Bubblehammerblog

While I'm no pacifist I'm not in favour of judicial killing under any circumstances. Since early childhood, scenes of execution in films have remained among the most vividly recalled - from Lesley Howard's guillotining in A Tale of Two Cities, Cagney's screaming appointment with the chair in Angels With Dirty Faces, to the most harrowing of all in Krystof Kieslowski's masterpiece, A Short Film About Killing.

A person's views on capital punishment are for me a touchstone, determining all other assessments of that person's opinions or personal qualities. In the spirit of Sartre's statement that 'all anti-communists are swine', I make the same sweeping gesture concerning apologists for the death penalty.

I've heard all the arguments about vital revolutionary necessities, heard the tales about Spanish anarchists of the 1930s, choosing the most magnificent vistas and exquisite sunsets when dispatching fascists, and listened to the intricately constructed logic of thought experiments that point inexorably to the firing-squad, but I remain unmovable.

Which is why, despite the man's odious crimes and unrepentant responsibility for the deaths of many thousands of civilians, I would not condone Tony Blair being put against a wall and shot.

Guardian readers who have not, through relentless exposure, become finally deaf to irony will have noted with the flicker of an eyebrow the small headline on page 6 of today's paper:

Materialism a threat to planet and human identity, says Blair

It may have been Donald Rumsfeld who rightly pointed out that being a hypocrite is better than having no values at all. The piece goes on to report that Blair delivered a speech at the 'prestigious' Communion and Liberation conference in Rimini. The adjective is superfluous, since had the event not been prestigious Blair would not have been there. The speech was made during a stopover Blair made on his way to a holiday aboard a five-deck luxury yatch as the guest of an American billionaire.

I'll quote a little of what he's alleged to have said - I use that qualifier because I'm not entirely convinced that some cunning devil isn't making all this stuff up. The language seems too thoroughly unctious, too evocative of the sermons of Rev. J.C. Flannel, to be authentic:

This is surely the role of faith in modern times...To represent God's truth, not limited by human frailty, or by the interests of the state or by the transient mores of a community, however well intentioned, but to let that truth bestow on us humility, love of neighbour, and the true knowledge that indeed passes all understanding.

Of course, since leaving office and becoming a multi-millionaire, Blair has entered into the Roman Catholic communion. I'll be frank about my prejudiced view of Roman Catholicism. This is not a religion but a conspiracy against the human spirit. Of all the main religious movements centered around the person of the rabbinical carpenter's son from Nazereth, it is the furthest removed from its source. I'll not speculate on what attractions it held for Blair.

I was once listening to Radio 4 interview with Blair's missis, Cherie. Her aquisitiveness is well known, and she's openly caricatured in the press as a greedy scouser, elbowing her way to piles of designer freebies like a footballer's wag, and stuffing her face at prestigious charity banquets. At one point the interviewer, a bit impertinently but with the customary delicacy, asked her about the vast sums of money she and Tony were raking in. She talked of the deprivations of her working class upbringing, touching upon her feckless piss artist father, and wondered whether the experience might have caused her to need millions in the bank in order to feel secure. Oh, the relentless vulgarity of the times we live in.

|