| Author | Message | | gchq | | Posted: Mon May 25, 2009 8:34 pm Post subject: Tony Blair - War Criminal |
| Nuremberg set a valid precedent for trials of war-crime suspects in Iraq's destruction
Cesar Chelala
The Japan Times
26 May 2009
NEW YORK — The Nuremberg Principles, a set of guidelines established after World War II to try Nazi Party members, were developed to determine what constitutes a war crime. The principles can also be applied today when considering the conditions that led to the Iraq war and, in the process, to the deaths of hundreds of thousands of people, many of them children, and to the devastation of a country's infrastructure.
In January 2003, a group of American law professors warned President George W. Bush that he and senior officials of his government could be prosecuted for war crimes if their military tactics violated international humanitarian law. The group, led by the New York-based Center for Constitutional Rights, sent similar warnings to British Prime Minister Tony Blair and to Canadian Prime Minister Jean Chretien.
Although Washington is not part of the International Criminal Court (ICC), U.S. officials could be prosecuted in other countries under the Geneva Convention, says Michael Ratner, president of the Center for Constitutional Rights. Ratner likened the situation to the attempt by Spanish magistrate Baltazar Garzon to prosecute former Chilean military dictator Augusto Pinochet when Pinochet was under house arrest in London.
Both former President George W. Bush and senior officials in his government could be tried for their responsibility for torture and other war crimes under the Geneva Conventions.
In addition, should Nuremberg principles be followed by an investigating tribunal, former President Bush and other senior officials in his administration could be tried for violation of fundamental Nuremberg principles.
In 2007, Luis Moreno-Ocampo, the ICC's chief prosecutor, told The Sunday Telegraph that he could envisage a scenario in which both British Prime Minister Tony Blair and then President Bush faced charges at The Hague.
Perhaps one of the most serious breaches of international law by the Bush administration was the doctrine of "preventive war." In the case of the Iraq war, it was carried out without authorization from the U.N. Security Council in violation of the U.N. Charter, which forbids armed aggression and violations of any state's sovereignty except for immediate self-defense.
As stated in the U.S. Constitution, international treaties agreed to by the United States are part of the "supreme law of the land." "Launching a war of aggression is a crime that no political or economic situation can justify," said Justice Jackson, the chief U.S. prosecutor for the Nuremberg Tribunal.
Benjamin Ferencz, also a former chief prosecutor for the Nuremberg Trials, declared that "a prima facie case can be made that the United States is guilty of the supreme crime against humanity — that being an illegal war of aggression against a sovereign nation."
The conduct and the consequences of the Iraq war are subsumed under "Crimes against Peace and War" of Nuremberg Principle VI, which defines as crimes against peace "(i) Planning, preparation, initiation or waging of a war of aggression or a war in violation of international treaties, agreements or assurances; (ii) Participation in a common plan or conspiracy for the accomplishment of any of the acts mentioned under (i)." In the section on war crimes, Nuremberg Principle VI includes "murder or ill-treatment of prisoners of war or persons on the seas, killing of hostages, plunder of public or private property."
The criminal abuse of prisoners in U.S. military prisons in Iraq, Afghanistan and Guantanamo are clear evidence of ill- treatment and even murder.
According to the organization Human Rights First, at least 100 detainees have died while in the hands of U.S. officials in the global "war on terror," eight of whom were tortured to death.
As for the plunder of public or private property, there is evidence that even before the war started, members of the Bush administration had already drawn up plans to privatize and sell Iraqi property, particularly that related to oil.
Although there are obvious hindrances to trying a former U.S. president and his associates, such a trial is fully justified by legal precedents such as the Nuremberg Principles and by the extent of the toll in human lives that the breach of international law has exacted.
Cesar Chelala, a cowinner of the Overseas Press Club of America award, writes extensively on human rights issues.
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Tony Blair - War Criminal
http://www.petitiononline.com/BWCF/petition.html | |  | | gchq | | Posted: Tue May 26, 2009 2:59 pm Post subject: How the Left turned to the Right |
| How the Left turned to the Right
Oliver Kamm
The Times
23 May 2009
I attended an academic conference in late 1989 on the collapse of communism in Eastern Europe. Martin Jacques, editor of the now-defunct journal Marxism Today, put a brave face on the rejection of the ideals he espoused. He argued that these revolutions would expand the variety of left-wing views in Western Europe.
I recall arguing with him from the floor that the opposite was true. Of the two principal left-wing traditions in Europe, insurrectionary socialism and pro-Western social democracy, only the second retained credibility.
It is obvious now that we were both wrong. The revolutionary Left has made fitfully fruitful tactical alliances, such as the bleakly comic amalgam of Leninists and Islamists who formed and then rent apart George Galloway’s Respect party. But in its own name it remains a minuscule if variegated sect.
What has happened to the other wing of nominally progressive politics is more surprising. Liberalism, in its broadest sense, has become suspicious of its own ideals.
Notions once considered reactionary, even extreme, have insinuated themselves into the mainstream of right-thinking (that is, left-thinking) social idealism.
When you encountered someone of professed left-of-centre opinions, you used to be able to draw broad but important, and generally reliable, inferences about what these entailed.
They included, at a minimum, commitments to secularism, freedom of expression, individual liberty against collective authority, women’s rights, homosexual equality and the combating of xenophobia. Times have changed. Now these stances are unusual, even heterodox.
The degeneration of progressive idealism has many roots. But among the most important is the instinct that the ideas of Western liberty are specific to time and place — that they are Eurocentric. Almost coincident with the revolutions of 1989, which testified to the power of the human instinct for liberty, was a far more atavistic political movement.
Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini, Supreme Leader of Iran, issued in February 1989 his fatwa calling for the murder of Salman Rushdie, a British citizen, for writing a novel that satirised Islam.
Western governments, religious leaders and political figures were more embarrassed than appalled. In effect, they acknowledged the offence and took issue only with the sentence. The chief rabbi in Great Britain, Dr Immanuel Jakobovits, remarked: “Both Mr Rushdie and the Ayatollah have abused freedom of speech.”
Such ignorant, boorish heedlessness of the principles of a free society and the value of the novelist’s imagination sits easily on the political Right and with religious authority. Yet even then it had its left-wing adherents too. In his invaluable — because so often unintentionally revealing — diaries, Tony Benn records a meeting of the left-wing Campaign Group of Labour MPs in February 1989.
He refers to the late Bernie Grant, who was among Britain’s first black MPs: “Bernie Grant kept interrupting, saying that the whites wanted to impose their values on the world. The House of Commons should not attack other cultures. He didn’t agree with the Muslims in Iran, but he supported their right to live their own lives. Burning books was not a big issue for blacks, he maintained.”
This was one day after the leader of a foreign theocratic state had sought to procure the murder of a British writer for his ideas. Few then or now would be as openly contemptuous of the life of the mind as Grant.
Yet the notion that freedom of expression is a specifically Western obsession that needs to be balanced against the demands of social cohesion has become commonplace in today’s debates. It is part of the political mainstream; part of supposedly progressive thinking, assuming that the sensibilities of minority groups should be protected.
These impulses littered the controversy about the publication in the Danish newspaper Jyllands-Posten in 2006 of cartoons satirising the Prophet Muhammad. The offence caused to believers has become a catch-all explanation for religious violence and intimidation.
When, last year, suicide bombers attacked the Danish Embassy in Pakistan, killing six people and wounding more than 20, a Danish journalist writing for The Guardian commented that the attack was “of course, indefensible, but it raises questions about the wisdom of the much-debated cartoons and Danish reactions to Muslim wrath”.
The “of course, but” formulation is worse than a dreary cliché. It indicates a liberalism evacuated of content. Those who prize social unity and order will tend to believe that people’s deepest feelings and beliefs should be accorded respect.
But respect for ideas is never an entitlement. It depends on their intellectual resilience in public debate. No free society can treat people’s deepest beliefs as sacrosanct. They are fair game for hostile and derisive criticism. That is how knowledge advances.
The figure of Rushdie continues to disturb the liberal imagination. When he was awarded a knighthood in 2007, the Pakistani parliament passed a resolution condemning the insult to the feelings of Muslims.
Some British liberals thought they were right. Baroness Shirley Williams declared on the BBC Question Time programme that the award was not wise, for Rushdie had “deeply offended Muslims in a very powerful way”. It was, as her fellow panellist Christopher Hitchens remarked, a contemptible statement.
No one has a right to the protection of feelings. If politics concerns itself with mental states, there is no limit to how far legislation can intrude on people’s lives. The task of progressive politics is to protect liberty, not least by attacking the accumulation of bad ideas. Yet to many on the Left, the individual, inquiring mind is of far less importance than the representation of designated groups.
For example, Ken Livingstone commonly asserted that as Mayor of London he had “a responsibility to support the rights of all of London’s diverse communities”. No, he did not. Londoners belong to many different ethnic, national or religious groups. And for civic purposes those affiliations have no relevance at all.
The only characteristic that matters for politics is common citizenship with equality under the law. The notion that democratic politics acknowledges, even celebrates, group identities leads inexorably to the idea that the loudest figures in such groups have a claim on the attention of everyone else. Livingstone notoriously (and literally) embraced a visiting Islamic cleric, Yusuf al-Qaradawi, who defends suicide terrorism in Israel and advocates the “punishment” of homosexuals.
It ought to be obvious that liberalism should not stomach that type of thing. Yet there is a type of left-wing thinking that regards militant Islam almost as idiosyncratic liberation theology. Verso, the left-wing publishing house, has produced a volume of the thoughts of Osama bin Laden entitled Messages to the World. To read the editor’s annotations is to gain the impression of a revolutionary figure who daringly challenges Western oppression.
The mass murder of American and other civilians on 9/11 was the expression of a nihilistic, millenarian doctrine of religious absolutism. Yet for a certain type of critic the greatest war criminal of our age is Tony Blair. Blair in reality perceived earlier than most the nature of the international order after the Cold War.
This was an anarchic international order in which supranational institutions were too weak and inchoate to stymie the ambitions of the worst of rulers. In a speech almost exactly ten years ago in Chicago, he expounded the responsibilities of Western nations in the protection of human rights against oppressive governments. And he named Slobodan Milosevic and Saddam Hussein.
Blair’s analysis has many critics. But the extraordinary fact of the supposedly left-wing objections to his interventionist policies is its identity with realist positions on the conservative wing of politics. Attempting to broker a disinterested division of territory in the Balkans in the mid-1990s merely encouraged Milosevic in further depredations, against Kosovo. The containment of Saddam was an inherently threadbare system that could be implemented only if the UN Security Council were resolute in implementing it.
Many civilian lives were lost in Iraq owing to a grotesquely underprepared military intervention. But the notion that this was aggression against a sovereign state with rights gets exactly wrong the balance of moral responsibility. It is hard to find many on the Left who will say this, or will argue the intrinsic connection between peace and human rights. It is not the trahison des clercs, only because there is nothing any longer that the Left still has to betray.
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Tony Blair - War Criminal
http://www.petitiononline.com/BWCF/petition.html | | | | gchq | | Posted: Thu May 28, 2009 4:53 pm Post subject: Culture of Corruption |
| From "Culture of Corruption" by John Pilger
When Blair's army finally retreated from Basra in May, it left behind, according to scholarly estimates, more than a million people dead, a majority of stricken, sick children, a contaminated water supply, a crippled energy grid and 4 million refugees.
As for the "celebrating" Iraqis, the vast majority, say Whitehall's own surveys, want the invader out. And when Blair finally departed the House of Commons, MPs gave him a standing ovation--they who had refused to hold a vote on his criminal invasion or even to set up an inquiry into its lies, which almost three-quarters of the British population wanted.
Full Report
http://www.warwithoutend.co.uk#bad-link
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Tony Blair - War Criminal
http://www.petitiononline.com/BWCF/petition.html | | | | gchq | | Posted: Sat May 30, 2009 3:22 pm Post subject: Polanski shoots 'Ghost' in Germany |
| Polanski shoots 'Ghost' in Germany
Variety
29 May 2009
BERLIN Roman Polanski won't be working in the U.S. anytime soon, but shooting in Germany is no problem -- especially with the help he's getting from Studio Babelsberg.
After shooting much of his Palme d'Or and Oscar-winning "The Pianist" at Babelsberg in 2001, he's back for the controversial "The Ghost."
Polanski says it wasn't just the easy access to federal and regional subsidy coin that attracted him to the studio, which specializes in international co-productions.
"I had a very good experience on 'The Pianist.' It has great crews," Polanski says. "And the studio itself -- the place, the set construction gang -- it was all perfect, so I was looking forward to an opportunity to shoot in Babelsberg again."
The adaptation of Robert Harris' novel, about a ghostwriter hired to finish the memoirs of a former British prime minister who is awaiting indictment on war crime charges, stars Ewan McGregor, Pierce Brosnan, Kim Cattrall and Olivia Williams.
The film, which recently wrapped shooting at Babelsberg, has picked up some $6.4 million in film grants from federal and regional funds here, and might still see more coin coming from another state subsidy.
Yet producer Robert Benmussa says subsidies were not the main incentive. While financing is readily available, salaries in Germany are usually higher than in other European countries (Polanski shot his last film, "Oliver Twist," at Barrandov Studios in Prague), and subsidy coin often only helps to compensate that difference.
"It was an artistic choice that made sense," Benmussa adds.
Set largely on Martha's Vineyard, the pic shot on the German islands of Sylt in the North Sea and Usedom in the Baltic Sea, with interiors filmed at Babelsberg.
In view of the ongoing debate over torture and enhanced interrogation techniques under the Bush administration, the film is sure to spark a firestorm of controversy.
In Harris' novel, the British prime minister, played by Brosnan in the film, bears a striking resemblance to Tony Blair, although in the story, he is facing war crime charges after a leaked memo revealed he secretly approved the transfer of U.K. citizens to Guantanamo Bay to face interrogation and possible torture by the CIA during a disastrous Middle East conflict.
Critics see "The Ghost" as an indictment of the war in Iraq and, specifically, of Blair and his unshakeable support of Bush's policies.
While Polanski notes the book is based on true events, he dismisses any overt link between the film and Blair's policies or the former prime minister's close relationship to Bush.
"Inevitably it will be a topic, but that's not what we're looking for," Polanski says.
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Tony Blair - War Criminal
http://www.petitiononline.com/BWCF/petition.html | | | | MADMAX | | Posted: Sat May 30, 2009 4:03 pm Post subject: |
| .
Judge rejects Roman Polanski's request to dismiss sex charges
May 7, 2009
A judge officially rejected Roman Polanski’s request for a dismissal of 32-year-old child sex charges today after the filmmaker missed a deadline to surrender to U.S. authorities.
His attorneys had informed Superior Court Judge Peter Espinoza in advance that the director would not return to Los Angeles to meet a deadline set by the court in February, but the judge nevertheless took the bench at the time of his scheduled appearance.
“Court calls for the record the matter of Roman Raymond Polanski,” Espinoza said to the vacant well of the courtroom. Answered only by stares from half a dozen reporters – neither prosecutors nor Polanski’s attorneys attended – Espinoza continued, saying that “by their absence” defense lawyers indicated “that Mr. Polanski doesn’t intend to submit himself to the authority of the court.”
"Motion is denied,” he said and left the bench. The 30-second proceeding capped Polanski’s most recent effort to resolve the 1977 case in which he was accused of raping and drugging a 13-year-old girl at Jack Nicholson’s house. He pleaded guilty to a statutory rape charge, but fled to France, where he now lives, after learning that the trial judge planned to sentence him to prison.
Polanski, now 75 and a married father of two, asked the court to throw out the entire case in December based on new allegations of prosecutorial and judicial misconduct detailed in an HBO documentary last year. The L.A. district attorney’s office argued that he could not make such a request while a fugitive and Espinoza agreed. A 1997 attempt at settling the case also failed. Polanski's lawyers have vowed to appeal Espinoza’s decision.
-- Harriet Ryan
Drugs and anally rapes a 13 year old child and hollywood still shows his movies... SICK!
I wonder if he's an askenazi jew?
. | | | | gchq | | Posted: Mon Jun 01, 2009 12:00 am Post subject: Victims of war suffer long after the troops have gone home |
| From the Down Under perspective
Victims of war suffer long after the troops have gone home
Lyn Allison and Tim Wright
The Age
01 Jun 2009
ONE year ago today, at a US military base in southern Iraq, the Australian flag was ceremonially lowered. After half a decade of fighting, the last of our combat troops were sent home. Like others before them, they received a heroes' welcome. No one mentioned the men, women and children they had killed in the name of peace and freedom.
The large-scale loss of civilian life is, perhaps, to be expected in such a one-sided, shock-and-awe affair. Drawing attention to it at a moment of national commemoration would have been viewed as disrespectful, even unpatriotic. But we cannot seriously ignore the horrors committed by coalition forces in Iraq.
It is beyond time we acknowledged the many victims of our aggressive war. The children of Fallujah whose bodies Western forces burned with white phosphorous in a hopeless attempt to flush out Sunni insurgents. The traders at two Baghdad marketplaces, and the Al-Jazeera and Reuters cameramen, whom Australia's war partners callously shelled to death.
But just acknowledging them is not enough. The political and military leaders responsible for their loss and agony — those who authorised the illegal invasion and those who committed egregious crimes during the conflict — must be brought to justice. Our collective failure to challenge their impunity sends a dangerous message to others who may be contemplating awful acts.
Prosecutions, in addition to deterring crime, would bring a degree of comfort to those whose lives we shattered through our breaches of international law. Just as peace-time victims of crimes can reasonably expect their perpetrators to be punished, so should the victims of wartime atrocities. Without justice for the people of Iraq, peace will remain elusive.
The International Criminal Court, which opened in 2002, has jurisdiction over individuals who commit serious crimes of concern to the international community. In 2007, the chief prosecutor, Luis Moreno-Ocampo, told London's Guardian newspaper that he had no trouble envisaging a scenario in which Tony Blair — and presumably also John Howard — might one day face charges at The Hague over crimes committed in Iraq. (Australia and Britain, unlike the US, have ratified the court's statute.)
The obstacles to prosecutions for Westerners at the ICC are primarily political rather than legal or factual. Grave breaches of the Geneva Conventions are well documented by the press and non-government organisations, and include the use of excessive force in densely populated civilian neighbourhoods, attacks on media outlets with no clear military objective, the bombing of hospitals and other medical facilities, and the denial of humanitarian aid to the sick and wounded.
Australia's air force has also admitted providing cover to US ground troops carrying out illegal, indiscriminate cluster bomb raids around Baghdad, which killed hundreds of civilians. These actions were clearly excessive in relation to the overall military advantage anticipated. Human Rights Watch reported that America's 50 acknowledged cluster bomb attacks in 2003 dispersed more than 1.8 million bomblets but failed to kill a single targeted individual — and they certainly did not liberate the children of Iraq.
The assault on Fallujah in late 2004 provides some of the most horrific examples of war crimes committed during the war to date. US intellectual Noam Chomsky described them as "far more severe" than the torture and abuse of detainees at Abu Ghraib.
Some 30,000 to 50,000 civilians remained in Fallujah throughout the coalition's three-week-long bombardment. They were denied food, water and electricity in flagrant violation of the Geneva Conventions. When scenes of devastation at the local hospital hit the world's media, soldiers stormed the building and ordered patients to lie on the floor before tying their hands behind their backs. Major-General Jim Molan, a decorated Australian war hero, was in charge of the operation. (He has since written a book giving his version of events.)
Where Australians were not directly responsible for committing certain crimes, they may nevertheless be tried on the grounds that they were participants in a joint criminal enterprise — namely, the illegal invasion of Iraq — of which war crimes were a foreseeable consequence. This legal concept formed the basis of prosecutions against former Yugoslav leader Slobodan Milosevic and Liberian warlord Charles Taylor. Their prosecutions prove that heads of state, like the rest of us, are subjects of the law.
Blair and Howard can no longer hide behind official immunities, but the forces of realpolitik might prove an equally powerful shield from prosecutions. We must ask ourselves why, despite important advances towards a system of international criminal justice, a man still stands a better chance of being tried and punished for killing one human being than for killing hundreds or thousands. Is it because our leaders' crimes are committed in our name?
Lyn Allison was leader of the Australian Democrats from 2004 to 2008. Tim Wright is president of the Peace Organisation of Australia.
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Tony Blair - War Criminal
http://www.petitiononline.com/BWCF/petition.html | | | | Von Curtis | | Posted: Mon Jun 01, 2009 12:58 am Post subject: |
| | Great find - I always liked Lyn Allison - other politicians appeared to collude to kick her out. | | | | Von Curtis | | Posted: Mon Jun 01, 2009 1:00 am Post subject: |
| | Labor and Liberals killed off the Australian Democrats in 2008 so we could have the One Party State in Australia. NICE | | | | gchq | | Posted: Mon Jun 01, 2009 2:47 pm Post subject: A million dollar bounty on Bush, Cheney, Rumsfeld, and Blair |
| Not confimed via any other News Site to date!
A million dollar bounty on Bush, Cheney, Rumsfeld, and Blair
Scoop
01 Jun 2009
Jürgen Todenhöfer
A bounty on their heads! One million dollars was offered on May 30 at 2:58 pm PST by Dr Jurgen Todenhofer, former member of the German parliament, former judge and honorary Colonel of the US Army, to the one:
who brings George W. Bush, Dick Cheney, Donald Rumsfeld and Tony Blair in a fair and legal procedure before an American or an international court on the grounds:
of the wounding and killing of thousands of American GIs and
of the torture, dismemberment and killing of hundreds of thousands innocent Iraqi civilians.
As the Nuremberg war crimes tribunal stated: “To initiate a war of aggression is not only an international crime, it is the supreme international crime - differing only from other war crimes in that it contains within it the accumulated evil of all crimes of war.” The chief U.S. prosecutor Robert H. Jackson said: “We must never forget that the record on which we judge these defendants today constitutes the record on which history will judge us tomorrow.” Or as the famous British writer and actor Peter Ustinov once noted: “Wars are the terrorism of the rich.”
A true democrat and a firm believer in the rule of law cannot hang the little thieves and let the great ones escape.
Todenhofer made the offer in post # 47 in response to a question about how he managed to cope with the human tragedy he witnessed while interviewing people for his book about the Iraqi resistance, Why Do You Kill? The website for the book (which is called “Why Do You Kill, Zaid?” in Germany) is here.
In a later post in the FDL salon, Todenhofer urged people to buy three copies—“one for you, one for your best friend, and one for your senator. Those people who have read this book can no longer vote for war.” He donates all the royalties to injured Iraqi children and to an Israeli-Palestinian reconciliation project in Jerusalem.
Among the Ten Theses that form the epilogue of the book, is this one:
10. What is needed now is the art of statesmanship, not the art of war - in the Iran conflict, in the Iraq conflict and in the Palestine conflict.
In his elaboration of that point, Todenhofer says that a solution to the Iraq conflict “will only be found if the United States negotiates - as it did in the Vietnam War - with the leaders of the resistance, though of course not with Al-Qaeda. The leaders of the patriotic and moderate Islamist resistance are almost all prepared to take part in such talks.”
Firedolake’s book salon with Dr. Todenhofer is online here.
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Tony Blair - War Criminal
http://www.petitiononline.com/BWCF/petition.html | | | | gchq | | Posted: Fri Jun 05, 2009 11:48 pm Post subject: Crimes and congratulations |
| Crimes and congratulations
Financial Times
05 Jun 2009
When political and economic turmoil is all around, it is the duty of cultural institutions to remind us that nothing in human affairs is new. A sense of perspective and an appreciation of the long view provide the ballast that protects us from the flighty excesses of political opportunism. We need the examples of history to tell us: we have been here before. It will pass. Keep calm.
A remarkable little show at the British Museum (the latest in a run of brilliant exhibitions, by the way, that have the “whiff of PT Barnum combined with the most ferocious scholarship”, as Nicholas Hytner, director of the National Theatre, described them to me recently) fulfils the brief admirably.
It takes as its subject a little-discussed but ubiquitous subject: dishonour. Twelve artists have been commissioned to produce medals that do the opposite of what most medals do. Instead of glorifying, they shame; in the place of heroes on their faces, there are villains.
What is most fascinating about the show, which opens later this month, are the examples that stretch back for more than 400 years, to unveil a tradition littered with joyfully scabrous moments.
There is the Dutch medal of the late 16th century, forged just after the defeat of the Spanish Armada, that shows the Pope and the Roman Catholic princes of Europe blindfolded, barefoot and treading ever-so-lightly on a sea of spikes: nothing will be the same for them again.
A century later, there is poor Louis XIV, defecating and vomiting, satirised mercilessly for concessions he had made to the Pope. Closer to home: Britain’s first “prime minister” Robert Walpole leaning on a bag of money, with the inscription “I am kicked out of doors” wrapped around him, in reference to his ignominious resignation from government in 1742.
On the flip side, there is a head on a pole on a wall (get it?) and a more direct inscription still: “No Screen”. This alludes to Walpole’s obfuscatory talents, which had earned him the nickname of “Screenmaster-General”. You begin to get the point about contemporary resonance?
Also from the 18th century, a German example of this most satisfying of artistic genres; on one side of the medal, a man who has killed himself, conjoined with the bleak words “Credit is dead”. On the other side, a view of the back of a financier, disappearing fast, we presume, from the scene of his black magic. “Visibilis, invisibilis” – now you see him, now you don’t. It was the aftermath of a stock market crash, you see, and the public raged against the faceless perpetrators. Fancy!
All these medals would have circulated freely (up to a point) among populations that surely enjoyed the joke: the subversion of a tradition that was meant primarily to reward valiance and good service. Medals of dishonour were the Private Eye magazines of their day, a reminder that base motives have always lurked beneath high-talking, and that we have always, since the time of Aristophanes, loved to make fun of those who profess to lead us.
It was the US sculptor David Smith who self-consciously turned this popular tradition into art with his “Medals for Dishonor” of the 1930s, 15 cast bronze medals that rallied against war, fascism and environmental destruction. Packed with satirical detail, their nightmarish visions are made grimmer by their compactness: look what I’ve got in my pocket – an inferno!
These are the tacit inspiration for the 12 artists newly commissioned by the museum for its show. The medals were conceived a couple of eventful years ago, so there is no reference to worldwide financial meltdown, let alone parliamentary expenses. But there was the war in Iraq. The New York-based Chinese artist Yun-Fei Ji shows the true nature of the “Coalition of the Willing”: the corpse of a goat being picked at by vultures. Richard Hamilton names his medal the “Hutton Award” (in reference to the Hutton Inquiry into the death of David Kelly during the furore over weapons of mass destruction propaganda), with the heads of Tony Blair and Alastair Campbell accompanying the Latin inscription De Albati, or “Whitewashed”.
Cornelia Parker has the backs of two heads seemingly talking to each other inside the medal. They are admonished by ominous inscriptions: “We know who you are” and “We know what you have done”.
Away from war, Michael Landy’s “Asbo medal” features a gleaming portrait of a (real) habitual offender with a list of his 20 misdemeanours. “We checked with the police and they could only find seven,” says the show’s co-curator Philip Attwood, appreciative of the further layer of irony: did the subject of the medal exaggerate his importance? Was he seeking further honour for his dishonour?
None of the medals is on permanent display, but perhaps they should be. We don’t need reminding, right now, of the disreputable side of human conduct. Only that it was ever thus.
‘Medals of Dishonour’, British Museum, London, 25 June -27 September www.britishmuseum.org
peter.aspden@ft.com
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Tony Blair - War Criminal
http://www.petitiononline.com/BWCF/petition.html | | | | | ©2002-2009 WarWithoutEnd.co.uk |
