While wars rage and people are made to hate, too many are blind to the real enemy, says Neil Oliver

Far right … just so we’re clear … He would say that, wouldn’t he?

Irish justice minister Helen McEntee looked at the fires and said a “… thuggish and manipulative element must not be allowed to use an appalling tragedy to wreak havoc.”

A manipulative element … wreaking havoc … oh, the irony.

A violent act … an angry reaction … and the only actors authority wants to talk about … to condemn and to initiate action against … are those lighting fires … the only possible explanation for such a reaction to the stabbing of children … they must be lunatics of the far right.

Already legislation is rushed through the Irish parliament to enable more state surveillance of the populace … more state control of so-called hate speech.

Do you see the playbook yet? How or why could any sentient being miss it?

A person would have to wonder if there’s just one copy of the playbook … dog-eared after its ceaseless use by London’s Metropolitan police and perhaps reluctantly shared … or whether multiple copies circulate freely … with “far right” underlined on every page.

Children bleed and parents weep. Protestors take to the streets and politicians and legislators … and those they serve … which is not us … patiently reeling in the line … knowing the hook is swallowed deep … the barb fixed fast.

It's so very hard to resist … after all … the relentless push to hate and to fear.

For decades something deliberately disruptive has been forced on the people of the West … there’s no denying it.

Mass immigration. People from all over the world have been thrust together virtually overnight and without any sort of foreplay.

Before the turn of the century New Labour were apparently glorying in the thought of rubbing our noses in diversity.

It ought never to have happened this way. But it was made to happen this way and for a reason … by those fear-filled cowardly authoritarians desperate for the controls they think will save them from the rest of us.

What's been done in Europe, done to Europe, these years past has been less advisable than speed dating in the dark with drunk people. And so you get what we've got. Marry in haste … repent at leisure. Not even the most basic due diligence either … so that along with all the decent human beings has come some of all the trouble in the world.

And so … by these means have people been made to hate other people … people they don't know … while all their hate ought properly to be reserved and somehow focused on those they do know … those deserving of being on the receiving end of such destructive emotion … familiar faces all … cynically stoking the anti-human hatred in pursuit of their masters’ ends.

I have people I love. Among them Christians, Jews, Muslims and others besides. Or if you prefer Westerners, Israelis and Arabs. They're my friends. I won't hate on command. Everyone I love … hates the hate as well.

I won't hate on command and certainly not on behalf of those who line their pockets and secure their positions by stoking that hatred.

And so millions of people have deliberately been made afraid and angry.

While all that is going on … a former British PM … yet another from a grisly cast of characters … each at the head of his own column of countless dead civilians in countless countries …

… this time the Right Honourable Sir Tony Blair … renews his old calls for the introduction of digital IDs to solve the problems of all that immigration.

Tony Blair and his ilk want you frightened and filled with hate. Then you'll beg for the solution they offer … which is slavery for you and freedom for him.

Unflushable apparently … digital IDs and Tony Blair both.

Blair has done as much as any of the rest of the club of international ghouls to destabilise the Middle East and to sow the very unrest that sees tides of people rise and walk away from wherever they were born in search of anything else … anywhere else.

If your home … and everyone else’s home for miles around … had been bombed flat … what would you do? Where would you go?

All over the West frightened angry people … overwhelmed … by changes to their lives and communities they feel powerless to influence … are automatically abused by being labelled with names chosen to make them feel isolated … vulnerable … lunatics … far right.

All over the world frightened angry people are also overwhelmed by fast moving changes they feel powerless to influence.

One war after another ensures those already on edge … stay on edge … while simultaneously being told … ordered … what to think about what they see.

Millions of people … of every creed and colour … marched through cities all over the world demanding a cease fire in Gaza … and were abused in line with the same old playbook …

They are labelled as you’d expect … not pro peace, just anti this or anti that.

In truth people of every creed and colour all over the world are only MADE to feel powerless … denied any sense of their real power … by those who work tirelessly to make the mass of the population FEEL powerless … and therefore dependent at all times for their safety and well-being … on those above them in the food chain.

Out of sight of most, that thin sliver of powerful people displays a level of cynicism that is beyond the comprehension of decent people.

Nothing is off limits to ensure the objectives of those who would do away with nation states … and the freedom of populations … not even children … anyone and everyone’s children.

Children are exploited like tinder to keep the heat under unrest … to keep as many people as possible distracted by hatred and suspicion of each other … of their neighbours … rather than focusing fury where it belongs … on the ghouls that keep stirring the pot … stoking the fires.

And in among it all … what is the word on every authoritarian’s lips … why … democracy of course.

As soon as people, any people start realising and manifesting their power … in any way … those in charge prick up their ears.

Democracy in the West is like the toy steering wheel a parent fixes to the dashboard of a car to entertain a toddler … making it think it's steering the car … when of course it isn't.

Whenever people find a way to get their feet on the actual pedals … if only momentarily … their hands on the actual wheel … those in power act quickly to correct any possibility of a change of direction.

Look at recent moments when the people grabbed the wheel … the election of Donald Trump in 2016 … the vote for Brexit here in the UK the same year.

In 2019 people gave the Tories an 80-seat majority … the collapse of the red wall and all that jazz … but again it brought only swift retribution … just like the Trump presidency and Brexit brought swift retribution.

I have wondered at the coincidence of the pandemic and everything else since 2020 and wondered if it wasn’t all the punishment beating meted out to an upstart populace that dared to grab the wheel.

Democracy in the West has been made a fraud and a confidence trick … a cut-and-shut used car … a chocolate teapot … an ash tray on a motorbike … snake oil for the gullible.

For as long as the present incumbents hold sway … the face-men and women of the crime syndicates really running the show … then any notion of democracy … the so-called rule of the people … is what we call in Scotland a busted flush.

Too few people are angry with the right people … and by the right people I mean the wrong uns … that interconnected … interdependent lot that always crops up … spiders on webs.

The many of us are goaded and atomised … split by chaos into smaller and smaller mutually loathing and mutually suspicious factions … while the same few get richer … laughing at us behind our backs on the way to the bank.

They have an emergent and growing problem however … those few. The pesky people are grasping at the wheel again.

In the Netherlands the latest election has given prominence and significance to the PVV the Party for Freedom … led by Geert Wilders … routinely and loudly dismissed as far right and extremist. At the other end of the world … in Argentina … the president elect is Javier Milei … economist and author and another labelled right wing and populist.

Populists … of the people … how dare the people have what they want?

Supine journalists obediently squeak the populist word … what they really mean is lumpen scum … casting such politicians and their supporters into Hilary Clinton's basket of deplorables.

Implicit in that deliberate corruption of the meaning of populist … explicit if you're awake … is that we … the people … are the problem. The demos are the problem …

… which means that for the uniparties - the hybrid Democrat and Republican party in the US … the hybrid Conservative and Labour party in the UK … democracy itself … what remains of democracy … is the problem.

Trump is a Republican in name only … a loner given independence by his billions. Robert F Kennedy Jr is another … an outsider with an insider's surname.

And yet in the race for the White House … Trump and Kennedy are the frontrunners … apparently beyond the control of the swamp. Vivek Ramaswamy is apparently outside the tent too … or at least as far as anyone can tell.

Even if all of the above are really double agents … the very idea of outsiders is almost spice enough for jaded palates … in these decades of bland automatons handed power as if by right in return for allowing themselves to be compromised enough so they’ll hold out their hands for whatever they're given by those really in charge.

The intention is to drive us off the cliff. With that in mind … does anyone really think they’ll let the people into the driving seat? Surely what we face is more censorship … more shutting down … more fracturing of society … more atomisation?

When democracy itself is demonstrably the last obstacle in the path of the authoritarians … flimsy … hollowed out … shadow of a thing that it is …what is the future of elections? Even if they happen … courtesy of the uni-party bending the knee to unelected, unaccountable entities like the WHO and the WEF … how can the results even matter?

Here’s the thing: while wars rage and people are made to hate, too many are blind to the real enemy.