A history lesson

Subject: A history lesson.

It's baffling to think that in amongst the brickbats which are being thrown around between ourselves and the Europeans today lies the indubitably fact that we, the people are once more mere pawns in a game which only the political class play.
Pre 1939 the average German, Frenchman, Italian, Greek, Spanish man or woman went about their business with much the same endeavor as they do today that of putting food on the table and relaxing at the end of the day in a way which represented their culture and the weather. Prick one and they bleed, they were as peas in a pod much the same except that they had been brought to a boil by political mischief. 

We have names for the cults that were at play, Communist, Fascist, Nationalist, and the turmoil in Spain, a civil war with Spaniards tearing into each other with the ferocity of wild animals was only the precursor to the bloodbath of the Second World War. 
How can people with so much in common be led by a few to apparently hate each other, not even hate but disagree with, not even that but perhaps don't feel quite comfortable with, the mind boggles at the childishness of it all. What is it in the psych of men and women which leads them to pick sides and hurl abuse at each other. How are we so easily led, so easily influenced that we become like animals tearing at our boundaries like pit bulls striving to show how special we are, how strong and resolute.
As the Brexit Ferraro comes into its last stages and the politicos run for cover disclaiming their own part in it, the shambles which has occurred since 2016  are left for the people to shake their collective heads at as they pick up the pieces of what for some will be lives destroyed.
It won't be on the scale of 1945, it won't count corpses totaling 40 million 40.000.000, each an individual tragedy repeatedly mirrored in the tragedy at home, the loss of a son or daughter, father or mother, husband or wife, breadwinner or homemaker, the whole fabric of what we call society, destroyed by the ideological proclivity of a few.
Now as then, although fat less cataclysmic we wait to see what our masters will decide. The known structures torn down for the unknown, security for insecurity, freedoms trashed for the confine of a national boarder to promote our identity. It seems surreal and yet it is the condition of man ever since he gathered to socialise along the banks of the Euphrates