Does Anybody Out There Even Care?

Lately there hardly seems to be any reason for writing this Blog. You read the news and every day it is full of atrocities... Why should you read about it here, when you can just click through Google News or your local paper and see 1,000 reasons to get rid of Bush every day.

At the end of the year 2000, I wondered if the 20th Century would be remembered as a century of wars. I dared to hope that the 21st Century would be more enlightened and that wars would become a thing of the past. Sadly, no sane, intelligent and well-informed person on the planet could truly believe that the world today is heading in that direction.

Instead, we are assaulted by madness on all sides, often from the very people we elected to bring us peace and prosperity. George W. Bush campaigned on the promise that he would be "a uniter, not a divider". Tony Blair promised "ethical government". John Howard's campaign motto was "relaxed and comfortable". How united, how ethical, how relaxed and comfortable are we now, boys?

Many people are now so uncomfortable that they do not want to read the news any more. Or if they do, they do not want to face the uncomfortable conclusions that the stories present: that the USA, Britain and Australia were mislead into war, that our leaders lied to us and continue to lie to us, that multinational corporate interests now dictate international policy and that government accountability has been reduced to "spin".

International alliances and treaties that have provided stability for the past 50 years are broken. The fanatical vision of religious wars between Muslims, Jews and Christians - the number one rallying call of Islamic extremists and terrorists - is now being echoed by US politicians, US army generals and US puppets.

Is this the world we want to live in?