WELCOME TO LIE-LIE LAND
Writing something like this seems a waste of time. It is ‘preaching to the converted’. In the current dark and threatening atmosphere with its sinister, uncertain future, it could also be dangerous. Yet when one becomes frustrated with the madness which is sweeping across the world, and your only outlet is the use of words, what is there left to do? I read today that in parts of Syria where ISIS rule, the heads of executed victims are left on walls, lined up so that children can retrieve them and use them to play football. This is the far, outer edge of the madness, yet it is not far removed from the spite, anger and irrational hatred which is being promulgated by Britain’s tabloid press.
Following David Cameron’s naïve and over-confident decision to offer Britain a referendum on Europe, the fires of simplistic populism continue to be stoked daily by a rabid media (owned mostly by tax-avoiding billionaires domiciled outside the UK) and a cabal of unscrupulous politicians with duplicitous agendas.
Thus, on June 23, the People had their say, and the victorious 52% no doubt expected us to be out of the EU the following day. Now we find ourselves in a new era; it’s called ‘Post Truth’. It’s been created by people like Donald Trump, (whose new supporters include the Ku Klux Klan) Nigel Farage and others, and it means that veracity (albeit never the sharpest knife in a politician’s toolbox) has been replaced by a loud and proud dishonesty. Now you can say what you like, invent bogus ‘facts’ on the hoof, and be as insultingly incorrect in all areas as you wish, providing this keeps your followers enraged. To maintain this carpet-biting indignation, all we need to do is ignore and refuse to read any genuine facts which oppose our vitriolic frame of mind. ![Image result for IMAGES tRUMP AND fARAGE]( "View source image")
For example on June 8th, 2 weeks before the referendum, David Cameron’s father in law, Lord Astor, said “The EU referendum is merely advisory; it has no legal standing to force an exit. Parliament is still sovereign.” Perversely, it was that very ‘sovereignty’ which we’d never lost that everyone was voting to ‘restore’. When three Supreme Court judges are consulted on the Parliamentary Law relating to UK sovereignty, and come up with their hapless answer, they are dubbed ‘Enemies of The People’. Meanwhile, Cameron, in the wake of his badly conceived mess, has bitten the bullet and sloped off into a well-heeled country supper oblivion, whilst his austerity ‘slash and burn’ colleague Osborne is doing a well-paid ‘Blair’ on the US lecture circuit. The new and seemingly clueless Westminster cartel have been left to clean up their mess by pandering wherever possible to the bigotry and xenophobia which increases day by day.So we are indeed at the top of a slippery slope into social and political darkness. Will this threat subside when we thankfully leave the EU and ‘take our country back’? (Which begs the question - where had it been, who took it?) I doubt it. Politics and democracy have been injected with a powerful, deadly poison; hate. It is the same virus which infected Italy and Germany in the 1920s and 30s. There is no longer any room for compassion or alternative opinions. The new, growing breed of trolls who infest social media will not tolerate the sentiments expressed here, for they see their ill-informed anonymous cowardice as some form of strength. However, we should remember the words of the American philosopher Eric Hoffer: “Propaganda does not deceive people; it merely helps them to deceive themselves.”
