The Blair Belief Project Part I

"I can only go one way, I've not got a reverse gear." —From Tony Blair's speech to the Labour Party Conference, September 30, 2003.

Back in 1997, I’m rather ashamed to say I voted for Tony Blair, as sick as I was with the relentless individualism of the Thatcher years and still under the naive influence that politics could actually change things.

It is clear that an endemic naiveté of which I was a part not only persists in contemporary politics but goes deeper into an almost pathological denial of the reality of our world. Along side the caricature that is Bush, the British Prime Minister embodies such a pathology to perfection, gleefully leaping across the world stage with all the conviction of one who has thoroughly learnt his lines and for whom the applause and adulation is the fix that keeps him functioning. The massive protests of the hoi-polloi (you and I) matters little to Tony as he casts his eye on those in the high boxes way above the stalls, giving him the nod and wink that he’s doing just fine. He is a man with a mission and his mission is all consuming.

There is no doubt that he is passionately driven to do whatever it takes to make his delusions fit neatly into the lies and manipulations so prevalent on the geo-political scene. Indeed, our Tony has become a consummate propagandist for the cause of globalisation, world government advocates and the dismantling of the already diluted and suspect powers of the United Nations. Finally he has taken it upon himself to act as an apologist for George Bush with increasingly religious overtones in his speeches and interviews. Blair may genuinely see himself doing God’s will, holding hands with his neo-conservative, fundamentalist friends and generally living out his fantasies as world statesman and saviour of us all. Blair has taken on the role of mercurial messenger and has made it his purpose to assimilate truth to one singular idea: that we should all be afraid, very afraid. So much so, that we should give up the last vestiges of freedom for our own protection designed to lock out the terrorists forever so that when a comprehensive lock-down occurs the Blairs of this world can have a comfortable private pew on which to pray for a kindly “judgement” from a future history – should there be one.

Coupled with this determination to have a piece of Bush’s “divine guidance” this man harbours an egotistical vision that is partly driven by an intense obsession with the illusion of American democracy and its speedy exportation into British society. Certainly, New Labour is merely an extension of the New World International Order he so passionately believes in. Hehas done more than any other Prime Minister to warp British society into one vast shopping-trolley of consumptive values and vested corporate interests. (Read George Monbiot’s Captive State for details). To this extent, Blair’s vision can be compared to the Reagan and Clinton years insofar as this was the overt beginning of the erosion of civil society by the culture of psychopathy. This in turn is laying the foundations for a further reduction in civil rights (most notably with the Civil Contingences Bill) where the “War on Terror” is in actuality nothing more than a “War on Truth.”

Although Blair lied that he did not attend a Bilderberg Grp. meeting in 1993 it is easily verifiable that he was on the guest list report at the time. Could it be that he was being primed for his task as “saviour”? Did someone whisper into his shell-like just how urgent the state of the world really was and that it was Tony’s mission – should he wish to accept it – that could mean order or chaos in the new millennium? Perhaps he has since interpreted these whisperings as an indirect angelic intervention designed for him alone. Though ask any of the families of the 1 million plus Iraqis killed in this abhorrent war as to whether that interpretation is correct I don’t think their answer would be ambiguous. One thing does seem probable, he has been manoeuvred into power, fed some frightening facts personally tailored to his ego which has then been basted with the hottest juices of the gravy train and the promise of a divine mission during the “End Times.”

Regardless of the source of such role, we now have a perfect environment for Blair’s “calling” to flourish. He will stop at nothing to fulfil his delusional mission of “Blair knows best” which includes burying anything deep in his subconscious should it threaten his subjective take on events. All Truth is put through the Blair-belief filter and clustered into centres of self-importance and delusions of grandeur, where any grains of truth are plucked from their original hypothesis and reinvented.

To repeatedly evoke the idea that the sacred values of the West are at stake is to indulge in some breath-taking hypocrisy. For all his lip-service to diversity and human rights they do not remotely match his actions and his deep seated fear that is so tainted with Revelations and Armageddon. Values to Blair mean to protect at any cost, a Christian, preferably business suited, modern, super-swanky-cool-Britannia kind of values. And as long as there is a McDonalds, a Wal-Mart, several hypermarkets and a Disneyland right outside everyone’s front door then our lives will be fulfilled. It is a shame he prefers to ignore the facts that the reason for the state of the world is due primarily to so called Western democracies, a growing cult of consumerism and Christianity voraciously raping and pillaging any notion of the Sacred and the True right down to our present day. Thus we have a world which has not learnt its lessons, hosting an array of “Leaders” with a variety of pre-dispositions and personalities bound together by a common cabalistic creed: Power.

Many in the Military-Industrial Complex may also be convinced they are serving God while in reality they serve to protect themselves against their own fears that they are obviously not in control and that the version of reality we have been educated to believe in is very far from the Truth.

Which brings us back to the slight wrinkle in Blair’s copious rants on Islamic extremism and the sanctity of Western values which is simply this: The “War on Terror” is a hoax of monumental proportions, underscored by a history of “normalized” deceit in which the US and Europe led operations to conquer and monopolize. We are now reaching an apotheosis of such a dynamic. When Blair harps on about these hallowed ideals of liberty, freedom and justice which he has vicariously trumpeted hither and thither, he refuses to acknowledge the glaring contradictions in all of his actions to date. While on the one hand he sings the United Nation’s praises calling for a strengthening of its powers and on the other, he abuses everything the UN stands for (even if only on paper) and ignores, twists and manipulates the security council resolutions in favour of an illegal war. He believes he has covered every possibility, bar the chance that he may be gravely wrong.

In his professed determination to prevent Armageddon Tony Blair is actually courting a major conflagration in the Middle East. The illusion of an interconnected international world order where governments work together to usher in a new spiritual dispensation is a dangerous romantic fantasy at the very least, yet one in which has an historical basis excluding any notions of a “New Age” in human relationships and governance, rather one in which control is the literal Order of the day. This pattern of intent can be discerned from an objective analysis of geo-political history and human nature rather than any sensationalist conspiracy theory. The only networks forming in the corridors of power are those who crave only more power as social and environmental catastrophe draw closer.

Before Blair was hand-picked to play his role in the ““War on Terror” he had long since become flushed with excitement that he would be playing with the big boys. This has not been a sudden conversion as people may think but a steady romance with the riches of globalisation and “Big is beautiful” ethos. He has imported the same techniques of deception from the US where Tony’s heart seems to go thumpety-thump at the merest mention of a hamburger or Chevrolet. His astonishing defence of thousands Iraqi families murdered in Fallujah should give us an indication of the depth of this identification. It is no mistake that Blair is the darling of the neo-cons. Indeed, the smouldering love affair is mutual throughout most of Middle America. Like many across the pond, their zeal has been bubbling away on the sheen of oil-laden interests comprising of most of the US administration and the American Zionist network also gagging for a slice of the Action in. As a precursor to such controls, the oil reserves in Iraq are one prize Blair and Bush are determined to secure knowing only too well that if they did not then Russian and French multinationals would move in. Consequently, Blair will not brook a bad word said against his American friends. Which is why Blair will probably decamp to be amongst his own kind once the Prime Ministerial panto has been played out. No doubt too, like Margaret Thatcher, he will be able to charge enormous sums for after-dinner speeches. That is, should American laws at that time allow such displays of free speech…

Regarding Blair’s own personalized public speaking, they are sparse on facts, big on rhetoric, heavy with out-dated reports long since proved to be false and a constant stream of barely disguised biblical references and emotional pleas for a global crusade. There is also an undercurrent of defensiveness, a childish insistence to pre-empt our very thoughts in order to bolster his own belief that he is sitting firmly on the right hand of God. Amen. Of course, in the final analysis this is not about doing God’s work or the upholding of human rights, or the long-term greater good, it is about Mr. Blair maintaining his beliefs and his self-image at any cost. Very probably he believes in what he is doing. Like any fledging despot and full-blown narcissist the more you point out the gargantuan holes in their argument the more determined they will become to fill it, albeit temporarily, with feats of intellectual snake charming so slippery that your mouth hangs open at the sheer dexterity of it all.

Day in and day out we see Blair and others omitting salient points and slanting the topic in question or introducing a lie that is so convincingly parroted from some long discredited source it has an effect of rendering the listener dizzy with confusion. One is left with the impression that it does indeed come from a rather dog-eared script that is being passed around to all those keen to squeeze out the last droplets of material gain from the fracturing status quo. And so, after listening to the many arbitrary “truths” and “vagaries of perception” the holes in his argument are patched by more and more rhetoric and impassioned pleas for the world to see the light. The tone is so earnest one almost wants to believe him. And so the holes remain “hidden” by obfuscation, disinformation, a complaint media and the ignorance and apathy of a sound byte culture.

But sound bytes are Tony Blair’s domain. Lies and subjective beliefs are dressed up in capable oratory and the use of hyperbole and sentiment. He has made it his own special mission to play the intellectual counterpart to Bush making him his friend and ally, a kindred spirit for his increasingly evangelical sensibilities. His ability to achieve such a fanatical drive and consistent refusals to apologise, as well as his powers of persuasion lend credence to the accusations of psychopathy. After all, in the face of such suffering who in their right mind would call on us to “rejoice” at the “liberation” of Iraq? His body language, expression and public speaking are believable to many people not least to the New Labour party and much of the British public who backed his stance. In many of his speeches we see him pouring with sweat, literally putting his heart and “soul” into such performances. Even his recent heart electro-shock treatment suggests that our Tony is feeling the pressure. To resist reality and to adhere to lies twenty-four hours a day under the spotlight of the world stage is no easy task. When this pressure is partly symptomatic of a tenacious will to retain one’s self-image transplanted onto a tight-fitting belief system, it will take its wear and tear on the body.

This is an intelligent man, a former barrister who attended Fettes College, “Scotland’s Eton” and later Oxford University where he graduated to practice the same law he now ignores so well. Lies are now part of the Blair package as former ministers Clare Short and Robin Cook revealed in extensive reports which have had an equal corroboration. Perhaps there is no real “Tony Blair”, just an open place to rent whichever righteous cause provides the most elastoplasts to his patchwork ego. Indeed, his penchant for hanging on the coat tails of astonishingly egotistical spin doctors Peter Mandelson and Alistair Campbell should give us pause for thought.

As Blair is so keen to point out, we are all becoming ever more interrelated and interconnected. Which makes it all the more vital to understand that we must not except this as an excuse to fall into the fear-laden trap of “better the devil you know” where establishing a centralized system of global controls spawned from the hoax of the “War on Terror”, is well and truly on the cards. Once again, if we value TRUE freedom and the vital principle of free-will then it means we must learn to think for ourselves and learn the language of deceit so that we may SEE what is being laid before us as truth.

Perhaps we should examine what it is that Blair has contributed to the cause of freedom? From the whitewash of the Hutton and Butler Reports, (all appointed by Blair for the required outcome) to pathetic attempts to find intelligence via a student’s thesis from the internet - Tony Blair clings to office:

• Tony Blair is a liar, the man who headed the CIA’s Iraq Desk during the Gulf War said last night. “Bush and Blair want a war in Iraq and they are both prepared to lie if necessary in order to get one,” said Dr. Stephen Pelletiere who recently retired as professor of National Security Affairs at the US Army War College. [Top Intel expert Brands Tony Blair a liar over Iraq, Kevin Dowling, Global-Intel]
• …Tony Blair refused to apologize for inadvertently 'misrepresenting' the dossier issued in February as 'intelligence' when large parts of it were culled from an article in a Middle East journal based on a PhD thesis." [Andrew Grice | The independent | July 9, 2003] “there was a selection of evidence to support a conclusion... intelligence was not being used to inform and shape policy, but to shape policy that was already settled", with contradictory evidence being ignored. [Patrick Wintour Guardian, June 18, 2003]
• "Prime Minister Tony Blair conceded privately that Iraq did not have the quickly deployable weapons of mass destruction that the British government cited as justification for war, former Foreign Secretary Robin Cook asserted today." [Warren Hoge | New York Times | October 5, 2003]
• The lawyers "said the war in Iraq breached international treaties such as the Charter of the United Nations, the Geneva Conventions and the ICC's own Statute." Top lawyers from Greece are travelling to the International Criminal Court in The Hague on Monday to file a lawsuit against senior UK officials. [Richard Galpin | British Broadcasting Corporation | July 28, 2003]
• President George Bush first asked Tony Blair to support the removal of Saddam Hussein from power at a private White House dinner nine days after the terror attacks of 11 September, 2001. According to Sir Christopher Meyer, the former British Ambassador to Washington, who was at the dinner, Blair told Bush he should not get distracted from the “War on Terror's" initial goal - dealing with the Taliban and al-Qaeda in Afghanistan. [David Rose Sunday April 4, 2004 The Observer]
• Tony Blair is facing a formal complaint to the international war-crimes tribunal by a panel of senior international legal experts for unlawfully waging war in Iraq. The panel of eight law professors, including experts from Oxford University and the London School of Economics, is studying evidence that alleges Britain has broken international treaties on war and human rights in Iraq.
• Dramatic new evidence from the intelligence services casts fresh doubts over Tony Blair's central claim that Iraq continued to produce chemical and biological weapons until the outbreak of war, The Observer can reveal. Newly disclosed Cabinet Office documents show that the Prime Minister's categorical assertion was based only on a single source and was attacked as 'too strong' by a senior intelligence official. The same official attacks the dossier's descriptions of the graphic effects of mustard gas and VX, a nerve agent, as 'grossly misleading'. [Martin Bright, Gaby Hinsliff and Antony Barnett Sunday September 14, 2003 The Observer]
• [The Niger Forgeries] When the Prime Minister is quizzed by the committee, he is expected to say that the Government had more than one source for the allegation. One British official said: "There were a number of sources for the text in our dossier on that and we stand by it." Last night the IAEA expressed surprise that Mr Blair did not take the opportunity offered by Mr Cook to abandon the allegation. Melissa Fleming, a spokeswoman for the IAEA, said: "These were blatant forgeries. We were able to determine that they were forgeries very quickly." [By Andrew Grice and David Usborne Independent June 5, 2003]
• Tony Blair’s credibility over weapons of mass destruction is set to face its sternest test after his special envoy to Iraq conceded yesterday Saddam Hussein had stockpiled none. Sir Jeremy Greenstock’s remarkably frank admission came as speculation mounted that two of Britain’s top spymasters and the government’s most senior law officer will be criticised by an official inquiry into the handling of intelligence on Saddam’s WMD. [Alison hardie Political correspondent]
• The Prime Minister shifted tack on Saddam Hussein's weapons of mass destruction again today - fuelling doubts that hard evidence of their existence will ever be found. Challenged whether he believed pre-war intelligence about Iraqi arms was accurate, Tony Blair said he was convinced evidence would confirm Saddam's "complete determination" to obtain illegal weapons. [By Joe Murphy, Evening Standard Political Editor 8 June 2004]
• Tony Blair was warned two weeks before publication of the Iraq dossier that the intelligence was dodgy, it emerged last night. In a personal meeting with the PM, the head of MI6 Sir Richard Dearlove admitted one of the key sources on Saddam's chemical weapons was "on trial". He told the PM "the source remains unproven". But just 14 days later Mr Blair declared in the forward of the dossier that the chemical weapons intelligence was "beyond doubt". [Jul 16 2004 By Bob Roberts Deputy Political Editor]
• Downing Street secured vital changes to the Butler Report before its publication, watering down an explicit criticism of Tony Blair and the way he made the case for war in the House of Commons. [By Melissa Kite and Patrick Hennessy]
• So what of Tony Blair, the man who claims that human rights are so important that they justify going to war? Well, at the beginning of this year, he granted Uzbekistan an open licence to import whatever weapons from the United Kingdom Mr Karimov fancies. But his support goes far beyond that. The British ambassador to Uzbekistan, Craig Murray, has repeatedly criticised Karimov's crushing of democracy movements and his use of torture to silence his opponents. Like Roger Casement, the foreign office envoy who exposed the atrocities in the Congo a century ago, Murray has been sending home dossiers which could scarcely fail to move anyone who cares about human rights.  [ Tony Blair’s New Friend George Monbiot Monbiot.com/ 2003]

And so it goes on.