And I saw David Cameron on a pale horse

Revelation 6:8King James Version (KJV)

And I looked, and behold a pale horse: and his name that sat on him was Cameron , and George Osbourne followed with him. And power was given unto them over the fourth part of the Uk to kill with sword, and with hunger, and with death, and with the beasts of ATOS

Watching Andrew Marr and Sunday Morning live this morning you could see the preparations being made for war. All right wing governments drift to war when their economic policy is in tatters. The Generals rubbish the peacemakers, the military industrial complex sharpens up its maw to gobble more and more young people, it promises employment and skills and instead it excretes weapons, it promotes the boogie man and keeps us all afraid. It does not tell you that our allies in the shape of Saudi Arabia, execute with public beheadings over 600 individuals a year. Isis is an apocalyptic organisation it believes in a last day of judgement when in a great battle the infidel will perish. What a gift it presents for the arms industry, what a gift for the failing cult of austerity, what a gift for Ukip and the right.

No one taks about the arms trade, the fact that the invasion of Iraq laid the ground conditions that enabled Isis to appear. They dont tell you that after the second Gulf War the provinces of Iraq experienced centralisation, devolved powers were removed and concentrated on Bagdad, that the Sunni were given no representation.

No one tells you that during the Reformation and Counter Reformation in Europe religious toleration we saw similar events that are now happening in Iraq and Syria and on the streets of Paris and Brussels. As long as yo think there is only one true faith, that there is only one right answer then ultimately this leads to the slaughter of Islamic peoples by the medieval Crusader and to the adherents of Isis in Paris and in Brussels. To the true believer the person who thinks differently is essentially a spiritual serial killers murdering the truth. If you are Queen Mary in the 16^th century burning the early Protestants, or Calvin in Geneva acting the other way round you create Theocratic Societies where your truth is the only truth. European tolerance did not come from negotiation..it came because nether side could win. Islam and the Arab Spring have begun an Islamic Reformation. Corbyn, the Green party , Russel Brand have begun a challenge to the Neo-liberalism religion of Austerity. We are at a major turning point in perceptions both across Europe and across the Middle East

Isis does tell you or its followers the true meaning of Jihad, that the great Medieval Islamic warrior Saladin was a Kurd and allowed Christians to worship in the Holy Land. The apocalyptic believers within Isis have a clear vision a simple apocalypse. The-refugee crisis allows us in the West to fear the other, the stranger. The Priests of Neo-liberalism and the religion of austerity promote a cult of fear, of distrust and of loathing. We are being manipulated by both sided in numerous ways. I think of the poem by WB Yates poem the Second Coming

THE SECOND COMING

  Turning and turning in the widening gyre
  The falcon cannot hear the falconer;
  Things fall apart; the centre cannot hold;
  Mere anarchy is loosed upon the world,
  The blood-dimmed tide is loosed, and everywhere
  The ceremony of innocence is drowned;
    The best lack all conviction, while the worst
    Are full of passionate intensity.

    Surely some revelation is at hand;
    Surely the Second Coming is at hand.
    The Second Coming! Hardly are those words out
    When a vast image out of Spiritus Mundi
    Troubles my sight: a waste of desert sand;
    A shape with lion body and the head of a man,
    A gaze blank and pitiless as the sun,
    Is moving its slow thighs, while all about it
    Wind shadows of the indignant desert birds.

    The darkness drops again but now I know
    That twenty centuries of stony sleep
    Were vexed to nightmare by a rocking cradle,
    And what rough beast, its hour come round at last,
    Slouches towards Bethlehem to be born?