The awareness that the government of the country I live in, is complicit in acts of torture, is a deeply disturbing one for me. I hesitate to call them 'my' government, because they do not represent anything that I believe in. They are liars above all else, and they have been proven many times over to be so.

They are exposed by their deeds, and caught in their own falsehoods. The fact that they make denials for the lies they tell, only compounds and confirms the deceit and disinformation, upon which they thrive. So blatant is it, and  the evidence of it everywhere, that none but a fool could fail to see it. So it is then that they have conspired, to take us for nothing but fools.
 
We prize our "great democracy" little aware, that we have never lived in a democratic society. The vote itself is only a recent invention, and most of our ancestors were slaves. Elections everywhere, have been demonstrably shown to be manipulated, fraudulent sets of statistics. A meaningless race, between two competing brands of the same parent company. Or worse, the harsh face of brutal repression, vote rigging, ballot fixing, black propaganda, and Psy-Ops.

I do not feel that the mass of people surrounding me have any real awareness of what is occurring. They do not perceive the relentless and gradual slide into tyranny. Bent double by the weight of propaganda directed against them, and cowed into submission by fear, they perceive only their next faltering footsteps. They do not chance to look ahead, at the path being taken, and seem only dimly to perceive the darkness shrouding the world they live in.

Make no mistake, we are in the vale of shadow now. The world that is opening up before us is not the world that many have fought and died to protect. In place of true tolerance, we place the darkness of suspicion, implied guilt, and mute acceptance of injustice. Rather than look clearly at the true appearance of the tyrant in our midst, we have fractured into a million atomized individuals. Plugged into the matrix, and under the rigid electronic eye of surveillance.