As surreal as they come

These are indeed surreal times. At this moment in time in world history when people find it increasingly difficult to distinguish between fake news and reality, the last thing you want to see happening is credibility automatically crumbling in front of on

When what is real and what is true are being viciously and outrageously painted grey, often even black, to suit one’s own personal and political agendas, then, there can be only one conclusion: Mankind is again sadly caught in a monumental predicament threatening its own existence.

The self-destruct button has not been pushed yet, but there is a mighty scramble going on for whoever will be the first to reach it. This world-wide human phenomenon is occurring at all levels – personal, local, regional, national, and continental, as well as in outer space The tragic signs are there for all to see, most of them the handiwork of elected and nonelected leaders, politicians, journalists, radio and television pundits (with CNN’s David Frum incredibly insisting that “the worst mistakes that press organizations have made in their coverages have precisely occurred in their overzealous effort to be fair”), churchmen and religious fanatics, military gurus and even glorified international organizations that are so hopelessly susceptible to misinformation and infiltration.

The Donald’s decision to shatter the status of Jerusalem by unilaterally recognising it as the Capital of the State of Israel, for example, is as serious as his stupid dismissal of global climate change. I have serious doubts over the European Union’s stance on the issue, regardless of its immediate reactions to the announced US embassy move from Tel Aviv to Jerusalem. While the two-state solution makes absolute sense, with Jerusalem as the shared Capital of both, surrendering to pure, unadulterated American pressure is a characteristic EU trait, alas. I really do not see Brussels, caught as it is in bitter self-analysis, sticking to its guns and will, eventually, find the usual refined way of toeing the US line about this.

Netanyahu’s brittle statement in Brussels last week had its predictable biblical over-dilation, as if we still live in the days when one believed whales swallowed and threw up good people to save them from drowning, coded tablets with digital instructions came down tumbling from mountain peaks, and seas theatrically opened up to let a whole people escape to freedom. Ask the Palestinians in Gaza. Ask the Kurds in Turkey and Iraq. Ask the Rohingya refugees fleeing from Myanmar. Wouldn’t they all love to have these phantasmagorical escape routes to freedom and nationhood?

Again in these surreal times, the last thing the world needed was two nutters playing nuclear musical chairs. But it is happening. In nuclear warfare, there really is neither David nor Goliath, to keep the biblical metaphor. The America First slogan and the North Korean clown’s gloriously daft pronouncements could have a completely different interpretation given the horrendous prospects of an Asian flare-up. They are both bound to end up on the scrapheap of history – and with them the rest of the world.

As John Pilger foresaw many years ago, mainstream politics has come to the end of the road. Way back in 1998, he wrote in probably his greatest work Hidden Agendas, that “in Britain, the United States, much of Europe, and Australia, the policies of the principal parties have converged into single-ideology states with rival factions, which are little more than brotherhoods of power and privilege”. Twenty years on, as we trudge the last fearful steps into 2018, the state of affairs is worse. We have just seen in the inter-party confusion at the European Parliament last Wednesday over the tax haven tag people who cannot stomach Malta’s economic success want to impose on us, the smallest EU nation.

... and on the local front

The same surreal situation