Surprise! The United Kingdom's former Prime Minister Tony Blair is now Sir Tony Blair, whether people like it or not.
I have lived in Britain for more than a decade. Yet, too often, I struggle to unveil the real face of Britain. Until today, most Brits have felt proud of their British values and feel honored when people describe them as polite, pet lovers, football fanatics, liberals and respectful of human rights.
To a great degree, these descriptions are genuinely true. Before the invasion of Iraq on Feb. 15, 2003, hundreds of thousands of people of all races took part in a million march to say "no to war in Iraq" although they were unsuccessful in their mission to stop Blair’s government from committing a bloodbath. Yet, they have shown the world that ordinary Brits are peace-loving humans.
Once again, hundreds of thousands of Brits have come together to say "No Knighthood for Blair" citing his unpleasant "role in the Iraqi war." The petition to revoke Blair’s knighthood has passed 1 million signatories.
Recent YouGov survey results revealed that 41% of the British people strongly disapprove of "Tony Blair being given a knighthood" in comparison to only 3% who strongly approve of it. Thousands of British people have also taken to Twitter to debate on it.
Britain presents itself as a democratic country, meaning that the will of people wins because in a democracy people have the authority. But that’s in theory because, in reality, the British people may be disappointed once again.
The story of knighthood
A long list of leading academic studies, research papers, newspaper articles, editorials, documentaries and films show aspects of the Iraq War that the British politician George Galloway has termed as "a pack of lies."
Even though Blair had admitted to playing a notorious role in the killing, displacing and disabling millions of innocent Iraqis and destroying their prosperous country on the pretext of fake (arguably manufactured) information on "weapons of mass destruction," while at that time the attacking nations, including Britain and America, themselves had deadly atomic weapons.
Obviously, Sir Blair has been honored for his remarkable services for making Britain glorious again. At what cost? It doesn’t matter for those in power as long as their interests are well-protected.
Evidently, events leading to wars and conflicts do not happen suddenly but are properly planned ahead of time.
The Iraq War did not happen the way Tony Blair and his associates portrayed to the media and the public. Hence, the event resulted in a misleading case of false information that lead to the destruction of the whole country.
A list of studies authored by non-Muslim and Western authors and a stream of arguments forwarded by leading intellectuals in the West have dismissed the Western discourses on the Iraq War and called it a crime against humanity.
Before Blair, Winston Churchill was knighted by Queen Elizabeth II on April 24, 1953. The same year, Churchill also received Nobel Prize in Literature "for his mastery of historical and biographical description as well as for brilliant oratory in defending exalted human values." So Churchill was honored for his service to promoting "human values."
That’s not the whole story of mighty Britain’s rule. One major study also reported in The Guardian revealed how "Churchill’s policies contributed to the 1943 Bengal famine," remembered as a forgotten holocaust that killed "5 million people."
Throughout my student years at leading British universities, I have learned how Western governments mastered propaganda tactics and expertly used political language to disseminate their own versions of events, wars and conflicts to sell them to their public as a noble cause of fighting cruelty and bringing peace and democracy in faraway places.
No matter how controversial and questionable the growing list of Nobel Prize winners gets, I imagine that the day is not that far when we hear news of "Sir" Tony Blair being awarded a Nobel Peace Prize – after all, Barack Obama, the former U.S. president, has also received it for serving humanity in the Middle East and beyond.