Help for Heroes: Recycling Charitably Engineered Cannon-fodder

As a 25 years served ex-British Army Sgt Major I want to believe that the Forces charity ‘Help for Heroes‘ is a genuinely grass-roots organic venture to help ex-Servicemen and Servicewomen. However I have my doubts as much of the circumstantial evidence and lead-in timing points toward something far more sinister, as it epitomises the hypnotic-lionising heroic martyrdom that might have mass appeal to young adolescent males and in particular to white working-class males.

Indeed, it’s almost as if swathes of aimless, directionless, poorly educated young men are being ‘self-esteem starved’ by the Tories austerity policies and channeled by ‘patriotic poverty’ to ‘willingly’ feed themselves as ‘volunteers’ soldiers into the war machine and specifically the infantry.

It is the perfect, archetypal model of celebrity prestige presented pride in veterans, which chimes with the population – predominantly the white-working-class, and specifically males which just so happens to ‘coincidentally‘ afford them a new ‘meaning’ and purpose handed to them on a plate, designed to cart them off to their own self-destruction.

Help for Heroes relationship has in the past been described as ‘too cosy with the MoD‘ and has even been alleged to have provided funding for MoD building infrastructure refurbishments! And it seems as if the MoD was so close to the ‘charity’ they have been able to count on actual and projected donations on as part of its own MoD budget funding for veterans.

The ‘charity’ seemed to come out of nowhere in 2007 and has very much from the outset sat in a league of its own. It’s the US military-power equivalent of the British Forces charity world. Yet it just happened to capture the imagination of the general public and of children too like no other had before it.

Perhaps this is where all the previous Forces charities have always ‘failed’ – by not selling their soul to a corporate-financial model and to instead maintain their humble, reflective approach to the memory of the war dead and by keeping a respectable distance from the glorification of war.

Whereas Help for Heroes in the very early days had immediate access to a host of the ‘who’s who’ of the British political and military establishment and prestigious celebrities, to lead the way as the fledgling charity market-tapped into and targeted emotionalised patriotism by catalogue product numbers, via age range and gender targeted demographics and of via course sports – especially football and rugby stadia where the media and MoD have always conventionally recruitment young men.

It’s become a profiteering corporatised-charity beast steeped in patriotic-propaganda purpose that has not only become a thinly-veiled recruitment tool itself, but has also played a key role in seamlessly enabling an era in which the once sombre Poppy has become accepted as a ‘legitimate’ Army recruitment tool and ushered in a new era of yellow-branded ‘military-TV-sport’ emotionalised-empowerment called The Invictus Games. which itself too has been afforded Royal appeal for broadcast across western continents.

But like the manufactured human misery, the belief systems; community, country, flag, military and Monarchy compel us to hand over the most innate ‘belief system’ of all; our children – to become soldiers – to become recycled cannon-fodder.

The increased concentrations of media-manipulated and manufactured ideological-lionisation, sacralisation-idealisation of the military – especially since the Westminster Bridge Attack – with Emergency Services and other yellow-references housed in verbal media-saturation of “ran towards the danger” ; a cyclically reinforced news-narrative which has featured in just about every attack since – almost as if a pre-directed exercise by live-fire soap-script to begin Basic Training for the masses.

All of which appears to have been pre-emptively and of course subliminally inserted into other forms of ’emotionalised-empowerment’, especially ‘community’ TV entertainment, sport and threaded within second and third choice football and rugby strips, as well as in advertising and films that will psychologically and physiologically appeal to the heroic-fantasies of boys, particularly in the eyes of girls.

But then if they lose a limb or two and/or they lose their minds in battle are simply invalided out, or even at the end of their career struggle to adjust back to ‘civilian’ life not understanding that ‘civilian’ life, a ‘civil’ life had already been denied to them in childhood, having been raised in broken homes without male role models to enter the military institution but then struggle without the camaraderie cloak of a institutionalised ‘belonging’ and as such flounder and left to ‘charity’ to pick up the pieces.

Without the camaraderie-cloak of the uniform, overnight they can become as invisible as a male victim/survivor of domestic abuse; and deliberately so, upon which both of whom – the ex-soldier and domestic violence survivor…

…can end up meeting each other invisibly on the homeless streets or in the institutionalised prisons from where many too, will also begin their journey into the military, and where they might actually even meet each other’s sons and brothers – as willing ‘volunteers’ of course.

Almost as if they were sealed within an invisible, patriotic ‘Prison-Military Industrial Complex’ which if it had a design would look something like this;

Like most things that are too good to be true, the success of Help for Heroes certainly seems suspect but what seems certain is they’re helping to ‘create’ heroes to generate more martyrs and in doing so, are helping to create a British patriotic ‘reality’ which is entirely engineered.

This results in even more broken men through a cyclical, largely self-sustaining ‘charity’ model process to Emotionalise > Irrationalise > Moralise > Patriotise > Weaponise > Militarise (trigger) > Mobilise (recycle) entire populations.

As such, they’re not helping anyone except the war machine which simultaneously guilt-shames men into a military uniform by pincer channelling them through a Rampant Sexism reverse-psychology propaganda campaign presented as mass misogyny but is actually normalised mass misandry; the humiliation and even hatred of men as a demographic class simply for being of that class i.e. an acceptable form of divide and rule identity-politics akin to racism, cultural and religious bigotry.

I’d been tracking these gender agenda media narratives since September 2016 however they recently shifted from the subliminal to the overt demonisation and dehumanisation of men; we know this Rampant Sexism construct as #MeToo.

It’s yet another facet global western and specifically successive UK and US Governments deploy in order to recruit ‘volunteers’ and send them to oil-wars for so-called ‘freedom and democracy’, after which, their corporate charity partners use the construct to absolve Government of responsibility for soldiers care by patriotically palming them off to you. Just so they can do It all over again.

Live. Die. Repeat.

Edit-insert: Video recorded on 25th June 2018, on the first anniversary of going to Berlin and warning the German Bundes Polizei & Irish Embassy on 250617, of the inevitable #ToryAnalytica coup d’etat militarisation of Brexit and the arrival of a US/UK-led global fascism; “Being in a minority, even in a minority of one, did not make you mad. There was truth and there was untruth, and if you clung to the truth even against the whole world, you were not mad”. Orwell, ‘1984’.

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‘Fascism, steeped in pathological hypocrisy, superiority entitlement and inveterate victimhood, is the group-characteristic extension of narcissism and is the Machiavellian-patriotic, militarised business model extension of joint Government and corporate engineered crisis-capitalism’. ‘Characteristics Of An Individual Narcissist & A Fascist State’ (© 2017) https://wp.me/p94Aj4-dZ

Gaslighting Gilligan – by Johnny McNeill, a contemporary, dystopian ‘fiction’ about the intrinsic, interconnectedness of personal & political domestic abuse, is free to download from here. It is copyright © but is free to share as a public service.

Twitter: @GasGilligan