Once upon a time a device was invented that allowed ordinary people to communicate with each other, across the world and to say and do whatever they wanted to do, whenever they wanted to do so.  This was wonderful and many people began to share experiences to compare lives.  Pictures were exchange of cats and jokes were told,  and in the middle of this magical lovely communication some of the people started learn about each other and together they began to question the role of governments and people in power across the world.

This really upset some of the governments who worried about how this invention was allowing people to talk and organise in ways beyond control, they didn’t mind the cat pictures too much, but they needed to find a way to justify blocking this communication. They thought really hard about how they could achieve this and eventually started to imagine ways in which it could be achieved.

Perhaps if they could get people to believe they need to be scared of each other so they wouldn’t notice what was really going on around them, they wouldn’t want to communicate with each other, that could be a reason for restricting the communication levels and for the governments to start spying on what such people are saying and doing.

Then someone had the idea that what was needed was an enemy,  someone that people would be scared of and not want to talk to.  The governments decided they could create an enemy.  It would need to be someone that would be realistically easy to identify, perhaps they would dress differently to the the ‘norm’, and they decided who that could be.  There was a problem,  no one from that chosen enemy had any real issues against the government or any of the people in the countries where these governments had chosen to make them an enemy. In fact the rest of the people also hadn’t an issue with the chosen group, and they were living pretty much side by side and doing ok.

The governments then decided it would help their cause to start a war with the chosen enemy in their own country, to bomb and kill people and to do this in the name of keeping everyone else safe. Over time people would begin to trust the governments and to believe what they read in the media, and begin to think that they needed to be afraid of each other and that they could not trust people who looked, dressed or worshipped differently to them.  Then they might stop all this communication and organising and leave the governments in control and with all the power.

But  people were still communicating with each other and finding that not everyone did believe the governments and some people were actually saying there were other things that were much more important, things, like poverty and freedom and health.  These people started to act to change things, they challenged the governments and came together.  The governments were upset, their plan wasn’t working, they  needed to keep this enemy constantly in the public eye, to keep everyone scared. The war hadn’t worked out too well, some of the people who should be scared were even saying it shouldn’t have happened that way, and they were still organising and communicating with each other in ways you as the government couldn’t control.

Maybe then the the governments had to think of another way to remind people to be scared of each other.  In fact some of the chosen enemy began to be fed up with being treated as the enemy and decided to start a war of their own.

So glad this is only a fairy tale, it could have been really nasty in real life.