"Cognitive dissonance is a psychological phenomenon which refers to the discomfort felt at a discrepancy between what you already know or believe, and new information or interpretation. It therefore occurs when there is a need to accommodate new ideas, and it may be necessary for it to develop so that we become 'open' to them."

Five years since the stealing of the 2000 US presidential election and nearly two years since a repeated computerized electoral theft in 2004, the vast majority of the US electorate have not yet woken up to the reality that their country has been hijacked by a small cabal of militarists who make Dr Strangelove look a cuddly moderate.

Certainly, the overall responsibility for the concealment of this frightening state-of-affairs must be laid at the door of the international mainstream media (MSM) which since the end of the ideological Cold War of the 'eighties found itself lacking a serious contender for replacing the old Soviet Union as the scapegoat for all the evils of western capitalism. The 'Red Menace' was a convenient bogeyman for western governments and provided a rationale for the otherwise unjustifiable spending of colossal amounts of public monies on a parasitical Military-Industrial complex.

Once the 'Red Menace' disappeared over the horizon it had to be replaced with another propaganda big lie: 'Terrorism' which quickly morphed into 'the Threat from Islamic Terrorism' and which, thanks to utterly cynical political con-men such as Bush, Cheney, Rumsfeld, Blair and Howard, has now become 'the threat from Islam' in a so called 'clash of civilizations.'

Journalists, too, can be war criminals and many of them, in the US, UK and elsewhere became de facto war criminals by supporting an illegal war against Irak. Having once decided to take that course it was natural that journalists should embrace the 'war of civilizations' as a rationale for what would otherwise only be described as psychopathic behaviour.

The behaviour of both politicians and journalists are essentially tribal. And when tribes go to war their leaders need to embellish their belligerence with rationales and big lies in order to mentally bamboozle and bully everyone into going along with them. Hence the use of emotionally coercive words like 'threat' and 'clash' where, in reality, both the threat and the clash are nothing more than of an artificially manufactured nature. Manufactured to manipulate the lumpen public into doing whatever their 'leaders' might wish. Manufacture which leads to the artificial creation of a consensus reality which has no basis of truth outside its own bubble.

In a rapidly-changing world of increasing competition for a finite amount of natural 'resources' we find ourselves in a time of Resource Wars with Oil being presently at the very top of the list. Now, there are very few folk around who are dumb enough to believe that the invasion of Irak and the impending attack on Iran are nothing more than a continuation of the current Resource Wars, wars being re-packaged and sold us as a 'Perpetual War against Terrorism'. So how is it that so many of them appear to have bought the WMD story, in the case of Irak, and the 'Nuclear Threat' story in the case of Iran?

Far from being a nuclear threat, Iran is today in danger of nuclear extinction from the very regimes that project their own belligerence on this non-nuclear country. The US and Israeli regimes, so far, have taken the leading part in threatening Iran. And, as usual, Washington's quisling, Tony Blair and his cohort Jack Straw, have done so much of the diplomatic machinations required to get others to toe the line in order to use the United Nations as a pretence for what is a fait accompli.

That fait accompli was decided upon by a semi-secret cabal of warmongers described as 'neo-conservatives' when they prepared their blueprint for total world domination, the Project for a New American Century. The neocon's mentor and guru, Leo Strauss, based his machiavellian ideology on the belief that humans are basically evil and need to be governed. In order to govern effectively one has to create an enemy and then focus public attention on that enemy. Through doing so a state of perpetual war can be justified and this, in turn, would ensure that the public remain manipulable and under total control.

When the neocons' puppet, George Bush, Jr describes Americans as "a warlike nation" what he is really saying is that his country has been taken over in a coup d'etat by a cabal of warmongers. Warmongers who despise everything that the US Constitution and Bill of Rights stands for and who have every intention of turning the USA into a totalitarian state. And in five years they have already done most of the work necessary to dismantle the constitutional structures of checks and balances which were deliberately created by the founding fathers of the USA precisely in order to protect it from becoming a dictatorship.

All this has been performed in a lightning blitzkrieg which has left the public stunned into shock and awe, unable to believe that good old Uncle Sam could have so rapidly become a serial-killer gangster out to control and destroy everyone and everything he cannot control. How to reconcile this terrible nightmare with all the assuring fantasies of the American Dream so effectively sold to its own public and the rest of the world over so many decades? Surely we went to Irak to topple an evil dictator. And we might have to use force to stop the Mad Mullahs from developing an evil Islamic bomb.

Cognitive dissonance: "a psychological phenomenon which refers to the discomfort felt at a discrepancy between what you already know or believe, and new information or interpretation."

Is mass cognitive dissonance leading to the creation of a prison planet ruled by barbarians the kind of which this world has never known before? The mass trance under which so many have been put will not only lead to the creation of a perpetual war culture but to a way of life devoid of humane feelings towards all the other countless human beings who will be cruelly and inevitably sacrificed in order that we might survive.

This is the reality to which we must all wake up and 'smell the coffee' now. For if we do not it is only just a very short time before we, too, become the new nazis' blood-sacrifice.