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the wages of spin .....

the wages of spin .....

Tony Blair today took a little time off from serving the world’s despots in order to exploit the 10th anniversary of the July 7 London train bombing. He did so by casting blame on “radical Islam” for the world’s violence while exempting himself, pronouncing …

“This is a global problem … we’re not going to allow anyone to excuse themselves by saying that the slaughter of totally innocent people is somehow a response to any decision by any government.”

The proposition Blair just decreed invalid — “the slaughter of totally innocent people is somehow a response to any decision by any government” — is exactly the rationale that he himself repeatedly invoked, and to this day still invokes, to justify the invasion and destruction of Iraq, as in this example from December 2009:

Tony Blair has said he would have invaded Iraq even without evidence of weapons of mass destruction and would have found a way to justify the war to parliament and the public. . . . “If you had known then that there were no WMDs, would you still have gone on?” Blair was asked. He replied: “I would still have thought it right to remove him [Saddam Hussein]”. . . . He explained it was “the notion of him as a threat to the region” because Saddam Hussein had used chemical weapons against his own people.

“Excusing the slaughter of totally innocent people” — whether in Fallujah or Gaza or Yemen — is a staple of Western elite discourse to justify the militarism of the U.S., the U.K. and their most special allies. It only suddenly becomes inexcusable when carried out by Muslims against the West. It is a stunning testament to Western self-delusion that one of the prime architects and salesmen of the most destructive political crime of this generation — the invasion of Iraq — can stand up with a straight face and to applause and declare: “we’re not going to allow anyone to excuse themselves by saying that the slaughter of totally innocent people is somehow a response to any decision by any government.”

There will undoubtedly be all sorts of self-loving jingoists in the West, along with those whose overriding political priority is the demonization of Islam, who will find this comparison invalid and even obscene. After all, their own governments’ violence, aggression and slaughter of innocents is kind-hearted, civilized and justified, whereas the violence, aggression and slaughter of innocents by Muslims is savage and barbaric. But that’s precisely the point.

While the leading lights of the West love to celebrate themselves as beacons of civilized, progressive rationality, their overriding mentality is just the crassest and most primitive form of tribalism: when Our Side does it, it is right, and when Their Side does it, it is wrong. No matter the esoteric finery in which it drapes itself, that is the primitive, banal formulation that lies at the heart of the vast, vast majority of foreign policy discourse in the West. So often, those who fancy themselves brave warriors for rationality and advancement by demonizing Islam are just rank tribalists whose own national, religious and cultural loyalties are served by doing so.

One last point while we’re on this topic: the notion that radical Muslims commit violence in response to violence by the West is often characterized as an attempt to deny that they possess agency or autonomy. That claim is just bizarre, the opposite of the truth. Those who deny that Muslims act with agency are, in fact, those who try to claim that they are manipulated by religious dogma into committing violence without any rationale or purpose. To point out that there’s an actual, rational causal relationship between their violence and the West’s — to acknowledge that they choose violence as a calculated course of action they believe to be justified just as the West does — is not a denial of their agency, but rather an affirmation of it.

This causal relationship is the point that Tony Blair and his like-minded comrades are, above all else, most desperate to deny. Blair thus expressly denies that the July 7 bombing in London was largely motivated by his war in Iraq even though his own government’s secret report reached exactly that conclusion; a Pentagon-commissioned report years ago acknowledged the same causal motive for “terrorism” generally. They’re desperate to deny this causation because to recognize it is necessarily to acknowledge that their professed moral superiority is the ultimate delusion, that they in fact are the embodiment of what they love to hear themselves condemning.

It’s always comforting to believe that one’s own tribe is morally superior yet perpetually victimized, so it’s an easy sell. But as Blair’s remarkably self-unaware comments today illustrate, this mentality centrally depends upon a steadfast commitment to blinding oneself to one’s own actions and failings. Nobody is more resolute in that commitment than Tony Blair.

Tony Blair and the Self-Exalting Mindset of the West: in Two Paragraphs

 

the pat tillman story...


Controversial criticisms[edit]

After reports of Tillman's anti-war views became public, Ted Rall, who had previously written a comic calling Tillman a "fool" and "idiot", said that he was wrong to have assumed Tillman to be a "right wing poster child" when Tillman regarded the invasion of Iraq as illegal.

Then-Lieutenant Colonel Ralph Kauzlarich, Regimental Executive Officer at Forward Operating Base Salerno on Khost, Afghanistan, under which Tillman was serving at the time of his death, and who led the second investigation into Tillman's death, made statements about the Tillman family's search for the truth based on Tillman's atheism. In comments to ESPN, Kauzlarich said: "These people have a hard time letting it go. It may be because of their religious beliefs" and "When you die, I mean, there is supposedly a better life, right? Well, if you are an atheist and you don't believe in anything, if you die, what is there to go to? Nothing. You are worm dirt. So for their son to die for nothing and now he is no more... I do not know how an atheist thinks, I can only imagine that would be pretty tough."

Kauzlarich conducted the second investigation into Tillman's death which lasted a week, from May 8 to May 15, 2004. Brigadier General Rodney Johnson, the Commanding General of the United States Army Criminal Investigations Command, testified before Congress that he found these statements "totally unacceptable". Acting Department of Defense Inspector General Thomas Gimble also testified that he was "shocked" that Lieutenant Colonel Kauzlarich would make these statements.[52] According to AP analysis, there are three lower-level officers expected to be punished, and Kauzlarich may be one of the three. Tillman's mother continues to reject the Pentagon's characterization of the officers' offenses as "errors" in reporting Tillman's death, because several officers have said they made conscious decisions not to tell the Tillman family that friendly fire was suspected.[53]


Media analyses[edit]

Reviews by New York Times reporter Dexter Filkins of Jon Krakauer's book Where Men Win Glory: The Odyssey of Pat Tillman noted that the book did well to compile the facts and "nauseating" details regarding the coverup of Tillman's death. "After Tillman's death, Army commanders violated many of their own rules, not to mention elementary standards of decency, to turn the killing into a propaganda coup for the American side", Filkins wrote.

A documentary film, The Tillman Story, was shown at the Sundance Film Festival on January 23, 2010, and was released in August 2010.

On October 19, 2006, Tillman's brother Kevin broke his silence about his brother's death, lashing out at the Iraq War in a 660-word essay published on Truthdig, a progressive online journal of news and opinion.  The essay was widely distributed and was cited in The New York Times and Associated Press.[57]

Religious and political beliefs[edit]

Krakauer described Tillman as "agnostic, perhaps an atheist", while later news reports state he was an atheist. According to speakers at his funeral, he was very well-read, having read a number of religious texts including the Bible, Quran and the Book of Mormon as well as transcendentalist authors such as Ralph Waldo Emerson and Henry David Thoreau. However, responding to religious overtones at the funeral by Maria Shriver and John McCain, his youngest brother, Richard, asserted that "Just make no mistake, he'd want me to say this: He's not with God, he's fuckin[g] dead—he's not religious." Richard added, "Thanks for your thoughts, but he's fuckin[g] dead." Another article quotes Tillman as having told then-general manager of the Seattle Seahawks Bob Ferguson in December 2003, "You know I'm not religious."

The September 25, 2005, edition of the San Francisco Chronicle newspaper reported that Tillman held views which were critical of the Iraq war. According to Tillman's mother, a friend of Tillman had arranged a meeting for Tillman with author Noam Chomsky, a prominent critic of American foreign and military policy, to take place after his return from Afghanistan. Chomsky has confirmed this.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pat_Tillman

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The Tillman Story is a 2010 documentary film directed by Amir Bar-Lev. The film is about the 2004 death of U.S. Army Ranger Pat Tillman in the war in Afghanistan, the coverup of the true circumstances of his death, and his family's struggle to unearth the truth. It was nominated for the Grand Jury Prize at the 2010 Sundance Film Festival. The film is narrated by Josh Brolin.

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see: http://www.filmsforaction.org/watch/the_tillman_story_2010/

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"In war, the truth is the first casualty"

 

Aeschylus
Greek tragic dramatist (525 BC - 456 BC)
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The most fundamental of the fifth century BC Chinese general Sun Tzu's principles for the conduct of war is that "All warfare is based on deception".

 

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Gus: The first deception of warfare is to tout the necessity of it...


Should you be watching the Tillman Story documentary, note the official inquiry where Donald Rumsfeld is one of high ranking personnel accused of the cover-up with three generals. In the background of one of the shots, there is a young woman wearing a headband akin to that of the Statue of Liberty with the world "truth" written on it... The entire American government personnel lied about Tillman's death because they needed a hero to their rationalised madness which is the highest form of psychopathy. 

 

Tony Blair is still showing the same form of psychopathy. The same can be said of most of our leaders — and we, voters, are responsible. We let them lead us because we also listen to the songs of the sirens, as sung through the news and newspapers like those of Mr Murdoch...

 

Tony Blair, George Bush and John Howard should all be convicted of war crimes — and removed from public life... Unfortunately this won't happen. Our entire political system relies on psychopaths doing the dirty job of glorifying our own cultural deceit...


2500 years later, aeschylus becomes a tragedy...

You think identity politics can’t get any crazier? Dateline: Paris:

A row over alleged racism and attacks on freedom of expression has erupted in France after students forced the Sorbonne to cancel a performance of a Greek tragedy featuring actors using black masks, claiming it was “Afrophobic, colonialist and racist”.

Protesters picketed the prestigious Paris university, stopping actors from entering the theatre and accusing them of using blackface for the play The Suppliants by Aeschylus.

A photograph on the Sorbonne’s website publicising the event showed one of the cast in dark makeup. Protesters said actors had blacked up in last year’s performances of the work, which features in the university’s annual ancient Greek theatre festival.

Read  more:

https://www.theamericanconservative.com/dreher/aeschylus-afrophobe-sorbo...

 

 

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