What is one meant to say? Rage is too crude, and disbelief illogical. And a young man’s life ebbs away on the street as the police mock him. A dying man pleads for his life, that he has been stabbed and need urgent help, and instead is handcuffed and belittled as his life bled away; ‘I don’t think you have, mate’.
The copper heard a story and refused to reconsider. Had he but put his hand to him in the dark and felt the warm ebbing blood, maybe a bell would be rung. You have to ask what infection of the reason seized him in the moment, and beyond – why the Hampshire Police still stuck to slandering the man they helped to kill. There is something deeper in deathly bureaucratic logic that does this; all while a family mourns.
This should not be a cause for hatred or division. The race and culture of the murderer is irrelevant in this case: there was in his action nothing typical of his community, so put those placards down and protest against the police action. We need the police, but we deserve better police. If it is true, as has been suggested, but of which I have no evidence, that ‘diversity officers’ have terrified the Bobby on the Beat into racial prejudices against White people, that needs to be uprooted. The law must be enforced irrespective of race and prejudging a man by race, whether to disbelieve him or be uncritically believing – that cuts to the heart of law enforcement.
And then there was Belfast. Rage did burn. A shame to see that city in flames again – too many bad memories. The attempted murderer there was like several others we have seen in troubled cities: he was displaced from his culture, alone, isolated. In cities all over the land there are thousands; maybe millions. The peace of society relies on the existence of that society. Those outside social bonds are unrestrained: that is a liberation for some, and terror to others.
What would I be like if cast onto a foreign shore, away from friends, and bundled into an alien culture I cannot understand? I hope I would not be violent. I would though feel panicked, drowning in a place I could not understand. I would beg to come home, if I could not force my hosts to adopt my ways.
It seems cruel to keep young men away from their home culture, orphaned from that bigger society in which they can thrive, and have their natural violent instincts restrained. In a displaced world, there are many displaced young men, with deathly instincts. Do not blame their unwilling neighbours for their fear.
The police in the meantime, must bend their thinking to realities which no society has had to face before. The diversity officers have death on their hands, and need to be sacked, or prosecuted. Once a policeman would listen to a stabbed man on the street, and must do so again, listening not to a favoured voice mechanically but to all around him. Have they the courage to break the conditioning of unreality? Going by what we have seen, I don’t think you have, mate.
See also
- In fear of Jahannam
- Warre Of Every One Against Every One
- The Noble Savage, Caliban, and Hobbes
- Of the Natural Condition of Mankind (Hobbes)
- Quarrel of a dying empire poisoning modernity
- Art in the word
Books
- In The Shadow Of The Sword: The Battle for Global Empire and the End of the Ancient World by Tom Holland
- By Thomas Hobbes:
- By Anthony Burgess:
- The Confessions – St Augustine
- Augustine: Conversions and Confessions by Robin Lane Fox
- By H G Wells:
- By Aldous Huxley:
- By George Orwell:
- By Jordan Peterson:
