At a high-security facility in an unidentified city, heavily armed police are interrogating what appears to be an anti-fascist protestor, dressed in red and black. They take fingerprints, record his confession on camera and add his details to a database. In the control tower, cutting-edge surveillance tech oversees and records a high-walled perimeter. Officers armed with assault rifles look out. Across town, their black-clad colleagues in the riot squad are driving an armored van, sirens blaring, to a scene of unrest. They jump out, visors down, rifles loaded, shields ready. Another division has set up roadblocks at key strategic points, dogs straining at their leashes, spikes laid out across the road.

It could almost be a scene from “24” or a Hollywood action movie, but one thing doesn’t sit quite right. The cast is made up of Playmobil toys, aimed at children between four and ten years old. Today, we are all more closely tracked and monitored than ever before, and kids are no exception. As AI and internet-enabled “smart” devices expand their reach into the nursery — complete with networked teddy bears and Barbies with inbuilt video cameras — a new generation of playthings has emerged that reflects the very grown-up themes of law and order, surveillance and defense policy.

Taken together, these toys can be seen to normalize the coercive powers of both technology and the state, preparing young minds for a life of near constant tracking, monitoring and control by both government agencies and commercial entities.

As with so many things, in order to fully understand where we are now, it is necessary to look to the past. The intrusion of authoritarianism and violence on the ostensibly innocent world of childhood play is not a new phenomenon. Military figurines, for example, have been found in ancient Egyptian tombs and toys have long provided telling markers of contemporary norms. As the historian Michael Paris has observed, this has been visible in Britain since the Crimean War of 1853-56, when patriotic passions reached fevered extremes.