----- Original Message ----- From: Rick Rozoff <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> To: <[EMAIL PROTECTED]>; <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> Sent: Sunday, July 02, 2000 3:20 AM Subject: [STOPNATO] "Bombs For Human Rights - Well Done Tony Blair" STOP NATO: NO PASARAN! - HTTP://WWW.STOPNATO.COM http://www.the-times.co.uk (World) The Times Students give Blair the WI treatment FROM ROGER BOYES IN T�BINGEN SHUNNED by Oxford, Tony Blair travelled to another elite university, T�bingen in southern Germany, yesterday and found himself heckled by ungrateful students as noisy and ill-disciplined as members of the Women's Institute. "Bomb for human rights - well done Tony Blair!" said one of the banners suddenly hoisted and unfurled in the university auditorium. "Warmonger" read the slogan on the T-shirts of nine undergraduates whose main disruptive tactic was to blow whistles and burst into hysterical laughter whenever the Prime Minister mentioned the word "global". Mr Blair said that he had heard worse in Oxford and Cambridge, which came as a relief to the nervous German dons who had come together to celebrate the British leader. Mr Blair's host, his new-found globalisation guru, Hans K�ng, snapped at the demonstrators: "Tony Blair referred in his speech to controlling anti-social behaviour. You would be more convincing if you sat down and shut up." Mr Blair's speech, Values and the Power of Community, was very much about shutting up and listening while modern, progressive leaders sorted out the tricky balance between the opportunities and threats of change. The balance of the speech was upset by the need to feed British journalists with a domestic headline: the plan to impose instant fines on troublemakers such as football hooligans, drunks or, well, disruptive students. "A thug might think twice about kicking in your gate, throwing traffic cones or hurling abuse if he thought he might get picked up by the police, taken to a cash machine and asked to pay an on-the-spot-fine of, for example, �100." The Germans, among them gentle liberals such as the venerable Countess Marion von D�nhoff, were disturbed. In the German marketing of the Third Way - this week called "progressive government" - there is almost no authoritarian strand. To German ears Mr Blair sounded a bit of a bully. The very idea that German policemen could drag off rowdy revellers and handcuff them to cash machines was a little bit old-fashioned. The questions from the dons reflected that concern. Does the Third Way have to be quite so brutal? Was it really necessary to bomb Yugoslavia (Blair: "There was no alternative") to cosy up to the new Russian President ("Chechnya is not Kosovo") to endorse the spending of �40 billion on an unnecessary nuclear missile defence (Blair: "There is nothing unethical about defending yourself"). The German academics were, in short, as doubtful as their demonstrating students about Mr Blair's new world order. There was not such a big gap, it seemed, between taking thugs to cash machines and bombing Slobodan Milosevic. "I missed a sense of participatory democracy," said one woman, a teacher of history. These things matter in the city twinned with Sedgefield, Mr Blair's constituency. The reason that Professor K�ng found shelter here is that T�bingen, the university and the town, distrusts dogma. The Prime Minister talked much of faith and reason and, above all, about "belief in community" - the answer to global uncertainties - but not much about choice. It took his headline-grabbing diversion into hooligan control to remind his listeners that the concept of free will had barely earned a mention. "Now you can go home," shouted one of the anti-globalisation demonstrators. The British Third Way is not really made for export. ______________________________________________________________________ To unsubscribe, write to [EMAIL PROTECTED] Start Your Own FREE Email List at http://www.listbot.com/links/joinlb
