I woke up and I was sixty six years old and something was gone.

Colour, flavour, perspective?

A man builds a life, with all its potential, all its sense. Maybe he excels at some of it. Maybe he is just average. But maybe there is a seed of hope, of optimism. Maybe he feels strong and capable, competent. He looks at the world handed down by his predecessors, and can see the effort, the struggle. All the blood and guts and suffering and combat that went into building it. He is the latest inheritor, he is the new recruit in this ever lasting war. He will only take part in some of its battles, maybe only little skirmishes but he is ready as he can be. He puts on the armour, he feels ready. He is already preloaded with the stories his ancestors have left behind. He thinks they are moral lessons, they list the targets, the battle scars, the gashing wounds. But the progenitors have left gaps in the stories, after all how do you tell the story of the minutiae of a life? The nuances, the daily grind, the small victories and losses? How do you transmit the whole truth without obfuscation or ego. So he lives with only the cleaned up legend as his guide. When he is still young the legend suffices. He does not need to know the dirt under the legend, the misery on the flip side of the heroics. But once he is blooded in the first personal tangle with his own life a seed is planted. Did those heroes of the past also feel those little doubts? Did they also metaphorically; or perhaps in reality; piss their pants? Did they have those cowardly moments? At first it is easier to think “No of course they didn’t! It’s just you”. But sooner than he expects he begins to look over the foot notes of the legends, the little margin additions. There in tiny subtext the more revealing pictures emerge.

That is not only the truth of personal histories. That applies in full horror to the mythology we are taught about our countries, the histories that offer us delightful tales of our nation, of our people, of our race. How we; only WE the nation of nobles; were the greatest people, rich in historical beauty, our contributions to culture, science, morality, philosophy made the world infinitely better. How we the chosen brought sense to a dark and unknowable world through the genius of our blood. Every nation large or small old or new on this planet mythologises itself in this way. From the ancients to the present day we use this noble nonsense as a salve and as justification for the horror we bring upon the world.

For those born in the mid twentieth century, there was a world that we call the Post War era, as if this war, the Second World War, was the only one. When we say the WAR it reads by most people as that mass extinction even, not all the others that have brought the world to edge of disaster. We call the horrors of this war the worst things that ever happened in history. Of course any historian worth the name can tell you that this is only true, if at all, because that was was the first truly modern mechanical war. It was the one that first fully addicted us to fossil fuels, to mechanised mass murder, remote destruction of foreigners. It taught the world the word holocaust, concentration camp, genocide, as if it was the first. It magnified the process of exploitation by an infinite factor. The first world war had taught the world that trench warfare, ranked bayonet attacks and other 18^th and 19^th century tactics and strategies were no longer valid ways of killing. Progress became defined as making better and more lethal machines. The slavery of the previous centuries was now systematised by the self appointed arbiters of democracy and western superiority. The old racial hierarchies had become a little embarrassing so the powerful western nations redefined them as first world benevolence towards the poor deprived underdeveloped third world. They gave themselves license to put their boots on the neck of the rest of the world. What we now politely refer to as the “Global South” is a callous euphemism for the vast geographical regions Europe and the United States can freely attack, subjugate and terrorise into submission, so that the west can get fat and powerful on the fruits of their rich lands and resources. The West having already begun giving itself the right of hegemony back in the time of Elizabeth I of England, by the end of the 18^th century and the emergence of the industrial revolution had wound itself up as the de facto emperor of the world. Slavery and genocide had proved massively profitable already when the European powers finally found the New World. Their first response, before even attempting to communicate or cooperate or even recognise as human to the indigenous population was genocide and slavery. They set about deleting the very existence of those millions there. Concurrently they were making inroads into the massive continent of Africa. Deleting and grinding to dust the rich histories and cultures of that continent too. There though they decided on light genocide and opted instead for mass slavery. The English and French mostly in the North Americas and the Spanish and Portuguese mainly in the Central and South America, carried out three or four centuries of systematic destruction of indigenous cultures and peoples while at the same time importing millions of Africans as slaves to work the land to enrich the Europeans.

This is all supposedly a matter of record.

After the war ended in 1945, we are told in films and books that there followed the longest period of continuous peace in history. This was presented over and over again as time of progressive thinking, scientific, medical and industrial innovation hand in hand with a growing political enlightenment. This is one of the most egregious lies ever told. Since 1945 the western nations have been engaged in almost nonstop warfare all through the globe. Whether directly or through proxies they have waged the most vicious and insidious aggressions through the so called global south and not only. I will attempt a very short run down from memory, of wars since 1945, waged by the main Western powers, especially the UK and US.

Immediately after the declaration of peace came the British war in Malaysia, Americans in the occupation of Japan, leading to the Korean war after the sabotage of the majority will of the Korean people and the dividing of that nation into north and south, designating the North communist and the south as a democracy. The US and UK built military bases all over the world during this period with the excuse of the Marshall plan giving them permission to intervene militarily and otherwise in the running of sovereign nations through the world. I’m sure my memory fails in recalling that course of events in correct detail, but along general lines those are the facts. So let’s see. This period of peace in the immediate aftermath of 1945 lists in no specific order war, conflict, political and covert intervention, sabotage, genocide and so many other western initiated horrors. Korea, Malaysia, Philippines, Suez, Palestine, Iran, Afghanistan, Iraq, Vietnam, Congo, Cyprus, Greece, Algeria, Lebanon, Yemen, Serbia, Pakistan, India, Chile, Guatemala, Ukraine, Venezuela, Egypt on and on. I run out of names now but trust that the list is far greater. The simple fact that the US has been in existence for 250 years in 2026, and for 230 years of those it has been at a war it initiated somewhere in the world is staggering. And it does not even cover the covert disruptions it has been involved in in those 250 years.

The invention of racism, and the propagation of it amongst the people of the planet; has perhaps been the cruelest, dirtiest trick the West ever played on our world. I don’t intent to invite any discussion about that. Facts; as they say; is facts.

You may reasonably wonder why all this strife. Where is the sense in such conduct? The answer is extremely simple and stark. Capitalism. I don’t mean this in the oppositional sense of Capitalism versus Socialism. To my thinking socialism is at base a capitalistic form of political philosophy, just angled towards using capitalistic systems for the fairer benefit of all through a more even handed distribution of wealth. But untethered Capitalism logically only points in one direction, oligarchy and the eventual total dominance of a tiny minority of hyper wealthy elites, a middle tier of super wealthy facilitators and disproportionately massive majority of an exploited, poverty stricken under class.

The promise that I was born into was perpetual progress and a world fairer and more just than any we’ve known so far in history. All kinds of potentiality was waved in our faces. Distractions, bread and circuses became ever more sophisticated and what Huxley called Soma was realised to the full, and grew till by the end of the 20^th century we were more or less totally immersed in distraction. War, genocide and world wide exploitation was beautifully polished and packaged for consumption as humanitarian efforts to save the third world from its backwardly savage tendencies. The West went to war with Muslims to save their women, with communists to save their people from oppression and so on. Every Western atrocity was made into video and film, books and news stories, all sanitised for our edification. Everything told us that we were only bombing civilian areas with such technologically brilliant Western inventions that they could target an individual bad actor in an apartment building full of families, without hurting a single innocent. This with high explosive piece of ordinance that could flatten an entire city block in one go. And we allowed ourselves to believe this myth, after all we were properly educated to believe deeply in the wests incredible sophistication and brilliance. Of course they could build such a bomb!!! Smart weapons that could almost distinguish between the American trope of the “Bad Guy” against the “Good Guy”. We bought the bullshit wholesale, until it was too awful to call the lie out for what it was. Our guilt in our complicity, and our addiction to the fruits of this technological playground could only lead us to one choice. Ignore the genocide, the big lies by adhering to the falsehood that the advanced nations brought tragedy to the rest of the world only by rare accidents. The burning oil fields of Iraq and the flattened cities, the skeletal husks of vehicles on the road to Basra, stretching for miles, had contained no innocent refugees trying to escape the American bombs. The Vietnamese children and farmers are not being blown to oblivion by unexploded ordinance left behind by the US. No these things are all easy to ignore when we see in the movies that in fact it was the Americans who were the true victims, since they were viciously murdered by “insurgents” who hated their way of life while the troops were only there to help those people. It is shocking how much swill we have swallowed willingly over the years as truth, while trying our damnedest to put the glaringly obvious out of our minds.

First draft, October 2026

Vishy Moghan