A Manifestation of Evil or Just Plain Madness?
By Alan Hart
12/03/07 "ICH" --- - Who said the following: When you’re the leader “you need, um, to be able to separate yourself (pause) somewhat from the magnitude of the consequences of the decisions you are taking…”?
Was it Adolf Hitler, Joseph Stalin, Menachem Begin, Pol Pot or possibly George “Dubya” Bush?
Answer, none of the above.
Just occasionally terrestrial television comes up with a documentary that provides real and (to my way of thinking) terrifying insight into the mindest of leaders. One such documentary, actually a series of three, The Blair Years, has just ended on BBC Television.
The third and last programme, which like all three was constructed on an in-depth conversation between the former prime minister and Sunday Times columnist David (am I really a Zionist?) Aaronovitch, was titled Blair In Power.
Throughout the programme, as in power, Blair insisted that he did what he did because he truly and totally believed it was “the right thing to do.” That, said Sir Ming Campbell, the former Liberal Democratic Party leader, was “a very frustrating phrase”. Why? “Because if I say to you (David Aaronovitch) that it’s ‘the right thing to do,’ there’s no forensic skill you can exercise that can disturb that. It’s a phrase of last resort, impervious to argument.”
In discourse analysis it’s known as the false dilemma. You can’t argue with somebody, particularly a leader, who insists that he was doing what was right because, implicity, you invite yourself to be seen as arguing for what is morally wrong. And that’s why conviction politicians are so successful and can can get away with murder. Literally. (It’s analogous to the assertion that “God promised us the land.” The only sane response to that, if ones dares, is “You’re mad.”)
After a line of commentary that said, “He had become a devisive and unpopular prime minister,” Blair said: “The very moment when I was becoming less popular and less publicily acceptable was when I felt a greater confidence.” Translated that could only mean, “The more people told me I was wrong, the more believed I was right.” (When I discussed this with a former senior BBC producer and friend, he said: “I’m different from Blair. When people tell me I’m deep in ****, I look down and see how I can get out of it!”)
Charles Clarke, a minister in one of the cabinets Blair treated with almost the same contempt he subsequently developed for public opinion, described his former leader as “almost a messianic politician in the way he saw himself.”
Eventually Blair did talk about his religious faith, but he was most uncomfortable doing so; and he explained why. “If you talk about religious faith in our political system, people think you’re a nutter. They might think you go off to sit in a corner and commune with, um, the man upstairs and say ‘right, I‘ve been told what the answer is, and that’s it!’” (One obvious implication was that if Blair had been an American, he would have said, Bush-like, “God told me to do it.”)
Commentary: “Blair says it was his religious faith that helped him to live with the consequences of his decisions.”
Blair: “To to this, this, the prime minister’s job properly, you need, um, you need to be able to separate yourself (pause) somewhat from the magnitude of the consequences of the decisions you are taking the whole time, which doesn’t mean to say, and let me emphasise this, that you’re insensitive to the magnitude of those consequences or that you don’t feel them deeply. If you don’t have that strength, it’s difficult to do the job, which is why this job is as much about character and temperament as it is about anything else. For me having faith was an important part of being able to do that; but it’s not, you know I’ve said probably more than I intended to say about it, but it’s just, you know, in the end that’s, that’s, I mean, and I think that that is also important because ultimately you’ve got to do what you think is right in this job and I learned that over time really.” (There were moments, this I thought was one of them, when Blair was nearly as incoherent as “Dubya” can be).
During the course of the last programme in the series we learned that the prime minister who read from the bible and prayed every night also swore, didn’t always delete the expletives. (No harm in that in my view). I mention this in passing because of what I want to say, write, next.
The end of the last programme provided a moment, actually moments, of television magic.
Aaronovitch’s last words were, “Tony Blair, thank you.”
This was followed, before the end titles rolled, with ten seconds of silence, a hell of a long time in television when the camera is still running. During this silence Blair looked confused, bewildered, deeply troubled and frightened, rather like a rabbit caught in the car headlghts. I think it is not unreasonable to speculate that he was thinking to himself something very like the following: “****! I should never have agreed to do this ****ing interview!”
On the eleventh second he managed a forced, nervous smile and muttered, “Is that that, then?”
It’s not quite that (the end) because our Tony is now the Quartet’s Middle East envoy. When I was discussing the programme with the former senior BBC producer quoted above, he said to me: “Alan, don’t be surprised if somebody responds to your article by saying, ‘Perhaps Blair is the right man to try to bring peace to the Mddle East because they’re all mad, too!’”
I have long believed and often said on public platforms that it was wrong to describe Blair as “Bush’s puppet”. Blair was one of them. I mean that he was, is, something of a neo-con and not that far away from being a Christian Zionist, as his predecessor at the time of the Balfour Declaration was. (There is speculation that Blair wants to convert to Roman Catholicism, but the Vatican seems to be in no rush to look upon that prospect with favour).
As The Blair Years documented, he was, in fact, in favour of using force to topple Saddam Hussein when President “Dubya” Bush was opposed. That was before 9/11. It was only after that dreadful event, and because of it, that Bush became the puppet of Vice President Cheney and his neo-con associates, many of whom were, are, hardest core Zionists. I think they probably could not believe their luck when Prime Minister Blair first arrived in Washington.
It was also Prime Minister Blair who opened the door wider to Zionist lobby funders who were keen to purchase some of what passes for democracy in the UK. And today Prime Minister Gordon Brown is paying the price for that. If I was advising Brown, I’d tell him to come clean and ask for understanding while he cleared up Blair’s mess on this account.
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