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You leaders that proclaim governance and civility. The pinnacles of our developed society. The culmination of thousands of years of progress and evolutionary thought. You wizards that sit in your ivory towers and protest that you are best seated to decide what is wrong and what is right for us, the subjects. Your heads entrenched in an inebriating layer of clouds, gazing down upon the world and all of its history through a fluff-tinted mist you herald as democracy, yet sneer at and rebuke when it fails to bend over and drop its trousers for your own salubriousness.

Many are the voices we hear, including yours, against the maelstrom background of a hundred other arguments and points of view, each suffering their own frail balance of validity and proud insurgence. What gives you the right to trumpet your own affairs above those upon whom your power depends on? Why do you stick to your beliefs and act upon your own ideals when, ultimately, all that you are is the admitted pawn of the people, the marionette of the populace that seems to have believed it could live without its strings.

Reason has failed on two sides. Democracy, the closest our nations have to some semblance of order and balanced wit, has become undermined, stolen and manipulated as the guise for the phantom of self-interest and economic value. A steam-and-piston-driven machine built upon theories of "majorities" and "inclusion", now twisted by fire and greed and secrets into a word to be wielded in the name of slavery. It is a game in which the hierarchy decides who gets to say what, and who gets to listen. And when the hierarchy becomes fenced, the system breaks down. The sundry proletariat are now no longer listened to by those they shout at, their means of communication severed by the gates and the walls that their elected reside behind.

Assessment is the second to fall to the marches of the idealistic. A nation that turns to belief and romanticism as a guiding hand endangers all of the pragmatism that has developed and existed within it, all of the analyses that enable it to realise itself more and more with every passing thought. And yet, now we see the ironic clarity of short-sightedness prevalent amongst those in the foremost position to learn such lessons. We see the ignorance of the past alongside the cyclopean blinkedness of the future, the desperate willing to disregard evidence and consequential thought, in favour of dogged pride and militaristic might to prove that action in the present is infinitely less futile than in the past. We see the headlong rush into mistakes that can only be measured in decades or more. On the eve of a war, where are the discussions for ongoing humanitarian support? Where are the assurances of improvement in what we are embarking upon over centuries previous? Where are the arguments to assuage the fears of the streets and the opposition? Fears that remain neither acknowledged nor denied by those that wage their moralism under pretence of freedom of speech. Fears that are just as valid as those put forth by our "superiors".

_ "Whenever morality is based on theology, whenever right is made dependent on divine authority, the most immoral, unjust, infamous things can be justified and established."

-- Ludwig Feuerbach, The Essence of Christianity

_

History is not just something to be learnt as a subject, rammed into students' minds as they sit at their desks, like an educational corn mixture intent on producing an academically-brilliant, yet socially tolerable foie gras. History is the testament to decision, a journal to cause and effect. By unraveling its multitude of threads, we can gain the profound insight into our own actions that all of us usually only dream of. By ignoring its tales of sooth and caution, we resign ourselves to become a constant droning record of cyclic failure, an indefinite loop of self-destroying, drunken actions.

War isn't some pamphlet to be handed round and used as propaganda before being thrown in vast quantities into waste piles. It's not an idle threat to be wielded in place of discourse when its keepers grow idle or impatient with sense and logic. War is big, with planetary-like influences on the forces and events that surround it, and the fact that we have now become very much detached from this reality contributes little to the importance that must be placed upon it, and its outcomes. War is not to be taken lightly, nor undertaken without serious consideration for all that it stands for and all that it means. Thankfully, some of the world has realised this, and this is the hope that the rest of us cling to, even if we are blind to its complexities.

So fuck you Bush. Fuck you Blair. Fuck you Aznar. You may or may not have decent reasons for doing what you're doing. But you've had your chance to prove them, and you blew it. You've had your chance to listen to people, and you blew it. You had your chance to think this all through with a grain of sense, and you've not shown me any evidence of anything like that. Instead, you keep going, intent on proving your own worth. Fuck the reasons for and against this war. You've taken everything that you stand for, everything that gives us a leg to stand on, a dream to believe in that stops us from killing ourselves one by one, and fashioned it into an individual arrogance that sickens and destroys. Fuck your war.

_17th March, 2003