The Primrose Path To Perdition

I recently learned that there were eight steps
that governments take when they commit others
to the path of collective death, or genocide.

The first step is making the otherness
that makes up a natural diversity
officially a cause for division,
through classifying the population.

In itself this act is not murderous.

The second stage is forcing citizens
to wear outward signs of difference
in public, to make difference
more easily identifiable.

In itself this step is not murderous,
but it makes public places less inclusive,
and unsafe for groups that are not labelled.

The third step is to write new laws
built around the established signs
of outwardly different citizens
which limit their citizenship.

In itself this step is not murderous
but with an unstable and skewed media
characters who are personally unstable
will see these laws as an entitlement
to bully minorities and the weak.

The fourth step is is to popularise
verbal abuse towards minorities
via abusive and sly sleight-of-word
government announcements.  .

This step is nearer manslaughter
than citizens are prepared to admit
-when the machinery of government
toes the new line citizens lives
get shortened but mostly 'by accident'
when they are denied basic support.

The fifth step is to make 'state security'
a rhetorical argument backed by guns and laws
where creeping militarisation
takes the 'civil' out of civilian life.

Such weaponisation seems safe
when it is against a discredited otherness
but when that otherness is actually false
than the weapons could soon be against us.

The sixth step is hate groups
'spontaneously' forming themselves
to defend/act out a piece of propaganda
that was a fiction and is now the motive
for a polarising unthinking hierarchy
to defend the streets and a false 'freedom of speech'.

This is where open murder starts,
even if it is more in the heart than in actions.
In the heart it is defended and disguised
by the theories of exceptionalism,
'one apple rotted, everyone else is sane'
while the whole barrel promotes the rot.

The next two steps are only possible
when a government systematically hides
as much as it plans what it is doing.
When governments act in secrecy,
and act against democracy,
their actions cannot be undone.

Purpose built buildings securely imprison
those the state deems 'without purpose
for the new reordered/improved society'.
There people cease to be citizens
and the previously-open media have no access.
Lawyers are hamstrung at every turn
and the gov't department who are in control
issue euphemistic public statements
full of managerial bromides and plain lies.

So far so British, and it was the British
who invented the concentration camp
and led the world in creating architecture
that divided families and isolated people.

What the British started the Nazis refined,
for them 'room to roam' (lebensraum)
country by country, across all of Europe,
included the sacred duty to kill the weak,
the less favoured, and the innocent.

Read all you need to know about it here.