War criminal Blair's knighthood should NOT be revoked - he deserves to be 'honoured' by a criminal establishment

New Year 2022 commences with one of the most egregious acts of elite contempt for public sensibilities one could ever imagine. 

Tony Blair has been awarded a special knighthood - Knight Companion of the Most Noble Order of the Garter - elevated now to the highest echelons of the British establishment.

One can but wonder how the families of one million dead Iraqi souls will receive this shameless announcement. The UK state's contempt for them is multiple times greater than its blatant disregard for the British public.

For services to British imperialism and mass murder, arise 'Sir Tony'. A state that should be expressing atonement for its historic crimes has conferred its highest award on someone responsible for a million Iraqi deaths. A truly depraved establishment.

Calls are now circulating for Blair's knighthood to be revoked. Though well-meaning, they are deeply misguided. Intent on shaming and punishing Blair, they turn any similar damning attention away from the very system that has conferred this award on him.

One leading petition urges, in deferential tones, that "Her Majesty" rescind Blair's knighthood. Yet it's the monarch and her offices that hold direct responsibility for making this particular award. Are we to believe that she and her court advisers had no understanding of Blair's actions over Iraq and the resultant furore this blatant patronage would cause?

Lamentably, such calls only help validate the Honours system, while lamenting the 'damaged constitution' and showing continued homage to the institution of monarchy. 

Instead, we should be using this announcement not only to denounce Blair, but the ways in which the entire establishment peddles such rewards, providing cover for its villainous own.

War criminal Blair's elevated knighthood from the establishment should NOT be opposed. It helps shine a double damning light on both him AND the rotten 'honours' system. Saying that he's 'not deserving' of the royal system only serves to validate the system itself.

The argument that Blair's 'recognition' 'makes a mockery' of the honours process is deeply blind-sided, serving to excuse the monarch's central role. 

It fails to make what should be an obvious connection between the political crimes of figures like Blair and an institution that has given vital authority to the vast imperialist crimes which so many leaders of an ultra-militarist British state has inflicted on the world.

And while the public express due outrage over 'Sir Tony', those bestowed with royal honours might now be more honestly reflecting on how they see themselves in wearing the baubles of Empire. Will any, one wonders, be so conscientiously inclined to send theirs back?

What kind of system-preserving propaganda manages to have us, and perhaps even some of them, outraged only about the recipient of this award rather than the very institution giving it?

Of course, why WOULDN'T a debased establishment protect and honour one of its debased own? The real question is whether all those already 'honoured' will ever see their own compliance, relinquish their tainted 'honours' and expose that debased system.

Blair's all-knowing part in bringing mass death and suffering to the Middle East cannot be dissociated from an institution that has given its own royal stamp of approval to every murderous regime in the region. The same corporate-produced bombs and armaments visited on Iraqi and other innocents by Blair have been dutifully endorsed and promoted by this same militarist-invested family.   

  

Objecting to warmonger Blair's elevation by a blood-soaked establishment is a bit like expressing indignation over a local crime boss being rendered a 'made man' by the mafia.

Meantime, while Blair is being feted and living it up on his life of crime, Julian Assange, the figure who did most to expose such heinous actions, is festering in high-security Belmarsh jail, an alarmingly opposite form of 'reward' reserved by the establishment for this true public servant.

Where is the due media attention and public backlash against this scandalous anomaly?   

It's also of dark happenstance that Blair's New Year award coincided with the late Archbishop Tutu's state funeral. The moral and humanitarian gulf between the two could not be wider.

With perverse irony, on the day of the great Desmond Tutu's funeral, war criminal Blair was given a knighthood. While hypocritical Western leaders laud Tutu, protect Israel and denounce #BDS, Tutu refused to share the same platform as Blair, supported Palestinians and backed BDS.

Rescinding Blair's knighthood may bring understandable satisfaction in 'taking down' an unrepentant war criminal. It may even help bring closer the hopeful day he and his cohorts get sent to The Hague. 

But it won't bring forward any fuller indictment of the actual system that facilitated his actions and the palace forces that sought to decorate and protect him. 

Perversely, if this award is ultimately revoked, the 'validity' of the honours system and notion of a 'listening' monarch will actually be enhanced. Conversely, the more such 'honours' are conferred on infamous figures like Blair, the more an already depraved system will be further debased, delegitimised and threatened with extinction. 

All of which renders 'Sir Tony' the most welcome and deserving knights of the rotten realm.

It's not just Blair that needs to be exposed and brought to justice, it's the whole nexus of elite institutions and the system of thought control that allows their collective crimes to be hidden and sanitised.