As a right-wing American poet almost said: history is now, and London.

In 1999, history was Seattle; in 2000, Prague and Montreal; in 2001, Gothenburg and Genoa; in 2002, Porto Alegre and Florence ; in February 2003 it was – we were – everywhere. Now, for a few days in November 2003, this imperial city by the river Thames is the capital of the political world.

The reason? Well, there is really no excuse for not knowing, even if you depend only on the mainstream media (and for many of us in the global justice, peace, solidarity and anti-war movement, that includes openDemocracy.net) for your information.

However, just in case you are not one of the enlightened, let me spell (or as I would prefer, spit) it out in just nine letters: BushBlair.

There, I’ve said it. Not a pretty sight or sound, I’d be the first to admit. A much lovelier world it would be without what the great Harold Pinter calls “this pair of dangerous, imperialist war-criminals”. But whether we like it or not, George W. Bush and Tony Blair are indeed closeted together in London this week, plotting the next phase in their cruel “war on terror”.

Yes, the “president” of the “free world” and his faithful lapdog, the Don Quixote and Sancho Panza of global politics, are at this moment sashaying between the symbolic homes of imperial power – the British Queen’s main residence, Buckingham Palace, and the British prime minister’s Downing Street – on their way to an extravagant banquet.

But as they devour the roast pumpkin and braised ham with the Queen in Banqueting House – “three monarchs under one roof”, as my pal Latif says – they are not alone. For just outside the palace gates, and indeed everywhere they go during Bush’s three-day visit to Britain, we in the movement are being joined in protest by tens of thousands of ordinary workers, students and people from minority groups. Our cries of outrage at these “new rulers of the world” (to use the great John Pilger’s phrase) mingle with the distant screams of dying Iraqi children to fuse into an enormous roar of just eleven letters that echoes around the world:

I hope that you too, the readers of openDemocracy.net, hear this roar, wherever you are in the world; I even hope someday you will join us. But if you choose to do so, it will surely be no thanks to the mainstream media, whose conformist cheerleading for the two monarch-presidents is a disgrace to the idea of a “free press”. No wonder that those of us standing proudly outside the stifling tent of embedded, spin-doctored, public-relations-fodder journalism reluctantly come to think of ourselves as voices in the wilderness.

The media chloroform

There are of course a very few exceptions to the almost universal chorus of praise that in Britain – “the 51st state”, as the great Michael Moore says – “covers” the BushBlair jamboree. The Daily Mirror, the Guardian, the Independent, the Daily Mail, the Sunday Mirror, and the Independent on Sunday are consistently anti-BushBlair; the Mail on Sunday gives regular opinion slots to that brave, persecuted dissident George Galloway, and the cutting-edge scourge of Blair’s “New Labour”, the great Tony Benn.

There is also hard-hitting commentary in alternative magazines like the New Statesman, Red Pepper,Tribune, and Socialist Worker (where the unmissable column of Alex Callinicos can be read); and no-illusion websites like MediaLens, Stop the War Coalition, Schnews, Global Resistance, Indymedia, and Media Workers Against War.

There is also very occasional space on the BBC – in programmes like Today, Question Time, PM, Newsnight, Any Questions, The World at One, and Radio 5 phone-ins – for critics of BushBlair to smuggle their views past the media “thought police” and onto the airwaves. Channel Four News is another rare vehicle of real news – its daily “Snowmail” newsletter offers a unique, spin-free summary of the top stories.

Then there are the very few political columnists and comedians who put their careers on the line by opposing the BushBlair juggernaut. Courageous, right-wing voices like Peter Hitchens (Mail on Sunday), Stephen Glover (Daily Mail, Spectator), Matthew Parris (Times), Andrew Alexander (Daily Mail), Simon Jenkins (Times), Mark Almond (Daily Mail), Geoffrey Wheatcroft (Guardian), Correlli Barnett (Daily Mail) and Peter Dobbie (Mail on Sunday); wittily subversive journalist-comedians like Mark Thomas (New Statesman), Jeremy Hardy (BBC), Mark Steel (Independent), Armando Iannucci (Daily Telegraph, BBC), Terry Jones (Observer), and the great Rory Bremner (Channel Four); lonely defenders of truth like the great Robert Fisk (Independent), Suzanne Moore (Mail on Sunday), Seumas Milne (Guardian), Simon Tisdall (Guardian), Madeleine Bunting (Guardian), the great Naomi Klein (Guardian), Gary Younge (Guardian), Jonathan Freedland (Guardian), Tariq Ali (Guardian), Paul Foot (Guardian),Yasmin Alibhai-Brown (Independent), and of course the great John Pilger (Daily Mirror, New Statesman) – these marginalised but fearless figures can sometimes break through the censor’s vice to savage the powerful.

The space of freedom protected by these few exceptions to the pro-BushBlair media bandwagon may be infinitesimal – but in that tiny space we can breathe the clean air of radical passion for a better world.

These painfully fragile alternatives to the mainstream media may not yet be enough to make BushBlair choke on their beer in the “local pub” propaganda stunt that concludes the visit. But they are symbolic of the way that, as Latif says, “you can’t forever keep the truth out or the people down”.

The real war

These challenging voices, writing against the grain, are a vital part of the carnival of hope that the movement against BushBlair represents. This is the other war – not the one where innocent Iraqis, Afghans and Palestinians are blown to pieces every day under the guise of “fighting terrorism”, but the war of ideas, whose key weapon is democratic argument backed by the strength of numbers.

Which brings me to those thirteen enigmatic letters: openDemocracy. Which side are you on?, as the great Dick Gaughan sings. Is your soul alternative or mainstream? Are you a dissident or an establishment project? Are you conformist or questioning, safe or unruly? Do you choose to stand with the heroes outside the palace gates, or with the “Toxic Texan” and “Tony Blair, a political runt” (Michael Moore) within?

In the end, these questions are not mine to answer; they are yours. But I would still like to invite any readers of this article who are still on the BushBlair caravanserai: step off – and get on board the global justice and peace train to a better world.

I started with a misquotation from an American right-wing poet. I will end by adapting the lines of a left-wing Scottish one. Against the BushBlair behemoth, our minds and our voices will not be silenced:

“For we have faith in the people’s hidden powers;
the present’s theirs, but all the past and future’s ours”.