Upside down
So it seems, once again, that Tony Blair spun half-truths into lies in order to condemn around 11,000 people to their deaths in a criminally unnecessary war. On the BBC News, some establishment cadaver in a suit, standing in a marbled Whitehall foyer, referred opposition calls for a judical inquiry into this crime as “political opportunism”.
It’s so odd. As political awareness spirals up into God knows where, the cynicism of the powerful burrows further into blatant iniquity. One would have thought it would be different. It’s so damn obvious that one splutters in astonishment at how the servants of power don’t blush as they read their copy. Perhaps that’s why they wear make-up.
In this extremely moving speech, also a memoir, Power, Propaganda and Conscience in The War On Terror given to the University of Western Australia, John Pilger provides an antipodean angle on this curious dynamic.
Back on the European stage, in the essay Intellectuals and Anti-Fascism Enzo Traverso analyses the meaning of what he calls “a massive campaign to denigrate the entire anti-fascist tradition” as intellectuals retreat (not always from choice) from the political scene.
Other Splinters posts of interest:
- Writing, power
- Zoo
- Newspapers are crap. Period.
- Reading list
- You are the murderer you seek This morning, I r…
