Matt Carr

Tony Blair’s latest self-aggrandizing and bloodthirsty pronouncements on Iraq have not surprisingly been greeted with a storm of ridicule, contempt, and disgust across a wide spectrum of political opinion. Boris Johnson, Clare Short, Malcolm Rifkind, Christopher Meyer and even John Prescott have all joined in the chorus of condemnation. Johnson says that Blair has ‘gone mad.’ Short says that he is ‘wrong, wrong. wrong.’ Former Deputy Prime Minister Prescott, who once voted for the Iraq war, now says that he once told Blair that he risked restarting the crusades by going to war.

Beyond the mainstream the condemnation has been even more severe and unrelenting, as is only to be expected. Blair himself is clearly aware of this, and can’t understand why the world doesn’t admire him as much as he admires himself. In his public appearances he increasingly looks like a haunted and hunted man, a disturbing mixture of arrogance, fanaticism and narcissistic self-belief that is entirely disconnected from any awareness of the consequences of his actions.

Blair may have become rich, but outside the elite circles that he serves, his reputation is in tatters and it is difficult to imagine how it can ever be restored. Instead he is likely to spend the rest of his life as a faintly pathetic and dishonourable figure, hollowed out by his own lies and pursued by the horrific trail of blood, folly, madness and destruction that his dim-witted actions have helped unleash, and which he has never accepted responsibility for.

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Kumaran Ira

Jeune Rom lynché: la presse anglaise publie deux photos
interdites en France. (Le Monde/The Telegraph)

A 16-year-old Roma teenager, Darius, was abducted and savagely beaten by a lynch mob last Friday at the Cité des Poètes estate in a poor northern suburb of Paris, Pierrefitte-sur-Seine. As of this writing, he is still in a coma, fighting for his life in a Paris hospital after suffering multiple skull fractures.

The assault on Darius is an indictment of French society, and in particular of the persecution of the Roma by the Socialist Party (PS) government, whose officials are ordering police to break up Roma encampments and have called for all Roma to leave France. The government and the police covered up the lynching for four days, finally breaking the news on Tuesday.

Julie Launois-Flacelière, the lawyer retained by Darius’ family, said, “Darius was taken away as they watched by several individuals, some of whom were masked and armed.” The teen was reportedly pushed into a Renault Clio around 5:30 p.m. on Friday by a group of armed men. According to police, Darius was then locked in a basement, where he was beaten to within an inch of his life.

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Ulrich Rippert

The 100th anniversary of August 4, 1914—the disastrous day on which the SPD (Social Democratic Party) faction voted in the Reichstag for the Kaiser’s war credits to finance World War I—is only weeks away. The SPD is preparing for the anniversary by pressing for renewed German militarism.

At the end of May, Foreign Minister Frank-Walter Steinmeier (SPD) opened a new web site for the foreign office with the title “Review 2014—Rethinking foreign policy.” The goal of the site is to combat long-standing public opposition to war and militarism.

With the support of the German federal government and the president, Steinmeier declared at the beginning of this year that the country’s previous policy of military restraint was at an end. In the future, Germany would intervene independently, “including militarily,” in crisis regions around the world. The foreign minister justified this by saying that Germany was “too big and too important” to limit itself “to merely commenting from the sidelines of world politics.”

Although this return of an aggressive German foreign policy underwent long and intensive preparation and was supported by all parties in the Bundestag as well as practically the entire media, it has met with the opposition and hostility by the majority of the population. That is now supposed to change.

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