Wednesday, May 04, 2005



Pilger on the UK election

Last week's New Statesman (which I read in the library today) had an article by John Pilger reminding British voters of what voting for Blair means:

By voting for Blair, you will walk over the corpses of at least 100,000 people, most of them innocent women and children and the elderly, slaughtered by rapacious forces sent by Blair and Bush, unprovoked and in defiance of international law, to a defenceless country. That conservative estimate is the conclusion of a peer-reviewed Anglo-American study, published in the British medical journal the Lancet. It is the most reliable glimpse we have of the criminal carnage caused by Blair and Bush in Iraq, and it is suppressed in this election "campaign".

By voting for Blair, you will be turning a deaf ear to the cries of countless Iraqi children blown up by British cluster bombs and poisoned by toxic explosions of depleted uranium. These unseen victims of Blair and Bush - including Iraqi women who have developed rare "pregnancy cancer", and children with unexplained leukaemia - will not be your concern. According to one of the military experts who cleaned up Kuwait after the 1991 Gulf war, Blair and Bush have created "another Hiroshima" in parts of Iraq. You will be voting to endorse that.

By voting for Blair, you will turn away from the tens of thousands of children left to starve in Iraq by his and Bush's invasion. On 30 March, the United Nations Commission on Human Rights heard that malnutrition rates among Iraqi infants under the age of five had almost doubled since the invasion - double the number of hungry children under Saddam Hussein. The author of the report to the commission, Jean Ziegler, a UN specialist on hunger, said the "coalition" was to blame.

By voting for Blair, you will be affirming that liars triumph. Blair is a liar on such an epic scale that even those who still protect him with parliamentary euphemisms, like Robin Cook ("He knew perfectly well what he was doing. I think there was a lack of candour") and the Guardian and the BBC, now struggle to finesse his perjury.

[...]

By voting for Blair, you will invite more lies about terrorist scares in Britain so that totalitarian laws can be enacted. "I have a horrible feeling that we are sinking into a police state," said George Churchill-Coleman, the former head of Scotland Yard's anti-terrorist squad. Like the fake reasons for Blair's tanks around Heathrow on the eve of the greatest anti-war demonstration in British history, so anything, any scare, any arrest, any "control order", will be possible.

By voting for Blair, you will fall for the spin, the myth, of the social reformism and "economic achievements" of his government. The ban on fox-hunting and the lowering of the age of gay consent are political and media distractions that do nothing to protect a social democracy being progressively shorn of ancient liberties, such as those enshrined in Magna Carta.

If you're British, and care about Iraq, then please don't vote for Blair. How far you want to go in this is up to you (though I'd advise checking out some of the strategic voting sites, like so now who do we vote for? or Strategic Voter) - but don't be put off by Blair's scaremongering. Voting for the Lib Dems (or any other party) will not let in the Tories.

4 comments:

I really dont think you (including pilger) will be able to mobilize enough of the population for it to matter either way so you dont really need to worry about the effect of your vote.

Posted by Genius : 5/04/2005 06:22:00 PM

or you could read johann hari's far more relevant comment in the independent - link on my site - and understand that tyrants do not justify the protection offered by sovereignty. the deaths during the invasion are tragic but in the greater scheme of things they are similar in morality to Churchills decision to allow Coventry to be bombed so as not to reveal Enigma had been broken. Your morality on this is twisted. Blair has freed people not enslaved them. Stop being an apologist for tyranny.

Posted by sagenz : 5/04/2005 11:14:00 PM

Genius: there's a lot of anger over the war, and Labour strategists admit to being worried. But I don't really expect (or even want) them to lose. What I want is for Labour's majority to shrink and for some of their pro-war hacks to go down, to remind them of who they are supposed to be serving. The dream scenario is a hung Parliament, which would mean Blair out on his arse...

Posted by Idiot/Savant : 5/05/2005 12:34:00 AM

Sock thief - what Pilger opposes is the West's role in creating each of those tyrants in the first place (at the cost of much human suffering), then 'overthrowing' them when politically expedient.

And as he spent 8 or so years on the ground covering Vietnam, and has reported from Bosnia and Iraq, do you think he may possibly have more insight than you have from your armchair?

Posted by Anonymous : 5/05/2005 09:33:00 AM