It may be too early to make final conclusions but reading the details of the presumed suicide of the American scientist Bruce Ivins working for many years as a much respected much trusted researcher in the biodefence laboratories of the U. S. government. Whatever the outcome it is yet another moment for rethinking many things.  Perhaps it's the time for a heavy and necessary doubt which the normal and responsible citizens in our radically transformed world should entertain and practice towards their politicians, governments and the people who make life and death, war and peace, ruin and prosperity, decisions on their behalf

I am amazed that the apparent suicide of the American army scientist should make the headlines without any comment or commentary attempting  a deep critical analysis of the dynamics and history of the happenings in relation to the great anthrax scare.  Leaders have always been assured by their mentors and advisers since Machiavelli that people and nations have a very short memory, enticing and tempting their leaders to reach the conviction that they can get away with anything.  This disorder seems to have afflicted Western societies as well as most Eastern societies and for that matter all societies who allow for their own comfort  and pseudo-safety the qualities of critical analyses supported by documentation to wither away from them and their consciousness and socio-political behaviour. With such a short memory politicians and decision makers can rest assured and safe from the threat of being held to account. 

How can anyone with an acute analytical memory forget or underestimate the enormous scare created and perpetrated by the US administration in relation to the anthrax "terrorist" attack on the US whipping up the fever and the panic that further allowed

 the Administration to take decisions and to pass laws and regulations that would be unthinkable without the panic state deliberately created and amplified.  No need to remind the American electorate that in this confused panic state the Iraqi regime and Al Qaeda were roundly and squarely accused and declared guilty even before any of the data was really subjected to objective and cool scrutiny.  Five people died of mysterious anthrax infection from anthrax polluted letters and the whole nation was thrown into panic fearing the eruption of out of control deadly anthrax infection "epidemic".

It was the same tragicomedy with the so-called instruments of mass destruction in Iraq.  The enormous and dramatic noises made about these fictitious weapons of mass destruction were enormous enough to instill panic in every household.  Ministers and officials at the highest level swore and asserted to the people’s representatives whether it be  in Congress or in Parliament or in any other peoples assembly that there was irrefutable evidence of weapons of mass destruction ammassed in Iraq and ready to attack the West within 20 minutes.  Everybody who had any amount of useful grey matter in their brains to be  used with some objectivity would know that this is complete nonsense.  But the panic factor once the leaders set the ball rolling will, as we all know, amplify itself, snow ball and even completely cut off all reason and all sanity.  A wonderful situation for leaders and rulers and and an administration with a hidden agenda that goes against the real interest and will of its own people and most of the people of the rest of the world!.

I was horrified and not very surprised to read a quote from no other than Herman Goring during the Nuremberg trials 1946 and wonder if we have learnt from the blunders and tragedies of history?:

In short every citizen without exception must take up their responsibility towards the policies and decision making of their own leaders.  The amount of neglect and complacency that perfectly good and honest citizens allow in relation to this all important right leaving it to be usurped in the peoples name by politicians without morals or ethical values but with hidden agendas that they dare not declare. Mostly they dare not declare the hidden agendas because they are related to the self-serving, maintenance and enlargement of power serving interests of persons or parties.  The warning is that the short term benefits that politicians are attached and dedicated to serving themselves and their benefactors are frequently incompatible in the long-term with the strategic interests of the community or communities they purport to be serving.  The ordinary citizen everywhere must wake up to the fact that he or she has an enormous responsibility to the whole world and to our mother earth now that we all understand that we are all together on spaceship Earth hoping that live in peace prosperity and happiness, a natural right, together on the same vulnerable planet with a vulnerable and threatened life sustaining environment. We all now know that the balance of a life sustaining environment can be turned against life if we continue with our short sighted selfish complacency towards life and Earth and ruthless power-hungry politicicians. It is all too easy to forget about the nobler and more important international issues like equity, fairness, justice, inalienable basic human rights for everybody to growth development and the pursuit of happiness without hurt or destruction to others or to earth or to nature.