Posted by rippon
on October 27, 2009, 11:38 am, in reply to "This type of dissent is one of the bars on our prison cell"
Yes, I was cheering this argument by Monbiot until I read this.
The Editors have got this absolutely right.
Monbiot is focusing on an individual - Blair. His argument appeals on an emotional level because Blair is a particularly odious, repugnant character. But Monbiot's argument applies equally to all in Blair's cabinet who, according to theyworkforyou.com, "voted strongly for the Iraq War", even relatively 'cuddly' characters like, say, Harriet Harman.
Focusing on Blair like this is like blaming Hitler for genocide: one man is physically incapable of committing such a crime. Mass-murder requires mass infrastructure.
And the media constituted a crucial part, probably the decisive part, of the infrastructure that enabled Blair's Iraq crime. And, as the Editors say, Monbiot has nothing to say about the complicity of the mainstream media (of which he is a well-remunerated employee).
The focus on Blair is reminiscent of the focus on Griffin on QT: it's handy to have a bogey-man to berate - obviates the need for the more tedious, less glamorous task of analysing institutional and structural evils which empower criminals in the first place, and for which the burden of responsibility is spread far more diffusely than the shoulders of one repugnant individual.
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