Psst! Did you hear about Beau and Naomi? Everyone who matters on campus is in the know. What they do not know however, is that it is all a vicious hoax.

For a while in the story, all the coins are in the air and it is impossible to tell what particular story will triumph. You get the very discomfiting feeling that there is only one possible truth, the one with enough firepower behind it, the one with most backing in the media to become the prevailing version. The B-movie then presents us with that dilemma, so very pertinent in modern society. The media much like fire is a good servant but a terribly evil master. Governments and organizations seeking power and influence undoubtedly spin the news and facts to suit their desires, and if media management find that one of these false versions of the truth is after their liking, then that particular version becomes the truth. This problem is further compunded when the market for news and information, like in the case of our country is dominated by a few players. If the NMG and Standard Group do not want to cover an event, or address a particular issue, it does not exist at all.

In our times, the global powers and the media have seen fit to meet in an alliance of fear, using in the most adept fashion the power of nightmares to concoct such tales as would make us ever more eager for the embrace of the smothering state. Headlines are invented that have no basis in reason to justify such actions as the populace would never acquiesce to if the truth was on the table. Our slightest prejudices, our keenest concerns are seized upon increasingly to wage a war on our liberties, on our very selves, whipping up the passions of the mob into such frenzy that an extra-legal mandate is gained to do whatever it takes to keep us safe and warm. Sometimes this fear is of foreigners, sometimes it is of particular groups within our society. Often it is political as it was with the swift-boating of John Kerry, or the allegations of state house visits thrown at Kalonzo Musyoka.

making it up as we go

There are uncountable other examples of such actions, ranging from the infamous Saddam's Iraq could attack the UK in 45 minutes , to Colin Powell's disgraceful ricin stunt at the United Nations to underscore the presence of WMD in Iraq. Also, the Bush administration long pretended that there was a link between Al Qaeda and Saddam Hussein , allowing the American populace to convict Saddam for the horrors of September 11^th 2001 with nary a shard of evidence. Today, Europeans are told that their states cannot carry any more immigrants, and the trickle of visitors, nowhere exceeding the 15% mark is presented as a flood of foreigners that is determined to change the very fabric of the nation. In the UK, Melanie Phillips whips up such passions undeterred with a strange chant about Londonistan, and a Europe so conquered by Islam that it becomes Eurabia.

Closer home, there's similar sport being played with the collective psyche. Newspaper bosses unquestioningly collude with the official government line on anything from Somali involvement in the terror attacks of August 1998 to the Kikambala bombings, all without anything approaching real evidence. The cruel war being waged on the people of Somalia is relegated to a position of negligible import even as we rightly deplore the atrocities being committed in the name of the War on Terror elsewhere around the world. On Sudan, we are told of the desire of the Bashir government to wipe out the black people in Darfur, and predictably we accept it as truth, prejudice triumphs over common sense and truth again and again.

There was a time once, when President Moi very successfully managed to fool the nation, claiming the human rights abuses of his government were necessitated by the fact that there were plots to overthrow his government. We were told of troops coming in from Libya, and of intrigues carved in the middle of the night at the American and British embassies. It seemed necessary did it not, to collude with the security services in the murder and oppression of innocent young Kenyans, our brothers and sisters, all in the hope that we could keep the nightmares out. We surrendered to the Leviathan our trust, and our liberties, in the hope that we would be free from harm- and then he showed us.

Be afraid, be very afraid. And then play sleuth and as much as you can, find out for yourself what is true and what is not.