I'm not one of his greatest fans, but you have to hand it George Galloway - he's one of the most robust political street fighters around, and you enter an argument with him at your peril, as the US Senate once found. This evening on Question Time he came up with the 'bon mot' of the evening, when he said that Tony Blair's current appointment as a Middle East peace envoy was a bit like 'posthumously appointing Harold Shipman as chairman of Help the Aged'.
Galloway - never knowingly guilty of good taste!
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2 comments:
He makes a good point.
Number of innocent civilians killed by Harold Shipman: 150 (estimated)
Number of innocent civilians killed in the Iraq war: 100,000 (estimated)
Shipman faced justice for his crimes. He was tried, convicted and died in jail, demonised by the press and (we are told) hated by society.
Bush and Blair meanwhile, architects of death on a far greater scale with motives which were equally self-serving, both went on to secure further terms of office from their respective electorates, while vast swathes of the media on both sides of the Atlantic merrily cheered them on.
Benedict XVI, shortly after becoming Pope, spoke about the evils of moral relativism which grip the world, threatening to blur the distinction between (Catholic) right and (Catholic) wrong. We see these evils in sharp relief here, in a case he bizarrely failed to spot when he invited Bush and Blair to his papal inauguration.
Had Blair been a provincial doctor travelling around gently offing old ladies, he’d be in jail. Had he been leader of a Balkan state responsible for 100,000 deaths, he’d be on trial for war crimes. As a leader from the “free” world, he avoids such a fate. Galloway’s humour is black, but nowhere near as black as the irony in which this warmonger ends up as a peace envoy to a region his war did so much to destabilise.
The relativism – the sheer hypocrisy – which infects us in this case is so powerful as to push the notion that Bush and Blair should stand trial for war crimes to the very fringes of sensible debate. I feel like a lunatic just for writing this post. But think about it. The number of people who have died as a result of their failings, their cavalier acts, is astonishing. And it terrifies me that they did all of this in full view of the world, and we did nothing.
I tend to agree, and I don't think your post is a 'lunatic' one at all (I wouldn't apply that to all of your posts though!). It was in that seminal, profound film 'Cliffhanger' that the baddie commented "Kill ten people, they call you a murderer; kill a million and you're a conqueror. Go figure!"
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