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Blair: New Age Mouth, Old Age Fist
Tony Blair is to interdependence and international community and George W. Bush is to compassionate conservative.
Meaning: It's just rhetoric, not action.
In 1999, at a speech before the Chicago Economic Club, Tom Blair unveiled his "Doctrine of International Community":
"Today the impulse towards interdependence is immeasurably greater. We are witnessing the beginnings of a new doctrine of international community. By this I mean the explicit recognition that today more than ever before we are mutually dependent, that national interest is to a significant extent governed by international collaboration and that we need a clear and coherent debate as to the direction this doctrine takes us in each field of international endeavour. Just as within domestic politics, the notion of community -- the belief that partnership and co-operation are essential to advance self-interest -- is coming into its own; so it needs to find its own international echo."
And then he went to war in Iraq. David Brooks has argued that Blair's support for the Iraq war is a natural extension of his internationalist views. If one believes in shared, universal values, Brooks argues, then one believes in imperialist wars to impose those values on others.
Kind of misses the point of shared, universal values. The belief that everyone should have enough to eat, that children should get a quality education, that the environment should be clean and free from pollution, that people have a right to express themselves, that we should all be free from violence — to say these are shared, universal values suggests that are endemic to the human condition and need to be unshackled and nurtured, not tyrannically imposed. These deep values, enshrined in human rights doctrines and expressed in every community and every family around the world, are like oxygen. Breathing them in is automatic.
War, on the other hand, takes our breath away. It steps on the chests of those who are occupied and killed and tears the moral fiber of those in whose name it is fought. War doesn't impose shared values. It crushes them. A political agenda that embraces interdependence and shared values helps support other nations, not obliterate them.
Tony Blair's former best friend, Bill Clinton, once said, "It is better to be strong and wrong than weak and right." Clearly, President Bush, the stubborn decider, agrees. And Blair? Blair should not be remembered as someone who espoused human rights and global justice but somehow fell short, dragged down into the muck of war by an arm-twisting US. Instead, Blair should be remembered as an unremarkable link in the British chain of empire, who hid behind a mask of lofty ideals to conceal his inherent imperialism.
Sally Kohn is director of the New York-based Movement Vision Project, working with grassroots organizations across the United States to advance our shared values of family, community and humanity. She has interviewed progressive leaders across the country on their vision for the future.
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Show All"Blair: New Age Mouth, Old Age Fist"
Blair: New Age Mouth, Old Age Foot in It
As long as society's primary goal is money, people like the Clintons, Bush and Blair will continue to occupy the highest ranks of society and direct the people into more wars and oppression. It is only after people understand that peace and justice should be first and formost that we can actually start changing to a society that is fair and just.
So called democracy without protection of human rights is just an empty slogan.
And countries that impose religion on their people, whether jewish, christian or muslim, is contrary to the protection of basic human rights.
peace, justice, and human rights for all
AG
Listen to Marley and Toots. Without Justice there will be no Peace. Everybody crying out for peace -- nobody crying out for justice.
Am I the only one who gets the creeps from the idea that some "Economic Club" needs to be told that a "community spirit" is essential in order to advance *self-interest*? Even Adam Smith himself argued, according to my understanding, that his "invisible hand" actually advances general wealth and well-being through individual self-interest. This is, however, a completely different relation of subservience!
Truly, Tony's sales pitch captures the essence of our times. My only hope is that he just tried to talk to these people in terms they could relate to, and that it isn't his genuine belief that the human tendency to form communities for a greater good isn't just something that has to be "tapped into" and forced into an interpretation in terms of the world model of the navel-gazers...
The key elements of the US constitution were never democracy and capitalism.
Its was the definition and protection of freedom. Remember, this was a government formed by a people who just years earlier had fought a long, nasty war for the right to establish a government that protected and defended the unalienable rights they claimed they had.
Majority rule by elected representatives was simply the mechanism they choose for a government. They felt the need to have some government, so they set one up with as many restraints and as much representation as they could in an era were travel and communication was by sailing ship and horse.
But the key part to them was to try to establish a country where people could be free. This was to be a society of free citizens. It was an age largely before the corporation. Corporations and large accumulations of money were viewed with distrust by our founders, and viewed as a threat to freedom. This was an era when everyone was expected to be in business for themselves. It was an age where to work for another was to be a "wage-slave".
This is the spirit of America. A society of free people who freely act in an economy on their own. America was never the vision of a nation of wage slaves who depend on others for employment, and who then spend all their money at the company stores.
All our systems favor the big over the small. We've actually made it illegal to favor the small and local over the large and distant. We need to reverse this. Among many things.
@Spike May - "Equal Rights' was co-written by Bob Marley and Peter Tosh - the late, truly great Peter Tosh, the hard edge of the Wailers...
@COMarc - are you really that myopic on your own history? "America was never the vision of a nation of wage slaves..." no, it was a vision of a society with slaves, forget the wage bit. "A society of free people" yes, a society of free white people built on the bones of the eradicated 'injuns'.
"Four hundred years, four hundred years of slave philosophy" - from "400 Years" by Peter Tosh
Blair has been the little poodle that loyally barked on command for the dreadfully sinister Bush regime.
Someone should build a big statue of a damned poodle, and give it Blair's face.
I really am getting sick and tired of bloggers and others constantly referring to Blair as 'Bush's poodle'. It is just so unfair. I mean, have any of you actually had dealings with a poodle? They are lovely, friendly dogs, good with children and a joy to be around, so comparing a whole species of commendable canines with that treacherous lump of odure is just out and out dogism. 'Enough' I say! If you have to resort to animal analogies how about Bush's slug? They're slimy, nasty and a threat to your vegetable patch so would be a much more appropriate comparison.