‘Sense Offenders’ and Sudan

IIn the 2002 sci-fi film Equilibrium, agents of the state hunt down ‘sense offenders,’ dissidents who refuse government-mandated drugs designed to eliminate all human feeling. In the setting’s city-state of Libria, when a citizen is murdered, the deep state dispatches undercover officers to lay flowers at the scene in a bid to create a funereal atmosphere and muffle any temptation to anger.

As atrocities become commonplace, the government writes and issues false statements in the name of the victim’s families in a bid to effect behavioural change on its long-suffering populace. They seek to play down, or even deny, the most heinous crimes, because in Libria “there is no crime.”

Except, apart from the free prescriptions, these are actually all UK government policies. According to the Daily Mail, a government propaganda unit known as the Research, Information and Communications Unit has made us all unwitting subjects in a long-running psychological operation. 

The RICU, in addition to deploying fake mourners and issuing fake statements, reportedly plays down the impact of Pakistani grooming gangs and plants pro-Muslim stories in the media to smooth over atrocities that might otherwise upset public feeling. 

It builds on a 2019 report from the Middle East Eye which shone a light on the government’s “controlled spontaneity” terror response protocol. Britain’s National Risk Unit is apparently charged with formulating and deploying “recovery programmes” in response to terrorist attacks on British soil.

The interfaith vigils which invariably follow an Islamic terror attack are apparently pre-planned, even down to the signs that appear at them. Social media campaigns, politicians’ statements, and media articles are all sitting on a shelf, ready to be picked off whenever a bomb explodes or a knife man cuts his way through central London. 

Reportedly, the RICU remains active, has briefed the liaison team dealing with the family of Henry Nowak, and is right now working to control the narrative in Belfast after Stephen Ogilvie lost an eye in a horrific stabbing attack.

Standing accused of attempted murder and of threatening to kill an NHS radiologist is Hadi Alodid, an Arabic-speaking Sudanese national who was admitted to Britain in 2023 and awarded refugee status on a fast-track scheme.

It is now routine for the courts to hear that third-world migrants who found safe harbour in Britain have condemned the British to the most sickening abuse. But while the myriad of horror stories which now dominate the news come as quickly as they go, this one feels different.

The image of a man, kneeling atop Stephen Ogilvie, brandishing a knife, has captured the public imagination. In a single frame it says what a thousand words could not and crystallises in the mind the feeling that our unwelcome guests are now dominating us.

We have accepted some of the worst people, from some of the worst parts of the world. The Foreign Office advises against all travel to Sudan. That’s not because they suffer from severe acid rain or active volcanoes, but because of the Sudanese people. As many as 400,000 may have been killed in three years of civil war, a conflict that abides by no rules of war and more closely resembles a national head-chopping contest. 

To many of these people, our high-trust society is a thing to be exploited. In their world, the man with the Kalashnikov is king, and our police officers don’t even have big beating sticks. So by taking up a knife, or forming a gang, the better to rape white women, they can wield power over their benefactors, and as one case after another shows, they are unabashed in so doing.

To Westerners, these crimes are all the more pernicious because they violate our customs—the respect between guest and host is instilled in our foundational text, The Iliad, and reiterated through our canon, in The Aeneid, Macbeth, and the Bible. But for too many who have found refuge on these isles, claiming with various degrees of credulity to be fleeing for their lives, our hospitality is a thing to be abused.

If anything should give rise to anger in this world, it would be that those people whom we have taken in, housed, fed, and treated should turn on us, their hosts, and cut them down, rob them or rape them. But for the government, the real criminals are the ‘sense offenders,’ those people who, on hearing of the latest appalling death, experience human feeling,and give rise to anger.

But the truth is we have good reason to be angry, not only about the obscene crimes but about the fact that many of these people are here in the first place. Alodid entered Britain via one of the longest, most implausible routes imaginable. Libya, the Mediterranean, Europe, Ireland, and finally Northern Ireland.

In recent years, more than 200,000 people have landed on British beaches claiming to be refugees and have been moved into HMOs, hotels, and council houses. Over the past decade, more than 10 million people have moved here legally, largely from Africa and South Asia.

And yet successive governments are not only relaxed about this level of migration, but they are actively subsidising it, leading to the absurd spectacle of an Arabic-speaking Sudanese man being put up at taxpayers’ expense in the midst of a latent religious sectarian conflict.

In the 1960s, the Roman lead poisoning theory took off. It claimed that the fall of the Roman Empire was a consequence of lead pipes, pots, and pans, which drove elite decision-makers mad, leading to ruin. But while lead cookware didn’t do the Romans much good, it wasn’t responsible for the collapse of their civilisation.

Nonetheless, it’s a bit of pop history with an enduring legacy—it remains popular to find recourse in the accusation of general madness to explain complex social phenomena and state failure. During the COVID lockdowns, we heard all about “mass formation psychosis”; through peak woke ,we suffered through Piers Morgan telling us, “The world has gone mad!”

Historians might look back at how it came to be that we paid for foreigners to rape and kill us and, by way of shorthand, develop something like a “European microplastic poisoning theory” and tell of how the urban middle class, who both disproportionately drink from plastic bottles and hold jobs in the civil service, lost their minds, and then the country.

But Home Office officials, decision-makers, and legislators are not mad, stupid, or suffering from exposure to 5G. Their decisions arise from an ideological view of human nature, which would more befit a Cold War-era Romanian prison camp than the British Civil Service. 

They regard with derision the idea that there could be a taxonomy of the human species, whether its origins lie in nature or in nurture. To their mind, humans are essentially fungible units of capital who can be transplanted to one place or another—for them, human differences are socially contrived and ultimately meaningless.

If officials even account for the existence of difference at all, that difference is not expected to survive contact with British soil. As Britishness is about diversity, meaning the negation of British identity, there can be no one more British than a man from Sudan. This all makes sense to clever people in Whitehall.

But successful multicultural societies know that the truth is just the opposite. Singapore is a success story because it acknowledges that its heterogeneous society warrants careful and calculated management of its various constituent groups.

For Lee Kuan Yew, diversity was a problem to be managed, not a strength to be celebrated. He admitted Singapore would be better if it were “100 per cent Chinese”, because where there are different groups, there are fault lines, factions and division. And when multicultural societies fail, the consequences are often bloody, as in the former Yugoslavia or Northern Ireland.

In the 1600s, the British government sponsored the movement of English and Scottish Protestants from the mainland to Ulster. Around 30,000 Protestants took up the offer and made new homes in what is now Northern Ireland. Some 400 years later, the island of Ireland is cleaved in two, and Northern Ireland is riven down the middle between Catholic and Protestant.

It might seem, then, that only a madman would take a place where two groups of white English-speaking Christians can’t get on and dump Arabic speakers from Sudan, Muslims from Somalia, and tribesmen from The Congo there. Instead of understanding Northern Irish identity as prefigured, the government apparently regards it as a multicult melting pot. 

Whether you go by Jared Diamond or Jared Taylor, you need some understanding of what it is that accounts for human difference. It’s the total rejection of human difference on ideological and moral grounds that creates the conditions in which the third world is rehoused in Canary Wharf and undercover state agents run around spraying hashtags around London to convince you this is not just normal, but good.

Fortunately, an increasing number of people now realise they are living in their very own Truman Show. Few seriously believe that the first thoughts of Stephen Ogilvie’s family were for migrants working in the hospitality sector—the charade is being stretched to its breaking point. A recent poll found more Britons than not believe the police take a two-tier approach, and more than 90 per cent want the kirpan banned or restricted. 

The state is losing control over the narrative, and increasingly the public are choosing to believe the evidence of their own eyes rather than the Potemkin multicultural wonderland that appears on the TV. But dropping the act will only be the first step, after coming to terms with the problem, it must be dealt with. 

We don’t need to house foreign offenders in our prisons or grant them early release because they overcrowd them. Or put up all and sundry who wash up with their NGO talking points and an eye on a Premier Inn in Newcastle. Or operate a national gaslighting operation, complete with deep-state agents posing as mourners.

We just need to accept that people like Hadi Alodid, whatever the court rules, have no business in Britain.