first published in weblog one hundred and twenty on Sunday 30th April 2006

The power of the military-industrial complex began to wane after the fall of the Berlin Wall and the rise of the politico-legal-media complex (PLM). I had occasion to discuss this in an exchange of e-mails with Tom Greco earlier this week about my intention to go public with my misgivings about the Global Warming bandwagon. The exchange went like this.

Tom Greco had written in response to my e-mail on Global Warming that it seemed to him there were far better uses for 'my considerable talents' (Hmm!). ‘Why not focus on what we can do something about rather than idle debates about matters that may or may not eventuate? Time will tell about that.’ I begun my reply by writing that I though we might be at cross-purposes on this. This is how I continued.

I have absolutely no intention of getting involved in the Global Warming Issue and will not be taking sides as an activist for or against... if this is what you fear. But I have some deep generic concerns about where this whole Global Warming issue has come from and it is these that I will be highlighting once a week in my Sunday weblogs over the next few weeks...in the second volume of my three volumes in 2006. Let me try to give some sort of overarching paradigm for this.

The military-industrial complex is not the primary driver of society. It all changed when the Berlin Wall came down. For the past two decades we have been under the control of an entirely new complex...the politico-legal-media complex (PLM)...which is far more powerful and far more pervasive and is dedicated to promoting fear under the guise of promoting security.

Western nations are actually really safe and secure by any objective standards yet people are being made to feel insecure by the PLM. And the PLM is powerful and stable precisely because it unites so many institutions of society. Politicians need fears to control the population; lawyers need dangers to litigate and make money; the media need scare stories to capture an audience and so on. These three estates are where power is being exercised...the tail that is wagging the dog...and the place where much funding is going...to such an extent that they can go about their business even if the scare is totally groundless.

And then there's academia. Global Warming facts are coming out of the ivory towers’ computer models…and there is no longer any disinterested Public Science Forum to verify the data and adjudicate between rival scientific claims. The universities have invented a new role for themselves as the factories of fear. They invent all the new terrors and all the new social anxieties; all the new restrictive codes; the words you can't say; the thoughts you can't think. They produce a steady stream of new anxieties, dangers and social terrors to be used by politicians, lawyers and reporters. Foods that are bad for you; behaviours that are unacceptable. Can't smoke, can't swear, can't think etc. Dr Aidan Rankin was getting close in his focus on political correctness...but this is just one part of a much larger complex.

In the course of pulling together my Global Warming research to write my Sunday weblogs...I will be trying to clarify why I believe the issues behind the emergence of Global Warming are very pertinent to concerns such as reclaiming the commons, evolving strategies for our peace parties to outwit their War Party etc. I see it as a brief but necessary diversion to make sure radical politics does not get spun off into the weeds and lose sight of the ball.

Once I have had my say about this I think we can start looking at how the money boys keep the whole of the PLM show on the road…because there may be some way to cut off the funding at the pass…once we find out where we should be setting up our ambush.

One final little remark...at the personal psychological level, fear and love are directly opposed to each other...so if there is an axis of evil anywhere then this is where it is...and this is where the battle between Good and Evil may need to take place. i.e. the personal response to all this is to refuse to be made insecure and Make Love Not War...which brings us full circle to the sixties and the hippies where we all grew up. We were actually right all along. That at least is probably what this Sunday's weblog will say. And that is what it said.

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