This story emerged a few days ago (28^th Feb) and quickly found its way down to the local mainstream media outlets in the UK (eg, Liverpool, Birmingham, Newcastle and even Chorley). I thought it worth a post here too.

I first came across the article via Alan Watt's RBN radio show dated 29^th Feb. If you'd prefer to hear him comment on the article you can click here to download the audio but I'm going to flesh it out a little more here because I think it's an interesting story with a strong message. (Several actually).

The article as published by AP starts:

QUOTE

New police anti-extremist strategy

Every part of Britain will be mapped for its potential to produce violent Muslim extremists under a new strategy drawn up by senior police officers, it has emerged. At its counter-terrorism conference in Brighton this week, the Association of Chief Police Officers (Acpo) approved a blueprint for how to prevent al Qaida recruiting fresh supporters.

As Alan Watt points out, this statement in itself reveals a sharp contrast between the way things are in the world of public policy making and the way things seem to be. In 1994, Griffiths & Verdun-Jones observed that in Canada, while there had been an expansion of the role of the police in recent times, the activities of police forces were still being discussed in terms of three major categories:

1) Crime control - responding to and investigating crimes and patrolling the streets to prevent offenses from occurring

2) Order maintenance - preventing and controlling behaviour that disturbs the public peace, including quieting loud parties, settling domestic disputes and intervening in conflicts that arise between citizens

3) Service - the provision of a wide range of services to the community, often as a consequence of the 24-hour availability of the police, including assisting in the search for missing persons and acting as an information/referral agency

Contrast that with what we've just been told by ACPO above. The police are creating blueprints to fight al Qaida recruitment; which sounds reasonable enough until you remember that the police are not supposed to make policies and announce them like this. You'd normally expect a press release saying that ACPO intended to recommend such a thing to the government, leading to a govt. policy announcement further down the line, but today it's "every part of Britain will be mapped...", rather than "every part of Britain WOULD be mapped under proposals blah blah" as it would have been played until even quite recently.

It's one of those tricky ones isn't it? Not quite proof of anything concrete, but a worrying step onto a very slipperly slope nonetheless.

The article continues:

QUOTE

The 40-page document aims to stop extremist ideas gaining hold in schools, colleges, prisons and over the internet. It includes advice for parents on how to stop their children searching for jihadist websites.

Do you have "extremist" thoughts? I do. I dream about a world where people don't kill each other and I'm told that's quite extreme and "unrealistic". Apparently it's not good for business because peace and love just doesn't have the same market value as pain and war. If your child turns out to be the next Marx, Rousseau, Kropotkin, Hobbes or John Locke will they be hauled off to jail for expressing an idea?

The phrase "...stop their children searching for jihadist websites" is interesting too. As a parent, I'd want my child to develop a well-balanced view of the world and I'd want to take an active part in that. Of course, some parents don't feel that way and I guess in those cases the preventative advice has some relevance. My problem with it all though is that I keep sensing an as yet unspoken stress on the word "searching". If my child wished to view a jihadist website and I felt that they had enough background knowledge to evaluate it objectively then I'm going to be mad as hell if he or she gets in trouble for typing the wrong word into Google. It's bad enough that most of our young get processed by the state education sector, let alone being monitored for thought crimes at home too. I might be stretching the point to make another, but I believe we will see developments along these lines – the primary purpose being to condition the minds of the young into a passive and apparently natural acceptance of the Orwellian Total Information Network. In fact, it's already here. Remember this story from early 2007 which revealed that around 3500 of British schools use some form of biometric ID, thus shaping the minds of approximately 750,000 of our most impressionable? Same thing. Concentration on the minds of the young, just like the Soviets and the Nazis did.

Anyway, there's more – and it gets worse!

QUOTE

"The internet is a potential area where a tendency towards violent extremism can be exploited," it reads. "Parents and carers have a need for advice on how to control access for their children and to understand what defines the legal-potentially illegal divide."

Won't you just take a look at that? Until now, I'd always thought that there was a certain objective distinction between legal and illegal, but suddenly, there's a new divide – a new area to be concerned about: the "potentially illegal". Oh dear. If I'm standing in my kitchen with a bread knife, am I committing a potentially illegal act? What about if I stand by my front window, or walk out into my garden? I'm not sure I know how to behave anymore. Should I drive my car? I know it goes faster than the 30mph limit on my street. It has the potential to be used to break the law; kill someone even. If I walk into a shopping mall with cigarettes in my pocket I potentially might light one up. I don't know. Life just became very complex. How does one explain "potentially illegal" to a child?

QUOTE

The strategy also outlines details of an anti-extremist agenda to be included at every level of state-maintained education from primary school to university by 2008-09.

It speaks of a "pressing need" to develop relationships between the police and the education sector "at every level" with regard to preventing violent extremism.

Look at the use of language here. "TO BE included at EVERY level" and "Pressing NEED". And the schedule – er, right now. This is the dictat from your police service and you've now been told! This is no way to make the law folks.

Notice also that we've reverted to the concept of "violent extremism" again, whereas the last paragraph was more about suppressing free speech and thought. This trick exploits the primacy-recency effect known to psychologists. I can't think of a name to attach to the idea (although Solomon Asch did some work in this area IIRC). Crudely, if I want to sell you some bad news I mix it in with some good stuff, ie bit of good news, slip in the bad and then revert to happy talk. The listener tends to gravitate towards and remember best the first and the last bits of information (primacy-recency). It's used against us often. (Bullet points about a product in an ad usually follow this principle – check it out!).

QUOTE

"The strategy will be rooted in "neighbourhood profiling" to establish what is normal and what is unusual behaviour."

If you've read this far then I think that one can be left to speak for itself. It's nothing new and yet at the same time, to see it laid bare like that in a press release like that is unusual and rather troubling.

The article ends with:

QUOTE

An unnamed senior source told The Guardian newspaper that it was important to map areas of the country for their tendency to produce extremists. The source said: "You have to assess where the need is greatest. Just relying on the census data for the number of Muslims in an area is not detailed or sophisticated enough."

The document has not yet been published.

Same as for the last section really, but in particular, note the re-introduction of the word Muslim right at the end to allow non-Muslims to disassociate themselves and go back to sleep. "No it's alright dear, they weren't referring to us...Zzzz"

To finish, allow me to repeat the famous Martin Niemoller quote one more time:

In Germany, they came first for the Communists, And I didn't speak up because I wasn't a Communist;
And then they came for the trade unionists, And I didn't speak up because I wasn't a trade unionist;
And then they came for the Jews, And I didn't speak up because I wasn't a Jew;
And then . . . they came for me . . . And by that time there was no one left to speak up."

Bibliography not already linked above:

C. Griffiths and S. Verdun-Jones (1994). "Canadian criminal justice". Harcourt, Toronto.

Ah.
So this lasts for 40 years, or just 20? I imagine 2012 olympics will be like the Nazi Berlin Olympics.

Hi Far.

For what it's worth I think it'll probably continue like this until we are fully "evolved" (by the fake gods rather than the real one) into a single giant homogenous slave race. A testament to pharmacological and electronic ingenuity and no longer able to even conceive of ourselves as anything other than what we were made to be. My guess is that it'll still take several generations to finish the job, but they are making excellent progress so far.

My view of the 2012 Olympics is similarly depressing, but I think could be the point at which we might begin to lose sight of any clear distinction between man, other animals and machines altogether. If they can add fish genes to tomatoes and a paraplegic guy can send email by thinking about it, then it's only a matter of time.

Put the two together and I think the Olympics becomes a ceremonial relic somewhere even further down the road. A symbol of former times representing a troubled age of competition and nationhood: both of which will seem alien and obsolete to the "people" of the day.

Who can say really I guess, but I fear the outlook's gloomy, whatever happens from here.

I think this is certainly a worrying development towards the implementation of thought-crime legislation. The similarity to what happened in Nazi Germany can't be ignored either - where the Jews & the Gypsies were ostracised, dehumanised, and then subjected to appalling abuses in the name of eugenics, and then political dissenters rounded up, too.

The forceful wording is deeply worrying.

"Those who do not learn from history are doomed to repeat it"