasion of Iraq. As with many past U.S. wars, prominent Harvard intellectuals admittedly played a leading role in administering official support for, and justification of, the war. And there were some cases in which Harvard intellectuals uncomfortably understood the possible consequences of the war, but didn’t speak up because they didn’t want to seem unpatriotic among their peers, who shared similarly silent reservations.

    The U.S. invasion of Iraq resulted in the destruction of human life comparable in number with the Rwandan Genocide and the Cambodian killing fields based on the September 2007 outstanding report by British polling agency ORB, the Opinion Research Business. The U.S. invasion resulted in roughly 1 million violent deaths.

    Snip

    There’s one important distinction, however. Using words or phrases like “getting it wrong” or “mistake” or “misconduct” assumes that, in the U.S., we have the right to “experiment” on another country with a war whose disastrous consequences and inherent injustice are easily detectable by anyone, whether a Harvard intellectual or a local bus driver.

    True, Harvard academicians could argue ­- as in usual misconduct cases – that they didn’t intend to help cause the murder and displacement of millions of people, being directly complicit in the crimes that resulted from the U.S. invasion of Iraq in 2003.

    But, as elementary legal and moral principles reflect, criminal responsibility is not judged by intention, but by the real or likely consequences of the act, or failure to act.

    And serious precedents are not far off in history within American society.

    Snip

    At the International Criminal Tribunals at Nuremberg following World War II, U.S. justices applied these very standards to intellectuals of Nazi Germany: from Julius Streicher, editor of a leading newspaper, to Wolfram Sievers of the University of Strasbourg. Both cases were judged on the basis of the defendants’ prominent cultural, political and so-called “scientific” work and ideas which, wittingly or unwittingly, supported the vicious crimes perpetuated by the Nazis. And both intellectuals were hanged for them. {read more}

  2. …..  as one commenter wagged somewhere, oh great, we had not one but two drunks leading the Free World and making all these decisions.  

    • RUKind on September 3, 2010 at 18:18
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    Seems to be common in banking, coal and oil.

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