P.M. Tony Blair, the war criminal and serial killer of Iraqi and Afghan people

Source: GEORGE BARNSBY DAILY BLOG NO.160 MONDAY 21ST JUNE 2007

www.gbpeopleslibrary.co.uk


ARREST BLAIR, WAR CRIMINAL, SERIAL KILLER AND VANDAL NOW.

Simon Jenkins in the Guardian 8 June has been the first to record that British and American collusion in the pillaging of Iraq’s heritage is a scandal that will outlive the illegal and racist war. Under Saddam you were likely to be arrested and shot if you stole an antiquity. Under the US and Britain you are liable to be shot if you don’t steal one. Iraq is the site of some of the irreplaceable Wonders of the World. For instance Ur is reputedly the oldest city on earth, but the great zigguratt is pock marked with shrapnel and its national Museum in Baghdad has been looted not only by permission of the American but with their active participation.

Blair’s crimes are those of war criminal, serial killer and cultural vandal and it is no longer fanciful to point the example of the Nazi war criminals in 1945. They were charged at a newly invented War Crimes Tribunal in the heart of a ruined Germany at Nurenberg in a specially built prison and court premises with mass murder and crimes against humanity.

Blair’s trial will take place under different circumstances. For instance he might be Impeached, as recently suggested by General Michael Rose. This has not been done since Cromwellian times and might remind us of the time when Englishmen led the world by cutting off the head of a king and existing for some years as a Republic. At the moment Parliament is too craven for Impeachment to succeed, but times change fast and this could be Blair’s fate.

Other ways are possible in our more sophisticated world. For instance Blair might be tried at the Court that he himself set up in 2000, namely the Court of Human Rights. This would be poetic justice. Another possibility is the European Court of Human Rights at Strasbourg in France. Finally Blair could be arraigned before the International Criminal Court dealing with the most serious crimes such as genocide, crimes against humanity and war crimes.

But it is not only Blair that we are concerned with but those who have aided and abetted him. Chief of these is Gordon Brown who seems not only eager to pick up the bloody mantle of Blair but to add war crimes of his own. Then there is the Attorney General, Lord Goldsmith who not only criminally declared the war in Iraq legal and thus gave Blair his excuse to support the war, but has supported Blair in every other illegal act that Blair has performed.
Next we should mention several of those currently competing for the post of Deputy Leader of the Labour Party, a post Brown, assuming that he becomes Prime Minister, could abolish with a snap of his fingers. I am thinking particularly of Peter Hain, Harriet Harman, Alan Johnson and even Hilary Benn if he doesn’t back track soon, all of whom have been ministers in the Blair government and thus a party to his crimes. Also Hazel Blears so devoted to Tony Blair that it seems she is willing to go down with the sinking ship. To those can be added Labour MPs who continue to support the war in Iraq. Also civil servants and Heads of Departments often guilty of giving wrong advice and bludgeoning Ministers into decisions they would not have taken on their own. When Blair stands trial, there will be many who share his guilt.

I would mention only one other category of people. That is journalists and newscaster who today have unprecedented power and are virtually the sole means of our being given truthful news. I pick out Jeremy Paxman, Andrew Marr, Jon Snow, Kirsty Wark and Martha Kierney, all members of the ruling class through their education at public schools and Oxbridge who have protected Blair by never challenging him on the war in Iraq and in their arrogance and conceit have for 37 times ignored the urging of a plebeian like myself to explain their actions.

PATRIOTISM AND LOCAL HISTORY .
British Day, I am told has just come and gone . I have expressed myself before on this question but it bears repeating. I see no reason at all to be proud of a gynaecological accident which saw me dropped on a slice of land called England where the people are much the same as those elsewhere, some good, some not so good and others so awful I wouldn’t touch them with a barge pole let alone a flag pole. Of those who want to wrap the Union Jack around themselves and me I recall the words, ‘Patriotism is the last refuge of a scoundrel’. often attributed to Winston Churchill, but actually said by another great patriotic Englishman Dr.Samuel Johnson, whose biographer, James Boswell, amends this to read, not the last, ‘but the first’ refuge of a scoundrel.

In my search for a definition of my Englishness I recall the famous statement, ‘I am a citizen of the world my aim is to do good’. This occurs in various forms including Baden Powel, but I prefer the version of Pablo Casels, ‘Love of one’s country is a splendid thing, but why should love stop at the borders’.

My next exemplar in the search for my Englishness is that great patriot, and scourge of all hypocrites and humbugs, W.S.Gilbert. You may remember that in the comic opera HMS Pinafore, Gilbert had a character with a choice of nationality. ‘He might have been a Roosian, A Frenchman or a Proosian, or perhaps I’tal-ien’. However after mature reflection, ‘In spite of all temptations to belong to other nations he remained an Hinglishman, he rem-aaaaained an Hinglishman’. And if that is good enough for Gilbert and Sullivan it is good enough for me. I am an HINGLISHMAN.

But my best definition was that of Karl Marx, ‘Workers of the World Unite, You have nothing to lose but your Chains’. This was certainly true of me when in 1939 I was conscripted to fight for ‘my country’ and possessed nothing but two suits and a bicycle. Clearly some people had much more of this country than I had and some were enlisting me to fight against my fellow working men in a war waged, like the 1st World War to re-divide the world among capitalists.

Whether Marx’s definition remains true I am still not quite sure, but I know that Gordon Brown, who wants to burden me with a British identity that I don’t want and even Tristram Hunt a true English born aristocrat who writes eruditely on this question cannot separate my Englishness of what I am from the Britishness that I don’t want to be saddled with.

In the meantime, I have lived a long life, been round the world and have been not only a history teacher who teaches history from a text book written and researched by some one else, but a historian who has researched history for himself. And many strange thin g s have I discovered.

For instance, I was brought up in the town the Romans built on the banks of the Thames and called Londinium. Except that the Romans didn’t build it. Few of the invading army were Romans, most being Celtic tribesman from Western or Eastern Europe who had been trained to do the skilled work while the unskilled work was done by ‘ancient Britons’ of many tribes.

The same is true of Roman roads built throughout Britain. But particular to my studies, the Roman road which branched off from Watling Street and went through Wolverhampton which I was the first to excavate with a party of school children from Etheridge Secondary Modern School along the line of the road at Barnhurst Farm. This was built by labourers whose descendents were to become Mercians and who were probably too few to be able to resist the alien invaders of their land.

This Mercian ‘nationality’ has recently been in the news from revived interest in the Battle of Tettenhall fought either in Tettenhall or Wednesfield and where possibly in Henwood Road where I live Anglo-Saxon tribesman charged down the steep slope to defeat the Viking invaders who fled to their ships moored on Smestow Brook and thence down the Severn and back to Scandinavia with their ill-gotten loot. To excavate in Tettenhall or Wednesfield and turn up remains of tribesman or their weapons is the exciting prospect for children and adults in this neck of the woods. History does mean something to us here.

Finally I want to deal with another feature of local history. Just before Wolverhampton’s millennial year in 1985 which is dated to the time of the discovery of the first written document of the charter to Wulfruna of the ‘gift’ of Wolverhampton, I discovered that Lady Wulfruna was not the gracious benefactress beloved of all, but the Mrs.Thatcher of her age who received a gift she was not entitled to accept from a person who was not entitled to give it, namely the King of Wessex, of what was virtually the whole of Wolverhampton.

Inspired by my fellow midlander, Williiam Shakespeare who was disparagingly said to know little Latin and even less Greek, but became one of the world’s enduring history writers, I who had no Greek or Latin or even Anglo-Saxon was inspired to research what was, and remains the only history of Wolverhampton adopting a Marxist outlook of class struggle. The booklet ‘The Origins of Wolverhampton to 85 0 AD’ was published by Wolverhampton Borough Council to celebrate the town’s millennium. The booklet argued that although the Charter of King Ethelred to Wulfrun in 985 was the first written document of the town’s history, it was the final act of assigning land to private persons land which had formerly been the property of the whole community. So from the time the Romans landed bringing with them a class society we have had ever since, in Anglo-Saxon times an unholy alliance of Church and State whereby the state punished all those who wished to return to a classless society and the Church threatened everlasting damnation to those who refused to accept the new religion.

So history is made by the common people and should be written by them, not as an academic exercise, but to illuminate the history of the Multicultural world which is emerging in the 21st century.