In the thirteenth century, an organization called the Order of Teutonic Knights broke away from the other German regional groups and decided to create its own new state. The site the knights chose was Prusailand, so they invaded and exterminated or assimilated the Prusai people, making the entire population Teutonic. In classical and fantasy art, however, you won’t find any images of knights wiping out Indigenous people. What you will find instead are armored heroes bravely slaughtering beasts, dragons, and mythical monsters. These creatures came to represent the tribal cultures of the world: the romantic European image of the knight slaying the dragon is actually a hidden reference to the systematic genocide of what were called pagan peoples. This European tradition of propaganda in which victims of genocide are portrayed as dangerous animals was later used to great effect against the Jews and even our own “mob” here in Australia, who up until half a century ago were often considered animals rather than human citizens. By 1281, the Order of Teutonic Knights had all but wiped out the native Prusai and created the new state of Prussia. The interesting thing is that these “white knights” had been heavily involved with the Crusades, in which the Roman Church had been fighting a Christian war for centuries to take over Jerusalem and other holy places. They failed so badly that instead of bringing Europe to the Middle East, they brought the Middle East back to Europe in the form of a system of government that they had seen there and liked. This system was in its final stages of decline during the Crusades, with most of the Middle Eastern forests and farming land stripped bare and turned into desert by the ravages of the world’s first civilizations. In the following centuries, the survivors had begun returning to more sustainable ways of life—tribalism, subsistence agriculture, and pastoralism (a way of life that would later be turned upside down again by twentieth-century Anglo oil interests). The failed model borrowed by the Teutonic Knights wasn’t invented in the Middle East. It had its origins in an unsuccessful Asian experiment of large states with total government authority and rampant expansion and production. This was completely alien in Europe, which was used to a system of petty warlords and oligarchs struggling chaotically over dwindling natural resources, while local peasants in villages persisted much as they had since the beginning of the Iron Age, periodically disrupted by the activities of the powerful. The exotic new system introduced by the Teutonic Knights was all about absolute power concentrated into one highly organized central government that would control the daily lives of all. Remember too that these new Prussians had just spent a thousand years trying to replicate the system of control that they had experienced under the Romans, who had originally conquered Germania. (Britain and the US later mastered Rome’s imperial method: a system of establishing Indigenous elites to keep conquered peoples in check, promoting lateral violence and competition to make subjugated peoples self-policing vassals.) Prussia even adopted the Roman symbol of the eagle as a logo, which was later picked up by the United States and the Nazis. Rome introduced mesmerizing dreams of power and control that have not been easy to shake, even in modern history. By the eighteenth century, Prussia, under Frederick the Great, had become one of the greatest powers in Europe, despite its small size and lack of natural resources. This was due to the fact that it had a larger permanent military force than anyone else. No other country could force so many of its citizens into the army full-time. The Prussian system was one of total control, which successfully managed to coerce the population into complete submission to the will of the government. Creating a massive standing army was not a problem for them. (Over a century later, the US military would adopt their formula for maintaining permanent standing armies on the advice of a Prussian military consultant named Friedrich Wilhelm von Steuben.) Prussia didn’t stop there. The more rights it stripped from Prussian citizens, the more powerful it became. Frederick the Great’s nephew continued this process, depriving every adult of all rights and privileges. Then in 1806 the Prussians suffered a shattering military defeat at the hands of Napoleon. After their beaten soldiers fled from certain death, the Prussians decided to turn their attention to the children, realizing they had to start young if they wanted to instill the kind of obedience that would override the fear of death itself. The government decided that if it could force people to remain children for a few extra years, then it could retard social, emotional, and intellectual development and control them more easily. This was the point in history when “adolescence” was invented—a method of slowing the transition from childhood to adulthood, so that it would take years rather than, for example, the months it takes in Indigenous rites of passage. This delayed transition, intended to create a permanent state of childlike compliance in adults, was developed from farming techniques used to break horses and to domesticate animals. Bear in mind that the original domestication of animals involved the mutation of wild species into an infantilized form with a smaller brain and an inability to adapt or solve problems. To domesticate an animal in this way you must: Separate the young from their parents in the daylight hours. Confine them in an enclosed space with limited stimulation or access to natural habitat. Use rewards and punishments to force them to comply with purposeless tasks. Effectively, the Prussians created a system using the same techniques to manufacture adolescence and thus domesticate their people. The system they invented in the early nineteenth century to administer this change was public education: the radical innovation of universal primary schooling, followed by streaming into trade, professional, and leadership education. It was all arbitrated by a rigorous examination system (on top of the usual considerations of money and class). The vast majority of Prussian students (over 90 percent) attended the Volksschule, where they learned a simple version of history, religion, manners, and obedience and were drilled endlessly in basic literacy and numeracy. Discipline was paramount; boredom was weaponized and deployed to lobotomize the population. This system worked so well that Prussia became one of the most powerful countries in the world at a time when the idea of “nations” (rather than regions, kingdoms, tribes, or city-states) was first being promoted as the dominant form of social organization on the planet. The Prussians began to make plans to spread the institution of schooling as a tool for social control throughout the world, as it facilitated the kind of uniformity and compliance that was needed to make the model of nationhood work. The US could testify to the effectiveness of Prussian education as a tool for domination and power, as American educators had been making pilgrimages to Germany for more than half a century. Excitingly, test schools across America proved that the artificially induced phenomenon of adolescence was achievable outside of Prussia, too. In 1870, Prussia got its revenge on France by annihilating the French military in the Franco-Prussian War and immediately established Germany as a unified nation-state—the dream of the Teutonic Knights finally realized. After that, the Prussian education system (and the new institution of extended childhood) became all the rage around the Western world. It was modified to some extent, probably because the Prussian model seemed a bit weird, even to the power-hungry ultra-rich of Europe—it was so all-encompassing that women were required to register each month with the police when their menstruation started. Prussia was described jokingly as an “army with a country” or a “gigantic penal institution.” Towns and cities were built like prison blocks, gray grids of rigid cubes and plain surfaces. The government worked hard to “cleanse” the society of homeless people, gypsies, Jews, and homosexuals as they expanded and enforced their embryonic doctrine of eugenics. Their motto for education was Arbeit macht frei (Work sets you free), a slogan that the Nazis adopted and later placed above the gates of concentration camps, including Auschwitz, used for Jewish slave labor and extermination. There are many schools in Australia today with a similar motto in Latin: Labor omnia vincit (Work conquers all). Now, as ever, the creation of a workforce to serve the national economy is the openly stated main goal of public education. And, as ever, the inmates of this system are told that their enthusiastic compliance with forced labor will be in their best interests at some future point. Germany’s compulsory education system expressed six outcomes in its original syllabus documents: Obedient soldiers to the army. Obedient workers for mines, factories, and farms. Well-subordinated civil servants. Well-subordinated clerks for industry. Citizens who thought alike on most issues. National uniformity in thought, word, and deed. And it spread like wildfire: to Hungary in 1868, Austria in 1869, Switzerland in 1874, Italy in 1877, Holland in 1878, Belgium in 1879, Britain in 1880, and France in 1882. From there it quickly expanded further to European colonies, including Australia. As we’ve seen, the US had been involved much earlier, with even Benjamin Franklin advocating the Prussian system. In 1913 Woodrow Wilson established the Federal Reserve, copying Germany’s centralized banking system too: this way, the state would control both learning and money, just like Germany did. As the twentieth century wore on, more interesting links emerged between Germany and the US, both drawing on the symbols and dreamings of ancient Rome—because Germany’s old obsession with ancient Rome hadn’t gone away. They called their leader “Kaiser,” German for “Caesar”; they adopted the symbol of Roman fasces, bundles of rods with an ax that once represented Roman state power. The US followed suit. American education documents emerged with those same symbols printed on the covers, and today the fasces are still a prominent symbol of American power, proudly on display in many official ceremonies. The Roman fasces came to represent a whole modern belief system around social control and national domination—that’s where fascism got its name—and a version of the Roman salute was famously adopted by the Nazis. In that period, when Hitler was Time’s Man of the Year in America, the pseudoscience of eugenics that the Nazis so enthusiastically adopted was popular throughout the Western world. It purported to legitimate a decades-old tradition of white supremacy that had earlier informed the nationalist values established during Australian federation and exemplified by the White Australia Policy. Not just in Australia but all around the world, new systems of education, nationalism, finance, corporatism, and social control were informed by fascist ideas and theories from Germany and the United States, encouraging the extermination of Indigenous people and minorities, just like the white knights of yore. Cataclysms followed as new nations that had missed out on the empire-building activities of the age of discovery tried to catch up with their land-rich neighbors. When the smoke cleared, lands and power and blame were redistributed unevenly among the survivors, and a new world emerged with new stories providing a sanitized history of good triumphing over evil. In Italy, for example, it used to be common knowledge but is now all but forgotten that Hitler’s fascist partner in crime, Mussolini, exterminated the Cavernicoli, a cave-dwelling people who were still maintaining a Paleolithic culture. But the structural racism installed through Prussian-style schooling and the eugenics movement would not be discarded, merely re branded.