Don't know how many Le Carre fans there are here, but this one looks as if it has some substance. Thanks from Dave Garnett for passing it on!
'That war on Iraq was illegitimate... it was a criminal and immoral conspiracy. No provocation, no link with al-Qaeda, no weapons of Armageddon. Tales of complicity and Osama were self-serving bullshit. It was an old colonial war dressed up as a crusade for Western life and liberty, and it was launched by a clique of war-hungry Judaeo-Christian geopolitical fantasists who hijacked the media and exploited America's post-Nine Eleven psychopathy.'
It's a paragraph from the new John le Carre novel. And this is from Friday's Guardian --
Le Carrأ© describes Absolute Friends as "a piece of political science fiction" aimed at showing "what could happen if we allow present trends to continue to the point of absurdity where corporate media are absolutely at the beck and call in the United States of a neo-conservative group which is commanding the political high ground, calling the shots and appointing the state of Israel as the purpose of all Middle Eastern and practically all global policy".
The novel's rage is muted compared with Le Carrأ©'s remarks during Radio 4's Today programme interview this week. Then he sounded more like Harold Pinter in full flow than the suave, meticulous creator of labyrinthine spy novels. He compared himself to the German-Jewish diarist, Victor Klemperer, who hid from the Nazis during the second world war in a cellar in Dresden, waiting for the good Germans to return, saying: "I'm waiting for the real Americans to come back."
But he reserved his bitterest bile for Blair. "To me," he told James Naughtie, "there's no bigger sin that a politician can commit than allowing his country to go to war under false pretences."
'That war on Iraq was illegitimate... it was a criminal and immoral conspiracy. No provocation, no link with al-Qaeda, no weapons of Armageddon. Tales of complicity and Osama were self-serving bullshit. It was an old colonial war dressed up as a crusade for Western life and liberty, and it was launched by a clique of war-hungry Judaeo-Christian geopolitical fantasists who hijacked the media and exploited America's post-Nine Eleven psychopathy.'
It's a paragraph from the new John le Carre novel. And this is from Friday's Guardian --
Le Carrأ© describes Absolute Friends as "a piece of political science fiction" aimed at showing "what could happen if we allow present trends to continue to the point of absurdity where corporate media are absolutely at the beck and call in the United States of a neo-conservative group which is commanding the political high ground, calling the shots and appointing the state of Israel as the purpose of all Middle Eastern and practically all global policy".
The novel's rage is muted compared with Le Carrأ©'s remarks during Radio 4's Today programme interview this week. Then he sounded more like Harold Pinter in full flow than the suave, meticulous creator of labyrinthine spy novels. He compared himself to the German-Jewish diarist, Victor Klemperer, who hid from the Nazis during the second world war in a cellar in Dresden, waiting for the good Germans to return, saying: "I'm waiting for the real Americans to come back."
But he reserved his bitterest bile for Blair. "To me," he told James Naughtie, "there's no bigger sin that a politician can commit than allowing his country to go to war under false pretences."
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