Priming us up for war – “it’s not so bad, after all” – Britain’s Labour government leads the way

The Unseen March – video from 9 years ago – but now it’s getting worse.

On the outskirts of Berlin, you can visit what’s left of Sachsenhausen , one of the first Nazi concentration camps, set up in 1936, as a model for the more than 44,000 such camps they ran between 1933 and 1945.

I was impressed by the efficiency shown by the way that the Nazis carried out mass murder in this camp – which became a model for how to run this operation as quickly and with as little fuss as possible.

In the early days of the camp, the inmates were used as forced labour. Systematic extermination was carried out. Many thousands died  by hunger, disease, overwork, medical experiments and mistreatment. But by 1941, tens of thousands of Jews and Soviet prisoners were being directly murdered.

I saw where this happened. Originally, the prisoners were forced down a brick path, and shot. You can still see stains on this path. But here’s the interesting bit. It turned out that the German soldiers who did the shooting became badly affected by it. Sometimes they would miss, or have to make several shots to actually kill a man. It made the soldiers unwell, having to rather messily murder their victims – it’s not like being in combat, not at all fair. It was making those soldiers mentally ill.

Here’s where the practical genius of the Nazis came in. They devised a special unit, (which was still there, when I visited a few years ago). In this unit, the shooter could be sure of doing one direct lethal hit, but the victim was placed in such a way that the shooter was unable to see him. This system solved the psychological problem of upsetting the man doing the shooting. No more mental illness, and the mass killing could proceed in an orderly way.

In a sort of sequel to this discovery, the Americans in recent years developed the efficiency of drones. targeting and killing  suspected terrorists and militants in countries like Pakistan, Yemen, and Afghanistan. Once again, – such a beneficial effect on the operator’s mental health. From thousands of miles away – press a button, no sight of any mess. and a beneficial effect on the the public too – all this killing being done so neatly, and so far away – so much better than an old-fashioned war battle.

So it is that the thought of war becomes much less unpleasant. With drones, and missiles, it has become a sort of distant, sort of “clean”, precision operation.

This new palatability of war comes to add to the already existing beneficial aspects of war. Getting ready for war shows that our great leaders are strong and decisive. It’s patriotic. It defends our democratic values. There are those other – nebulous, but still real, concepts of courage, heroism, and past glorious victories. The new “war-readiness” shows that we are aware, and awake-up to the threats of other countries, who undoubtedly want to attack us. And on top of all that – getting ready for war provides jobs jobs jobs!

Now Sir Keir Starmer’s UK Labour government is not so sure that the British public is convinced of all this. So they’re accentuating the already existing British trend to promote militarism. The Daily Mail announces the new education programme:

Children taught value of the military

Defence chiefs will work with the Department for Education to develop understanding of the Armed Forces among young people in schools, by means of a two-year series of public outreach events across the UK, explaining current threats and future trends.

Schools and community-based cadet forces will also be expanded, with an ambition of a 30 per cent rise by 2030 with a view to the UK having 250,000 cadets, many of whom will then go on to join the armed forces.

It looks as if mass education on the necessity of war is now well underway. The general public in the West is being brainwashed with the doctrine that authoritarian Russia and China are about to invade our peace-loving democracies. Sir Keir Starmer takes the initiative, showing how Labour there is in concert with the Tories. We must be ready to fight back, or perhaps better, to pre-empt such attacks. No doubt the Russian and Chinese populations are being taught a similar message, the other way around.

What now makes it easier is that we can buy ever more of those glorious distance methods, so much neater than sending our boys out for messy personal danger. The efficient Nazis got the ball rolling on this. In education Sir Keir Starmer now takes the initiative. Labour in the UK is enthusiastically backing their own and and the USA’s arms manufacturers. Weapons-making is the big thing in business now – in Europe too, and of course in the US

June 5, 2025 - Posted by Christina Macpherson | Uncategorized