I got up on the morning of the 10th of August, it was pretty normal, well as normal as things are at the moment, I got Xan up and went downstairs. He had cereal for breakfast, and I put BBC Breakfast on. I was expecting to see something about the fact Israel had launched a ground invasion of Lebanon. No, there had been a terror alert. Hand luggage was not being allowed on flights. It was the only story on the news.

After a very little while of going to reporters all over the place, who besides a few standard bits of information, nothing much, but they could make it sound exciting, I said ‘why today’. I remembered the time the tanks went into Heathrow, the way that every so often the state of alert turns from ‘panic’ to ‘blind panic’. You can’t forget thinks like using Brazilians for target practice or justify sealing off a street and mobilising hundreds of officers to break in and shoot someone and to leave with some totally unrelated charges. Or indeed invading a country to get rid of WMD. How did that little project go again? Two million on the streets that day Tony, you should have listened!

With Blair, there was just always something about him that said you can’t trust this man. I told him to his face before it became fashionable. If you have BBC 3, they have ‘MPs Outakes’ on a Continual Loop very couple of months or, so keep a look out. But look, there he had the brass balls to say in the manifesto “We will not introduce top-up fees and have legislated to prevent them” and then go ahead and do it. You just get lied to that many time that you expect it.

So I went upstairs, got on ednet and wrote this;

Absolute Bollocks. YOU ARE BEING CONNED

I cannot believe it this is a complete farce.

Remember when the tanks went into Heathrow a few years ago? There was nothing whatsoever happened, but it did provide a welcome news distraction.

This morning I have been watching BBC breakfast for spout an hour on and off, baby permitting. There has been no other story, but most importantly, Bill Turnbull, and I trust our Bill, just told me;

"AUTHORITIES SAY THERE WAS NO SPECIFIC INFORMATION ABOUT ANYTHING HAPPENING TODAY"

So why pick today? What else has happened recently? Oh did Israel LAUNCH A GROUND INVASION last night? Oh yes so it did. Is there the first mention of that on the news? No all we are getting is a constant stream -and it is constant- of "The terrorists are evil, they are out there, they are here. Don't you think we should do something about it? Countries should do something about these evil terrorists. Like kill all the civilians in a 100 mile radius"

Wake up! Ask yourself, why if

"AUTHORITIES SAY THERE WAS NO SPECIFIC INFORMATION ABOUT ANYTHING HAPPENING TODAY"

Did the authorities chose to do this TODAY, the day after the ground assault was launched?

Now that may have been going a bit far, and I have been told I look very silly, but quite frankly I don’t agree, because this whole situation seems to be based on paranoia, deception and escalation. And I’ve seen it too many times now not to be sceptical. And maybe, just maybe we weren’t being lied to that day, on that subject, but that would be an exception. Whilst there may be a threat out there, we have to understand why and the why is simple, because we believe that war will be the answer to our problems. Many say that religion has a lot to do with what is going on, with talk of Crusades and Martyrs, it’s hard not to make that connection. The other one of course is the inclusion of the ‘Promised Land’ in the equation, the problem being that God seemed to promise it to all of us. Was it that God being a git, or maybe the message was we should just learn to share like good little children? God is probably just leant forward on a chair, thinking ”I really did think they’d figure it out one day.”.

Anyway the best religious type stuff that I think sums up what is happening are “Violence begats violence” and “As ye sow, so shall ye reap.”, and that is why people are willing to get onto tube trains and blow themselves up. It is a message, and that message is “This is the consequence of your Governments actions”.

And what we are seeing is escalation. To put it in George Bush terms, it’s a bit like Tom holding up a hammer to hit Jerry with, and then they each take it in turn to pull out a bigger weapon, before one of them has something big enough to destroy the entire planet. Which they inevitably do.

Because war is just another word for ‘Pointless Deaths’. How many innocents have to die before we understand it is not the way? Tony, I could tell you a bit about the value of listening to your wife, sadly it’s too late for me, but if you remember, Cherie said she could understand why people become suicide bombers. And you’ve got to see. The west is in a mentality that it has to do everything by force, and that must have it’s consequences, and how desperate must someone be to do that sort of thing?

My parents both lived through the war were on the edge of the bombing and of course knew some of those who never came back. When I bought my first house, there was a big dent in the wall opposite where a bomb had landed in the street right outside my front door. Everywhere around, like gaping teeth there were holes in the terraces were there had been a house until November 1940, and then one day it was gone.

Because that’s what war does, it randomly kills the innocent, and now it is more mechanized, more dispassionate, easier to kill and not have to look at the person you are killing than it has ever been.

One of the things I always liked about NUS was that its founders set it up to help fight for peace. People moan about being interested in international issues, but they are at the core of the foundation of the organisation. And the thing was that back then, Europe had just had its first mechanized war and it was impossible to imagine the scale of the death that it brought. And now the weapons have advanced so so much.

We just have to stop this before it goes too far. And it’s about time someone round here started to realize that a global economy based on oil is a dead duck, and if you are seen by so many as empire building, what is to stop other powers getting the same idea? This planet currently has a limited shelf life, what we are doing is going to make it worse. If we don’t tackle that issue, we might not make it through. That’s another reason all this shit has to stop.

And of course this is a massive issue for students too. We have seen what the Glees report said, and we know he is punting round the Home Office. We have seen the farcical conviction of the George Fox Six and the expulsion of the Matthew Boulton Two. The system is being tested, prodded. There will be a crackdown this year on campus. And we’ve seen how well some of these crackdowns have gone so far. Universities are going to be targeted this year. Maybe slowly prodded at first, but you are going to see it. And I’ve seen it too. I still can’t believe the way the machine gun armed (I’m sorry that picture never made it on line) searched that old asian geezer at Nuneaton station about a year ago. We have to be ready for seeing if this is happening, but in fairness we know all is not in order with in the house and have to make sure that we take a proactive role in making sure involvement in extremism is an issue on campus. That is our duty too.

They say that with the boy who cried wolf, eventually there was a wolf. But the wolf only took the agitator in the story, and then went away.

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