Oh, it’s never going to happen?
Damn, that sucks.
Modern imperial states have now completely finished even pretending opinion shapes political policies; when the Iraq war 2 was ramping up in Britain, the country was rocked by the largest ever protest movement against sending British troops. The protests were violently crushed, media opposition was ignored or sidelined, and politics coalesced around nu-Labour authoritarianism, surveillance statism, and interventionism. They don’t need to pretend to care anymore, they can just kill and arrest anyone who dissents, and they know they can get away with it because the other politicians are worse, and because there is no experience in creation of a political dual-power alternative.
The problem is that the material effect is that the wars happened, anyway, and now people hate Blair instead of all of them.
Despite an ample body of evidence proving the war is, was, and always had been a sham, with Newsnight even at the time pointing out how it was a farce and then unceremoniously getting brushed under the carpet with the whistleblower suicided under mysterious circumstances. Despite this, the war went ahead, with millions of dead Iraqis and the UK 100% complicit. Nu-Labour was briefly rejected with the nomination of Corbyn as Labour leader, and after nearly five years of systematic media demonzation he was purged under a nu-Labourite leadership contest. Nu-Labour is back with a vengeance, ready to win the electorate of mid 1990’s Britain with soft Thatcherism once more.
I won’t belabor the point much more, but when the government was willing to completely ignore the electorate and public opinion as a whole to go ahead and murder a million Iraqis then the government has lost, in my view, any claim to legitmacy. I don’t care how much Blair was apparently loathed, because he’s not faced any consequences for it; he’s on track to get a knighthood, he’s still widely revered as the man who “saved” Britain from Thatcher, and, crucially, he wasn’t tried at the Hague.
I won’t lay the blame on the British public for not doing more, because they’d exhausted all legal and semi-legal pathways to stop the war and Blair ignored every single one. At that point the only path to stopping the war would have ventured into sabotage, revolutionary defeatism, and protracted people’s war, which, let’s be honest, nobody was willing to carry out because there was no precedent for it.
Modern imperial states have now completely finished even pretending opinion shapes political policies
https://amp.ft.com/content/1e030bbb-a074-4fbd-94c5-94fe579a9a8a
