Ron, you are a complacent conventional liberal-minded person, with all the right liberal ideas and rhetoric, intelligent, articulate, well-educated, and with excellent ideals and intentions (I would assume). But you are living inside a once democratic society that has been quietly mutating into a fascist militaristic state for decades...one little step at a time. It happens quite gradually, so most people don't notice it while it's happening. They continue to believe that things are "normal", just as they did once in Germany.

You are in the same position as a conventional, liberal-minded German in the late 30's...not seeing what is going on around you for what it truly is. You're oblivious to it. Or you're in denial...but I think it's more like being just plain unaware of what is really afoot.

This is happening in both the UK and the USA. It's even worse in the UK which now has more surveillance cameras watching its ordinary public than any other nation in the world and more draconian laws. It is happening (to a considerably lesser extent) in Canada. It is happening also to a lesser extent in Australia. The English-speaking countries of the world are turning themselves slowly into an Imperial coalition that bears extremely close parallels to the Axis in WWII and with the same basic intentions: conquest and world domination by the Anglo nations.

It's being done through the mechanisms of aggressive capitalism and corporate marketing and corporate mass media, tied to military supremacy.

It's not a conspiracy, it's a policy, and it's one that is becoming dead obvious to people not hypnotized by their romantic notions of a past democracy that is becoming just a memory.

How can something be a conspiracy when it's plainly happening right out in the open??? ;-)

Much of the world is aware of what's afoot. Russia and China certainly are. The Arabs are. Most of the Third World knows it. But what can they do? The USA, whose imperial military is the point and shaft of the spear, has enough firepower to devastate any other power on Earth if it wants to. No one can risk what it would entail to openly confront this new Axis...so the world watches in increasing concern, waits, and prepares for the worst.

Putin has not been fooled. The Russians are doing what they can to restore at least their ability to defend themselves adequately enough to deter further attempts to gut their nation.

The Chinese have not been fooled, but I think they are confident of their own strength, because they have economic clout which the USA cannot afford to have turned against it. And the Chinese have a longterm view. They think ahead by a hundred years.

You're part of the great new burgeoning fascist order in the world, Ron. You just don't know it yet. They may even find you useful if things move really fast. Pray that they don't move that fast. If they move slowly enough, you and I will have passed on before things reach a point of absolute crisis in our societies, and we will be lucky enough to be spared something similiar to what millions of essentially good and decent Germans, Japanese, and Italians went through after 1939. (I mean the ordinary citizenry. They didn't believe it could happen there either, but it did.)

Our Anglo governments, Ron, are the fascists of the world today and they are on the march. Their token "Jews and Communists" to be slaughtered for the imperial program are, right now, the Islamic people. After that, whoever else can be found and scapegoated will do. Excuses have been already found for entirely illegal wars of choice, wars that were not a legitimate response to any real threat or attack from abroad by any sovereign nation. Excuses will be found for further such wars...as in Iran or Syria. At some point the house of cards will fall down, just as it did for Hitler, Tojo, and Mussolini. The shit, as they say, will hit the fan.

The world as a whole simply cannot suffer indefinitely the kind of criminal liars and thieves who are presently dictating your national policy and that of the UK and launching these criminal wars. They will fall in the end.

Remember what I said. It's not a conspiracy, it's a policy. To be a conspiracy, it would have to be hidden, and it is not being hidden at all. It's happening right there in front of the eyes of the world, for anyone to see who has his own eyes reasonably open and who is not blinded by past assumptions about his own culture.