After The London Bombings What We Can Do - Road to the Middle Class

WHO CAN fail to be shocked by last week’s story of London police pursuing a terror suspect into a subway train and shooting him dead? Eyewitness Mark Whitby was sitting in the train:

“I heard people shouting `get down, get down.’ An Asian guy ran on to the train and I looked at his face. He looked from left to right, but he basically looked like a cornered rabbit - he was absolutely petrified.”
He added: “The man half tripped and was then pushed to the floor by three plain-clothes police officers who were pursuing him.
“One of the police officers was holding a black automatic pistol in his left hand.
“He held it down to him and unloaded five shots into him. I saw it all. He was dead, five shots. I was literally less than five yards away.”

Forget about the friendly British bobby, the BBC’s avuncular PC Dixon and his: “What’s all this then?” Forget jolly British caper movies of the 1950s like The Lavender Hill Mob. All of a sudden the rules have changed.

It is all the more shocking when you consider that, since the Macpherson report in 1999 that acused the Metropolitan Police of institutional racism, policemen in London have had to fill in a form to report every encounter with a minority. But here the policemen hunted down an “Asian” suspect, pushed him to the floor, and killed him. Obviously somebody has changed the rules of engagement. Obviously the policemen that pursued and shot the suspect were no longer worried about accusations of institutional racism.

The rules have changed, and just as well. As of now the Brits are getting serious about the war on terror.

But what about the future? How long can they keep it up against the other enemy in the war against terror, the left-wing “Why do they hate us” crowd? Probably not too long. By the weekend, the Brits had found out they had shot the wrong man.

We know what the doubters and the snipers will do with that.

Mistakes or not, we scribblers must still provide covering fire so the soldiers in the war on terror can to do their job. We can start with an answer to the puling question: “Why do they hate us?” The answer was given half a century ago in Eric Hoffer’s The True Believer, written in the aftermath of World War II.

Hoffer experienced the Nazi movement not as a uniquely malevolent outburst but as a perfectly normal mass movement in the mold of the Exodus of the Jews from Egypt, the various outbursts of Christianity, the explosion of Islam, and the militant mass movements of our own day, Marxism, fascism, Islamicism, and Pentecostal Christianity.

Every mass movement, he insisted, mobilizes its followers for action above all with one powerful force: Hate. It must have a devil, for every “difficulty and failure within the movement is the work of the devil, and every success is a triumph over his evil plotting.” Ideally, the devil is a foreigner, or as we now say, the “other.”

Mass movements are not, as the left tirelessly insists, recruited from the mass of helpless victims. On the contrary, the “abjectly poor… stand in awe of the world around them and are not hospitable to change.” People attracted to a mass movement

must be discontented yet not destitute, and they must have the feeling that by the possession of some potent doctrine, infallible leader or some new technique they have access to a source of irresistible power. They must also have an extravagant conception of the prospects and potentialities of the future.

When Islamicist activist Anjem Choudray crows that “One day the black flag of Islam will be flying over Downing Street,” we can understand what he is saying. He is a leader of a mass movement in its active phase communicating an extravagant hope to his followers. He is doing his job.

The problem for the Islamicists is that the overthrow of the existing order is not just a question of raising the flag of Islam over Downing Street. Instead it is an enormously difficult operation. It can only succeed when the existing order is corrupted and demoralized and lacks the will to organize itself for defense. Or when the “men of words” of the existing order are actively engaged in corrupting and demoralizing it.

The secret weapon of the Islamicists is the left-wing woman of words who does everything in her power to delegitimize and marginalize the existing democratic capitalist order with her poison pen.

For us the task is simple, to fight smart and hard against the women and the men of words whose consuming passion is to defeat the existing global order of world-historical doers and builders. Are we up to the task?

Christopher Chantrill blogs at www.roadtothemiddleclass.com. His Road to the Middle Class is forthcoming.

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