Irresponsible and Right: Pete's recruiting speech

John Dallman
21 November 2010

We're at war with Germany. This is serious stuff. Germany is not being nice to the people they conquer. We aren't at war with the USSR, although they're acting rather friendly towards Germany and are being hostile towards us via espionage and sabotage.

Germany wants to attack the USSR. It?s in "Mein Kampf", the space Hitler wants for hundreds of millions more Germans is only available in Poland, Russia and the Ukraine. He says Communism, and Socialism, and everything related, are German's enemies. He's made the pact to keep his Eastern Front quiet while he fights us. It?s the same trick as he played on Chamberlain at Munich. He'll try to invade again this year, and if he beats us, he'll go for the USSR next. He's broken his promises of peace and friendship with plenty of countries, and he'll do it again. But he'd be a fool to fight Russia at the same time as us.

We can make good use of you, Mr Little. So much so that what you've done can be overlooked, and, in the course of time, forgotten. This is an extraordinary offer, since you're responsible for the deaths of servicemen: think about it carefully.

You'll have noticed we didn't hand you over to the ordinary police as a saboteur, which would have made covering up your actions much harder. To get good work out of you, we need you healthy, and we need you to work with these machines, and that means we'll want you to carry on curing yourself. We'll also want you to teach others how to use them, and assist with experiments. But we do not want you to contact the USSR ever again, or sabotage anything on our side, and if you do, we will find out ? perhaps not immediately, but inevitably. If you take this offer, you have to be completely loyal hereafter.

You may have noticed that the Labour Party are part of the government now, and backing the war in full. If we win the war, their words and deeds will carry more weight. If they win elections, then things will change in something like the ways you want.

Things are changing already. Nobody is fighting this war like the last one: regiments of working men aren't being sent into machine-gun fire by toffs, because everyone knows now that's stupid. This war needs men with brains and skills as well as courage. The training men are getting now ? in aircraft, radio, fixing lorries and tanks ? isn't the kind of training industrial workers got in Marx's day. They have to learn to improvise, to think and to give their utmost. Once you've taught men to do that, they won't stop just because they aren't in the services any more.

The alternative to winning, and making a new world with the men who won, is to lose, and be reduced to slaves in farms and factories. With Nazi bullets ready to hand for anyone who dreams of anything better.