The Power Of Nightmares

This week, BBC 2 television broadcasts the first of three programmes devoted to showing us how our leaders have abandoned dreams, and seek instead to terrify with nightmares. The scenarios of doom and gloom, are false of course, just like the claim Iraq could deploy its mass destruction weapons in three quarters of an hour. Fear though, is the way to drag us meekly into line, a mechanism furthering an illiberal genda. They have spun mythologies that spread unquestioned, we must forego our freedoms, tolerate imprisonment without trial, accept ever closer surveillance, even the use of torture, because we are about to be wiped out. Don't question these things - secret intelligence exists that only some can see.

The claim that society faces an organised terrorist menace equipped with the deadliest of weapons, nuclear, biological and chemical, just doesn't stand up. We may believe that ricin was found in London, but it wasn't - not one drop. Never mind - the scenes of men in yellow suits, persist in memory and they've been repeated across the land as firemen at the government's behest, practice in space suits for Armageddon. Across the sea, American fundamentalists rub their hands, confidently preparing for the end of the world. Their bedtime reading is, Left Behind, a Christian end times story, also now available on video.

Strangely, the rest of us have missed the fact that neither 9/11, nor any subsequent attack has used these dark new weapons - that outrages in Madrid used dynamite, the Bali bomb, fertiliser and diesel fuel, and Saddam Hussein had no terror weapons after all. Our view of the future, is in the hands of Neoconservative scriptwriters, and they're busily at work on a horror movie. Look out for their next installment - be sure it's on its way.