Some readers might have been following the online furore over the British rape gang story in the last several days. Like many, it was an episode I had vaguely heard about but didn’t know the details. So, I was as shocked as anybody to read some of the paragraphs from the official report that have been circulating. The crimes themselves are heinous enough, but what’s even harder to swallow is the fact that multiple British authorities in multiple different locations systematically covered it all up. This was not a one-off bit of corruption; it was nation-wide.
The systematic corruption part of it reminded me strongly of corona. Obviously, all western nations went insane at that time, but the thing that I remember about Britain was that a number of high-profile establishment figures got caught breaking their own covid rules. The most ludicrous one was Neil Ferguson, whose bullshit models had been used to justify the lockdowns. He got caught visiting the home of his mistress, a married woman no less.
Meanwhile, Boris Johnson and many of his subordinates were caught multiple times breaking the covid rules. That even got its own name. It was called PartyGate, because Johnson’s office threw numerous boozy parties right in the middle of lockdown.
The correlation between the rape gangs and corona was strengthened in my mind, however, by the fact that a number of well-known public figures have come out defending the actions of the authorities in covering-up the rapes. Their justification? The story needed to be kept quiet because it could inflame racial tensions. Suddenly, it occurred to me that both the rape gangs and covid followed a deeper pattern. This is not a bug but a feature of the way we are governed.
Let’s start with the less controversial question of vaccines, of which covid became one example since the vaccines were supposed to save us.
Imagine you’re an important person in the establishment. You might be a government minister or high-ranking bureaucrat. News comes to you of deaths or severe injury resulting from people after taking a vaccine. You look into the numbers and realise it’s happening to only a small percentage of people, but the numbers are still quite high because everybody gets vaccines. Let’s just pretend the number of injured is 10,000.
Within the utilitarian mindset that still predominates in our culture, you weigh up that 10,000 against the supposedly millions of lives saved by vaccines, and you conclude that the damage is worth it. But you can’t admit in public that 10,000 people were injured because that could scare people into not taking vaccines. Therefore, you ensure that the vaccine injury figures never make it into the news. This is not that hard to do because you can destroy any reporter who goes near the story by labelling them an “anti-vaxxer” who is risking the lives of millions by reducing confidence in vaccines.
In our society, the majority of people would be perfectly okay with this approach. The lie and the cover-up are necessary for the “greater good”. What’s more, the “greater good” has been conclusively shown by science. Case closed.
But the “greater good” was exactly the argument made by those seeking to justify the rape gang coverup. The lie and coverup were needed in this case in order to protect public order and defend multiculturalism.
Here is the big difference between the rape gang story and the vaccine one. Advocates for multiculturalism can argue that it brings benefits. But those benefits are not based in science, they are just a moral view of what kind of society is good. What’s more, unlike vaccines, nobody’s life is being saved by multiculturalism. The utilitarian “greater good” argument simply doesn’t work in this case, especially because thousands of girls were gang raped, and what possible benefit can outweigh that?
Setting aside the actual issues, however, we can see that the pattern is the same in both cases. It is, in fact, the same pattern that is followed in questions around climate change, renewable energy, and seemingly every other issue of politics these days.
The pattern is that the establishment, which includes the politicians, the compliant media, and even the justice system, all coordinate themselves based on the party line. The party line may be nominally justified by science as in the case of vaccines and climate change, or it may just be a straightforward political position as in the case of multiculturalism. What the establishment will do in every case is to defend the party line.
But defending the party line no longer means rigorously debating the issues in public. Instead, it means stifling any and all information that contradicts the party line. What the rape gang story proves, however, is that the establishment now simply tows the party line no matter what. Towing the party line has become an end in itself.
In the case of vaccines, even people like me who think the whole thing is BS can still see why a majority of the public would believe it and why the politicians would want to pander to them. That was also true during covid. Although even during covid, it seemed obvious to me that the thing dragged on well beyond the point at which it could have been wrapped up. It seemed to me that something far more malicious was going on.
The rape gang scandal proves that this is true. It simply doesn’t get much more malicious than covering up for the organised, systematic, and repeated gang rape of some of the most vulnerable members of society. The details of what happened are so bad that it’s genuinely hard to think of worse crimes. Nevertheless, the establishment did what it always does now: it towed the party line.
All of that is bad enough, but what we have seen the last few days is that there are public figures, people with reputations to uphold, who willingly justify the cover-up. Not only that, they came out calling anybody talking about the issue racists, in just the way that any sceptics were called anti-vaxxers and covid deniers during the corona debacle.
The fact that these people are willing to do that over systematic gang rape tells you that the system is fundamentally broken. Clearly, it is now run by people who are 100% ideologues, lacking even the most basic of human empathy. Their only mission in life is to protect their precious belief system, even if it means allowing and facilitating horrific crimes.
Which reminds me of the quip that was made during covid: if you want to know what it was like to live in Nazi Germany, now you know.
It turns out that covid was not a one-off random event. That’s another thing that the rape gang story proves. We are now governed by ideological zombies. Best keep a cricket bat beside the bed.
Simon: “The crimes themselves are heinous enough, but what’s even harder to swallow is the fact that multiple British authorities in multiple different locations systematically covered it all up. This was not a one-off bit of corruption; it was nation-wide.”
Amen. I think it has to do with British class-ism. As far as I can tell, working-class whites are now the only people in Britain who can be openly denigrated without consequences for the person doing the denigrating (“gammon,” remember?). The “important people” just didn’t particularly care that these girls were being raped.
Simon: “In our society, the majority of people would be perfectly okay with this approach. The lie and the cover-up are necessary for the “greater good”. What’s more, the “greater good” has been conclusively shown by science. Case closed.”
Indeed, but with a twist. Most people will approve, as long as they are not being lied to about something that they themselves actually care about. Or perhaps more precisely: as long as the lies don’t support a course of action that the person in question is definitely opposed to. Well, by now, the “important people” (perhaps I should say “sophisticated people”) have lied about so many things that a very large minority (and perhaps even a majority) of people now realize that they’ve been lied to about something that’s actually quite important to them. How many Boomers who were perfectly fine with a little “white” lie here and there to keep Simon and Irena locked up during a once-in-a-century pandemic are horrified, horrified I say, about the industrial-scale child-rape that the important people chose to do nothing about? They may still despise Simon and Irena as much as before, but maybe, just maybe, they despise the people who did nothing about child rape even more than that? Well. If I were an “important” and “sophisticated” person, I might be a tad bit worried about my legitimacy. Heh.
Irena – yes, and one of those “important people” is now the prime minister. Not just that, he’s the leader of the Labour Party which, last time I checked, was supposed to be the party of the common folk.
I think you’re right about people accepting the lies as long as it doesn’t affect them. It’s the same way the mainstream media works. They rely on the fact that most of us don’t have personal knowledge of the stories they tell. When we do have personal knowledge, we can see that the reporting is complete bullshit. But as long as that happens infrequently, we forgive and forget.
Thanks for identifying the common background archetypal theme to this, the absurd horror of it was beginning to break my brain.
I guess as well as being an “anti-vaxer”, alongside my long held but no longer permitted anti-war and anti-terror(ism) views, I’m now an unacceptable anti-rapist. WTF!
On the flip side I just noticed in writing this out I suddenly have greater sympathy for endless (mis)characterisation of the pro-life brigade.
Daniel – that would be the blackest of black humour: anti-rape protestors being thrown in British prisons. Of course, they’d have to release the actual rapists first to make space available. It wouldn’t even be surprising if it happened.
It’s funny you used the Shaun of the Dead reference because the film this story reminded me of was Hot Fuzz, where the old council of the town is happy to resort to murder to maintain the town’s reputation, to keep up appearances for the benefit of ‘the Greater Good’.
It seems to me one of the worst qualities of the UK is the completely out in the open Class derision, and its not surprising no one in authority cared about this because it mostly affected lower class people. The class distinction is so bad in the UK that you can easily observe actual physiological differences between them. One of the few things about Aus to be grateful for is despite the fact that class certainly exists here, we will go out of way to pretend it doesn’t, from top to bottom.
Skip – I wonder if the current state of affairs isn’t predicated on the breakdown of the class system. Whatever else you want to say about the old aristocracy, they weren’t exactly lenient on crime.
In the old world, everybody knew their place and there wasn’t any way for somebody to steal your place. In a nominal meritocracy, you need some other way apart from class to determine who is in and out. It seems to me that ideology has filled the void. That’s why everybody is tripping over themselves to be seen to follow the party line. The correlations with Nazi Germany, communist Russia/China are valid in this respect.
Hi Simon,
Hmm, looks like the story is now slowly leaking out into the official news: Elon Musk calls for Reform UK leader Nigel Farage to quit. Three paragraphs near the end of the article suggest that this in fact happened, and was officially investigated. The numbers are staggering, and I’m honestly surprised that there had not been on the street reprisals.
When I was a teenager, a person within my social circle had a reputation for being a liar. At the time it was treated as a harmless prank. Yeah, well, eventually the person got into trouble with the cops, and appears to have misrepresented himself as me. Can’t say I was impressed, and it was a devil of a problem to unravel – which I didn’t hesitate to do. I also distanced myself from that social group.
And essentially that is the problem with liars: if you tolerate that, you’ll end up being next in the firing line.
Such acts undermine credibility in the most fundamental of ways.
Cheers
Chris
Chris – most people only change their behaviour based on cues from the environment. Our society has decided that it’s terribly old-fashioned to provide such cues, and then we wonder why bad behaviour continues unabated.
@Simon
Say, how much longer is “Sir” Keir going to remain the British PM? Probably not all that much longer.
It occurs to me that the UK (or some parts of it, anyway, starting with England) may very well end up becoming part of the United States. And why ever not?! We’re in the middle of a geopolitical tectonic shift. Ukraine is the most obvious “earthquake” at the moment, Taiwan may turn out to be next, and what the hell is going on with the Koreas?! As for the Anglosphere: Mr. Trump has been making noises to the effect of annexing Canada and parts of Denmark, but given the sorry state of the UK, maybe he could consider starting there. Heck, they (the British, that is) might just petition to join the Union of their own free will! And maybe Sir Keir can get a job at Columbia University, like Mrs. Nuland and Mrs. Clinton. And Boris can go work for, err, CNN perhaps?
Irena – sounds crazy and yet it’s not beyond the realms of possibility. Still, I don’t see why the US would need to formalise annexation. It has pretty much already has annexed those countries by controlling finance and trade. Meanwhile, Musk’s actions in recent weeks show that American social media companies are now more powerful than local media. So, yeah, Boris and Keir can get jobs at CNN. Who cares? Nobody watches them anymore.
Simon: “most people only change their behaviour based on cues from the environment”
Related to this, something very obvious suddenly occurred to me: when you don’t punish a certain kind of behavior (that’s attractive to at least some humans), you eventually get more of that behavior. For instance, if you don’t punish shoplifting, you get more shoplifting (hello, California). If you don’t punish child rape, you get more child rape (hello, UK). And I believe it was Heather Mac Donald on the Glenn Show (years ago) who made the point that after the Arab Spring, murder rate in Egypt went up, and not for any religious/ideological reasons, but simply because law enforcement became less effective, and so people were more likely to kill each other for the usual petty human reasons. In other words, if you don’t punish murder, you get more murder.
So, sure, what happened in the UK has to do with Pakistani clannishness and attitudes toward women and non-Muslims. But in addition to that, child rape was unwittingly cultivated by the British state. They weren’t punishing it, and so it blossomed (duh). And there was also no clannishness on the part of the English to compensate (via vigilante justice) for the failures of law enforcement. Well. What they do now about the whole sorry mess remains to be seen.
Irena – yep, and if you have a political system where the elites never ever get punished for being complete morons, you end up with the current state of western politics.
Here’s a classic case in point. Where I live in the state of Victoria, we had the longest covid lockdown in the world. The man who was chief health officer during that time, and therefore responsible for the whole disaster, has been put in charge of a project releasing genetically modified mosquitos into the wild. https://www.csiro.au/en/news/All/News/2024/December/CSIRO-Oxitec-to-tackle-disease-spreading-mosquitoes-threatening-mainland-Australia
Note that this basically the same pattern as with Starmer. It was on his watch that the rape gangs occurred, and now he’s the prime minister. The entire system is based on failing upwards. Governed by zombies.
Sorry to pick nits, but one “toes the line” not “tows the line” – think darts.
Daniel – thanks for the correction.
In other news, it looks like California is governed by zombies too.
Is this a new gang rape scandal or are we talking about Rotherham? It sounds the same.
Secretface – it’s the old story but was reignited when some fairly well-known American commentator brought it up on twitter recently and then Elon Musk amplified it.
Thanks for the clarification. Everything, including the reaction of the government, sounded the same as in the Rotherham case. That´s why I am asking.
It is interesting that Elon Musk seems to go into open opposition to the zombie establishment. I already here the cries of disillusioned conservatives that he is controlled opposition. We will see.
Musk is a weird guy. I don’t pretend to understand what he’s trying to do. But at this point, anything that changes the status quo is probably a good thing.
Musk´s strategy, if he has one, is very unclear. At the moment, he just seems to troll the establishment as often as possible. Maybe he is just seeing the Republican Party under Trump as the better solution for his businesses as the Democrats seem to be very anti-business.
Possibly. Although, that wouldn’t explain his interest in British and European politics. Maybe it could be really simple and he’s just doing what he thinks is right.
That could be the case. Maybe it is hard to imagine for me as there are few (or
no) honest people involved in politics. So, I automatically distrust him and think that he has a hidden agenda.