To the editor of the Palestine Chronicle:
Tony Blair’s psychologically challenged speech in New York (18th October) warning of a new era of Iranian led fascism similar to 1930’s Europe, a threat to the whole world (as the Balkans, Afghanistan, Iraq, here we go again) would have been laughable, had it not got three standing ovations from the very wealthy, real fascists with the ear of the Armageddonists and George W. Bush. That it was repeated, nearly word for word by Dick Cheney three days later (the man who mistook his unfortunate shooting friend for a quail) leads one to wonder who writes whose speeches. Gordon Brown repeated something remarkably similar, a short time later.
Perhaps they should read the following and reflect on history and the real enemy – within, as the US and UK have the temerity to urge ‘restraint’ on Turkey. Those who ignore history are doomed to repeat it – and blowing up nuclear power plants IS armageddon, the Middle East fried and irradiated, including Britain and America’s soldiers and mercenaries across the region and geographically ‘next door’. Chernobyl, whose nuclear cloud travelled the globe, is estimated to have been four thousand Hiroshima equivalents. The U.S. and Britain plan, reportedly, to attack thirteen nuclear installations if another illegal decimation is not halted. Nuclear madness is indeed back.
"What no one seemed to notice was the ever widening gap between the government and the people. And it became always wide; the whole process of its coming into being, was above all diverting, it provided an excuse not to think for people who did not want to think anyway gave us some dreadful, fundamental things to think about, and kept us so busy with continuous changes and ‘crises’ and so fascinated by the machinations of the ‘national enemies,’ without and within, that we had no time to think about these dreadful things that were growing, little by little, all around us.
"That’s the difficulty. The forms are all there, all untouched, all reassuring, the houses, the shops, the jobs, the mealtimes, the visits, the concerts, the cinema, the holidays. (Yet) now you live in a world of hate and fear …’- Milton Mayer, They Thought They Were Free, The Germans, 1938-45 (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1955)
Felicity Arbuthnot,
London, UK
