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quote:Listen to the calls of those passengers on the planes. Think of the children on them, told they were going to die.
the latter being an emotive image that, so far as i can see, is a cynical fiction. piecing together the messages from the planes, passengers had no idea what the eventual outcome was going to be. so - this image, i would suggest, is employed here as a crude piece of emotional blackmail.
quote:We will take action at every level, national and international, in the UN, in G8, in the EU, in Nato, in every regional grouping in the world, to strike at international terrorism wherever it exists.
For the first time, the UN security council has imposed mandatory obligations on all UN members to cut off terrorist financing and end safe havens for terrorists.
Those that finance terror, those who launder their money, those that cover their tracks are every bit as guilty as the fanatic who commits the final act.
an interesting u-turn for the west's terror sponsors, and one of many promises much to be applauded in the speech - IF subsequent actions bear it out. however, one imagines the US and UK will not include their roles as the premier suppliers of arms under 'supporting terrorism' - even when doing so to dictatorships and police states. more likely, selling guns to blood-soaked regimes to use on their own people will still come under 'trade'.
next is one of the most interesting threads of the entire speech - wherein Blair discusses globalisation.
quote:The critics will say: but how can the world be a community? Nations act in their own self-interest. Of course they do. But what is the lesson of the financial markets, climate change, international terrorism, nuclear proliferation or world trade? It is that our self-interest and our mutual interests are today inextricably woven together.
This is the politics of globalisation.
this is a very clever way of reclaiming what has become a dirty word - and in repeatedly stressing the 'interconnectedness' of the 'international community', Blair is again, briefly convincing. and never more so than when he even goes so far to say that I realise why people protest against globalisation. We watch aspects of it with trepidation. We feel powerless, as if we were now pushed to and fro by forces far beyond our control...The demonstrators are right to say there's injustice, poverty, environmental degradation.
but then he blows it by espousing something so obviously untrue that it is difficult how he can say it with a straight face:
quote:The issue is not how to stop globalisation.
The issue is how we use the power of community to combine it with justice. If globalisation works only for the benefit of the few, then it will fail and will deserve to fail.
But if we follow the principles that have served us so well at home - that power, wealth and opportunity must be in the hands of the many, not the few - if we make that our guiding light for the global economy, then it will be a force for good and an international movement that we should take pride in leading.
a pretty ridiculous piety when globalisation has been the engine for accelerating injustice and inequality everywhere it has managed to get its tentacles...
for example:
Of the top 100 economic entities in the world, 51 are corporations, only 49 are nations. General Motors or General Electric are much larger than Saudi Arabia or Poland, and so on.
Furthermore, studies by both UNCTAD and the United Nation University show that inequalities in most countries are inexorably rising, whether in China, Russia, Latin America or the West; 85 percent of the world's population now lives in countries where inequalities are growing, not diminishing. (Susan George)
[ 03-10-2001: Message edited by: autopilot disengaged ] |
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