Peter Simple was the pen name of Michael Wharton, who wrote a column in the Daily Telegraph for about thirty years starting in the 1970s. Looked at linguistically, Prevent had only given an unusually bold push to what decades ago Peter Simple called the Great Semantic Shift, whereby people’s opinions are moved inexorably to the left by the constantly changing use of the words “left” and “right” by the media and politicians. Yes Minister and The Thick of It were also thought capable of “encouraging far-right sympathies”. George Orwell’s 1984 and Aldous Huxley’s Brave New World were on the list. The government seemed particularly concerned about books that might provoke thought about the nature of the society it was creating. Read a book or watch a DVD like this and Prevent might come knocking on your door to “support” you, meaning to stop you going any further down the path to terrorism. Also listed were Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy and The Dam Busters. On the list were the works of Shakespeare, Chaucer and Milton, which were “warning signs of potential extremism” since people on the far right were known to read them. In February 2023 we learned that it had done just this by giving out a list of books and DVDs that, if found in a person’s possession, might indicate a tendency to far-right extremism. All it needs to do is decide that common products of White culture can exert a radicalising influence and it will be able to identify anyone who partakes of White culture as a right-wing terrorist in the making. Won’t Prevent eventually have to admit that they are largely imaginary? No, because Prevent doesn’t deal with terrorists but with people at risk of becoming terrorists, whom it can easily create. Where does the government expect to find all the right-wing terrorists it refers to? It is one thing to conjure up an image of large numbers of White people holding secret meetings to plan atrocities that never happen or sitting in bedsits up and down the country cooking up murderous plots that rarely come to fruition, but quite another to show that such people actually exist. The web page of its Prevent programme, which “supports people who are at risk of becoming involved with terrorism through radicalisation”, mentions extreme right-wing terrorism first and Islamist terrorism only second when identifying common types of terrorism. It now speaks not only of far-right extremism but of far-right extremist terrorism, which, despite the lack of cases, it seems to regard as more prevalent or serious than Muslim terrorism. Since then, the government has extended its pretence. But the pretence of racial equality had to be maintained, and what White counterparts of Muslim terrorists could there be but far-right extremists? Given the Muslim and White shares of the population, this meant that a random Muslim was more than 500 times likelier to be a politically motivated killer than was a random White person. Everyone knew that terrorists were almost invariably Muslims, who had killed about ninety people in Britain in recent decades whereas only one or possibly two people had been killed by far-right extremists. I assumed that this was done out of political correctness. When Theresa May was Britain’s prime minister and Amber Rudd was her home secretary, one of them, I can’t remember which, identified not only terrorism but also far-right extremism as a threat to society, suggesting that the two were equally to be feared.
0 Comments
Leave a Reply. |