Every Easter I marvel how in one week Jesus arrived in Jerusalem riding on a donkey, welcomed and hailed by the crowds, whereas a week later he was vilified by the crowd calling for his crucifixion.

This demonstrates how easily people can be manipulated, in this case by the Jewish leaders who went to great lengths to get rid of Jesus.

Unwittingly those leaders were participating in an event which God had planned, whereby Jesus rose again three days later in what became the foundation for Christianity.

As a reader of history I am amazed how often the manipulation of the crowd is used by leaders and factions to achieve their selfish goals, resulting in upheaval, death and destruction.

Events in the last century range from Adolf Hitler, who manipulated the German people from very minority position to wreck havoc in the world, wherein 70 million people died, to the Chinese warlords in the 1920s-1930s, Cambodia in the 1970s, the former Yugoslavia in the 1990s.

Nearer to us East Timor is a classic example, through to numerous countries in Africa and the Middle East today.

The same things are happening regularly on a tiny scale in New Zealand, where minority groups push their views through misleading publicity and propaganda to promote a far greater importance to an issue than is real.

Our precious democracy is far more fragile than most of us realise.

We need to think deeply before supporting a view, and this particularly applies in election year.

Bill Capamagian, Tauranga City.