A MANUFACTURED CATASTROPHE


Caligula: Tell me my young friend. What exactly is a tyrant?

Skipio: A blind fool.

Caligula: That’s a moot point. I should say the real tyrant is a man who sacrifices a whole nation to his ideal or his ambition.

Albert Camus Caligula



We may be witnessing something wholly new in modern history, a manufactured catastrophe. The outbreak of World War One and Two were the consequences of miscalculations, stupidity, a failure of imagination and in the case of the latter, cowardice and fear. The Wiemar hyperinflation and Wall Street crash were man made catastrophes but hardly deliberate, hardly intentional. From Suez to the Falklands, from devaluation to the 2008 financial crisis, these might have been avoidable, they might have involved greed, arrogance and mendacity, but unlike Brexit they were not manufactured.
Brexit was born in the lab, deliberately created by middle aged white men, a monster designed to manipulate the public and produce a result that would both enrich them and meet their ideological needs. It would also impoverish the country, destroy motor manufacturing and diminish British presence on the world stage, collateral damage.
So with less than a week to go to the election if the polls are to be believed we are headed for the penultimate act in a wholly manufactured tragedy, - the ultimate act of course being leaving the EU on bad terms or, as I suspect wired into the circuit of the lab model, on no terms at all, a disastrous so called ‘no-deal Brexit.’
From the point of view of Farage, Richard Tice, Arron Banks the people will have played their role flawlessly. We are all merely lab mice in an experiment to test the power of manipulative 21st Century social networking, of Facebook, Twitter, and other outlets, with the cowed complicity of 24-hour news and an abject press.
Of course, the polls could be wrong, the worm may have finally turned, a miracle may happen. But in the words of Colin Blunstone, I don’t believe in miracles. Here’s hoping I am proved wrong.

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