I presume that serial killers become addicted. The really big killers, like Hitler, Stalin or Pol Pot appear figures divorced from humanity. I really do find it hard to know what to make of Tony Blair. Universally execrated for fabricating the evidence to attack Iraq, apostle of war everywhere, Israel’s most ardent supporter, I used to think the desire for personal wealth – which his murderous career has indeed brought – was his primary motivation. But with his latest cheerleading for yet more wars, it seems he is indeed one of those who, having thrown off conventional morality in favour of homicide, just wants to go on and on with it.
For Bliar, the desire for killing will never stop.
Perhaps he feels reinvigorated by the discovery that he has an acolyte in Bomber Dave.
i think its termed as being ‘pyschologically flawed’.
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it is about wealth and power and his belief that he is on gods work.
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he’s not interested in what you think or what ordinary joe thinks of him, because his constituency is elsewhere and they pay well.
“Perhaps he feels reinvigorated by the discovery that he has an acolyte in Bomber Dave.”
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weird thing about dave is that he is as delusional as blair in that he actually believes that people cant see through his puffery and ad-speak.
“weird thing about dave is that he is as delusional as blair in that he actually believes that people cant see through his puffery and ad-speak”
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I’m afraid the evidence supports his view. There are no barricades on my street.
I have been reading recently about psychopaths , they number about one in a hundred of the population but in politics and the high echelons of business the proportion is higher. The classic symptom are.
High opinion of ones self importance
Compulsive lying to achieve ones goals
No empathy for others
A flagrant disregard for ones self or others safety
Compulsive risk taking
Over concerned with others opinion of self
Does any of this sound familiar?
Contrary to popular believe psychopaths live amongst us undetected and using us to further their ends ruthlessly using us and disregarding us. I am not a shrink but I am sure he needs one !
“We are a long way from getting out of this,” he says. The former prime minister adds: “The threat is still from the same ideology and the same narrative which is based on a perverted view of religion and which regards cultures and faiths as in fundamental conflict with each other.”
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Blair is kind of loosely correct on this one I reckon, he’s just got the actors mixed up as usual…
A major problem with people like Bliar, Cameron and their ilk, as I see it, is that – part from their obvious crimes – they actually subvert morality. Not just because of their failures and offences, but because they DON’T CARE what the rest of us think. Possibly a definition of psychopathy, but one doesn’t need to be a psychopath to be drawn to the attractions of such amorality.
It’s a common cry of the Daily Fail generation that young people have ‘lost respect’. Well my late Dad always held that respect could never be demanded – only earned.
Who on earth can young people and children look up to now? All around them, they see bent politicians – getting away with it. Bent coppers – getting away with it. Bent financiers – getting away with it. Bent multi-millionaire media moguls – getting away with it. They only have to appear in court as a witness let alone offender to see that the judiciary now have little to do with justice. And via the internet they see even war and torture first denied then actually defended.
Most children – despite our grumbles – are neither blind nor stupid. And, unless they have uncommonly dedicated parents, have very little to look to in the way of example. How can they be blamed for assuming morality is defined by what you can get away with? When the strongest figures in society hold the weak and vulnerable in open contempt – why shouldn’t they?
Hi,
And the world that Bliar has wrought:
http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-england-manchester-14851811 – deconstruct that report!
http://www.salon.com/news/opinion/glenn_greenwald/2011/09/04/speech/index.html
How many will remember the political culture of the 90’s as the current neocon anti-islamic/”radical”/”extremist” (whatever that is) ideology becomes assimilated and all our children (and the rest of society) are indoctrinated to believe in the new faith.
Kind regards,
MN
TB is a psychopath, no doubt about it…
Why have we put Belhadj in charge of the Libyan army if we don’t like Islamic extremism? 8 million kilos of explosives is a lot to spend just to put an Islamic extremist in power. Shows how much we hope to gain from Obama’s new Africa enterprise. Does Obama really think that Africa will be lulled into security by having an Islamic extremist as a new neighbour. This is really dirty politics, which of course Blair specialises in.
What gets me most about Blair is that he talks about how the reason a lot of Iraqis and Afghans were (and are) fighting British and American forces was ‘extreme ideology’.
There was a British reporter in Libya the other week telling how he was in Baghdad when Saddam was overthrown too – and Iraqis kept coming up to him to tell him how they loved Americans and Americans were the greatest people in the world. Two weeks later some of the same Iraqis were saying very different things. One told him that the Americans had killed his uncle and his cousin and now he would kill every American he could kill.
It’s not ideology that turns people against us Blair, it’s killing peoples’ family and friends and running Saddam Hussein style death and torture squads against them that turns them against you.
Blair never has to learn from his mistakes though, because it’s other peoples’ husbands, wives, brothers, sisters, cousins and friends who get killed or tortured because of him, while he gets paid to make speeches and sell books providing us with his supposed accumulated wisdom on how the problem is other peoples extreme ideologies that are out of touch with the reality of British and American benevolence.
“TB is a psychopath, no doubt about it…”
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Ok. Mine is a dry white wine (large). Next topic. And so we go on.
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http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4LDdyafsR7g
I don’t like Tony Blair and I have condemned his role in the launch of the unjust and cruel war on Iraq. But to account for his behavior in terms of psychopathology is simply nuts. Tony Blair is an imperialist, as was spelled out long ago by his foreign policy adviser Robert Cooper. Specifically, he is for the New World Order, which has a long and history and some logic behind it. I have spelled out some details here.
Reliable estimates put the “excess deaths” in Iraq alone at well over 1 million as of 2006. Since then it has gone right on. Then there were the 500,000 children whose deaths Madeleine Albright thought were a reasonable price to pay for something or other. That’s before we even think about Afghanistan and Lebanon and Libya and Somalia and Pakistan… Iran is apparently next.
The number of deaths usually associated with the Holocaust is 6 million. How come nobody ever seems to notice that we and our allies have already chalked up between a quarter a a third of that number – and why don’t the deaths of brown Muslim people in Asia or Africa seem to count for anything? Can it be that civlized, liberla British and American people in the 21st century think of Asians and Africans (if they think of them at all) in very much the same way as the Nazis thought of Jews?
The sole purpose of Zionist Blair’s rhetoric against Islamic extremism is to conceal the growing cracks exposing the fact that Islamic extremism is being used as a tool firstly against Islam because sensible people run away from extremism and secondly as a front for unacceptable colonialism. The doors of Africa, Asia and the Middle East are closed to the US and they utilise Islamic extremists not to fight proxy wars but to legitimise the colonial campaign, because funnily enough the majority of the world still respects Islam.
The appointment of Belhaj as military commander in Libya is the first time that I’m aware of that the US has openly handed power to an Islamic extremist. China, for all its expenditure in Africa, is still tainted with colonialism, but will Africa buy into militant Islam as an untainted flag of hope? They’ve been conned before many times. We gave them the bible and took their land. I have friends who engaged in this enourmous project even today.
Militant Islam will capture the parts the US missionaries and slush funds cannot reach. Essentially they are the same, a bunch of deceiving, mineral grabbing, enslaving colonialists. Plus ca change, plus c’est la meme chose again and again and again and again.
I couldn’t agree more with you, Jack. You see a lot of people making similar points on the Web and even in the conventional media.
One of the worst aspects, IMHO, is that if you devote yourself for 20 years to bringing up kind, thoughtful, polite, civilised, educated children, when they leave the nest you discover to your horror that you have simply hung millstones round their necks. How can they hope to compete with the swarms of people who lack morals, scruples, and consciences?
The socialist idea that you can civilise children from “disadvantaged” backgrounds by putting them in schools with “nicely brought up” middle class children is hopelessly wrong. All that happens is that the middle class children get mocked, beaten up, and gradually robbed of their idealism and aspirations. Of course there are exceptions, but that’s the overall trend. Indeed, the very phrase “nicely brought up” has become one that can only be uttered self-consciously and within those “ironical” quotations marks.
I wouldn’t call Blair a psychopath. He’s a sociopath. And hree’s the link that proves it.
http://www.mcafee.cc/Bin/sb.html
i.e. “here’s the link”. Of course he may not fit every category, but he fits most.
“The number of deaths usually associated with the Holocaust is 6 million. How come nobody ever seems to notice that we and our allies have already chalked up between a quarter a a third of that number – and why don’t the deaths of brown Muslim people in Asia or Africa seem to count for anything? Can it be that civlized, liberla British and American people in the 21st century think of Asians and Africans (if they think of them at all) in very much the same way as the Nazis thought of Jews?”
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People pay no more attention to the 40 to 60 million white Christians who died during WW2, or the 6 or 8 million white Christian Ukranians who were murdered by Stalin, than they do to a million dead Iraqis. Actually, the dead Iraqis probably get more attention.
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And there was nothing racist about the war on Iraq. They just wouldn’t join the New World Order. The same mass killing and chaos would happen in any white country that opted for national sovereignty. Russia, actually, could well be targeted by the NWO eventually. But at present they are too well armed and their position is ambivalent. They may come on side without a fight. But if necessary, we will see that any number of dead Russians (and Europeans and Americans for that matter) will be a price worth paying for global empire.
Canspeccy, I didn’t suggest there was anything racist about the killings in Iraq – just about the failure to care about them. (Although have you heard any recordings or accounts of the language used by American and British soldiers about “hajjis”, “sand rats”, etc.? Or the often-expressed view that countries like Iraq and Afghanistan are “shitholes” (a favourite expression with Americans).
The people who died in WW2 are constantly being remembered and memorialised – largely in books and movies and TV shows. Admittedly some get a lot more attention than others. But that’s a different issue, as the British and Americans were fighting against aggressive enemies who started the war. The Americans actually stayed neutral until the dictatorships declared war on the USA, although you don’t hear that mentioned much nowadays.
As for Stalin’s victims, Western governments were reluctant to have the truth come out because of that old factor – their precious “credibility”. Remember, Roosevelt and Churchill built up good ol’ Uncle Joe Stalin as our staunch friend and ally, so it took a while before he could be depicted as a villain of blackest hue.
I think the explanation is simple. He doesn’t want war for its own sake. It’s just that if there are other wars, it helps to justify his war. He can say he just did what others have done since. And, more worryingly, it helps him justify it to himself.
‘Suppose, for example, that the attack had gone as far as bombing the White House, killing the president, imposing a brutal military dictatorship that killed thousands and tortured tens of thousands while establishing an international terror centre that helped impose similar torture-and-terror states elsewhere and carried out an international assassination campaign; and as an extra fillip, brought in a team of economists — call them “the Kandahar boys” — who quickly drove the economy into one of the worst depressions in its history. That, plainly, would have been a lot worse than 9/11.
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‘Unfortunately, it is not a thought experiment. It happened.
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‘The only inaccuracy in this brief account is that the numbers should be multiplied by 25 to yield per capita equivalents, the appropriate measure. I am, of course, referring to what in Latin America is often called “the first 9/11”: September 11, 1973, when the US succeeded in its intensive efforts to overthrow the democratic government of Salvador Allende in Chile …’
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http://bit.ly/pHldlF
Blair’s arrogance is stunning – we ought to be inured to it and the general ullulations of naked imperialism by now, but it’s still shocking. And yes, he most definitely is not mad but very, very bad. Yet, as Vronsky astutely pointed out, there are no barricades down this way and no-one is burning down the City of London or Wall Street, let alone levitating the Pentagon. There is no organised oppositional mass political movement in the UK or the USA. The main UK political parties are all sold on the same aggressive imperialism and ideologically-driven monetarist economic system that typifies Tony Blair’s and David Cameon’s public presentation. So, in some ways, nothing will change.
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In other ways, the global rise of China and India is chnaging/will continue to change things enormously.
Craig you are right of course. Why can’t we just let these regimes go on killing and terrorizing their people in peace? When the history of these regimes comes to be written I trust that tossers like you will stand on the side of those indicted for their appeasement and passivity. You remind me of the Webbs and Shaw in the thirties extolling the virtues of Stalin’s Soviet paradise. Idiot.
Its not just Blair, many hundreds if not thousands of people who knew the truth and still helped him to commit these terrible crimes against humanity have also lost their souls. They all can pay no greater price.
Eddie – can you point me to the part of Craig’s post where he sings the praises of Saddam Hussein and the Taliban perhaps? As far as i can see it’s not there. If we’d intervened against Saddam in the 1980s when he was gassing the Kurds as part of the Anfal genocide and ended it – or if we’d intervened at the end of the 1991 Gulf War to prevent the massacre of Shia rebels and civilians – and then pulled out as soon as Saddam was overthrown – that would have been legitimate.
The Iraq and Afghanistan wars have resulted in vastly more deaths than not invading, not bombing the entire countries.
You’re also standing on a shaky spot trying to claim Craig is a “useful idiot” while you’re backing ‘democratisation’ that actually involves running El Salvador style torture and death squads (‘police commandos’ and ‘counter terrorism units’ trained by US forces) using the same torture methods and execution of dissidents as Saddam did. Having elections does not make a democracy while anyone can be jailed, tortured or disappeared by government forces at any time.
See some American journalists on this
Peter Maass in the New York Times magazine
http://www.nytimes.com/2005/05/01/magazine/01ARMY.html
Shane Bauer in The Nation (since ludicrously and unjustly arrested as an ‘American spy’ by the Iranian government)
http://www.thenation.com/article/iraqs-new-death-squad
and Amnesty International on the torture methods
http://report2010.amnesty.org/sites/default/files/AIR2010_AZ_EN.pdf#page=123
That is what Iranians can expect from any US led ‘democratisation’ – not American or European style democracy, but El Salvador and Iraq style death squads carrying out torture and killings of all critics and opponents on a scale that dwarfs what the Ayatollahs are doing (as they are a relatively established dictatorship, while the US backed puppet government would be a new one with less support among Iranians, especially after the killings started).
The Shah’s dictatorship, even when it was well established, was no more democratic than the Ayatollahs and ran the same secret police, torture, jail without fair trial, assassinations and disappearances
Psychopath? Sociopath? What’s wrong with old-fashioned conman? Blair isn’t really ill, or sick in the head, though it’s true he does appear to exhibit many of the classic traits of the sociopath, in the sense of him being willing to subvert and manipulate the normal “rules” for acceptable social interraction in order to “win” personal advantage over, and at the expense of others. But this is pretty normal, for people from his background, for example, Cameron.
The really great and successful conmen have the ability to convince themselves that what they are doing is right and proper, and then they appear so “straight” and sincere that convincing others becomes natural and second-nature to them. Blair’s talent is similar to mimicry in nature, where many insects have evolved so that they can mimic the behaviour patterns of other insects, usually their food, to such an extent that it is virtually impossible to see behind the mimics mask, until it’s too late. Blair successfully mimics honesty and sincerity, whilst he hides his cynicism.
But perhaps more importantly he represents the attitudes of powerful forces, or sections, of the ruling elite that have both Syria and Iran in their sights for more regime change. That Iran is cursed with having so much of our oil and gas under its sand, is a tragedy. They might have been better off without it, like the Libyans are about to learn.
The thing is, none of these attempted explanations (IMHO) get close to explaining the enigma of Blair. I wish they did. I don’t feel I need an explanation for Pol Pot or Stalin, I just think they were nuts. But I don’t think Blair is, and I don’t think you do. Even the psychopath route doesn’t quite cut it for me, it’s too glib to explain Blair.
I don’t think anyone can know exactly how Blair thinks for certain. The impression that i get is that he believes his own propaganda and is convinced that if so many influential people in government and academia and so many ordinary people agree with him, he must be right. Maybe that’s because, if he looked at what’s actually happened, the guilt would be just too much.
People can be very good at convincing themselves that whatever is easiest or the path of least resistance or the best for them personally must be what’s best for everyone – and if they get lots of other people telling them right that makes it even easier to believe.
So, Eddie, should we attack Israel for terrorising and oppressing the Palestinians? Or the USA, for terrorising and torturing thousands in the ‘black sites’ you support? Or indeed, the UK, for being complicit in all of that? Should we not call for regime chnage, since we are so concerned about the people being terrorised and oppressed and tortured? No? Why not? We don’t want to stand passively on the side of the oppressors, do we? Do you? You know, Eddie, I much prefer an honest, rabid imperialist. The regimes in Iran and Syria (and Saudi Arabia and Bahrain and Israel and Afghanistan, etc.) are shite. But cloaking greed in a concern for human rights (so let’s bomb, bomb, bomb!) simply won’t wash anymore. It’s a C19th thing, man. You’d need a waistcoat, sideboards and whiskers to pull that one off. Do you own some? Could we borrow some of your theatrical make-up?