It’s been a good while since I wrote something on here. As with most people, the distractions of everyday work and life have made demands on my time, and although I am still pursing my creative endeavours, I am having to balance them against other responsibilities.

I didn’t comment throughout the farcical general election, and the resulting bad punchline that is and remains the Conservative government. I’ve kept quiet even when I’ve seen the shoots of hope in an alternative vision through the emergence of Jeremy Corbyn, opting instead to watch cautiously from the sidelines, unable to believe that people like me may finally have a real voice in the world.

When the Paris attacks happened, I found myself searching for my response, both emotionally and outwardly. I knew it was a bad thing, and very, very sad, but adding my voice to the clamour of sympathy didn’t seem necessary. Some things go without saying.

What has finally made me feel like I need to ‘go on record’, for the sake of my own conscience rather than any expectance that my opinion is of any consequence, is this inevitable descent into war and the diversionary tactics of the elite to invert the argument against those of us who think there could be a better way.

You could be forgiven for thinking that the recent attacks and ensuing political posturing had been orchestrated solely to give the British media and political elite the excuse to further attack Jeremy Corbyn, who really stands less as an individual and more as a symbol for anyone who doesn’t buy in to the accepted narrative of vengeance and war.

In a bafflingly obvious rhetorical onslaught from the combined media machine, those who are anti-war are in some way anti-peace, or security, which have become somehow synonymous, as if security in itself is more important than liberty and humanity. Those of us who remember the last twenty plus years of woefully misjudged ‘interventions’ in the Middle East that have both added to and caused a lot of the ongoing violence and problems of today, are somehow apologists, rather than realists who have simply observed what is so and come to a sound conclusion.

What’s worse, if one is to dare mention our involvement in the causes of the atrocities that are taking place daily in this world, and the hypocrisy of the leaders who support the allies of our supposed enemies, and make allies of our supposed enemies to fight the enemies that were once allies, and so on, you are branded almost traitorous, unpatriotic or deluded.

Yet the evidence has not been hidden. There is no conspiracy. Even those people (bless them) who trust every syllable uttered by the BBC for example, can’t fail to recognise that in this case, the last time David Cameron tried to intervene in Syria, it was to fight Assad, and that this time it is to fight the enemies of Assad, who in themselves, have emerged from the ruins of other conflicts where rebel armies were armed and trained by ourselves and others.

For every inflated claim about rebellion in the Labour party that dominates the news headlines at this time, where are the reports into the questions Jeremy Corbyn and others have raised which are of so much more importance to this terrible situation? Such as:

Who is funding the ‘enemy’? Who is buying the oil that they apparently make million of dollars from a day? Who is selling them arms? Why will our bombs make any more difference that the bombs that have already been dropped over the past few years by others? Are ours ‘special’ in some way? Or do we just not want to be left out of the inevitable carving up of the spoils when the dust has settled and the indiscriminate thousands lay dead? What happens next? How long will this last? What do we do when we have killed the enemy of our enemy and they rise stronger for it? Were they really our enemies after all? Do we invade? Have we invaded already? Did we ever stop invading from the last time, or the time before that, or the time before that? Will we be safer when we further destabilise and decimate yet another part of the world? Does anyone really want this? Will we be asked? Can we vote on it? Can we hell.

I could write pages of these questions, yes still, one tabloid can print the word ‘Cowards’ and have millions of people agreeing with them because it’s easier not  to think about these things than it is to confront the complex and unsettling truth.

The only hope I hold is that despite the media’s efforts, the majority of us are just not as stupid as they have come to believe we are. I don’t think they are trying to sway public opinion, I think they create the illusion of it in order to justify whatever the hell they like and make us all feel that we are in the minority, because if the papers are saying it, or the nice man on the BBC, it ‘must be true’. They make it our problem, as an individual, make us worried to say what we think for fear of being branded the outsider to popular opinion. Just look at what they are doing to Jeremy Corbyn and his supporters. They, apparently, are the dangerous ones, yet the ones with the stick, poking at the wasp’s nest, want to make us safer?

The inevitable comeback to this thinking is ‘what would you do instead’? And if you have read this, and are asking that question, then go back and read this again, and think about that small handful of pertinent questions I listed a few paragraphs ago. Just think damn it, and don’t let them do it for you. And if you do find yourself questioning anything, ask yourself why any sane person wouldn’t want to know the answer before committing to something as horrendous as war without knowing they have exhausted or even considered the alternatives beforehand. Write to your MP, sign a petition, attend a rally, educate an ignorant associate, don’t buy the papers, write a blog, just do something to send the signal: No War.