UK riots: the role of government psyops in managing public sentiment about immigration
Matthew B. Crawford
Aug 05, 2024
Yesterday I found myself in a bar that had Olympics track and field coverage on the TV. I watched for a while, and had to ask myself why I no longer take much interest in the Olympics. I think it is because staging a competition between nations feels a bit fraudulent when the very idea of the nation is anathema to those who do the staging. Ideologically, the ideal outcome would be if the Refugee Team swept all events, thereby demonstrating that “ refugees are an enrichment to the society,” as the official line has it.
“Protesters hold placards during a 'Enough is Enough' demonstration called by far-right [sic] activists in Aldershot” (via Mathrubhuti, an Indian news site).
Meanwhile, across the Channel, the English and Irish are rioting on behalf of a contrary sentiment. A son of Rwandan immigrants (did his parents come to the UK to flee machete violence?) went on a stabbing spree against little girls in Southport, and protestors are taking this as emblematic of mass migration. The attack was not accompanied by any terrorist manifesto, but nonetheless it is being “interpreted through the prism of race and ancestry. It wasn’t simply regarded as a horrible crime against particular individuals in a particular place, but instead as an attack on the white English community as a whole,” as Ralph Leonard writes. To not interpret such episodes in this way requires Western populations to do ongoing emotional work on themselves, an effort of political asceticism to deny themselves the natural tendency to “tribalism”. Love of one’s own is highly suspect among us, and this self-denial can shade into an “ethnomasochism” that is peculiar to the West. But people seem to be tiring of the effort.
Since it is germane to the Olympics, to the UK riots, and to the issue of immigration that will be central in the upcoming US election, I am removing the paywall from my 2022 post “Love of one’s own,” which I am especially proud of. In it, I try to arrive at a deep political anthropology of ethnomasochism, and also to articulate the positive, affective case for nationalism.
Love of one's own
Matthew B. Crawford
·
December 27, 2022
Watching the World Cup this month, with all of its national passions on display, I was reminded of a very good book on nationalism. In Imagined Communities (1983), the Marxist political anthropologist Benedict Anderson writes,
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One is not supposed to notice the downsides of mass immigration. In fact, such noticing has to be actively suppressed, and the present civil disorder in Britain reveals a breakdown of the UK government’s longstanding program to psychologically manage its own peoples’ response to demographic upheaval, ethnic conflict and violence.
As it happens, it was at the 2012 Olympics that these techniques were first put in place, in anticipation of a possible terrorist attack. The summer before, there had been riots across the UK that badly spooked the government, and Western leaders were watching the Arab Spring with a view to both the hazards and the opportunities for population control presented by social media. By 2019, the publication Middle East Eye was able to report that the British Home Office prepares for terrorist incidents “by pre-planning social media campaigns which are designed to appear to be a spontaneous public response to attacks.” The point, of course, is to have candlelit vigils, flowers and impromptu expressions of mutual love between “communities”, rather than riots. This story is worth telling, as it parallels the US government’s re-purposing of information warfare techniques, developed in the War in Terror, for managing internal political dissent.
A protester is detained by police in Nottingham, England, Saturday as the U.K. erupts in a weekend of violence.
Police dogs attack a man during an anti-immigration protest in Rotherham, Britain (via Hindustan Times)
In the UK,
Hashtags are carefully tested before attacks happen, Instagram images selected, and “impromptu” street posters are printed.
In operations that contingency planners term “controlled spontaneity”, politicians’ statements, vigils and inter-faith events are also negotiated and planned in readiness for any terrorist attack.
…
The campaigns have been deployed during every UK terrorist incident in recent years, including the London Bridge attack in June 2017 and the Finsbury Park mosque attack that took place two weeks later.
Within hours of an incident, campaigns are swiftly organised, with I “heart” posters designed and distributed according to the location of the attack. Plans are also drawn up for people to hand out flowers at the scene of the crime, in apparently unprompted gestures of love and support.
The purpose of the operations, according to a number of people involved in their creation who spoke to MEE, is to shape public responses, encouraging individuals to focus on empathy for the victims and a sense of unity with strangers, rather than reacting with violence and anger.
The Home Office took inspiration from the outpouring of public emotion following the death of Princess Diana in 1997, when the power of mimetic contagion impressed anyone paying attention. The Princess was, of course, a symbol of the nation and therefore a natural object of love and affiliation. But could a similar response be engineered on behalf of the Other, if the need should arise?
“The point I noticed change was the [2012] Olympics,” said one veteran contingency planner in the UK. “The management of the… emergency planning work behind the Olympics became the social control that we would fall back on if we had any terrorist attack, or if we had any disruption. It’s: 'This is the hashtag we go to'. And we’ve never come back from those days.
“This job has changed significantly from planning for organic, people responses to tragedy, to being told: ‘We would like the people to do that, how do you get them there?’”
“A lot of the public’s responses are spontaneous, of course. But a lot are shaped. The [British] government doesn’t want spontaneity: it wants controlled spontaneity.”
According to MEE’s reporting, such controlled spontaneity was deployed after British and American aid workers were beheaded by Islamic State militants in 2014, and again after the London Bridge attacks of June 2017, in which eight people were murdered and almost 50 injured. The day after the London Bridge attack, a team of men arrived at the scene of the murders in an unmarked van.
They were admitted behind the police cordon, before plastering walls with posters bearing images of London and hashtags that were already circulating on Twitter, including #TurnToLove, #ForLondon and #LoveWillWin.
This practice, known in the UK as fly-posting, is a minor criminal offence, but police allowed the members of the fly-posting team behind their cordon and took no action. The men doing this work declined to tell journalists who they were, or where they were from.
When the cordon was eventually lifted and the public were able to return to the scene of the attacks, they found themselves surrounded by apparently impromptu signs of public defiance and unity.
The weekend after the attack,
a group of Muslims arrived at the bridge and handed out thousands of red roses. One of the organisers described it as “a symbolic gesture of love” for people affected by the attack. What the event’s organiser did not say is that she worked in law enforcement at the Home Office.
One emergency planner who spoke with MEE frankly said that her operations serve as “an anesthetic for the community.” The hope seems to be that the anesthetic will serve also as a soporific, politically.
The soporific is wearing off, to judge from the eruption of unplanned spontaneity in response to the Southport stabbings, as Aris Roussinos suggests in Unherd. (It is from his article that I learned of the MEE report). In Southport,
There are strong parallels with the ongoing disorder in Ireland, which is an explicit reaction to mass migration: last year’s Dublin riots, sparked by the attempted murder of schoolchildren by an Algerian migrant, were in some ways a foreshadowing for the current mass disturbances in Britain.
The UK establishment portrays the current riots as the work of the right-wing political hooligan Tommy Robinson and his network of footballers, but as Roussinos says, Robinson and his lads are merely piggybacking opportunistically on a revolt against mass immigration that has become widespread and is scrambling long-established political divides.
Shocked by the jolt to their worldview, British liberals, for whom the depoliticisation of the political choice of mass migration is a central moral cause, have also blamed Nigel Farage, the media, the Conservative Party, the Labour Party and Vladimir Putin for the rioting, rather than the explicitly articulated motivations of the rioters themselves.
The British formula has been to grant generous political rights to new arrivals while “dampening interethnic conflict by simply refusing to talk about the issue at all, and placing social sanctions on those who do.” At present, there are calls by at least one UK government advisor to impose Covid-style controls on the population in response to the immigration protests.
That would fit the mood of today’s internationalism.
All this unrest comes in the wake of the Olympic games’ opening ceremony, in which Da Vinci’s Last Supper was repurposed as a grotesquerie of sexual unfortunates, expressing hatred of the normal and healthy disguised as defiant self-love. That is what it means to “queer” this or “queer” that (in the sense made popular by Judith Butler); it is an instinct to attack all that is settled; anything that makes feel people at home in the world. Any sense of a common culture or owned space.
In 2024, the Olympics feel like a “survival” (as the anthropologists would say) that has been turned to the purposes of what right-wingers like to call GloboHomo, that confluence of corporate-state liberationism and replacism. As Machiavelli said, a wise founder-prince will keep up the old forms, emptied of content, to make his “new modes and orders” go down more easily. As my friend Ethan put it to me, the Olympics now serve as “a remnant vector of legitimation to be exploited until it no longer means anything to anyone, just one more instance of the strip-mining of our material and symbolic order for the benefit of whatever higher interests profit, however ephemerally, from the operation.”
I believe some intuition like this, and not just the immediate issue of immigration, lies behind the rage of the Brits. It is shared by some sizable portion of other Western populations. The intuition seems more or less sound to me. It is not easy to see how the current political order can accommodate it or neutralize it.
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