New Labour loved theme tunes and The End by the Doors was an appropriate one for for them to go out on at the election. They should have taken responsibility for their actions and hopefully the Lib-Con coalition will be an improvement? Politicians are best kept in a competitive state of equilibrium where no one has too much power for too long. Blair’s landslide victory gave him a “Messiah Complex” and it took someone similarly corrupted by power like President Mugabe, who said in Durban in 1999 that the former Conservative government was better. “We told them the Conservatives were better, more mature. They are moving Britain away from the path where Britain was the pacemaker and also from a Britain that has a heart.”

Again Robert Mugabe on 4th March 2010 offered David Cameron his endorsement and is he mad and bad enough to know that a change would be good even if it is someone else’s. “We have always related better with the British through the Conservatives than Labour,” Zimbabwe’s president said  “Conservatives are bold, [Tony] Blair and [Gordon] Brown run away when they see me, but not these fools, they know how to relate to others.” Speaking in Zimbabwe after hearing of Brown’s comments to Zuma, Mugabe said: “We have a better chance with David Cameron than with Brown.”Margaret Thatcher’s government presided over independence for then Rhodesia in 1980. It is not the first time Mugabe has used harsh language, saying in 1999 that Blair was a “little man” for refusing to honour commitments made by Conservative governments to help fund Zimbabwe’s land reforms. Perversely he may be right, hopefully lives can be be saved if so…

Watching the fan spin after coming round from yoga the day before the election date was announced reminded me of the sounds of the blades and fan from Apocalypse Now as Captain Benjamin L. Willard (Martin Sheen) wakes up.

“Of our elaborate plans, the end, Of everything that stands, the end, No safety or surprise, the end, I’ll never look into your eyes…again, Can you picture what will be, So limitless and free, Desperately in need…of some…stranger’s hand, In a…desperate land, Lost in a Roman…wilderness of pain.”

I did tai chi  and meditated later that day, more peacefully than Willard’s next sequence where he punches out the mirror and contemplated the Three Days of the Condoresque world that we live in.

Last orders for the “Gay Hussars” Gordon Brown, Alastair Campbell, Cherie and Tony “Perma Tan” Blair

“Political language is designed to make lies sound truthful and murder respectable, and to give an appearance of solidity to pure wind.” George Orwell One of my favourite tracks and movie sequences from the Apocalypse Now Intro, entirely appropriate to the economic and ideological chaos and wounds created in the spirit of the  “Adam Curtis – Richard Nixon Fear paradigm” that New Labour bequeaved us that will take a generation to correct. Through Blair’s manipulation of the power of nightmares he said he believed the Iraq invasion was authorised by Resolution 1441. But all he did was unlawfully legitamise the type of actions contained within the Collateral Murder – Wikileaks – Iraq footage, the jury may still be out but justice is yet to be served on this open ended crime against humanity. I am apolitical but in the spirit of Lord Acton it is time for constructive change away from paranoid control, “Power tends to corrupt and absolute power corrupts absolutely.”

From Adam Curtis’s The Power of Nightmares series, “In the past, politicians promised to create a better world. They had different ways of achieving this. But their power and authority came from the optimistic visions they offered to their people. Those dreams failed, and people lost faith in political ideologies. After the end of the Cold War, politicians had come to be seen simply as managers of public life. But now, they have discovered a new role that restores their power and authority over us. Instead of delivering dreams, politicians now promise to protect us from nightmares. They say that they will rescue us from dreadful dangers that we cannot see and do not understand. The new boogeyman, they tell us, is international terrorism–a powerful and sinister network, with sleeper cells in countries across the world–a threat that needs to be fought by a global war on terror.

But much of this threat is a fantasy, which has been deliberately exaggerated and distorted by politicians and a direlect media to their own selfish advantage. It’s a dark illusion that has spread unquestioned throughout the Western world.

Adam Curtis’s series of films explains how and why that fantasy was created, and who it benefits. At the heart of the story are two groups: the American neo-conservatives, and the militant Islamists. Both groups are idealists who share a common belief that liberal democracy failed to build a better world. And both groups share a similar explanation for what caused that failure.

These two groups have changed the world, but not in the way that either intended. Western politicians have created today’s nightmare vision of a secret, organized evil that they claim threatens the world–a fantasy they have used to restore their power and authority over an emergency-managed and willfuly-gullible public in a disillusioned age.

In a society that believes in nothing, fear becomes the only agenda. While the 20th century was dominated between a conflict between a free-market Right and a socialist Left, even though both of those outlooks had their limitations and their problems, at least they believed in something, whereas what we are seeing now is a society that believes in nothing. And a society that believes in nothing is particularly frightened by people who believe in anything, and, therefore, we label those people as fundamentalists or fanatics, and they have much greater purchase in terms of the fear that they instill in society than they truly deserve. But that’s a measure of how much we have become isolated and atomised rather than of their inherent strength.

But the fear will not last, and just as the dreams that politicians once promised turned out to be illusions, so, too, will the nightmares, and then our politicians will have to face the fact that they have no visions, either good or bad, to offer us any longer.

“The greatest evil is not now done in those sordid “dens of crime” that Dickens loved to paint. It is not done even in concentration camps and labour camps. In those we see its final result. But it is conceived and ordered (moved, seconded, carried, and minuted) in clean, carpeted, warmed, and well-lighted offices, by quiet men with white collars and cut fingernails and smooth-shaven cheeks who do not need to raise their voice. Hence, naturally enough, my symbol for Hell is something like the bureaucracy of a police state or the offices of a thoroughly nasty business concern.” – C.S. Lewis, Screwtape Letters, preface