RogerBW's Blog

I can't help noticing an obvious historical parallel which I haven't heard people talking about.

The traditional strategy of the revolutionary communist movement was (and may still be if there's any of it left):

• we commit some outrage
• the authorities clamp down
• this makes life nastier for the proletariat, who become more inclined to join us and start the revolution

And I can't help but notice a similarity to what's currently being done by "Islamic extremists":

• we commit some outrage
• the tabloids scream about Evil Muslims
• politicians pander to them and try to restrict Evil Muslims
• this makes life nastier for all muslims, who are less likely to be able to get anywhere with their lives, and are therefore more ready to do something frightful themselves

The way to counter this is very simple: don't fall for the paranoid hate-thy-neighbour destruction of society that the tabloids are pushing and at least one of the major parties is actively encouraging.

And the more you say "this is a uniquely terrible thing" and have one-minute silences and so on, the more shocking the next one will be, and there will be a next one.

I'm old enough to remember the IRA bombings in England. We didn't have official silences, we didn't panic, we didn't phone all our friends to say "oh no are you all right", we just said "some bad people have done a bad thing" just as we did about bank robberies. A bunch of men stabbing people in a market isn't terrorism, it's street crime. You don't need a copy of everything everybody does on-line to catch people doing that; you need policemen. Ideally you need a police structure that isn't an intimidating presence to everyone who isn't white. Step one: stop importing policemen and policing techniques from the USA. They are worse at it than we are and have nothing to teach us except how to be an occupying army in your own country.

In Birmingham last weekend there were bag searches on the way in to the NEC. That is, if you didn't walk in just behind someone else with a bag, your bag might get searched. For values of "searched" equal to "open the main body of the bag, look at what's on top". I could do a better bag search than that, and I've never even been trained in it; it was pure theatre, meant to make people feel Protected. And theatre on the cheap at that; the poor buggers doing the searches weren't even being paid overtime, they'd been "invited" to give up their weekends.

Meanwhile over in the election: well, I haven't started believing the promises politicians make. But I can't help notice that party A is promising things that are clearly a terrible idea: "no safe places for bad people on the Internet" is exactly the same as "no privacy for anyone on the Internet". And we've seen "we will stamp out extremists" before (and it hasn't worked over the last fifty years): "extremists" have already been redefined as "anyone who doesn't agree with government policy".

Meanwhile party B is promising things that it obviously won't deliver, but would at least potentially make life better rather than worse if they did happen. Party C is the one that's trying to be a voice of sanity, and is clearly going to do terribly as a result.