Here is my understanding: politics is a spectrum and at opposing ends there is Communism and there is Nazism and the thing is… they are exactly the same.  (I have the uneasy feeling that I may have peaked too soon here, as that is pretty much where my understanding ends, but I’ll plod on anyway: understanding is very over-rated in my opinion.)  So, now I think about it, politics is not a spectrum at all, it is a circle.  Whichever direction you take, clockwise or anti-clockwise, if you keep on going and refuse to listen for long enough, you end up in the same place: a totalitarian nightmare.  It is so weird that the far right so detests the far left (and vice versa) when they are both fighting for the same thing: disenfranchisement for the majority, vast riches and ungoverned power for the tiny elite.  Both of these systems thrive on corruption and function only because those that rule are completely divorced from those they rule over.

It strikes me that these despotic leaderships can only successfully function when the area over which they rule is vast – Russia and China – and probably explains why the Third Reich in Germany were so focussed on the kind of expansion that, eventually (and thankfully) proved to be its downfall.  The benefit of magnitude is that things can be hidden.  We can only scratch at the surface of what goes on in China, and Putin’s claim to be protecting the world from Ukranian Nazis rings exceedingly hollow when he is at the head of a State that behaves in such a manner.  In such a State that the rest of the world is treated with disdain whilst the home population is treated with contempt.  Such contempt that they never get to hear about it.

So, here we are, the rest of the world, arranged at various compass points around our political circle.  We have a single collective aim: to try to stop every other tinpot dictator from making his way towards the extreme end of the circle (except, of course, circles don’t have ends and if somebody stops you going round to the right, there will always be someone to help you make progress round to the left – unlike the M25, of course, in which case progress in any direction is generally impossible) and to do this, we have the Leaders of the Free World.  Let’s look, we have Joe Biden in America, a man who looks so confused it has to be an act and whose greatest asset is that he is not Donald Trump.  In the UK we had (until yesterday) Boris, and tomorrow will have who-knows-who to stumble through the next two years prior to an ignominious defeat either in a party coup or a general election.  And in France we have a man whose main aim in life is to become Napoleon – if only he could remember which way he needs to turn.

Do not panic fellow Earthlings, there is definitely a way out.  Let’s all start building a rocket before the buggers blow us up.