The UK government has decided to annihilate itself in bid for endless war that resembles 1933 Germany

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I was supposed to talk about hasbara this weekend. Instead, I find myself writing these lines as the United Kingdom is rushing for its own demise, intent on taking as many of its citizens down as it can in the process.

I think many people see the UK as a pillar of European imperialism and, perhaps owing to their extensive colonial history, also think of them as a mostly stable country.

The current reality of the UK starts with these figures: 21% of the population (14 million people) were living in poverty in the years 2022-2023 (poverty being defined as income being >66% below median income). Out of those 14 million, about half are in very deep poverty. Children are more affected than adults and pensioners in these rates.

And currently, Labour — who is little more than a faction of the right-wing Tories — is going hard on a campaign to slash disability benefits. Even the Tories didn’t dare. Around a quarter of the UK population has a disability; this doesn’t necessarily mean that they receive benefits, but that they have a recognized disability. The biggest share of the disabled population are retirees, who have spent a lifetime working and contributing to their pensions and deserve some rest now, but disabilities are of course varied and affect children, adults, and seniors alike.

Now, the Labour government has decided that going after the most marginalized and vulnerable was how they would save their sinking ship economy: an economy that survives mostly on imports, and who is the biggest exporter of liquor, sculptures, antiques and newspapers — not exactly something that you can easily make more of and retain a competitive edge in. Everything else they currently export: cars, gold, and gas turbines (their three top exports) are living on borrowed time as the UK only has three operating steel mills left (with one in the Netherlands). For comparison, China has more than 3000.

It started with the announcement of major cuts in disability benefits at the end of last year. With this measure, Labour aims to cut 400,000 individuals from receiving their benefits, or (only) 10% of current beneficiaries. People who by definition can’t work.

Yet Labour — the party of “work”, as Starmer put it — expects them to find a job in a climate where an employer has no reason to pick a disabled employee over an able-bodied employee. For many disabled people, working is simply out of the question: it already takes all they have just to survive day-to-day. People will die with these cuts — from exhaustion, hardships and destitution, and health experts have already warned as much; all to save a measly 3 billion pounds per year while the defense spending is 53 billion pounds per year.

People have already died under previous cuts. It’s giving real “Arbeit macht frei” vibes. Except instead of putting the marginalized and vulnerable in camps to work them to death, Labour wants them to kill themselves. That way, the social murder is not their fault, but the eugenics remain.

Labour is now moving very fast on this plan that nobody in the UK has asked for — and it’s generally a warning sign when governments try to pass a new policy very quickly. At the end of January, it was reported in the media that the benefits “changes” will launch at the end of March, where we are now. The plan is spearheaded by Rachel Reeves, the current Chancellor (finances minister in British speak), who was not elected to her position; ministers are appointed by the Prime Minister.

Then, as if that still wasn’t enough, Reeves announce further cuts on March 25, or just a few days before the plan is set to take effect. The “problem”, you see, was that the previously announced cuts were simulated and found not to achieve the target “savings”, and so further cuts are now “required” to meet the quota. Abandoning them entirely as a plan that won’t save any money is apparently not even in the question anymore.

Disabilities are not the only social service Labour has set its sights on either. Already, school meals for children are being rolled back too. A million children are expected to lose their school lunches in the coming years. Is the UK so strapped for cash that it can’t provide kids a sandwich for lunch?

Even now, as inflation has been gripping the nation and the cost of consumer goods are still high, Labour is more concerned about suffocating what remains of welfare than actually doing anything about the economy. These price hikes are expected to continue growing through 2025, even as it’s been revealed that these prices are manufactured and making record profits to companies — Tesco, for one, is making record profits in the UK and gathering a higher market share since Covid and the Ukraine war.

Yet profits, by definition, only go in one direction. The economic situation for the average Brit has come to a point where Tesco has adopted “anti-theft” devices in its stores, securing even 1.65£ items inside GPS-tracked boxes despite their huge profits. These devices are mostly deployed on foodstuffs and other essentials that people need on the daily, such as laundry detergent or shampoo products.

Meanwhile Diana Johnson, the minister for crime (for crime?), also a Labour member of course, equated shoplifting with stabbings, saying “Too many town centres have been decimated [emphasis mine] by record levels of shoplifting, and communities have been left shaken by rising levels of knife crime.” The second is not like the first. Her solution to this wave? Boosting police presence and being tougher on crime. Taking on the root cause of shoplifting — poverty — is not even in the question for Labour. In fact, they are creating more shoplifters by cutting benefits. But don’t worry, they have miraculously found the money to hire police to beat these new dangerous criminals. And once again, police becomes the enforcer of private property: a 1.65£ bar of chocolate has more rights and protections than an actual person.

Why is Labour waging war on the disabled?

At the same time as they are announcing complete cuts to benefits, British MPs have generously decided to give themselves a 2.8% pay raise in April to a whopping 94,000 pounds. At this point, we need to ask: why does Labour suddenly need all that money for anyway? After all, what is the point of a society if it can’t provide for its most vulnerable and in need of help?

In their seeming bid to outdo Hitler in the buildup to 1939, it seems the Labour government under Keir Starmer (affectionately called Kid Starver) prefer to focus on the sinking ship that is Ukraine and going down with it — but taking all the innocent people who have not asked for this along with them.

Indeed, while a fifth of the UK population is living in poverty and some cities can’t even keep the lights on at night anymore, Starmer has found the solution: he plans to raise defense spending to 2.5% of GDP (what GDP?) by 2027 — or, in absolute numbers, even more money than the UK is currently spending in disability benefits.

They are joining countries such as France, Germany and the United States in an arms race meant to take on the non-existent threat of Russia. The historical parallels are plenty — NATO itself was founded in a similar context, to take on a non-existent war from the USSR at the time (when the USSR had no plans whatsoever to invade the rest of Europe and confirmed as much several times).

This history is important to remember because it is still recent, and Europe as a whole hasn’t moved on from its WW2 past. With the proxy war in Ukraine slowly getting to an end and with Russia set to make its demands soon, and with billions sent to line the pockets of corrupt AFU officers (over 12 billion pounds sent so far with more to come), Labour has the perfect opportunity to fearmonger and pass all of their austerity measures. And sending a few bombs to facilitate the genocide in Gaza for good measure, of course. The two conflicts are now inextricably linked together on the global stage, with Europe supporting both Ukraine and “Israel” materially and reshaping the entire economy, policies, laws and rights in a direction that will let them continue the bloodshed for as long as they feel like, unopposed.

We should therefore not lose sight of the fact that Ukraine is an excuse to further solidify what capitalism does best: impose abject poverty on workers so that capitalists can make more money out of our labor. With the rate of profit falling each year, new policies are needed to find new profits — and one plan is to force disabled people to work, even if it kills them. And when they die? Good, says Mr. Starmer — that is less government money spent!

The other policy to create new profits is imperialism: forcibly opening up new markets and avenues of profits abroad for the benefit of the imperial power. The Russia-Ukraine war was such a situation: For the UK, US, France, etc. the point was never to defend Ukraine or deter Russian invasion — if they wanted to help Ukrainians, they would not be sabotaging peace negotiations which is leading to more dead Ukrainians. The point is to force Russia into proxy wars hoping that they will not be able to bear the financial cost as long as NATO can. The point is to completely destroy Russia so as to rebuild it in their image: a balkanized territory of weak states (like they did in Africa) in which Western capital can pour in (like they did in Romania) and buy up all the natural resources, all the workers, all the companies, all the social services. This is how money is made in the 2020s.

Imperial powers tried to destroy Russia with Yeltsin already. Famously, US advisors were sent to rescue Yeltsin’s second campaign, and it is a known fact in Russia that some agency (likely the CIA through the NED) funded his campaign past the legal limit at the time. But in 2000, Putin unexpectedly won — unexpectedly for the West, at least. Immediately, the West tried to rally him to their side. Tony Blair was happily having talks with him, hoping to sell him the European “dream”: becoming a comprador who will sell out Russia to western capital.

The campaign didn’t take and we know where Europe stands now in regards to Russia.

The question remains: are we headed for World War 3?

In 1933, Hitler was invited to power to prevent the communist party from ruling. The liberals and social-democrats (what Labour nominally calls itself) formed a voting coalition and Hindenburg, a liberal — in the European definition, i.e. proponents of free markets — won the presidential election in Weimar Germany. Instantly, he invited Hitler who had already achieved his reputation as a fascist by then to become Chancellor. All of this was meant to prevent the communist KPD from ruling in any way. Prior to that, in the 1910s, revolutionaries Rosa Luxemburg and Karl Liebknecht were killed by the social-democratic party in an alliance with the Freikorps, a group that would later become the Nazi SA.

Where the UK is joining up with Hitler is that after 1935, Hitler heavily invested in the arms industry in Germany. To do this, he poured billions of Marks into capitalist enterprises, announcing it point-blank: he claimed that Germany could not leave its borders defenseless against France, blaming the Treaty of Versailles (meanwhile Haiti, an actually imperialized country that had worse conditions than the Treaty of Versailles imposed on them, did not turn to fascism). In March 1935, he publicly announced his intentions to rebuild the air force, reinstate conscription, and rearm the nation as “defensive” measures.

In 1939, Hitler invaded Poland unprovoked, building along prior antisemitic pogroms that he instigated in Germany starting in 1933. In a way, his hand was forced by his own policies. The MEFO Bills he introduced were going to crash sooner or later and required war to stave off the incoming recession that would hit even worse than the Weimar recession did. War is good for the economy after all — just ask George Bush.

At the same time, Hitler promulgated labor reforms in the interest of his capitalist supporters. He banned trade unions in 1933 and installed the DAF (German Labour Front) in its place, a Nazi-controlled “union” that set wages and working conditions for all workers. Real wages dropped by 25% in 5 years, and maximum working hours increased from 60 to 72 per week. Workplace accidents increased. Young people between 18-25 were conscripted to work free labor in infrastructure projects before joining the army. Those who refused these conditions were listed as “work-shy” and were arrested to be put in concentration camps. Their symbol was the black triangle.

The nazis never meant to make things better for Germans. Their only purpose was to save the upcoming collapse of capitalism in Germany by any means necessary.

Remember how Labour is now forcing the disabled to find jobs they know very well they cannot work at. In 2015, Reeves (the same Reeves who is now spearheading disability cuts) said that “Labour does not represent people who are out of work.” She promised that if Labour ruled, she would slash welfare benefits - at the time targeting food banks, and we can only imagine these cuts will come up soon enough after disability has been gouged.

My point isn’t to say that Starmer is Hitler. Rather, we should remember that Hitler was not a dot in the past of human history or an outsider. He was a very real person who really existed. Pop history often makes him out to be bigger or more special than he really was by trying to cast him as an anomaly or blip in time, and in the process deifies him — the opposite of what they intend to do. This is counter-productive and lends legitimacy to the Nazis. Rather, Hitler was a result of the conditions at the time, and he was far from alone in his views. After all, he was invited to rule and he had a cabinet full of nazis just like him. Take Hitler out, and Goëring would take his place. Or Eichmann. Or Himmler. Or…

Hitler’s policies led to World War 2 and are policies we are seeing again, and the reason we are seeing them again is because the underlying causes that make such policies happen were never treated or solved; namely, capitalism and its contradictions. It would be a mistake to think that because fascism was defeated once before means we can never see it again, or can never see a similar repeat of history.

Contrast the German armament buildup with recent Labour comments — comments that will eventually become policy if Labour gets its way. The new defense budget, Starmer claims, comes after “the world has been reshaped [emphasis mine] by Russian aggression in Ukraine.” They claim conflicts overseas are “undermining security and prosperity at home” (how? They don’t explain). The new budget is expected to “support” high-skilled jobs and apprenticeships across the UK. That this money will mostly end up in the pockets of these so-called defense companies that are dropping bombs on Palestinian children is an afterthought.

And this is just the first phase of armament. Labour expects to increase the spending to 3% of GDP already, and I predict they will announce more increases afterwards.

Which war is the UK preparing for? Are they going to bomb their disabled and poor? Who is out there invading the UK, when the UK has been the one invading most countries in its history?

Countries invaded by the UK in history

The plan seems pretty clear-cut: work until you die making weapons that kill children so that an unelected clown can make money for himself and his friends, and in the process “save” capitalism — saving it for his capitalist friends, of course. And if you die under these policies, Labour will say it’s your own fault. After all, they’re the party of work.

Meanwhile, far-right stooges are participating in riots directed against immigrants that land them in prison while the string-pullers like Farage are safe in their villa compounds laughing at the naivety of their supporters and making deals with the same business owners Labour is. Ideology doesn’t prevent you from becoming disabled after an unfortunate illness. It doesn’t make your children immune to hunger and not needing school lunches either.

What will happen once all immigrants, all disabled are killed off in a mass-social murder in the UK? Well, what happened after Nazi Germany opened its concentration camps for Jews and other “undesirables”? As we saw, wages dropped, labor rights stopped existing, and the German worker became little more than fodder for the war machine, making weapons or being sent to the front to die for it.

We will not escape this fate if we continue down this path.

the UK has a history of uprisings — with its most progressive ones being perhaps the Cromwell era and the 1926 General Strike. If governments are intent on making life more difficult and outright hostile for the people, perhaps they should remember this past. And, if they don’t intend to remember, it must only be our civic duty to make them remember.

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