Total Pageviews

Tuesday 14 March 2023

472. Weapons of mass delusion are still with us…

…and as dangerous as ever as we mark the dark 20th anniversary of the illegal invasion of Iraq, a country still disabled by that catastrophe.

*

We watch in horror as the predictable and predicted results of the lies of Brexit stifle this country’s future. Similarly, we who have paid attention over the decades, sink in the stultifying inevitability of the madness of having sold off anything and everything of worth as the privatisation chickens come home to roost. We see a wasteland of corruption and dysfunction in our infrastructure as everything that was put in place post WWII for ordinary folk in Britain is now in private hands and fuelling the offshore accounts of the wealthy instead of making life better for ordinary people.

Lineker-gate rocks the already shaky foundations of the public broadcaster - see my letter in The Independent

As the BBC plummets further in credibility, our so-called public broadcaster is currently led by a Tory donor who was advisor to both Johnson and Sunak before being gifted the role of BBC chairman after helping Johnson secure a private loan. There is no better (or worse) example of the power of mass delusion than the illegal invasion of Iraq – orchestrated for Britain by Tony Blair. However, in the wake of the BBC nonsense we should remember the destructive power of wilful delusion and there is no surer symptom of constructed mass delusion than the attempt by weak politicians to control the media.

The 2003 invasion was not just a totally caustic and still corrosive historical madness perpetrated against the people of Iraq knowingly done under blatantly false pretences (like Brexit) – it has deeply, permanently harmed Britain – also like Brexit.

After the slightly saccharine up-beat early Blair years the rot of his ‘rightness’ set in. His own politicians sensed he was leading them down a wrong path. The country certainly knew with one of the biggest mass anti-war demonstrations Britain has ever seen. People like Diane Abbot threatened to resign but then shamefully did not and the madness entered our collective veins leaving its political poison.

 It was a kind of sickness a person might feel when they know they have done something deeply harmful, reprehensible and irreversible. In fact – there is only one thing to do and that is to continue with the delusion. I wonder if that is why Blair is still feted in the media; still interviewed by mainstream papers and on our news. It’s as if no one has read of even heard of the Chilcot Report.

One or two outliers did point out the obvious similarities when Putin invaded Ukraine under false pretences – but – that is them not us.

One of my very early blogs concerned the distortions of  false wars known and felt to be entirely wrong and how it ensnared an American soldier called Lynndie England – in that I outlined the disconnect between wrong doing by the soldiers on the ground and the worse wrong doing by those who knowingly instigated the war.

Abu Grahib was – as was admitted years later – a fertile breeding ground for what we came to fear as global terrorism – and for the UK that had not that long banished Irish terrorism – it should have sickened us more than it did.

Then came fear of migrants and some would argue –me include – as I have often on this blog – the attitude that led us to a racism/jingoism fuelled Brexit with all its xenophobic nonsense and now to the very migrant bashing that brought Lineker out to criticise the vile and idiotic Suella Braverman.

Weapons of mass destruction would have been monstrous if they had existed and let us not forget that Saddam DID use disgusting weapons against the Kurds. This is no defence of his regime.

However – in the long run – it is the insidious weapon of mass delusion that will do for us if not reigned in…

*

As always do checkout My BOOKS thank you.