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Blair: a mass murderer pretending to care about China’s human rights

In the service of neocolonial plunder, Bush and Blair invaded Iraq at the cost of millions of lives. How can he now find the hubris to attack China on yet more dodgy claims, asks KEITH LAMB

THE recent Bloomberg 2020 New Economy Forum hosted a conversation between former US president Bill Clinton and former British prime minister Tony Blair.

They discussed how the world needs to come together in light of shared global problems such as Covid-19 and the environment.

A large part of their exchange was spent on the topic of China.

Blair said that “China has a large population with an ancient civilisation, so it should be one of the great powers of the 21st century.”

However, the problem with China, for Blair, is that it “has a different system.” 

Blair believes that Western engagement with China and China’s opening up, was supposed to lead it down the path towards political liberalisation.

Blair continued to raise concerns about Hong Kong and Xinjiang and said: “China is becoming a more repressive society.” 

If his definition of repression means that Chinese citizens are getting wealthier, poverty is being eliminated and the Chinese are not tasting those “freedom bombs” dropped on Iraq by himself, then perhaps he has a point.

However, Blair’s basic stance is that if only China was a liberal democracy like the US or Britain, the “horror” of lived reality in China would be very different, human rights abuses would not take place and the world would be a safer place.

No doubt there would also be another ally for future illegal wars!

Consequently, Blair’s denunciation of China is rather rich coming from a man who, with the US, commanded Britain’s brave soldiers to shed their blood in the illegal 2003 invasion of Iraq.

Of course, let us never forget, the shedding of Iraqi blood is just as tragic for the Iraqi people.

After all, they feel the horror of war and Iraqi mothers cry for their lost children as much as British mothers.

In the first two years of the invasion and occupation, 24,865 civilians were killed.

Today with the numerous conflicts, sparked by the destruction of Iraq, there have been a total of 288,000 violent deaths.

Of these deaths, according to iraqbodycount.org, 208,419 are civilian deaths.

Thus, Blair is part responsible for one of the 21st century’s greatest crimes against humanity.

Yet, unlike those dead from the attempt to bring “freedom” to Iraq, Blair has his life and liberty.

Despite the calamity he has inflicted on the world through the might of liberal democracies, he shamelessly feels he is in a position to judge China.

Indeed, he earns astronomical sums through using his “expertise” and contacts built up through his destruction of the Middle East.

Currently, Networthstatus.com puts Blair’s net worth at $60 million.

The double tragedy is that Blair was the head of Britain’s Labour Party which had originally represented Britain’s working class and stood for socialism in opposition to imperialism.

Instead, Blair became a puppet for transnational capital and Western imperialism.

His election campaign was backed by the mass media mogul Rupert Murdoch who has influential media outlets across the anglosphere.

“Coincidently,” Murdoch’s news outlets were pro-Iraq war.

Blair’s director of communications Alastair Campbell revealed in his published diary, that Murdoch pressured Blair into the illegal invasion of Iraq.

Indeed, according to online publishing project Militarist Monitor, Murdoch was involved in founding the Project for a New American Century (PNAC), the US think tank which had its members within the US Bush Jnr administration who invaded Iraq based on a pack of lies.

These dark dealings of unfettered transnational capital within the most powerful liberal democracies call into question the very legitimacy of Britain’s democracy.

If elected governments are paid for by the highest bidder then they obviously do not represent the mass of their citizens and nor do the invasions carried out in their name.

Today few can deny that the tragedy of the illegal invasion of Iraq, carried out by a coalition of liberal democracies ostensibly in the name of human rights, was a neocolonial plunder of Iraq’s resources.

The very hypocrisy of staging the invasion from Saudi Arabia, which made Saddam’s Iraq look like a liberal paradise, speaks volumes.

The Women’s International League for Peace and Freedom said in 2013 about Iraq: “Contrary to popular imagination, Iraqi women enjoyed far more freedom under Saddam Hussein’s secular Ba’athist government than women in other Middle Eastern countries.

“In fact, equal rights for women were enshrined in Iraq’s constitution in 1970, including the right to vote, run for political office, access education and own property.

“Today, these rights are all but absent under the US-backed government of Nouri al-Maliki.”

No doubt some will say that even Blair can call out China on, for example, its actions in Xinjiang and will claim that I am engaging in “whataboutery.”

Those who claim this will do well to remember that the Iraq war was started by false claims that Saddam was in part responsible for the World Trade Centre attacks September 11 2001 and possessed weapons of mass destruction (WMD).

The very “proof” of the WMD claim, turned out to be a plagiarised document written by a junior aid to Alastair Campbell.

The Xinjiang “evidence” is actually more sophisticated.

It has been financed and disseminated by the military-industrial-complex and agencies linked to the US government.

It is even connected with those in the former PNAC.

As evidence is debunked, it remains unreported in the Western corporate media.

Even the fact that Uighur human rights campaigner Rushan Abbas was found to be an employee at Guantanamo Bay, housing both Uighur and Iraqi prisoners, is not considered newsworthy.

With all this in mind, despite Blair’s abhorrent human rights and intelligence-gathering record, he nevertheless feels confident in judging China.

However, as a traitor to British democracy, as a war criminal and as a socialist imposter, he has lost any legitimacy to lecture China which is engaged in working for socialism at home as well as multilateralism and development abroad.

These initiatives, not war, are the true foundations for global democracy and peace.

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