Rogueish
06/07/12
I finally got round to watching the last two Harry Potter films last week; taken together, they make a pretty good four-and-a-half hour film, although the first film is probably better (the design of the Ministry of Magic is especially good). I thought this sequence was particularly impressive. It became very clear with the publication of the fifth book that Harry Potter is an attack on the crypto-fascism of neoliberalism, and New Labour in particular, but the visuals here, it seems to me, add something that isn’t in the books: don’t the streams of smoke hanging quietly in the sky that represent the Death Eaters bring to mind images of the white phosphorous bombardment of Fallujah? It’s a valuable reminder of the other legacy of Tony Blair’s government.
Eagle Eye - John Rentoul: The moral case for the Iraq war→
03/12/10
Trusting that the secular rationality of Realpolitik would have prevented the rivalry between Iraq’s atrocious Saddam and Iran’s millenarian Mahmoud Ahmadi-Nejad from turning catastrophically nuclear.
Quit right. And how do we know that Saddam wouldn’t have constructed a giant robot dinosaur and unleashed it to terrorize the citizens of Tokyo? We don’t, and the certainty with which the antis dismiss this possibility proves how deeply naïve their approach to international relations is.
How the bloody anarchy of Iraq broke the spirit of Tony Blair→
02/28/10
Tony Blair became so demoralised in the spring of 2004 as Iraq descended into chaos that he almost quit Downing Street.
Almost quit! Tony Blair really is one of the most loathsome people in the world.
