We can all be fooled at times, and I was recently fooled by a film called Enemy at the Gates. This covered the epic battle-within-a-battle when Soviet sniper Vasiliy Zaitsev fought German Colonel Thorwald at Stalingrad. I had believed that this scenario was true, since the story is recited as history in several books.

But the masterly Stalingrad the Fateful Siege: 1942-1943, by Antony Beevor, dismisses the whole thing as a Soviet propaganda tale:-

'The telescopic sight of his prey's rifle, allegedly Zietsev's most treasured trophy, is still exhibited in the Moscow armed forces museum, but this dramatic story remains essentially unconvincing. It is worth noting that there is absolutely no mention of it in any reports.'

The history of the Second World War is littered with numerous examples like that. The outright lies shade into half-truths and distortions, such as the so-called 'Malmedy Massacre', which incidentally could and frequently did happen on the allied side, a process that continues to this very day in the military operations of Bush 'n Blair's various NWO wars.

This is not to suggest that the German soldiery were saints, merely that they were better than some and no worse than many others.

If we fast-forward through the decades, how have those who fell for the stories and half-truths of World War II fared?

Well, our government typically seeks to crow over some statistics which seem to indicate that Britain is starting to move up from the very bottom of the European poverty league. Big deal!

If the aged veteran should want the council to repair his leaky roof, he'd better be prepared to wait until every last asylum-seeker has had his dwelling done up to scratch, in accordance with those many secret government directives! Is this the future that our war veterans fought for, and was John Amery not right when he wrote that: "Win or lose, every door reads 'RIP Britannia'"?

In spite of being plastered by dozens of B-52s, Baghdad still looks to be in a better state than most of our own towns, wrecked as they are either by glass and concrete in prosperous areas or by dereliction and decrepitude in poorer ones.

You know, just when we think that we have the measure of this Government's utter contemptibility, they seem to sink a little lower, as if - as it were - to wallow around more in their own sleazy evilness.

Now they have wasted around £3 billion (perhaps far more) on a war against Iraq that was staged in the pursuance of no possible British interest, economies are required. From now on it's farewell to pension books. Instead pensioners have been issued with swipe cards and PIN numbers.

Arthritic fingers will have to get the hang of fiddling with mini-terminals. Obviously, this will mean more hassle and longer queues for our pensioners. Inflicting inconvenience and misery on the aged will help save a mere £35 million for future wars for Zion and Uncle Sam (sadly, now almost indistinguishable).

Additionally, the prospects of their grandchildren enjoying the dubious privilege of being stuck in a cubicle all day answering telephone calls seem increasingly slim, given the ongoing export - at a mind-numbing rate of loss - of call centre jobs to India.

Drug facts hidden

Surely, no nation can suppress the truth and hope to prosper! We are assailed from all sides with calls to tackle the 'drugs menace', and informed that we are in the midst of a 'war on drugs'. But how can we tackle a problem like this when the facts about the drugs trade are kept from the public?

To discuss the realities behind heroin, cocaine and especially ecstacy, is like treading on a mine-field in the present atmosphere of political correctness. In the days when sanity still prevailed in this country - during the middle-to-late 1950s - Robert Fabian of Scotland Yard wrote a couple of books detailing his experiences.

Fabian was very forthright in saying that most organised and persistent crime was the responsibility of foreign elements in the country. This was not to stigmatise any particular nationality, since the natives of many different countries were involved, but merely to point out the facts as they prevailed at that time. But these days Inspector Fabian would be behind bars on 'hate-crime' charges, while the asylum-seeker he arrested would be claiming massive compensation at the High Court!

A fair number of readers will be already familiar with what happens every year to several thousand gullible and naive Russian and Ukrainian women. Such girls, who are often well-educated but lack opportunities in their own homelands, are enticed to Israel by adverts which promise well-paid jobs as office workers, hotel receptionists and the like.

But once they arrive, these unfortunate women find themselves trapped inside a hellish world of forced prostitution and sex-slavery. Even this statement conveys something milder than the horrifying actuality, since according to the Jerusalem Post of November 12th, during these Slav girls' trek to their destination:-

'Women who complain of any kind of pain during the taxing march are drugged with medications and painkillers, and anyone who breaks down and collapses is abandoned on the roadside in the desert, as if she were a dying freight animal.'

The author of the article, Isaac Herzog, is a member of the Israeli parliament, and to his credit he called for an end to the evil trade, suggesting that: "Too bad those traffickers cannot be hanged, but long years in solitary confinement would be an adequate alternative."

Hypocrisy

How utterly despicable it is that the 'mainstream' media make disapproving noises about Arab women in far-away countries being allegedly forced to wear veils, while ignoring the torments inflicted on these poor duped Russian and Ukrainian females in Israel. Surely, if forced to the choice, all women would plump for a scarf over the head rather than suffer the fate of being auctioned off like Roman slaves and stuck in filthy cages - which may sound like hyperbole but actually happens in some cases.

Alas, the man on the London bus does not read the Jerusalem Post, and is thus an easy target for the merchants of managed, pseudo-news with their childish and inaccurate cast of 'goodies' and 'baddies'. The slave trade in Eastern European women, like the Lavon affair or the Mossad transmitter in Tripoli that led to the Reagan/Thatcher bombing raids in Libya, remains unknown to 99 per cent of the people, and both the broadcasters and the governing elite would like to keep it that way.

Indeed, if a person had any capacity for independent thought or a backbone of any sort, they would never find themselves in the position of making Newsnight commentaries or writing Observer editorials. Those kinds of people know all the accepted parameters of received opinion. They are adept at providing slanted coverage, basically state propaganda and censorship masquerading as public service broadcasting.

But recently, it seems that the boundaries of 'left' and 'right' have begun to change. Increasingly, it is everyone else against the media, the politicians and the plutocrats. Could it be the beginning of the British peasants' revolt? If so, it is long overdue!