3-24-06, 8:56 am
TONY Blair's rambling tirade against the rest of the world was an unashamed paean of praise to the US neocons' Project for a New American Century.
It ignored such fripperies as the UN and the rule of international law, substituting the military power of US imperialism and according it the right to pronounce definitively on what constitutes terrorism, democracy or, indeed, civilisation.
The wild-eyed certainty with which the Mr Blair enunciated his nightmare future for the world does not reflect either a man or a vision whose time has come.
It spoke of a man on his way out who feels frustrated that his self-given mission of swinging Britain and the world behind aggressive US imperialism has failed in the face of mass popular rejection.
Having announced that he will not lead Labour in the next general election, he feels free to rant and to require Labour's far too quiescent backbenchers to back his outlandish right-wing crusade.
Mr Blair claims that terrorists are 'plotting action' in 30-40 countries in support of an ideology that is absurd in its attitude to the US, pre-feudal in its concept of governance and reactionary and regressive in its positions on women and other faiths.
The sweeping nature of his assertions is on a par with the ravings of the late US Senator Joe McCarthy, who used to shout out numbers at random of alleged communists working in government departments.
The two men share a strategy of getting their way through scaring people that they and their families are at dire risk.
Senator McCarthy raised the hoodoo of a Soviet invasion and the imposition of a US communist government that would stifle all hard-won civil freedoms, while Mr Blair uses the catch-all category of terrorism to justify worldwide imposition of US imperialist hegemony.
The McCarthyite fantasy that the Communist Party USA, which had fought for workers' rights, against racism, for free speech and against home-grown fascists, could be an agent of alien dictatorship was as false then as is today's Blairite claim that human rights in bourgeois democracies are in mortal danger from the benighted pre-feudal fringe elements that he describes.
The only threat to civil rights in Britain today is the new Labour government, which claims, as repressive governments always have, that the only way to guarantee our freedoms is to allow them to be truncated.
Medieval and intransigent ideas on women's rights, religious tolerance and other aspects of human freedom are not the sole preserve of groups such as the Taliban, as shown by growing influence in US schools for anti-science creationists and restrictions on a woman's right to choose there.
The Blair-Bush project of using military power to cow the world into acceptance of a worldwide US imperialist empire is doomed to failure because of the global resistance that it engenders.
But the stakes are so high in a world that is armed to the teeth that people in Britain, especially the labour movement and Labour MPs, have a special responsibility to nip this poisonous plant in the bud by replacing the PM as swiftly as possible.
From Morning Star
