Peering through her looking-glass over a century and a quarter after her fictional debut, Lewis Carroll's Alice would have no difficulty recognising the upside-down world that Zimbabwe's President Robert Mugabe has created to sustain his campaign for political survival.
The evening television news bulletin carries a CNN-style banner headed "Fighting Terrorism". The terrorism referred to is not the violence spawned by Mugabe's armed supporters on farms across the country or their attacks on civil society workers, teachers, and independent newspaper vendors, but the activities of the opposition Movement for Democratic Change (MDC), allegedly backed by Britain.
Following 18 months of relentless state-sponsored lawlessness which has turned Zimbabwe into an international pariah, Mugabe's spin doctors have embarked on a strategy which involves turning reality on its head.
A presidential poll is due before April and Mugabe (77) is treating it as a battle for the very soul of the nation.
The MDC, which has eschewed violence despite every provocation and scrupulously adhered to a legal system that the President has assiduously subverted, now finds itself branded a terrorist movement responsible for the anarchy sweeping the country.
Behind this campaign of instability, it is claimed, looms the old imperial bogeyman, Britain. Not only is Tony Blair's government held responsible for destabilising Zimbabwe by backing the MDC, it is accused of mobilising the United States Congress, the European Union, the Commonwealth and Southern African heads of state to thwart Mugabe's programme of land redistribution.
Following the passage through the United States Congress of the Zimbabwe Democracy and Recovery Bill last week, Information Minister Jonathan Moyo described the MDC as "a movement for anti-people sanctions operating under the guise of democracy and the rule of law as defined and dictated by racist Americans and Britons". Moyo's mouthpiece, the government-owned Herald daily named MDC president Morgan Tsvangirai and his lieutenants as having "set the stage for the massacre of their own people".
These "Uncle Toms shall be judged by history for the evil they have unleashed upon the people of Zimbabwe", the paper menacingly warned.
Taking up the official line, Police Commissioner Augustine Chihuri said his force would not tolerate those who were "working in collusion with, and as admirers of, imperialist forces bent on destabilising our country". Police have arrested over 25 MDC supporters in recent weeks, including two MPs, for involvement in "terrorism" despite a conspicuous lack of evidence.
Some are accused of abducting and killing a prominent veteran of Zimbabwe's liberation war, Cain Nkala. But his threat to spill the beans on his involvement in the disappearance of an MDC campaign manager ahead of last June's general election could provide a more likely explanation for his death.
Meanwhile, British Foreign Secretary Jack Straw must be congratulating himself on a global reach that Lord Palmerston would have envied. But the truth is rather less awesome. Mugabe is the sole author of the predicament he now finds himself in.
The US Congress, EU, Commonwealth and Southern African Development Community, which includes neighbouring South Africa, have all, for different reasons, been reluctant to implement measures against the rogue regime in Harare. But Mugabe has ensured they all now think alike.
Instead of restoring the rule of law his followers have hounded the Chief Justice and other independent-minded judges into retirement and replaced them with more pliant individuals, two of whom have reportedly been recipients of land under the current partisan redistribution programme.
The police have been suborned into taking action only against opposition supporters while ignoring the ruling Zanu-PF party's record of terror and mayhem. And electoral laws have been changed to limit potential voters in the 18-30 age group, including the burgeoning diaspora, who are most likely to support the MDC.
Last week the government published details of a new media law that will make it an offence to cause "alarm and despondency" or to excite disaffection against the President - including by ridiculing him. It will also prevent publication of details about the fortunes amassed by the ruling nomenklatura since independence in 1980 and prohibit non-Zimbabwean foreign correspondents from working in the country.
None of this suggests a ruler safely ensconced in the affections of his people. Rather it reveals that after 21 years of declining gross domestic product, falling living standards and institutional corruption Zimbabweans have had enough of Mugabe's damaging demagoguery.
Land seizures are expected to result in a 40 per cent decline in crop production next year. Already parts of the country need emergency food supplies to head off starvation.
South Africa's President Thabo Mbeki is the latest regional leader to condemn Mugabe's failed policies, a criticism that has led to a stream of anti-South African vitriol in the official media.
When voters last year rejected Mugabe's constitutional proposals which would have legitimised his absolutist regime, and then came close to booting Zanu-PF out in the parliamentary election, the President decided he would punish the opposition and their perceived white backers in precisely the way he punished Matabeleland in the 1980s when he unleashed the North Korean-trained Fifth Brigade on the dissident province. That episode left at least 10,000 dead.
Whether his latest campaign of terror will have the same impact remains to be seen. But in setting his war-veteran militias on law-abiding people and persecuting those - probably a majority - who wish to vote against him next year he is only sealing his own fate.
Twenty-one years ago Mugabe was hailed in Africa and abroad as a revolutionary hero who had wisely made peace with his former oppressors.
Only 10 years ago he was seen as the man who provided education and healthcare to the rural poor. Today he is, in Archbishop Desmond Tutu's words, a caricature of the delinquent African ruler who has lost his way.
Comforting himself with the thought that he is the victim of an international conspiracy and locked in the ideological mindset of an era long since past, Mugabe is grimly holding on to power because he cannot imagine a future without it.
(Iden Wetherell is editor of the Zimbabwe Independent.)