I notice that the police are not treating the killings of those children in Southport as a terrorist attack. While the principal suspect has been charged with allegedly producing ricin and allegedly possessing a PDF document called ‘Military Studies in the Jihad Against the Tyrants: the al Qaeda training manual’, we have been told that no terror motive has been established.
The possibility that the perpetratoris a bit wacko is not allowable: it’s the politics that’s to blame
My friend and colleague Douglas Murray dealt, admirably, with the Southport business last week. But speaking more generally, the suspicion many people have that we are being treated as children who cannot be trusted to control ourselves when we are presented with information that may gravely disappoint us seems to be correct – and it has ramifications for the unspoken contract between the people and the government and indeed beyond.
It has long since got past the point where we simply nod wryly when informed that the perpetrator of some atrocity was a ‘Norwegian’ when we have seen the photographs and arrived at the conclusion that he was the least Norwegian-looking chap one could ever imagine. But that of course plays into the hands of those who wish to deny us reality, because if someone is a national of a certain country then that is all there is to it – and any comments to the contrary are ‘racist’. And yet, of course, the people who are lying to us know that they are lying, because there is no sudden investigation on their part into the hitherto latent threat posed to us by these weird, violent, fish-obsessed Scandinavians. They know that to call a perpetrator ‘Norwegian’ is just another example of crowd control and is essentially meaningless.
If he is not Norwegian then he is almost certainly mad. (In fairness he could well be mad and Norwegian.) This is the final redoubt of those who are charged with the task of telling us, officially, what the hell is going on. We very quickly discover that the perpetrator of the latest atrocity against us all was afflicted with mental health issues. There was evidence, we will be told, that he was a loner. That he wrestled with inner demons. That he was not quite right in the head. Crazier, as the Americans put it, than a shithouse rat.
This is at first sight a difficult allegation to refute. Anybody who believes that it is morally decent to go out stabbing people to death simply because they are probably not adherents of the same faith as yourself and that having done so you will be rewarded by the services of 72 virgins – really fit virgins, too, like those chicks in Made in Chelsea except, as I say, virgins – is clearly beyond the scope of the word ‘doolally’. You might argue that all such acts of terrorism are committed by people who, by definition, are insane. In which case the derogation becomes meaningless.
Except that it isn’t – and to understand why we need to turn our attentions to a real Norwegian maniac, Anders Breivik. He murdered 69 members of the Norwegian Labour party’s youth branch at their summer camp on the island of Utoya in 2011, having already killed eight people with a van bomb at a Norwegian governmental office in Oslo. I think it is fair to say that Breivik was ‘far right’ – and this is important.
The first inquiry into the mind of Breivik concluded that he was, indeed, mad as a box of frogs. But in so doing, it aroused the fury of the left and, essentially at their request, a second inquiry was convened which ‘proved’ that Anders Breivik was as sane as you or I. The point here was that the left could insist, therefore, that a right-wing, racist mindset almost necessarily leads to acts of what we would otherwise call psychotic violence. In other words, the political beliefs are the cause of the violence, not the troubled mindset of the perpetrator. In taking this stance the left is able to argue that merely to advance a right-wing point of view is to give succour to people who might very well decide to go out and do a bit of ad-hoc machine gunning.
To a certain degree, this is the view of the authorities in the UK regarding right-wing violence. On the frankly very rare occasions that we see an instance of far-right violence, the possibility that the perpetrator might be a bit wacko is not allowable: it is the politics which caused him (it is nearly always ‘him’) to do something which was obscene in its violence and intent and to assume he is crazy is simply incorrect thinking.
So, too, the ‘far-right’ protestors who took to the streets in this country at the end of July. Having observed the tail end of some of these riots and spoken to a few people linked to the participators, it struck me that they were basically coked-up football hoolies who would cease their rioting as soon as the football season began the following week. That is exactly what happened. But my view was pilloried because I did not give enough agency to their politics: the courts, however, did give agency to their politics and banged them up for rather longer than many people might have expected.
And yet when it comes to Islamist terrorism, the faith itself is always exonerated and so the authorities are left with the necessity of explaining to the public that the perpetrator must, ergo, be a nutter. The same rules do not apply. Indeed liberal western politicians will go further and insist that such acts of jihad are contrary to the tenets of Islam, as if they were Koranic scholars from Lahore polytechnic.
This doublethink breaks the bond between a people and its government. And the consequence is that more and more people begin to believe that there is indeed a conspiracy and that perhaps they should do something about it. The lying begets the violence, then.
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