Yasmin Alibhai-Brown: How the British empire is striking back
[Yasmin Alibhai-Brown is a Ugandan-born British columnist for The Independent and the Evening Standard.]
I did try to sit through the Blair show. An unfortunate combination of Asiatic high emotion and feminine fragility made me feeble. I had to walk away, knocking over a large goblet of dark red wine, the colour of blood. It stained the beautiful wooden floor. From TB, then, the final words. I Did It My Way and Je ne regrette rien. So long folks. The Tory poster of Blair as the devil man now seems prescient.
Acidic revulsion filled the back of the throat. I wanted to be there, to look into the opaque eyes of our ex-Prime Minister, shake his obscene complacency and moral smugness, meet head on his disdain for international law, evidence, citizens of both Britain and Iraq. I discussed these reactions on Sky News and afterwards was driven back by an Algerian driver, who confessed he too had to stop watching from time to time, to calm down the storm building up inside his head. Neither of us is Iraqi. Imagine now what it must have felt like if you were, and like millions of them, against the war.
Judging from the many, many emails I have had since that appearance, countless Britons were just as repulsed. For the families of dead soldiers, Blair's cold, pitiless delivery must have felt like fresh cuts on open wounds. They at least have had public attention. But what of the Iraqis? How can we have had five inquiries into Iraq without a single Iraqi being called and all Muslim voices expunged?
The Chilcot panel could have included a dispassionate Muslim academic or one of the impressive experts on international affairs at Chatham House. But no. They chose instead Baroness Prashar, an Asian of Hindu background, someone I know and admire, but who, in this case, might be seen as an establishment insider and so lack credibility.
Blair has always been an imperialist and one reason he fell in so readily with the neo-cons was that they promised to fly him on winged horses back to those glory days again. In his victory speech to the Labour party conference in 1997 he expressed unseemly pride and undisguised longing for the British empire "that covered the world", an echo of his godmother Margaret Thatcher's intimations of colonial greatness in Bruges in 1992. And from his testimony he is still is profoundly a Western supremacist.
That he says there was "no humanitarian disaster" means it doesn't matter how many dusky natives – men, women and children – have been killed, maimed, reduced to destitution or ended up as refugees. They do not matter any more than did those Bengal famine victims under the Raj when they were denied food for sound economic reasons. When he says the "calculus" changed – he reduces these humans to a number. He and Bush, white masters of the universe, decide who lives and who dies.
The only "humans" in Blair's story are the Americans whose safety and sovereignty was violated on 9/11. We know all that – more clearly than ever before. Blair for sure would not accept China and India using his example to launch an attack on Iraq. That privilege is open only to white power...
Read entire article at Independent (UK)
I did try to sit through the Blair show. An unfortunate combination of Asiatic high emotion and feminine fragility made me feeble. I had to walk away, knocking over a large goblet of dark red wine, the colour of blood. It stained the beautiful wooden floor. From TB, then, the final words. I Did It My Way and Je ne regrette rien. So long folks. The Tory poster of Blair as the devil man now seems prescient.
Acidic revulsion filled the back of the throat. I wanted to be there, to look into the opaque eyes of our ex-Prime Minister, shake his obscene complacency and moral smugness, meet head on his disdain for international law, evidence, citizens of both Britain and Iraq. I discussed these reactions on Sky News and afterwards was driven back by an Algerian driver, who confessed he too had to stop watching from time to time, to calm down the storm building up inside his head. Neither of us is Iraqi. Imagine now what it must have felt like if you were, and like millions of them, against the war.
Judging from the many, many emails I have had since that appearance, countless Britons were just as repulsed. For the families of dead soldiers, Blair's cold, pitiless delivery must have felt like fresh cuts on open wounds. They at least have had public attention. But what of the Iraqis? How can we have had five inquiries into Iraq without a single Iraqi being called and all Muslim voices expunged?
The Chilcot panel could have included a dispassionate Muslim academic or one of the impressive experts on international affairs at Chatham House. But no. They chose instead Baroness Prashar, an Asian of Hindu background, someone I know and admire, but who, in this case, might be seen as an establishment insider and so lack credibility.
Blair has always been an imperialist and one reason he fell in so readily with the neo-cons was that they promised to fly him on winged horses back to those glory days again. In his victory speech to the Labour party conference in 1997 he expressed unseemly pride and undisguised longing for the British empire "that covered the world", an echo of his godmother Margaret Thatcher's intimations of colonial greatness in Bruges in 1992. And from his testimony he is still is profoundly a Western supremacist.
That he says there was "no humanitarian disaster" means it doesn't matter how many dusky natives – men, women and children – have been killed, maimed, reduced to destitution or ended up as refugees. They do not matter any more than did those Bengal famine victims under the Raj when they were denied food for sound economic reasons. When he says the "calculus" changed – he reduces these humans to a number. He and Bush, white masters of the universe, decide who lives and who dies.
The only "humans" in Blair's story are the Americans whose safety and sovereignty was violated on 9/11. We know all that – more clearly than ever before. Blair for sure would not accept China and India using his example to launch an attack on Iraq. That privilege is open only to white power...