PATHS TO POWER AND DECAY

Note: To avoid unnecessary repetition it is important first to read Part 1, from which references are continued in Part 2 in numerical sequence.

In Part 1 we wrote of the subversive ideological forces moulding modern society in accordance with the compliant and submissive patterns required by the Ruling Elite(18). The extent to which these forces represent a coordinated, coherent conspiracy of global dimensions, perhaps ultimately destined for some form of future Armageddon, or the confluence of a vast interactive and complex relationship between concepts, cultures, ideologies and interests across the world is a matter for individual study and determination. Hopefully before it is too late as the vast majority bury their heads in the sands of convenient diversions such as golf handicaps, commercialised sport, entertainment and the celebrity culture. To every man, woman and child, their mobile 'phone! As we enter the more esoteric discussion of a world seemingly in a state of progressive globalisation and concentration of Power, it is well to remember one of those simple truths taught in one's early schooldays. This is that the forces of nature are such that even the smallest shoots will grow through the densest man-made materials. So, we suggest, with human nature and the insatiable drive this so often embodies. How we contain, constrain, discipline, control or otherwise live with these forces must ultimately determine the destiny of the world.

DISILLUSION, DISARRAY AND DECEPTION

Mixed Messages And Convoluted Philosophies

We quote John Gray, writing in the New Statesman after the General Election of 5th May, 2005, in which the "New" Labour Party was returned for the third time with a reduced, but still sizeable majority:

The people and the political class are at one: neither wants to face the future. Declining world oil production, the huge private debts of Britons and Americans, the lack of an exit strategy in Iraq, and irreversible global warming: these are the big challenges for the next four years. For all of them, Britain will be gloriously unprepared.

Sadly, neither the "New" Labour Party, nor the Conservative Party conveyed genuine political conviction; the leadership of neither party identified with personal authority, unity of purpose and integrity. There remains absolutely no evidence of honest, charismatic leadership, or contender for leadership, with the essential strength of character and strategic vision. The garrulous, superficially plausible Tony Blair is a proven liar. But the reality is that (so far, in Iraq) the winning side determines the guilty and the measure of that guilt; otherwise Blair would now be on trial as a war criminal. No political party has any credible or sustainable economic concept because all are ultimately beholden to the prevailing debt-usury system of money creation, the City of London and the international monetary and economic system, the essence of which is continual debt-driven expansion - Growth - and thus global exploitation. For this reason it is also patently obvious that the traditional alignments of both major parties have become obsolete. This has cut the ground from under the Conservative Party in particular because former Tory-Capitalist interests no longer have a credible National rationale. There are those individual politicians, too, who have been prepared to metamorphose these principles, globalise their interests, and so their loyalties.

The economy is in incipient collapse, public services, health care, law and order, education, immigration, public order and social morality are variously in disarray on a battleground of economic, organisational, managerial realism, social science, vested commercial and financial interests, and the impossible ideals of revolutionary ideologues. Internecine conflict infuses a New Labour Party faced with a global and, therefore, a national economy poised to disintegrate. The people are being increasingly encircled by bureaucratic and ideological oppression internally, and by slavish adherence to diktats from the United Nations and the European Union. New Labour has continued to fudge, renege and lie. The internally divided Conservative Party has been enmeshed in its duplicitous commitment to the invasion of Iraq and the Europe Union. Instead of any obvious fundamental analysis and formulation of a coherent philosophy or strategy, the Conservative party has thus continued speculatively and superficially to embrace a succession of opportune short term issues devoid of any genuine conviction. This we pointed out many months ago.

Government By The Will Of The People Or Will Of A Ruling Elite?

One of the most difficult concepts with which to come to terms has been that of a continuity of the Ideological Struggle or World Revolution in the West in the post Cold War era. What we have to ask is what form does our supposedly democratic freedom actually take, and what say do we actually have in determining our own future when the chips are down? Are we, or the politicians and governments we elect truly in control of our destiny? Broadly, the Tory ideal is what is good for the Tories; the Socialist ideal is what the Socialists believe is good for us, the electorate in the context of the Power they wish to accrue to themselves to enforce their ideologies on the rest of society. Our oft-repeated observation is that the essential philosophical divide is that between the National identity and International, Fabian, Socialism. We must never lose sight of this. In 1945, Professor Harold Laski, of the London School of Economics and Political Science (L.S.E.), Chairman of the British Socialist Party Executive, addressed a Swedish Socialist meeting with the words:

Why cannot the Foreign Ministers in the Socialist Swedish and British Governments - and soon in the Norwegian and Danish - meet and draw up a programme together. So also should the Ministers of Finance and Social Affairs. Our Socialism is one and indivisible. It is not enough to recite Marxism. We must apply it. All the countries of the world are interdependent. ("Second-rate Britain", Daily Express, 30th August, 1945)

A most important and definitive reference is Rose L. Martin's Fabian Freeway(19). Although published almost 40 years ago, in 1966, she lists numerous household names from both sides of the Atlantic, and organisations with transatlantic connections or counterparts such as the American Civil Liberties Union (A.C.L.U.) and the Rockefeller-funded L.S.E. (the second part of the title of which is invariably conveniently omitted). Laski himself straddled the Atlantic with appointments at McGill, Harvard and Yale Universities. One immediate contradiction in terms was the Labour Member of Parliament and Government Minister Denis (now Lord) Healey who was, paradoxically, a founder member of the Bilderberg Group of the Global Elite in 1954. Another example was the late Lord Roll of Ipsden, likewise a Bilderberger, Chairman of bankers S.G. Warburg, a director of the Bank of England and Times Newspapers, and a close associate of Fabian Socialist Prime Minister Harold Wilson. Like Laski, Lord Roll had a foot in both camps as a Special Rockefeller Foundation Fellow and holder of a number of British Government appointments in the United States.

Another revealing statement made by Professor Laski during his address in Sweden in 1945 was that:

We must control monopolies and cartels. We cannot trust the chaotic mind of the average businessman - industry is far too serious to be left to him.

If we allow for the Internationalism of Laski's ideals, we suggest that whatever political system prevails there have to be ruled and rulers. In the half-century since Laski's pronouncement we have travelled the painful loop in the United Kingdom from state ownership and control back to private ownership. We also have the potentially unstable compromises of the Private Finance Initiative (P.F.I.) and the Public-Private Partnership (P.P.P.); unstable because they are simply another manifestation of the fundamental truth of the current debt-usury system of money creation - that overall accumulated debt creation runs ahead of income, whether individual, government or corporate. In the United Kingdom these operations are already threatening to unravel. The same was known a quarter of a century ago in the United States, when the government was seduced into the joint financing of Penn Central and Lockheed with the result that the ultimate commercial debt could rebound only on the taxpayer when the Government had to foot the bill. ("Rise of the capitalist's socialism in the U.S.", The Times, 12th November, 1971). In the United States the Bush Administrations, father and son, have fronted openly for big business. In the United Kingdom we have had the fatuously idealistic Fabian "Third Way", in which the people - government - and big business theoretically work in collaboration (We have studied the Fabian pamphlet in question). This is another illusion, that any national government can meaningfully control trans-national business; a concept over which the electorate is being betrayed every day. We have made this clear in the case of Biotechnology, and Genetically Modified (G.M.) crops in agriculture and the food chain. Despite widespread public opposition to G.M., the Government made determined attempts to "get into bed" with the Monsanto Corporation, whose tentacles already extend into the Third and Developing Worlds, and the European Union. Jose MacDonald, B.Sc., co-founder of Farming and Livestock Concern (U.K.), arranged to have evidence of the dangers of G.M. placed personally into the hands of Margaret Beckett, Secretary of State for Environment, Food and Rural Affairs, and her Agriculture Minister, Elliot Morley. When the European Commission attempted to overturn a ruling that allowed individual member countries to ban G.M., at a session of the Council of Ministers, Morley voted for the Commission. This letter, to The Guardian of 28th June, 2005, indicates just how meaningless to those in Power are "Democracy" and the interests of the people who elect them to office to represent those interests:

Once again the majority view of the British people has been correctly represented by other European governments, and not by our own. As in the case of Iraq, the British Government supported the United States in its desire to impose G.M. crops on the world. ("E.U. votes to continue ban on G.M. crops", 25th June, 2005). One day maybe we too will have a government which does not bow to United States commercial interests.

In the real and demanding world of organisation and management, and long term strategic vision, Laski's concept of state control has spawned a regime of ideologically motivated incompetents, from union functionaries and school teachers to barristers, none of whom seem to have managed an organisation of any consequence in their lives. The acerbic, liberally minded Janet Street Porter, Editor-at-Large of The Independent on Sunday, was moved to write that Government Ministers Margaret Beckett and Margaret Hodge might usefully find employment in a Tesco store, preferably not in a check-out, but in the less demanding task of shelf stacking ("A job at Tesco awaits you, Margaret (and Margaret)", 19th June, 2005). Since 1997 successive governments of Prime Minister Blair have been strongly reminiscent of the privileged Soviet Nomenklatura and the reality that one ruling elite will simply replace another, likewise committed to self-aggrandisement, self-enrichment and patronage. Far from the squeaky-clean image promoted after the general Election of May, 1997, the catalogue of "Tony's Cronys" has been manifest. One of the latest came in a report in the Daily Mail of 16th May, 2005, headed "Offshore tax haven for Lord Crony". This referred to the newly ennobled Lord Grayson, now a Defence Minister with no evident experience of Defence. He had, however, donated £100,000 to the Labour Party, and had collected a £32,000,000 Health Service contract for his company. The same piece revealed that Blair adviser, Lord Birt, was connected with a £34,000,000 Defence contract. The academic career of Blair's son, Euan, and his appointment as a researcher at the United States House of Representatives had all the resonance of the scions of the privileged elite at the Soviet Komsomol. No less so, patronage in the appointment of Chelsea, daughter of former United States President Bill Clinton, to a consultancy job with the Health Service. ("Labour's favourite consultants employing Chelsea Clinton on £10m N.H.S. contract - Jobs for the boys (and an ex-President's daughter) in quango controversy", Mail on Sunday, 29th May, 2005).

The plot thickens in the murk of public perceptions as we pursue the apparently seamless, teflon coated transition and absorption of certain politicians such as Peter Mandelson, and supposedly mutually hostile functionaries of government, into the exclusive world of the Ruling Elite and their mattoid functionaries. The impetus behind the I.R.A., whatever the broader objectives of the majority of its members, has incorporated the Marxist-Leninist Ideological Struggle; for the mind, as well as the employment of terrorism in the military sense (the Armed Struggle). This has never been properly understood by the authorities in the United Kingdom and has allowed Gerry Adams and his I.R.A. colleagues to run rings round both the British and Irish Governments. Nevertheless one asks what influences led to Metropolitan Police Commander, George Churchill-Coleman, a senior Freemason, to withhold evidence of collaboration between the I.R.A. and the African National Congress (A.N.C.), from Conservative Member of Parliament, Andrew Hunter, or why Special Branch and M.I.6 made determined attempts to prevent Hunter's investigations? The smooth progress of the oleaginous Peter Hain, in his youth a fervent anti-Apartheid campaigner, has been almost as uncanny as that other instant expert in a succession of departments, Ruth Kelly. From becoming a New Labour M.P. in 1991, Hain had already held appointments in the Welsh Office, as a Foreign Office Minister and Secretary of State for Wales, before becoming Secretary of State for Northern Ireland. On 3rd July, 2005, The Sunday Telegraph reported Hain as praising the Marxist I.R.A. leaders Gerry Adams and Martin McGuinness as "courageous" and "visionary". Both men, as Marxists, have waged the Armed and Ideological Struggles from within the I.R.A. and have the blood of more than 3,000 dead and countless more injured and maimed in Ireland and on the British mainland. Throughout the period of Hain's earlier campaigning the A.N.C., like the I.R.A., was Marxist dominated and was also sustained by the Soviet Union. It was also known that the I.R.A. consorted with the A.N.C. at the latter's office in 28 Penton Street, in North London. We may take these convolutions in the corridors of Power a little further. Twice discredited former Cabinet Minister Peter Mandelson, another Bilderberg attendee, is now European Union Trade Commissioner. He is also on record as visiting Albania on behalf of Lord Nathan Rothschild(20). Lord Rothschild's cousin Sir Evelyn, of N.M. Rothschild, and yet another Bilderberger, is also professed to be a friend of Mandelson with whom he is said to share a common interest in Albania, and whose "Policy Network" "think tank" he finances. (The Sunday Times, 22nd September, 2002). Carla, the Italian wife of Lord Charles Powell of Bayswater, is on record as another friend of Mandelson. Powell, a former Private Secretary to Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher, has been listed as a director of J. Rothschild, the National Westminister Bank and Jardine Matheson amongst other directorships. His younger brother, Jonathan, is Chief of Staff to Prime Minister Blair. One might equally ask, en passant, how former United Nations Representative Sir Jeremy Greenstock, closely associated with the invasion of Iraq in 2003, and to B.P. Amoco, has come to be Director of the Ditchley Foundation? Or how the former Chief of the Defence Staff, General Lord Guthrie, comes to be on the board of N.M. Rothschild and a member of the secretive extra-governmental Rockefeller-Brzezinski-Kissinger Trilateral Commission?

Class War, And The Continuum Of The Revolutionary Struggle

If the post Cold War era renders it difficult to visualise the concept of an on-going World Revolution with its roots in France, in 1789, and later inspired by Marx and Lenin, it is perhaps even more difficult to accept a continuum of the Ideological Struggle into the Third Millennium as a part of such a Revolution; a Revolution that we are led to believe died with the collapse of Communism in Soviet Russia in the 1990s. When the armed might of the Warsaw pact still posed a serious threat to the West it was easy for the former diplomat, banker and M.I.6 officer George K. Young, to expose the subversive Communist threat to our security(21). Many of those Young named have since graduated from student insurrection and revolutionary political movements to important positions in public life. Have their early views matured and mellowed? Have their mentalities and convictions altered as the insidious process of Political Correctness, with its roots in Marxism-Leninism, is being allowed by successive governments to sieve inexorably into the fabric of contemporary society? For the serious analyst it has been possible to understand how the bourgeoisie and their interests, the broad band of the thinking Middle Classes posed a potential threat to the ultimate objective of a confluence between Communism and the forces of Global Capitalism; in other words, towards the Centralisation of Power. "Middle Class" is in any case a pliable term and conveniently difficult to define, but it constitutes a ready ideological target. This tends to explain why it was possible for George K. Young to publish a perfectly legitimate exposure twenty years ago and yet be marginalised politically as "far" or "extreme" Right today. What has changed? What began as a post-war Working Class movement against social position, privilege, wealth and "class" in general drew much of its momentum from pre-war poverty, unemployment and the visible aspirations of the petit bourgeoisie. In the closing months of the 1939-45 War an incipient challenge to the ethos of military authority axiomatic to such an environment on the part of demobilising servicemen, was whipped up by the politically motivated Army Bureau of Current Affairs and a stream of Left Wing books from the publisher Victor Gollancz. Perceptions of "authoritarian subjection" to a social elite continued to rankle through the period of National Service conscription until the 1960s. Behind the facade of evolving social change and the increasing influence of individual and corporate materialism, the deliberate gradual erosion; the dumbing down and dismantling of our hereditary freedoms, as well as essential social disciplines, has continued. The signs of this pervasive ideological virus are there if we care to look for them.

Only three weeks after the General Election of May, 2005, the Trades Union Congress set the scene with the issue of Diversity in Action, which advised on the use of harmless everyday terms such as race, marriage and language. The General Secretary of the National Association of Teachers in Further and Higher Education condemned the elitism of the Labour Party's own Ministers; no doubt a side-swipe at Ruth Kelly, the new Secretary of State for Education. ("'Posh' ministers get black mark from teachers", The Observer, 29th May, 2005). Ruth Kelly's predecessor in Education, Estelle Morris is already on record as commenting on the "snobs" who pursue higher examination standards; perhaps a petulant reflection of "class" resentment at her own inadequacies in an appointment from which she had been forced to resign(22). We have already identified the Marxist-Leninist philosophy that truth is that which advances the interests of the Party of the Revolution. In this context we have shown how Education Minister David Milibrand and Denis MacShane, Minster for Europe, both lied as Ministers in accordance with this philosophy(23). Using his office as Home Secretary prior to the General Election in May, 2005, Charles Clarke apparently had no scruples about addressing mosques in a manouevre to exploit differences over Race Hate legislation with the Conservative and Liberal Democrat parties. His letter was addressed from "the Office of Charles Clarke, 16 Old Queen Street, London", and bore the New Labour slogan and logo. He was also reported on 22nd May, 2005, as lying on six specific counts of law and order. ("Six falsehoods in 100 seconds: how the Home Secretary misled the public over 'yob crack-down'", The Sunday Telegraph). On 7th July, 2005, a Daily Telegraph report was headed; "M.Ps., make merry as bumbling deputy [John Prescott] takes up the reins". The newspaper and B.B.C Radio 4 referred to Prescott's allusion to the "class" of his Conservative adversary, Michael Ancram, who happens to be the 13th Marquess of Lothian. Whilst suggestions were that Prescott would have relished an old fashioned Left-Right battle, had Ancram alluded to Prescott's "Lower" or "Working" Class origins in the same way the talking heads of the Media would have been grabbing for their computers.

Each time these incidents could be dismissed as passing aberrations or individual prejudice. The sum of the parts, however, paints a different picture; one of a poisonous and deliberately divisive social virus. A frenzy of media criticism occurred when Prince Harry dared to adopt Nazi uniform for a fancy dress party. "This ignorant prince proves the idiocy of the hereditary principle", prated Deborah Orr in The Independent of 15th January, 2005. The actions of the youthful Prince did no such thing despite Orr's superficial and facile arguments. Indeed, one might well ask who is Deborah Orr that she presumes to shape the opinions of the rest of us. This process of attrition runs deep in the social, mental and journalistic blood-stream and applies to general carping selectively against the Constitutional Monarchy. Prince Andrew has been castigated for using a helicopter to fly to golf matches, yet we do not recall mention of the need for security or that this might have some relationship to a programme of formal commitments. The Daily Telegraph, which castigated Prince Charles and his entourage for not using scheduled air services during a visit to sites of the Tsunami flood disaster, impresses less and less as a loyalist, conservative or establishment newspaper. ("Charles and a charter to spend money - cost of royal travel back in the spotlight as prince and his entourage spurn scheduled flights and run up a £379,929 bill on a 13-day round-the-world tour", 23rd June, 2005). What the newspaper did not reflect was the standing, the prestige and importance of the British Monarchy in the eyes of the world; nor did it make reference to the use of air transport by the presidentially ambitious Prime Minister Blair and his entourage, whose journeys involve escaping domestic issues on some well-spun "initiative" elsewhere. This approach also conveniently ignores comparison with numerous tycoons and sporting celebrities, such as the golfer Greg Norman, who regularly fly in their own private executive jets and by private helicopter. No comparison is made between the Royal residences and numerous privately-owned residences at home and abroad, off-shore tax havens and luxury yachts. Philip Green, domiciled in Monaco, is the British Home Stores (B.H.S.) magnate and not untypical of those who, like "celebrities", make a handsome living out of the British public. Green's wife gave him an executive jet aircraft as a birthday present, and he is said to have spent £2,000,000 on his son's Bar Mitzvah celebrations. The Telegraph might no less have suggested that the Queen take a bus down the Mall on state occasions. This is the same newspaper that devotes entire pages to the ludicrously extravagant lifestyle of a self-generating world of celebrities; grossly overpaid sports stars, the fashion world, show business, their media afficionados and an army of hangers-on, freeloading politicians and so on.

If the sum of the parts constitutes a compelling scenario of subversion within Western society, we may quote the Financial Times of 28th June, 2005, in writing of a "culture war" in which the United States Supreme Court has ruled against the display of the Ten Commandments in a Kentucky court. This falls into line with the general, singular attack on Christianity in the West through the Mass Communications Media, entertainment and the cinema. It echoes attempts to ban Bibles from hospitals and the removal of the Cross from a crematorium chapel in the United Kingdom. A more relaxed and liberal society is one thing. We also have many commercial pressures within the publishing and fashion industries. Manners, respect for others and legitimate authority - another potential area for dispute - do not change significantly in principle, but these natural and essential disciplines have been gradually loosened by permissive legislation and the promotion of individual "Rights". In Part 1 we discussed simple questions of dress and style that are open to any one(24). A very visual example can be found in English test match cricket over a span of some 20 or 30 years. Originally, it was the custom to appear in public attired in blazers and white flannels; the authority of the umpires during match play was generally respected. During the intervening period the truculence and rudeness sometimes amounting to intimidation has been increasingly prevalent on the field exactly as authority is repeatedly challenged in society generally. This was reflected in a photograph of latter-day English players watching from the balcony, dressed in a hotch-potch of coloured shorts, tee-shirts, baseball caps, feet on the rail, drinking from cans. It is also a very subliminal process that finds a ready audience.

Some may question where this is leading in what may be justified by many as a naturally evolving and less deferential society; nothing sinister in exercising one's normal Human "Rights". We have already cited the loud-mouthed slob culture of television motoring presenters(25). Now witness the poison pill in a review of the new Ford Focus motor car in The Guardian of 21st June, 2005, to which we have added our own emphasis. The car was first billed as "elitist", meaningless in terms of the car, but it established the term "Elitist" in the mind of the reader. The text, which bore scant resemblance to a professional assessment of a motor vehicle, included the totally pointless statement that "The steering wheel had mock aluminium spokes - elitist, quietly racy and above all, screamingly Essex". Estelle Morris and the General Secretary of the National Association of Teachers in Further and Higher Education would have noted satisfying echoes here. Not much to get excited about? Radios and loudspeakers hang on the walls of workshops, cafés and offices around the country and blare mindlessly, to provide a continuous background of noise and chatter. No less subliminal than The Guardian was a B.B.C. Radio popular music programme that blared away in a barber's shop as we listened. During his transmission the slob culture presenter made repeated allusions to the "Middle Classes" for no obvious reason connected with the programme. It is therefore easy to understand how the mind control process functions, and how the ideology becomes embedded in the mentality, the psyche, of third rate journalists and broadcasters.

The sum of the parts? Maintenance of Law and Order is a vital function in modern society. Policing sprang from the Militia of the early Nineteenth Century. The Police wear similar badges of rank to the Armed Forces but, relatively recently, abandoned the too authoritarian custom of saluting. Chief Constables are important figures comparable to their counterparts in the Armed Forces, but career selection and patterns changed more sharply under the general pressure for social change in society. Perusing our press cuttings we see the general loosening of standards and the erosion of morale within the ranks precipitated by active imposition of the mores of (Marxist-Leninist, let us remember), Political Correctness. The regular use of Christian names has been exploited in pursuit of a more relaxed and approachable society regardless of the fundamental rule of human behaviour, that familiarity breeds contempt. We have now gone one further with Chief Constables whose names have been popularised and cheapened with abbreviations such as "Matt", "Steve", "Tony", "Mick" and "Tom". The professional image has been debased by public inarticulacy in too many cases, account fiddling and, recently, sexual mis-conduct in the case of "Tom" Lloyd, Chief Constable of Cambridgeshire. A fundamental tenet of sound management, no less than military command, is that of unqualified support for ones subordinates and no public display of censure or disharmony. Yet in the United States Air Force Academy, where a problem of prosletysing Christianity has occurred, itself an astonishing lapse of "good order and military discipline", the Jewish Chronicle of 10th June, 2005, was able to report that the Commandant had publicly revealed that he had admonished his deputy, Brigadier Johnny Weida, as the individual responsible. Perhaps this goes some small way to explain the appalling conduct of the American operation in Iraq. If we need confirmation that the Revolutionary Ideology is alive and well, even if we find it difficult to identify it as such in the West, we have the example of Zimbabwe. Marxist President Robert Mugabe's brutal land clearance, firstly of White farmers, and now of Black Zimbabwean political opponents to his regime - Black "Kulaks" - savours of that which occurred in Soviet Russia in the 1930s. That Mugabe is now inviting dispossessed White farmers to return to sort out the agricultural chaos has another parallel in the reinstatement of surviving Czarist officers to operate the Russian Armed Forces following the Bolshevik uprising of October, 1917, with its indiscriminate torture and slaughter of the Bourgeoisie. President Thabo Mbeki of South Africa resolutely refuses to censure Mugabe. Mbeki is also a Marxist.

THE FARCE AND FALLACY OF DEMOCRACY

So You Think You Count

Once we put a cross on a ballot paper we may as well forget it. In the United Kingdom and the United States one has the option of choosing one of two monolithic parties with precious little difference between them, both beholden to vested interests, in particular to International Finance-Capitalism. In the United Kingdom a third, Liberal Democrat Party, snaps hopefully at the heels of the other two. Very small inroads have been made by the U.K. Independence Party (U.K.I.P.), the one political group unequivocally opposed to an European Union "superstate". Prior to the General Election of May, 2005, matters of serious public concern such as immigration, asylum, Political Correctness, bureaucratic oppression in general, especially that emanating from Brussels, continuing violence against ordinary citizens, adolescent and juvenile behaviour, were picked up briefly during the party-political manoeuvring and discarded. Politicians generally will process high profile constituency issues useful to their electoral image, but challenge a Member of Parliament on a fundamental question such as substituting the right of a government to create its own debt-free money to finance public services, such as Health Care, for the conventional debt-usury system of money creation by the private banking system, and see what happens. We know, we have tried. All these issues emanate from legislation through Parliament by our elected representatives. It is possible to amend, overhaul, review or even withdraw legislation. It is equally possible to enforce existing legislation such as that designed to control the incursions of so-called "travellers", or the disastrous Children Act of 1989 that has caused major problems in Education. In the case of relayed diktats from the United Nations or Brussels, a simple answer on important questions such as the legal system: "We hear you, but in the case of this country the answer is 'No'", could have brought a landslide election victory.

Christopher Gill, the former M.P. for Ludlow, is a man who leads from the front as the popular Chairman of the resurgent Freedom Association(26). He was also one of the pathetically small band of Conservative Party M.Ps. who had the conviction and integrity to stand up to Prime Minister John Major and the repressive Party Whips to oppose the signing of the Maastricht Treaty in 1992. His Chairman's Letter in the May-June issue of the Association's magazine, Freedom Today, Christopher Gill began: "What a load of shysters, but by such we are governed!" He was referring to the pre-election promise of Prime Minister Tony Blair to hold a referendum on the European Constitution regardless of the outcome of the vote in France, which was in the event an overwhelming "No". Thanks to the duplicity of the New Labour and Conservative Party leaderships, inter alia, revealing the International Socialist creed of the former, no referendum has been held, and the British people have been tactically denied the promise to express their views. We have written extensively on the machinations of Prime Minister Edward Heath to manipulate the United Kingdom into a political as well as an economic union(27). We have written on the danger of the European Arrest Warrant(28), and on the threat to our Constitution(29). Outside parliamentary circles and special interest groups, what has been explained for public consumption about the greatest change to this country since the Norman invasion in 1066 or the Magna Carta of 1215; what officially sponsored radio or television series, what local government briefings or releases to the regional press? Information - promotional - packs have been circulated for schools, but what does any-body, even those politicians poised to vote away our heritage know, for example, of the address by Professor Arnold Toynbee of the Royal Institute of International Affairs, in 1931?(30) here is the key extract:

In the spirit of determination which happily animates us, we shall have no inclination to underestimate the strength of the political force which we are striving to overcome. If we are frank with ourselves, we shall admit that we are engaged on a deliberate and sustained and concentrated effort to impose limitations upon the sovereignty and the independence of the fifty or sixty local independent states which at present partition the habitable surface of the earth and divide the political allegiance of mankind. The surest sign, to my mind, that this fetish of local national sovereignty is our intended victim is the emphasis which all our statesmen and publicists protest with one accord, and over and over again, at every step forward which we take, that, whatever changes we may make in the international situation, the sacred principle of local sovereignty will remain inviolable. . . . The harder we press our attack upon the idol, the more pains we take to keep its priests and devotees in a fool's paradise - lapped in a false sense of security which will inhibit them from taking up arms in their idol's defence.

United States Intelligence, leading American political figures and the Foundations were involved in early post-war manoeuvres for a United Europe. The globalising process - the Centralisation of Power - included the requirement to dismantle Commonwealth trade agreements. Behind this lay a United States drive to penetrate and ultimately to dominate global markets. As early as 1947 this was perfectly well known to the Design for Freedom Committee, a panel of 24 leading public figures of whom 10 were M.Ps. The Chairman was Peter Thorneycroft, M.P., later to become a Government Minister and, as Lord Thorneycroft, Chairman of the Conservative Party. This illuminating extract from their Paper, Design for Europe, did not exactly reflect the democratic process(31):

Moreover - and it is just as well to state this bluntly at the outset - no government dependent upon a democratic vote could possibly agree in advance to the sacrifices which any adequate plan must involve. The people must be led slowly and unconsciously into the abandonment of their traditional economic defences, not asked, in advance of having received any of the benefits which will accrue to them from the [Marshall] plan, to make the changes of which they may not at first recognise the advantages to themselves as well as to the rest of the world.

The Editor of The Scorpion magazine, Michael Walker, devoted an entire issue to the question of Democracy under the title "Democracy we Presume?"(32). Here we reproduce his opening paragraph which we have coupled with text taken from the captions of selected illustrations:

Two fundamental questions belong to every consideration of democracy - do we have democracy and do we want it? In the course of this essay, which is an attempt to help towards an understanding of different approaches to the subject, the two questions should be kept in mind. If we are unaware of them, discussion about democracy and everything associated with it is likely to become a polemical tool in debate in which protagonists speak past one another, because they are arguing on different premises. . . . Political leaders in democratic regimes play the role of ventriloquist dummy to lobbies, the media and money. . . . Political parties campaign for the voters' support with sometimes droll publicity but the agenda is fixed by parties and the media and the gap between party establishments and voters in the West is widening.

Michael Walker asks "Do we have democracy and do we want it?". Perhaps we should invite the reader to provide the answer to the first part. It may help in reaching that answer to quote what E.H. Carr on the role of Economic Power in 1942(33). In reaching any conclusion it is also as well to reflect on the "Third Way" promulgated by the New Labour Party and the case postulated in these pages that a form of Ideological manipulation, or conditioning, is taking place to reduce the electorate to a state in which they are incapable of, or indifferent to, any such judgement.

Democracy may thus in ordinary parlance imply either the acceptance of certain ideals which are regarded as ends in themselves not requiring justification, or the establishment of a certain type of government machinery (ie., representative government as being the nearest practicable modern equivalent to self-government), which is not an end in itself, but is justified as the most effective means of attaining democratic ideals. . . . [of Liberal Democracy] [T]he holders of economic power, instead of agreeing - as the theory of liberal democracy required - that the state should merely hold the ring while they competed against each other with economic weapons, now more and more openly descended into the political arena and used political weapons to secure economic benefits for themselves, thus making organised economic power for the first time the dominant factor in politics.

Controlling What We Are Told And The way We Think

We have democracy in that we are able to fill in a slip of paper every four or five years. We may live peacefully with our golf handicaps, television entertainment and sanitized news and current affairs transmissions. We suffer no obvious form of tyranny, although it was possible for some 20 Marconi scientists and government scientist Dr David Kelly to vanish somewhat inexplicably from the scene. Any challenge to our independence of thought or deed comes from a process of legislative and social change. We postulate this as the Ideological Struggle - akin to psychological warfare - to control the mind. This is far more subtle than outright physical oppression and is therefore far more difficult to identify. The Labour Movement that began in the late Nineteenth Century and lasted until well into the following century brought greater prosperity and social justice to the mass of the people; the Working or employed Classes. One might suggest we have reached a condition of relative material equilibrium. Concurrently with these changes we have had the progressive Centralisation of Power in the form of International Finance Capitalism; that of banking and the multinational corporations, and those governments that we elect to represent our interests, but that in practice serve theirs. The thinking, socially responsible element of society, centred on the so-called educated, intellectual and professional property-owning Middle Classes, but drawn from perceptive individuals at all levels of the community, is a threat to this Centralisation of Power. They can recognise it, understand it and organise to challenge it. They cannot easily be liquidated as in France in 1789, or Russia, in 1917. We may enact legislation to reduce their material security and thus independence, and to restrict their independence of thought and expression. We may erode the heritage and culture that are the bedrock of their existence. Or we may control the flow and form of information available to them.

Thirteen years ago, in 1992, we published two consecutive editions of On Target in which we examined the Mass Communications Media(34)(35). In 1993 and 1994 we followed this with two further editions on the Power of the Media and those who control it. The first dealt with Diversion - "Diversiya" - and the active use and control of Propaganda and the Media under Soviet Communism(36). The second examined the way in which the Ruling Elite achieved much the same ends by more "democratic" methods(37). Writing in 1976, Thomas R. Dye left no doubt that the Media were almost totally under control of vested interests in the United States(38). He quoted Nicholas Johnson, a member of the Federal Communications Commission (F.C.C.), as stating:

The networks, in particular . . . are probably now beyond the check of any institution in our society. The President, the Congress of the United States, the F.C.C., the foundations, the universities are reluctant even to get involved. I think they may now be so powerful that they're beyond the check of anyone.

Many more sources convey the same message. In Chronicles of Dissent Professor Noam Chomsky shows how public perceptions are generated and almost completely controlled(39). Edward Abboud wrote pungently in 2001 from an Islamic point of view how American-Jewish and Zionist interests controlled the Media to their own ends(40). Abboud is best read in conjunction with the American-Jewish author J.J.Goldberg's reasoned and analytical assessment of what remains a clear source of control in this field(41). In the end the situation is one of what we are allowed to know and what we are conditioned to think.

In 1992 we gave details of the vast network of vested interests and individuals, the path from which led to ownership and control of the Media. Royal Commissions of 1947-49 and 1961-62 had expressed no concerns except for limited newspaper amalgamations and dual newspaper and television interests. This period that followed for the United Kingdom was one of rapidly growing Power of the media moguls; Robert Maxwell, Rupert Murdoch and Conrad Black. In 1989 the House of Commons expressed itself "united in opposition to media empires". In the same year the then Home secretary, Douglas Hurd, referring for some reason only to broadcasting, stated that "Broadcasting will not be ruled by tycoons". By 1994 and the Government of John Major, all semblance of formal regulation over Media ownership was thrown to the winds and we were reading headlines such as "TV review paves the way for mergers" (The Daily Telegraph, 4th January, 1994), "Proprietors at the gate - Newspaper groups hammer at the door of television as government launches review of media ownership rules", (The Sunday Times, 9th January, 1994) and "ITV free-for-all starts bidding battle of giants", (The Daily Telegraph, 25th January, 1994). From the earliest beginnings we had gone from the simple provision of news, the domestic influence in the media such as that of Lord Rothermere, Lord Beaverbrook and the Astor family in the 1920s, 1930s and 1940s, to a state in which public opinion could be shaped by foreign media tycoons on a grand scale. This was, inter alia, an early indication of the fallacy of the Fabian Socialist "Third Way".

Writing under the title "The Ghost Of Gleneagles" in the New Statesman for 11th July, 2005, John Pilger offers one single and compelling example of how the powers-that-be control our perspectives through the information chain. This is especially relevant at the time of the G8 Conference of Finance Ministers at Gleneagles, in Scotland. It is also relevant, since this is the time at which we are writing, to the tragic consequences and implications of the series of explosions that rocked the City of London on Thursday, 7th July, 2005. Here is an extract from the article in question, to which we have added the necessary emphasis:

Over the past two weeks, the contrast between two related "global" events has been salutary. The first was the World Tribunal on Iraq, held in Istanbul; the second the G8 meeting in Scotland and the Make Poverty History campaign. Reading the papers and watching television in Britain, you would know nothing about the Istanbul meetings, which produced the most searing evidence to date of the greatest political scandal of modern times; the attack on a defenceless Iraq by Britain and America. The Tribunal is a serious international public inquiry into the invasion and occupation, the kind governments dare not hold. "We are here", said the author Arundhati Roy in Istanbul, "to examine a vast spectrum of evidence [about the war] that has been deliberately marginalised and suppressed - its legality, the role of international institutions and major corporations in the occupation; the role of the media, the impact of weapons such as depleted uranium munitions, napalm and cluster bombs, the use and legitimation of torture . . . The most shocking [testimony] was given by Dahr Jamail. Unless you read the Internet, you will not know who Dahr Jamail is. He is not an amusing Baghdad blogger. For me he is the finest reporter working in Iraq. Together with Robert Fisk [The Independent], Patrick Cockburn [London Review of Books and The Independent] and a few others, mostly freeelancers, he shames the flak-jacketed, cliché-crunching camp followers known as Embeds". . . . He has reported from the besieged city of Fallujah, whose destruction and atrocities have been suppressed, notably by the B.B.C. (See www.medialens.org/alerts). . . . Jamail described how Fallujah's hospitals have been subjected to an American tactic of collective punishment, with United States marines assaulting staff and stopping the wounded entering, and American snipers firing at the doors and windows, and medicines and emergency blood prevented from reaching the hospitals. Children were shot in front of their families, in cold blood. The two men ultimately responsible for this, George W. Bush and Tony Blair, attended the G8 meeting at Geneagles. Unlike for the Istanbul Tribunal, there was saturation coverage, yet no one in the "mainstream" - from the embedded media to the Make Poverty History organisers and the accredited, acceptable celebrities - made the obvious connection with Bush's and Blair's enduring crime in Iraq. . . . In Edinburgh, a shameless invitation-only meeting of Christian Aid supporters and church leaders was addressed by Gordon Brown, a paymaster of this carnage. Only one person asked him, "When will you stop the rape of the poor's resources? Why are there so many conditions on aid?" This lone protester was not referring specifically to Iraq, but to most of the world. He was thrown out, to cheers from among the assembled Christians. . . . The mawkish images on giant screens behind the pop stars in Hyde Park beckoned a wilful, self-satisfied ignorance. There were none of the images that television refuses to show; of murdered Iraqi doctors with the blood streaming from their heads, cut down by Bush's snipers. . . . There was [Sir] Bob Geldof, resting his smiling face on smiling Blair's shoulder, the war criminal and his jester. . . . The suppression of African singers and bands, parked where Geldof decreed, in an environmental theme park in Cornwall, far from the vaunted global audience, was described by Andy Kershaw as "musical apartheid" Has there ever been censorship as complete and insidious as this? Even when Stalin airbrushed his purged comrades from the annual photograph on top of Lenin's mausoleum, the Russian people could fill in the gaps. Media and cultural hype provide infinitely more powerful weapons in the age of Blair.

THE PATH FROM COLONIALISM TO TERROR

Some Truths Of Democracy And Its Convenient Interpretation

We write in the aftermath of the bombing of 7th July, 2005, in the London Underground and, perhaps prematurely, an explosion on a London bus. Parliament predictably closed ranks across the party-political divide, and we must accordingly establish a clear division between the tragedy of the bereaved, dead and injured - the human story - and the political and geopolitical backcloth to this atrocity. The British people, with 2,000 years of tradition and culture behind them, rose resolutely to the occasion. The Police and supporting services have demonstrated characteristically British professionalism. Commentators and the "talking heads", few of them to our knowledge with expertise on the Middle East or the Islamic world generally, went equally predictably into overdrive and enjoyed a field day with speculative analyses. In The Sunday Telegraph Niall Ferguson suggested that when they portray the attack in London, on 7th July, 2005, as retribution for the invasion of Iraq, George Galloway, M.P., and Robert Fisk, a leading journalist and widely respected expert on the region, overlook the fact that if we give in to "terrorists" - which does not follow in any case - Osama bin Laden would control the Middle East. What Ferguson himself misses is that Osama Bin Laden was a C.I.A. creation in the first place with murky links with United States agencies right up to 9-11. Ferguson also conveniently forgets that the United States and the United Kingdom fabricated the evidence in order to invade Iraq in the first place, and thus themselves destroyed any semblance of stability. The one truth amidst this nonsense was Ferguson's admission that "The answer is that the Middle East is too economically and hence too strategically important to be abandoned - so long as the world's consumption of fossil fuels continues to grow". Now we have it! Professor Brian Brivati, of Kingston University, claimed in The Guardian that the "Invasion had reduced the threat of terror", and opened with the question: "Would 7-7 have happened, and would it have been more or less deadly, if we had not liberated Afghanistan and Iraq?". (Emphasis added) In making this palpably absurd proposition, he fails to define "terror" and explain that not only had Iraq not threatened anyone, possessed none of the Weapons of Mass Destruction alleged by the Coalition and had had no connection with Osama bin Laden and Al Qa'eda. Nor does he define the "liberation" of Iraq in terms of the subsequent brutal occupation, continued destruction of the ancient heritage, and exploitation by United States multinational corporations, or acknowledge the impotence of the current quasi-puppet leadership that cowers within the Green Zone in Baghdad. In the title to a leading article in the Financial Times by Bilderberger Martin Woolf, we read "Enemies of freedom always underestimate their "adversaries". What "enemies" and what "freedom", and who, exactly, are the adversaries"? The freedom destroyed in the first place was that of Iraq following a contrived invasion based on evidence known to be false, with a continuing catalogue of American atrocities worthy of any Nazi German occupation during the 1939-45 War. Wolf goes on, after assuming the complicity of Jihadis, possibly "home grown" Jihadis, that: "It is a bitter conflict that has at least one thing in common with the Cold War. It is a battle of ideas. It is a battle between tolerance and religious bigotry". (Emphasis added). This is duplicitous nonsense characteristic of the sheer hypocrisy of the Coalition Powers. Despite United States' and the United Kingdom's attempts to de-couple the bombing in London from the invasion of Iraq, Dilip Hiro, who clearly does know his Middle Eastern history, pointed out in The Independent on Sunday that the Anglo-American Coalition had ridden roughshod over the Islamic culture which has now helped to breed an even more menacing "swamp" of extremists.

Today, jihadists are drawn to Iraq not only because Iraq represents an ancient and powerful idea of Arab culture and history. After all, Baghdad was, almost uninterruptedly, the capital of the Islamic empire from 750 to 1258. Baghdad also holds the tomb of Abu Hanifa al-Numan (699-767), the founder of the Hanifi Code of Islamic law, the largest sub-sect among Sunnis. And the tomb of Ali in Najaf [desecrated during the United States assault in 2004], is sacred to both Shiias and Sunnis.

Before we distinguish between perceived or ritual political positions and simple truths, we must first consider the definition of "Terror", "Terrorists" and "Terrorism", which we examined first in December, 2004, supported by the appropriate references(42). "Terror", "Terrorist" and "Terrorism" as terms have been progressively distorted conveniently to define any group or activity that opposes the actions and interests generally of the Western Powers. In the present context this applies to the Middle East, Southern Asia and the Far East. We are not discussing here the anarchist political groups prevalent in Europe during the 1960s, 1970s and 1980s, such as the Red Brigade. We are not contemplating domestic insurrection such as the Basque separatist movement in Spain. In the Middle East, and on a wider, Islamic front, we are faced with a situation far closer to resistance groups, like the Maquis, which operated behind the lines in France, Eastern Europe and the Balkans during the 1939-45 War. The employment of techniques such as assassination, bombing, sabotage and demolition is to utilise what means are available to those who do not have access to modern battlefield weapons. Given a just cause, as in the case of Iraq, this is perfectly legitimate and ultimately less destructive than high level American bombing - "bunker", cluster bombs and the rest - of innocent, civilians and the use of helicopter gunships and heavy artillery against civilian populations during the wanton destruction of ancient towns and cities. As Dilip Hiro has pointed out, this will inevitably draw in more extreme factions, similarly to the presence of Communist elements in France and Jugoslavia in 1939-45. The use of "terrorist" or "insurgent" conveys an unjustified implication for those who simply want their country back, and are arguably more correctly defined as freedom fighters or guerrillas. In the case of the invasion of Iraq in March, 2003, one might ask who had planned this several years previously, who fudged the evidence against Iraq, and who fired the first shot? Who has slaughtered as many as 100,000 Iraqi civilians, many, including small children and doctors, in cold blood, and tortured thousands more to give rise to the present insurrection in Madrid, Bali and London? Who consistently censored this from the controlled Media and so left innocent civilian populations, in London Madrid and elsewhere, innocent not least of the scale of the atrocities being committed by governments on their behalf, with a false sense of security?

Next, we must disabuse ourselves of the ritual political cachet of "Left" or "Right" wing attributions and alignments. This tends to be a knee-jerk journalistic and political instinct of the mental process. For some, whose opinions are culled from no more than a favourite newspaper and according to perceived social background and tradition, the presumption that what "we" do is automatically justified and what the foreign adversary or target does must be wrong, goes with the thinking and natural demand for loyalty to what is perceived as the national interest. One has seen this instinctive arrogance in the Conservative Party ranks. One gets a whiff of the same even within the ranks of the excellent Freedom Association with its admirable small "c" conservative values. The Financial Times referred to some 140 Labour Party M.Ps. who were opposed to the invasion and occupation of Iraq as "Left Wing" and "Left-leaning". What is "Left" about an illegal invasion based on fraudulent evidence and a ruthlessly oppressive occupation? Perhaps the editor of the Financial Times would care to define his terms? In 1984 George Young published a perfectly legitimate exposure of the Communist threat within the United Kingdom, but in the same pages he referred to Ramsey Clark, when Attorney General of the United States in 1980, as "odious", and "notorious" for his mea culpa ("I am guilty"), in Teheran, thus bracketing Clark with the dangerous Liberal or subversive Left Wing ethos(43). Clark had bucked the orthodoxy of the Ruling Global Elite when he had negotiated the release of United States Embassy hostages seized by the revolutionary leadership that had ousted the Shah of Iran in the previous year, and in doing so had acknowledged American interference in the internal affairs of Iran. But this so-called interference was already a matter of record; in the early years through Louis Fischer(44) and Anton Mohr(45), while Timmerman has described in detail how we armed Saddam Hussein(46). In The Fire This Time Ramsey Clark gave a full account of how Great Britain, France and later the United States had continuously and unscrupulously manipulated the rulers of Arab nations whose boundaries had been arbitrarily defined after the fall of the Ottoman Empire after the 1914-18 War; nations that had had little experience of self-government and had long existed under various forms of mandate and protectorate. Moreover, Clark also gave a comprehensive account of American atrocities during the first Gulf War of 1991, including the deliberate bombing of innocent citizens in Fallujah, the shooting in cold blood of troops attempting to surrender and the murderous slaughter of fleeing soldiers and civilians during the infamous "Turkey shoot)(47). Given an historical evolution from colonialism to a world of the United Nations and Human Rights, one has to ask if Ramsey's actions and exposures were a question of his political alignment, or simply a matter of Right and Wrong?

When Is A Liar Not A Liar; Or A War Criminal Not A War Criminal

Cracks in the facade of the drive for "Democracy" and the fight against "Tyranny" across the world peddled by President George W. Bush are increasngly identifiable through the controlled mainstream Media. In compounding the friable image of its own political delineation, the Australian Green Left weekly exposed the true forces behind Bush's crusade when it reported that the multinational corporation, Halliburton, had moved from losses of $65,000,000 to a net profit of $365,000,000 in the space of some 12 months, and that a third of its $1,500,000,000 revenue had come from "Iraq-related" work. For the United Kingdom, Chancellor of the Exchequer Gordon Brown, when referring to the death of Ann Toward's husband in Iraq, stated that the Government had acted in the British national interest, and that "We believed we were making the right decisions in the British national economic interests". The British economy is already in trouble with a report that Chancellor Brown is to borrow a record £9,000,000,000. In the United States the Ford Company and General Motors are in considerable financial trouble. In Italy Fiat is about to follow them by converting debt into equity. We have already expressed our reservations about the relative impotence of electorates in a one-man-one-vote Democracy. It is easy therefore to see how and why economic colonisation; the privatisation of national infrastructures, free markets and inward investment have enslaved much of Africa and Latin America abetted by the process of selective democratisation. It is further possible to understand why the real impetus behind the democratic process is the elimination of more autocratic regimes, however accepted and suited to the domestic economic scenario, because they constitute a potential threat to globalising economic forces, largely from the United States.

Under the heading "Reformers and hardliners", Neil Clark, writing in The Guardian, asks "What do Iran, Venezuela and Belarus have in common?" He asks why the rulers of these countries are repeatedly referred to by C.N.N., the Wall Street Journal and the Financial Times as "hardliners", whereas regimes such as those in Bulgaria and Hungary that have capitulated to the global economic agenda of the free market are not? The ultimate moral fallacy of the drive for "Democracy" has been seen, for example, in the West's long-term support for oppressive regimes in economically important Indonesia. We are now seeing the same selectivity in the case of Uzbekistan, regarded as an ally of the United States in the war against tyranny, a country that sits on vast oil and natural gas deposits, and where the United States has established a military base. The British Ambassador, Craig Murray, was summarily dismissed from his post after he broke ranks to expose the ruthlessness of President Islam Karimov and his government, even to the point of boiling victims alive, and to which it is also believed the United States is sending suspects to be tortured.

Time magazine let another cat out of the bag when it revealed the privately expressed views of Sir Ivor Roberts:

Sir Ivor Roberts, Britain's Ambassador to Italy, declared last September that the "best recruiting sergeant for al Qa'eda" was none other than the United states President, George W. Bush. With the American election entering its final furlongs, he added, "If anyone is ready to celebrate the eventual re-election of Bush, it is al Qa'eda". The remarks, made at an off-the-record conference, were leaked in the Italian press, and Sir Ivor, facing the displeasure of his Foreign Office masters for committing the sin of candour, disowned the comments. But now, as the soot settles in the London Underground, the words hang again in the air.

Centre stage in this global scenario we have British Prime Minister Tony Blair. In May, 1999, Professor Noam Chomsky wrote to On Target with his pervading impression of Blair "as a slightly crazed six-year old with a big grin while he plays with his new star wars gun that can wipe out everyone in sight". We have observed nothing since to disabuse us of this picture of a strategically immature, presidentially ambitious but skilful and superficially plausible orator. Blair helped precipitate the invasion of Iraq on the basis of a "dodgy dossier" of cranked-up evidence that purported to show that Saddam Hussein possessed Weapons of Mass Destruction. At the final meeting of the United Nations Security Council in February, 2003, prior to the invasion in the following March, United Nations Inspectors Hans Blix and al Baderei both confirmed the lack of viable evidence. We also now know from Adel Safty of Al-Jazeera that President George W. Bush had already agreed with Blair on the invasion of Iraq at Crawford in Texas, in April, 2002. Faced with this incriminating scenario Blair has repeatedly changed his ground on the reasons for the invasion, even citing the wholly spurious "45 minute" threat from Saddam Hussein's non-existent weapons. Blair has continued his diversionary posturing by embracing one new "initiative" after another in his global perambulations. However, the disclosure of advice from the Attorney General, Lord Goldsmith, on the very friable justification for invading Iraq, forced Blair's duplicity back into the public domain. This was further exacerbated when The Times and Knight-Ridder revealed further evidence of confidential discussions in which Blair had sought an excuse to pursue the invasion. We have read carefully the full 13 pages of Lord Goldsmith's letter. United Nations Resolution 1441, upon which much of the argument was based, was clearly drafted to mean "all things to all men". There is little doubt in our minds that Blair was responsible for accepting the most convenient interpretation of this Resolution to support his subsequent actions. But for the overwhelming supremacy of the United States, there has to be little question that both Blair and his Foreign Secretary, Jack Straw, along with President George W. Bush, would stand condemned as war criminals.

UNITED IN GRIEF
WHAT OUR LEADERS HAVE VISITED ON US ALL

Ten-year old Zeinab was brought to Britain for treatment by free-lance journalist Lee Gordon, who is now in the process of selling his house to pay for her continued treatment, after she had lost a leg and 17 members of her family as a result of the actions of the Coalition Forces in Iraq. Yet when Zainab learned of the plight of the ill-fated hostage in Iraq, Ken Bigley, who was subsequently killed by his captors, she had the compassion to write to his brother, Paul, in Holland, expressing her understanding and sympathy. After the bombing in London on 7th July, 2005, in which some 60 lives have probably been lost, and many more maimed and injured, Professor Iman Al Saadun wrote from Basra to the people of London. In this she voiced her understanding of what they had suffered, and made a plea on their behalf for what political leaders in the West had visited on their own people and those in Iraq in their ruthless pursuit of profit and control of the world's natural resources for their own ends.

A Letter To The British People
from Professor Iman Al Saadun

I am sending this letter to the British people and in particular to the residents of London. For a period of hours, you have lived through moments of desperate anxiety and horror. In those hours you lost a member of your family or a friend, and we wish to tell you in total honesty that we too grieve when human lives pass away. I cannot tell you how much we hurt when we see desperation and pain on the face of another person. For we have lived through this situation, and continue to live through it every day since your country and the United States formed an alliance and laid plans to attack Iraq. The Prime Minister of your country, Tony Blair, said that those who carried out the explosions did so in the name of Islam. The Secretary of State of the United States, Condoleezza Rice, described the bombings as an act of barbarism. The United Nations Security Council met and unanimously condemned the event.

I would like to ask you, the free British people, to allow me to inquire: in whose name was our country blockaded for 12 years? In whose name were our cities bombed using internationally prohibited weapons? In whose name did the British Army kill Iraqis and torture them? Was that in your name? Or in the name of religion? Or humanity? Or freedom? Or democracy? What do you call the killing of more than 2,000,000 children? What do you call the pollution of the soil and the water with Depleted Uranium and other lethal substances?

What do you call what happened in the prisons in Iraq; in Abu Ghraib, Camp Bucca and the many other prison camps? What do you call the torture of men, women, and children? What do you call tying bombs to the bodies of prisoners and blowing them apart? What do you call the refinement of methods of torture for use on Iraqi prisoners, such as pulling off limbs, gouging out eyes, putting out cigarettes on their skin, and using cigarette lighters to set fire to the hair on their heads? Does the word "barbaric" adequately describe the behaviour of your troops in Iraq? May we ask why the Security Council did not condemn the massacre in al Amiriyah and what happened in al Fallujah, Tal'afar, Sadr City, and an Najaf? Why does the world watch as our people are killed and tortured and not condemn the crimes being committed against us? Are you human beings and we something less? Do you think that only you can feel pain and we can't? In fact it is we who are most aware of how intense is the pain of the mother who has lost her child, or the father who has lost his family. We know very well how painful it is to lose those you love.

You don't know our martyrs, but we know them. You don't remember them, but we remember them. You don't cry over them, but we cry over them. Have you heard the name of the little girl Hannan Salih Matrud? Or of the boy Ahmad Jabir Karirn? Or Sa'id Shabrarn? Yes, our dead have names too. They have faces and stories and memories. There was a time when they were among us, laughing and playing. They had dreams, just as you have. They had a tomorrow awaiting them. But today they sleep among us with no tomorrow on which to wake. We don't hate the British people or other peoples of the world. This war was imposed upon us, but we are now fighting it in defence of ourselves. Because we want to live in our homeland "the free land of Iraq" and to live as we want to live, not as your Government or the American Government wish. Let the families of those killed know that the responsibility for the Thursday morning London bombings lies with Tony Blair and his policies. Stop your war against our people! Stop the daily killing that your troops commit! End your occupation of our homeland!

REFERENCES

Note:. Prices are shown where available from Bloomfield Books, and represent only a selection relevant to the theme of this edition of On Target. A wide range of reading may be found in the Stock Price List (S.P.L.), which may be obtained post free on request from the address on the last page. Books temporarily out of stock are annotated *. Out of print, or older works, may be obtained through the Book Search Service, or the Second-Hand Book Service, both of which are operated by Mr. T.G. Turner, for which details are available as for the S.P.L.

(17) Emry, Sheldon. Billions for the Banker$ and Debts for the People - A Study. America's Promise Ministries, Idaho, U.S.A. New edition; £4.00.
(18) On Target, Vol. 34, Nos. 23 & 24, 14th & 18th May, 2005.
(19) Martin, Rose L. Fabian Freeway - High Road To Socialism In The U.S.A. 1884-1966. Western Islands, 1966.
(20) On Target, Vol. 30, Nos. 4 & 5, 12th & 26th August, 2000. Power - The Drive For The New World Order.
(21) Young, George K. Subversion and the British Riposte. Ossian Publishers Ltd., 1984. H/B; £12.00.
(22) On Target, Vol. 34, Nos. 23 & 24, Op. cit.
(23) On Target, Vol. 34, Nos. 5 & 6, 4th & 18th September, 2004. Control And Nature Of The Coming World Order.
(24) On Target, Vol. 34, Nos. 23 & 24, Op. cit.
(25) Ibid.
(26) Enquiries about the Freedom Association should be addressed to: T.F.A., P.O. Box 2820, Bridgnorth, Shropshire, WV16 6YR; tel/fax: (01746) 861267; E-mail: mail@tfa.net; Website: <www.tfa.net>
(27) On Target, Vol. 31, Nos. 3 & 4, 11th & 25th August, 2001. The Planned Break-Up Of The United Kingdom.
(28) On Target, Vol. 32, Nos.12 & 13, 14th & 28th December, 2002. Dangers Of The European Arrest Warrant.
(29) On Target, Vol. 33, Nos. 9 - 11, 1st, 15th & 29th November, 2003. Can The House Of Lords Save British Sovereignty?
(30) The Trend In International Affairs Since The War, read by Professor Arnold Toynbee of the Royal Institute of International Affairs to the Fourth Annual Conference of Institutions for the Scientific Study of International relations. Held at Copenhagen in June, 1931. Published in the Social Crediter, Vol. 60 No. 2, March-April, 1981. £2.00.
(31) Design for Europe. A Design for Freedom Publication, 1947.
(32) The Scorpion, Issue 24, Spring 2005. Enquiries should be addressed to The Scorpion, B.C.M. 5766, London, WC1N 3XX (U.K.), OR Postfach 850505, Koln 51030, Germany. Current subscription rates: Surface, all countries, £22/$28; North America, South Africa, airmail, £28/$36; Other places airmail, £32/$39.
(33) Carr, Edward Hallett. Conditions Of Peace. Macmillan and Co., Ltd., 1942.
(34) On Target, Vol. 22, Nos 1 & 2, 11th & 25th July, 1992. A Free Press In A Democratic Society.
(35) On Target, Vol. 22, Nos 3 & 4, 8th & 22nd August, 1992. Controlling Communications, or The Media And The Masses.
(36) On Target, Vol. 22, Nos. 14 & 15, 9th & 23rd January, 1993. "Diversion".

(37) On Target, Vol. 23, Nos. 16 & 17, 5th & 19th February, 1994. Media, Monopoly And Morality .
(38) Dye, Thomas R. Who's Running America? The Carter Years. Prentice Hall Inc., 1976, second edition, 1979.
(39) Chomsky, Noam. Chronicles of Dissent - Interviews with David Barsamian. A.K. Press, 1992. £12.25*.
(40) Abboud, Edward. Invisible Enemy - Israel, Politics, Media and American Culture. Vox Publishing Company L.L.C., 2001. £19.95.
(41) Goldberg, J.J. Jewish Power - Inside the American Jewish Establishment. Perseus Books, 1996.
(42) On Target, Vol. 34, Nos. 12 & 13, 11th & 25th December, 2004. Terrorists, "Terrorists" And Terrorism.
(43) Young, George K. Op. cit.
(44) Fischer, Louis. Oil Imperialism - The International Struggle For Petroleum. International Publishers, New York, 1926.
(45) Mohr, Anton. The Oil War. Martin Hopkinson & C. Ltd., 1926.
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