Over on the post about the extremely dodgy Abedi family,the family of extremists two of whom were behind the bombing of Manchester Arena in 2017, we have been having a bit of a discussion about why the State is so reluctant to be upfront with the populace about Islamic extremism. I take the view that at least part of the problem is political correctness and the infiltration of Government departments and the civil service by Islamic organisations, who want to shut down discussion about Islam. This is coupled with a fear that the Establishment holds of what the average Briton might do should the government be honest with everyone about Islam and its links to crime, exploitation and of course terrorism. I posed the possibility that the Establishment was panicked and seriously unnerved by the support that Enoch Powell got from the working classes following his Rivers of Blood speech and that successive governments have been worried that the people would panic and go and do horrible and stupid things. I feel that I should add at this point that I do not agree with how Powell’s comments have been applied to the issue of race as I believe that culture is more of a factor for conflict than is race.
Because of this cultural and political memory then there might be a worry by those in government, an unfounded one I believe, that to be honest about Britain’s Islam problems might spark pogroms against innocent Muslims. Others in the discussion take the view that what the Government is worried about is violence coming from some Muslims if the State started to be honest about Islam.
At the heart of this is a possible concern by those in authority that people might panic and assault or harm innocent Muslims if for example the Home Secretary said ‘look, most Muslims are OK but there are parts of the ideology of Islam that motivate some Muslims to carry out terror attacks’. I pointed out that I don’t believe that there would be such a panic as we’ve ample evidence that despite massive provocations in the form of terror attacks by radical Muslims, there has never been the sort of backlash of the sort that we saw in World War One against loyal Britons of German descent.
Even after some of the most atrocious terror atrocities that Britain has suffered, any backlash suffered by innocent Muslims has been remarkably small. Yes there have been the occasional and easy to condemn incident of hijab pulling or bad words in the street, but nothing that would indicate the presence of panicking mobs going after whatever Muslim they can find in order to harm them. This lack of, for the want of a better word, arseholes, is testament to the decency of the British people no matter what our religion or race. I’ve even seen this essential decency at a Tommy Robinson demonstration against the majority Muslim rape gangs. I saw a Muslim woman in hijab walk unmolested and unimpeded and without any snide remarks being made to her when she crossed from one side of Whitehall in London to the other. I thought that this action or rather inaction by a crowd that was extremely angry about the rape gangs showed that even in a highly charged atmosphere as an anti rape gang demo, the people there could still make a distinction between an individual Muslim person and those parts of the ideology of Islam that make sex slavery somewhat permissible.
Since the 19th century governments have been extremely worried about starting panics off among the population. It’s why former President Trump was much more restrained than maybe he could and should have been when speaking during the early days of Coronavirus and why the Chinese authorities forbade healthcare workers to be out and about in full PPE. In both these cases there was a fear that a panic among the populace would be caused which would spread like wildfire and become uncontrollable.
But how true is this fear of panic? Does it have any grounds in reality? Tanner Greer writing in an excellent and well researched article over at Palladium Magazine believes that the fear of panic is misplaced and governments might be worrying unduly about panic among the citizenry.
A fear of panic also, according to Tanner Greer, played a major part in why the Chinese government did not level with the international community with regards Covid. They didn’t want to do anything that would panic their own people and this may well have helped Covid spread more widely before measures were taken to stop it.
Mr Greer said:
Even as China’s top health official warned the Chinese health system to prepare for the “most severe challenge since SARS in 2003” and ordered the Chinese CDC to declare the highest emergency level possible, public-facing officials were still reporting that the likelihood of sustained transmission between humans was low.
The Chinese continually stalled WHO teams trying to gather information on the pandemic; it was not until the last week of January that Chinese health officials told the WHO the reason for their stonewalling. These officials conceded to the WHO team that they required help “communicating this to the public, without causing panic.” The WHO was sensitive to Beijing’s concerns and delayed its declaration of a global health emergency for several days. “You’ve got to remember this was a novel virus,” one member of a WHO delegation then tasked with the China response would say. “You don’t want to push the panic button until you’ve got reasonable confidence in your diagnosis.”
Maybe if the Chinese government were not so worried about their own citizens panicking over Covid then other governments might have been better prepared and could have embarked on policies of transmission reduction earlier therefore saving many lives. It’s a sobering thought that a misplaced fear of panic among the populace might have cost lives which goes against the received wisdom that in order to not lose lives panic must be avoided.
Another good example of how a misplaced sense of fear of panic can drive poor decisions comes Mr Greer said from World War II. It was generally assumed he said that the bombing of towns and cities would scare the population so much that a panic would set in which would then cause the country being bombed to lose the war. It’s also an assumption that led Sir Arthur ‘Bomber’ Harris to believe that area bombing of German cities would demoralise and panic the Germans to such an extent that it would bring about an early victory against the Nazis. However that’s not what happened, according to Mr Greer’s research.
Mr Greer went on to explain that much of the fear of panic had it’s roots in Gustave Le Bon’s 1895 book The Crowd: A Study of the Popular Mind. This book claimed that when men are in groups they forget their civilisation and behave like beasts out of fear. Panic, the author claimed caused a ‘contagion of the mind’. A reliance on Le Bon’s studies fed into future attitudes to crowds and panic by government but the assumption that panic was dangerous and should be avoided started to break down when studies were done of the effects of the Blitz on London. There was little of the expected bestial panic to be found.
Mr Greer added:
The first man to question the myth of panic was Charles Fritz. As an observer for the United States Army Air Corps during the Blitz, Fritz watched how the English responded to the bombing of London. He discovered that the air theorists drawing on Le Bon were wrong: in the face of death, the British public had not been reduced to hysteria. When Fritz was pulled into the United States Strategic Bombing Survey—a commission created to assess the failures and success of American bombing campaigns in Germany and Japan—a few years later, he came to a similar conclusion. Fire-bombing may have had important economic effects on the enemy war machine, but it did not result in mass panic. The survey’s field research suggested the opposite: many bombed cities had higher morale than those spared attack.
In other words the panic that those in authority thought would be unleashed and either lose or win the war for the Allies, didn’t occur as expected. Maybe the RAF and US bomb crews might have been better used on attacking German and Japanese industrial sites rather than cities? I’m not going to heap any moral criticism on Sir Arthur Harris for his area bombing campaign, although others have done, as he was really being led by the psychological assumptions of his time. He had been led to believe that area bombing would demoralise and panic the Germans but it plainly did not.
Mr Greer then went on to explain how Fritz’s study into the effects of wartime bombing campaigns was a major influence on how sociologists saw disasters and the reaction to disasters. Time and time again, Mr Greer said, when there have been floods, earthquakes, hurricanes and terrorist attacks, the response of the ordinary person, on the whole, has been to become more altruistic. Rather than to panic and run away from danger, a lot of people run towards it in order to rescue others.
All this is not to say that panic and indeed dangerous panic does not exist. There are ample examples of cases where fire or the perception of a fire in crowded buildings has caused panic that has ended up with people being crushed to death by a crowd. A good example of this is the panic that killed 76 people at The Italian Hall venue in Michigan in 1913. Someone falsely claimed that there was a fire during a Christmas event for striking miners and their families. People rushed to what they thought was the only available exit and people were crushed to death trying to get out. Panic can be dangerous but there seem to be more examples of ordinary people becoming more altruistic and calm in disaster situations than there are examples of people dangerously panicking. In any event, we should not compare apples with oranges. A fire or a presumed fire in a crowded building is different from an earthquake, a hurricane, a flood, a terrorist attack or even an WWII bombing campaign. Enclosed spaces coupled with the justifiable fear of fire are in my view more likely to induce panic than other events. Fire kills and fire kills quickly which is something that plays on people’s minds and why I when visiting unfamiliar venues, want to know where the fire doors and fire exits are.
Mr Greer then continued in his article about explaining the phenomenon of panic and the fear of panic to discuss the difference between the behaviour of ordinary people and the elites in a society. Mr Greer said that
If any aspect of an unfolding disaster is marked by panic, disaster sociologists Caron Chess and Lee Clarke observe, it is the behavior of elites. Catastrophe presents a leadership class with a terrible contradiction. On the one hand, the perception that leadership is not equal to the unfolding calamity erodes the legitimacy of any ruling class. Leaders understand that Heaven’s Mandate rests on their effective prevention of and response to crisis. On the other hand, the chaos inherent to disaster inevitably reduces leadership’s ability to control—or even stay aware of—the events by which they will be judged.
Further, the high morale and solidarity that citizens exhibit during a disaster dissolve the individualist outlook that elites have long learned to control and maintain. The seemingly positive and prosocial solidarity response of the population is itself a threat to the mechanisms of elite power in our society. Just as disasters empower normal citizens on the ground, who have no choice but to take fate into their own hands, they leave elites feeling distant and helpless.
This is a very interesting observation and viewpoint. Mr Greer points out that as Chess and Clarke wrote, when there is this ‘elite panic’ the response is sometimes not what is needed. He said that: “a fearful distrust of the populace that prompts leaders to restrict information, over-concentrate resources, and use coercive methods to reassert authority in the face of temporary breakdowns in public order. This style of response poses an active danger to disaster survivors and, ironically, creates the very resistance to authority that leaders fear most.”
He added that this ends up with really bad outcomes when it comes to epidemics and pandemics and uses the example of the 1918 influenza pandemic to show how a failure by governments, public health bodies, the media and others to level with the population, made a bad situation far worse than it could have been. By attempting to quell any potential panic by restricting information the people did not take the arrival of influenza into the USA seriously enough and the disease then ran rampant through a population that had not been adequately warned about in order that they could take precautions against it. Those in authority failed to trust the people with accurate information it’s quite possible that this misguided action contributed to the massive number of deaths caused by the 1918 flu. Five million people have died because of the Covid Pandemic, more than the number that died in either the Hong Kong or Asian Flu or SARS Cov1 or MERS ones. I can’t help wondering if this number would have been lower had more information had come out earlier and more trust had been had in the people?
It’s quite possible that those in authority feared panic over disease which would then spread the disease further but what can cause disturbances to policies of controlling or minimising diseases are bad decisions by those in charge. Mr Greer gives the example of the appallingly bad management by Britain of a plague outbreak in India in the late 19th and early 20th century. The British government in India fixated on stamping out the plague and in doing so carried out policies that offended and riled up the Hindu population. These policies such as sending male medical staff into homes where a lone woman was resident, sanitation campaigns that wantonly destroyed the property of Indians and coercive policies that separated families, sparked a massive resistance that resulted in 63 separate plague riots. The way that the British managed this plague outbreak was quite plainly not one of our finest hours.
The Plague riots of India were not the only instances of bad policies causing problems that either exacerbated the disease or which caused public disorder. There have been, with very few exceptions centred around Germany and the low countries during the Black Death, not that many examples, from the Plague of Justinian onwards of diseases causing widespread social breakdown, violence, chaos and persecution. Mr Greer attributes this widespread societal compassion in the face of disease to the widespread view at the time that plagues were an act of God and nothing could be done about them. He points out that it was only in the 19th century when public health became a thing and only with regards to Bubonic Plague, Smallpox and Cholera did we see widespread social disorder over a disease and as he says this disorder may well be connected to badly thought out, badly planned and badly executed public health mitigations against the disease in question. I do wonder as well if we would not be plagued by the anti vax types and the increasingly militant freeman on the land lunatics who are invading hospitals and schools and harassing journalists at home, dishing out bullshit and laughably unenforcible ‘legal documents. Maybe if governments had had a policy of giving out more early and accurate information about Covid as well having more trust in the people that they govern, then it’s quite possible that less people would have died from Covid and there would be less people flocking to take note of and take seriously the words of lunatics and charlatans such as David Icke?
With regards to disease, if we live in societies, which we mostly do, that don’t treat every disaster or disease as an act of God, which Mr Greer states was a major factor in why medieval societies didn’t implode because of the plague, then we can see that many of the problems, such as the Indian plague riots for example, have resulted from disease mitigation being badly planned and implemented.
So what does a potted history of plagues and the response to plagues have to do with Islamic extremism and the response to it? I believe that deep down those in authority, whether elected to Parliament, appointed to the House of Lords or who are in charge of the Civil Service, do not trust the people of Britain. They see the British people as not people they work with but a mob to be feared. They are worried that the British people are a toxic sea of bigotry all too willing to rise up and do harm to innocent people.
They have a fear, an unfounded one in my opinion, that if they are honest about the many problems that Islam has and the incompatibilities that some forms of Islam have with Western society, then they will unleash hell upon innocent Muslims. Because of that fear, politicians will not speak publicly about obvious social problems such as the Islamic Rape Gangs until they leave office nor will they speak about Islamic radicalisation. The political classes know that if they speak out of turn about Islam the their careers will be diminished and so carry on with sticking plaster policies like PREVENT, mouthing obvious lies such as ‘Islam is a religion of peace’ and failing to utter obvious truths for example stating that individual Muslims are fine peaceful and upstanding people but that Islam the ideology is not all sweetness and light. I’ve met hundreds of absolutely fine and decent Muslims over the years but knowing what I know about Islamic theology, I believe that they are decent not because of Islam, but in spite of it.
The problem with this fear by the political classes that the people of Britain will take any criticism of Islam as a permission to carry out pogroms, is that it is plainly not true. No matter what various Islamic grievance mongers may whine about when it comes to negative reporting about Islam in the media, criticism of Islam does not automatically result in violence or persecution. Just as being honest about a disease and trusting the people to act in their own best interests with regards to mitigation gives a better result than coercive and badly planned public health policies, so being honest or even critical about Islam may well be better than coercing people to shut up about Islam.
As I stated before there has been ample evidence to show that the British people are far too sensible to go mad when it comes to Islam. We’ve had two decades where Islamic terrorism and Islamic extremism has been as much of a constant in Western societies as a disease would be in earlier societies. Britain alone has been the target of many mass casualty Islamic terror attacks with Manchester, 7/7, Tunisia, London Bridge One and others being the most notable, and numerous other low casualty incidents. Yet we’ve hardly seen any serious retribution being aimed at innocent Muslims. Sure there’s been a lot of anger about these attacks, along with anger at the individual Islamic radicals and anger at the Government failing to keep us safe from these attacks and for creating the political and social climate that feeds Islamic extremism.
But it’s what we have not seen that is really important. We have not seen, as we saw in World War One, anything similar to the pogroms against loyal British people of German heritage. We’ve not seen retribution against innocent Muslims in the form of mosque and business burning on a large scale following yet another terror attack. We have not seen gangs of men armed with pitchforks and burning torches hunting for Muslims on the street. Of course we’ve had demonstrations against Islamic extremism and protests outside of mosques allegedly linked to terror or extremism and occasional acts of petty vandalism. But we haven’t had an anti-Muslim Krystalnacht or anything similar and we should be thankful that this sort of thing has not happened.
But why hasn’t it happened? As a person who hates mobs and who believes that ‘King Mob’ makes for a terrible and abusive leader, I’m extremely surprised and I should say pleased, that we have not had a more kinetic reaction to some truly awful provocations by Islamic extremists.
My opinion, based on long study of what has been going on with regards Islamic extremism and the reaction to it, is that the British are a bit more sensible than the governing classes give us credit for. We know that there is a universe of difference between nice Mr Mohammed who runs the local sweetshop or Nurse Begum or Abdul our co-worker and the sort of Muslim who dons a sweaty and explosive backpack and gets on a London Underground train. I for example, despise the ideology of Islam and know that whenever it gains control of a country, Pakistan is a good illustration of this, it creates a complete and utter unfree hell hole. However my dislike of Islam does not extend to individual Muslims. Whilst I would not stand in the way of a peaceful demonstration against a terror supporting mosque, I would also not hesitate to dive into a river to save a drowning Muslim or administer first aid to a Muslim involved in a road traffic accident. There is a massive difference between an ideology and in particular the extremes of an ideology and individuals. Whether I would be so keen to rescue a drowning Anjem Choudhury is a moot point but I probably would if only for the LOL’s at the discomfort for him of having a Jew pull this awful Israel hater and extremist out of the water.
So why have we not seen gangs of thugs targeting innocent Muslims following Islamic terror attacks? I would put this down to the innate decency of the ordinary Briton and the recognition by them that Muslim does not always equal terrorist. What I do not believe has contributed to the happy state of affairs where Joe Mohammed is not made a scapegoat for some stabby or exploding savage’s actions, is government policy. In fact I believe that the government’s policy of not speaking publicly about Islam related problems or whitewashing Islam following a terror attack or playing the ‘don’t look back in anger’ card might be contributing to greater problems down the line.
Just as we saw with the elite panic over disease as Mr Greer so eloquently discusses, we also have an elite panic about Islam. As with disease so it also is with Islam in that we have a political class who is panicking about Islam and also panicking about the reaction of the British people should criticism of Islam be widespread. They fear, like those who based their views on the work of Gustave Le Bon, that we will turn into barbarians if politicians criticise Islam or if the state does not give in to the demands of certain Islamic groups, for yet more and more censorship of criticism of Islam. The Establishment fears and distrusts the people over the issue of Islam and Islamic extremism which is why, even so short a time after the presumed Jihadist murder of Sir David Amess MP, the Islamic aspect of this is getting heavily glossed over by both the Government and the media. Do those in authority really believe that we are so idiotic and stupid as to go on a Somali hunting spree because one Somali heritage savage has allegedly murdered someone? If they do then I must say that they really do not know the British people that well at all.
Saying nothing or telling lies about Islam either following a terror attack or the revelation of some awful crime with Islamic aspects to it is little different in my view from how the New York State Authorities did little to publicise the problem of influenza in 1918 for fear of starting a panic. The problem was in 1918 saying nothing or giving false reassurances ended up being counterproductive.
I wonder whether the government’s policy of diverting attention away from Islamic extremism and onto nothingburger stuff such as anonymity on social media will end up being similarly counterproductive to how the authorities handled the 1918 flu pandemic? It is quite possible that a policy of diverting attention away from Islam and the promulgation of lies such as ‘Islam is a religion of peace’ (it’s not but then there have been times in history when other faiths have not been religions of peace either), might have just as bad an outcome as came from Britain’s mishandling of the Bubonic Plague outbreaks in India in the late 19th and early 20th centuries.
One scenario that could come about due to the lack of honesty about Islam by government is that people start to conflate radical Islam and the government as being one and the same thing. It could spawn an attitude of ‘well their all in it together ain’t they’ which might gain traction and prevail. The government might be perceived, wrongly I need to add, as working with the radical Muslims to destroy British society. Such a misperception will bode ill for trust in government and probably help to spawn far more worse groups and individuals opposed to Islam than which currently exist in our society. I cannot think of any better way of creating extremists than to rob critics of Islam of their voices whether those critics be part of mainstream politics or the more casual politics of the street. I’m familiar with a number of cases of people who have been targeted for oppression and who have sometimes been imprisoned for criticising Islam and few of them have come out of that experience less radical than they went in. In one case a relatively moderate person ended up, because of their experience at the hands of what they perceived as a state that ‘panders to Islam’ joining an anti Islam group that I personally would not touch with a ten foot bargepole.
Lies and misinformation do do damage to society. It’s how quackery sustains itself in the medical field and how extremist groups of both the Left and the Right and those of religious nature grow and thrive. Sadly what we get from the government about Islam is all too often dishonest and does not acknowledge many people’s genuine fears about Islam or even their experience of it. I can understand to a certain extent why the government tries to dial down the pressure following an Islamic terror attack, but this policy is one that might only work for a limited amount of time. We are already seeing a lot of sneering at the ‘don’t look back in anger’ policy and I worry that things might progress beyond sneering. Without honesty whether it be about Islam or anything else, there will be an increasing tendency to see the government as either liars or not working in the interests of the majority of the British people no matter what their race or faith. That’s not a situation that any sensible person would wish to see happen.
To conclude: My message to the UK government would be to trust the people with honest and accurate information, especially following a jihadist attack. Don’t obfuscate, or divert attention away from the main problem or main driver of the attack, tell the truth. Tell the people that it was the attacker’s belief in radical Islam that drove them and that Islam, like many other religions in the past have been, is not a religion of peace.
The government might be very surprised at what a policy of honesty might bring or rather what such a policy might not bring. There is now ample evidence that, despite the growing pile of dead bodies caused by Islamic terror attacks, there seems to be no appetite among Britons for engaging in widespread bestial idiocy towards Muslim individuals. This restraint is both laudable and praiseworthy but a failure to recognise this sensible and laudable restraint on the part of the people by government shows that they fail to trust the people that they govern and administer. We’ve seen what happens when an entity becomes distrusted, we have a really good example of that with the Metropolitan Police. Years of biased and inequitable policing and overt politicisation was bad enough for ruining trust but the murder of Sarah Everard by a serving police officer was the final straw for many with regards their trust in the Met. If such mistrust became the default view by the people of government as a whole then it would be a complete disaster. Already I’m hearing stuff about how people are dealing with problems like extremist eco-terrorists such as Insulate Britain themselves rather than waiting for the useless and bent Met to turn up. Imagine how worse things could be if such a feeling of mistrust was extended to government in its entirety?
Trust is a two way street. We need to trust the government to deal with the undoubted and obvious problems of Islamic extremism as this is plainly a threat to us. However we also should expect the Government to trust the people to behave logically and sensibly when told the truth about Islamic extremism. Personally I believe that there is much to be gained from such honesty. Firstly no longer will people believe that the government is siding in some way with the extremists and it will also be a boon for those who wish to reform Islam in order to make it compatible with the modern world and for those who are apostates from Islam who wish to criticise Islam. Everyone could win from a policy of honesty. The public would win, the government would win and the Islamic reformers and apostates would win. The only losers from such a policy would be the extremists and who in their right mind would want such extremists to win? A policy of honesty would remove the ability of extremists to hide themselves in Muslim communities and also remove their ability to gain access to the management of schemes like PREVENT by exploiting the Establishment’s unwillingness to be honest about the bad aspects of Islam. Just as you don’t effectively tackle killer diseases by mistakenly trying to stop a mythical panic, so also do you not stop religious extremism by not speaking about it.
