About
My adolescence was spent during the bleak years of Thatcher’s Britain, as the hard right dismantled the nation’s public services, sold our infrastructure off to the vultures of big business and started to roll back the social and political gains made by working people following the Second World War.
Shaped by my experiences of the Thatcher/Reagan years, I always leaned towards what people might term leftist, liberal or progressive politics. But so many things about the world, as it is generally conceived and portrayed in the media, made little or no sense to me. Why did the “leader of the free world” pay for terrorists to murder people in Nicaragua and support killers and rapists in El Salvador? Why did Britain and America support and, in America’s case, bankroll the persecution of the Palestinians? Why did economic reform always prescribe destroying workers’ rights, while letting big business run riot, regardless of the consequences?
Slowly, over the course of many years, through the work of some insightful writers and commentators and a keen attention to what politicians, governments and businesses actually did rather than what they said, I started to gain a new way of looking at the world within which those actions and policies which previously made no sense were finally comprehensible.
This weblog contains my perspective on world events, including attempts to highlight aspects and angles the mainstream media will not or cannot address.
War Within a Breath is a social and political journal supporting freedom, real democracy and social justice and is the work of Darren Reynolds (frolix22), a writer, philosopher and political activist based in London
