Friday, January 26, 2007

Bridge Over The River Kwai: Fireworks?



Luke has blogged about Burma and I agreed with his doing so and have congratulated him:

This may be an excellent campaign Luke. Well done for drawing attention to it. I say "may be" because all boycotts need to be weighed up by potential participants in terms of whether they harm workers or tyrants more in the short, medium and long terms. Have not had to decide on this one as Burma is not on my destination list, but did boycott South Africa, and don't boycott Israel - though I do very have strong antipathy to state actions there.

Tory conference 06 had an excellent platform guest on this very subject. You may have seen it yourself? She appeared to be urging military action however. And she received a standing invasion. Sorry, standing ovation.

At the time this reminded me rather of Iraqi refugees asking for invasions and getting ovations in other places. Burma would have the advantage of being a more realistic replica of Vietnam.

2 comments:

Anonymous said...

Don't you mean Iraqi oligarchs, out-for-themselves dissidents, and extreme right-wingers who coveted Saddam's position?

Chris Paul said...

They may or may not be included. Thre were certainly also many people of good faith doing and saying what they thought was the right thing at the time.

I am prepared, even as an opponent of these ridiculous wars from around midday on 11 September 2001 - my first anti war demos being in Melbourne just a couple of weeks later - to give Tony Blair the benefit of the doubt on this.

He did most likely believe that what he was doing and saying was right at the time. I'm not sure though how he can still believe it. And I don't think the same could be said of the first family or the Halliburtonees who were out for oil, contracts, military bases, and a less troublesome puppet regime. IMO FWIW.