Married to The Mob
Collective hysteria can take many forms. One of the first examples I was ever exposed to was ultimately benign and came in October 1973. I was watching ‘John Craven’s Newsround’ covering the chaos that accompanied The Osmonds as they touched down on UK soil and attempted to tour the country, despite hundreds of screaming teenage girls besieging the outside of every hotel and venue they set foot in. Beatlemania being before my time, I couldn’t understand how a pop group could provoke what seemed to me such inexplicable madness. A BBC series, ‘The Dimbleby Talk-In’, debated the issue and included a representative of the medical profession who described the process of the chain reaction when one girl in an audience of thousands releases her adolescent energy and triggers off a wave of identical responses throughout the hormonal cauldron.
If the reaction of female teens to Donny Osmond baffled me, I was no wiser when the male equivalent was sharing TV airtime – the football hooligan. Young men a dozen strong, thinking and acting as one, following the lead of an instigator in the manner of ducklings trailing behind their mother. Why had they succumbed to collective behaviour, responding to a situation in unison and sacrificing their individuality to a Bovver-Boot chorus line, as though choreographed by a Special Brew-fuelled Busby Berkley? I wasn’t then aware that when people are absorbed into a mob, the mob quickly ceases to be a collection of individuals and becomes almost a sentient being in itself. As I grew up, television transmitted the 1981 Riots, the 1984 Miners’ Strike and the 1990 London Poll Tax Riot; and I got it.
Anyone who lived through the tail-end of the Northern Ireland Troubles will recall the barbaric spectacle of two off-duty British soldiers unwisely gate-crashing an IRA funeral in Belfast, where they were immediately assumed to be Loyalist terrorists by the Republican crowd. This appalling 1988 incident, in which the soldiers’ car was surrounded as the pair were then dragged out by the mob, viciously beaten before being taken to nearby waste-ground and executed, lingers as one of the most graphically gruesome tragedies in the shameful annals of Ulster atrocities.
I couldn’t help but be reminded of it this week when I saw footage of an even more harrowing example of mob mentality on TV. It took place in Afghanistan just five months ago and concerned a 27-year-old woman called Farkhunda Malikzada, an apparently devout Muslim who was studying Islamic law as part of her intention to become a judge. En route to the location of her studies, she stopped off at a shrine outside a mosque in her home corner of Kabul to say her prayers and then encountered the mosque caretaker selling cheap charms bearing verse from the Quran. In an evident demonstration of her devoutness, she remonstrated with him for cashing-in on sacred text, a claim to which he responded by loudly accusing her of being an American spy; when that attracted the attention of others present, he added to it by accusing her of having burned a copy of the Quran.
Within seconds she was surrounded by a crowd of men who utterly believed the unfounded accusation, as though they were primed to want to believe it. No matter how much Farkhunda denied it, they had already decided en masse she was indisputably guilty. It took the blink of an eye for this judgement to be reached; the mob doesn’t take time to consider a situation; it responds with spontaneous immediacy, dispensing with human reason and adopting an animalistic instinct that reacts with attack. Her denials fell on deaf ears and she was pulled to the ground, whereupon the pack incensed by the false accusation began to kick her repeatedly, an action suspended by the intervention of policemen, who fired shots above their heads. Clad in full niqaab when the mob descended, the images taken from the mobile phone footage shot as the horrific events unfolded show a dazed and bloodied Farkhunda at the feet of the policemen, her head exposed and her features barely visible behind the scarlet sheen coating her countenance. A couple helped Farkhunda to her feet and took her to the inner courtyard of the shrine, but the mob hadn’t finished. With utterly inept policing either incapable or unwilling to prevent her pursuers gaining access, Farkhunda was grabbed again by the mob, who hauled her onto the roof of the shrine, where one member of the mob hit her so hard with what looked like a large branch from a tree that she fell from the roof and straight into the centre of the crowd.
For a brief moment, Farkhunda was captured on camera holding out her hands, an image as chillingly representative of man’s inhumanity to man as the 1972 photo of the Vietnamese girl with her clothes and skin incinerated by napalm; then she disappeared from view as the swarm – yes, a proper f***ing swarm – rained kicks and punches down on her. This wasn’t enough to satisfy the bloodlust of fanaticism, however; next up, they ran over her with a car, dragging her down the road before stoning her with heavy rocks. They topped off this litany of stomach-churning acts of unimaginable brutality by setting her on fire. One only hopes Farkhunda was already dead by this point.
Despite the condemnation by the Afghan President of the murder, several of those involved uploaded their videos of the sickening incident onto social media sites and their actions were applauded by some Imams. The authorities’ response was to parade the arrested suspects on TV, prompting an about-turn in public opinion. Thousands attending Farkhunda’s funeral included women’s rights activists who broke with Islamic tradition to carry her coffin and angrily reacted to men trying to prevent this brave act by asking them where they were when Farkhunda was being murdered. Mass revulsion at Farkhunda’s murder galvanised a protest movement, uniting the two sexes in unprecedented scenes on the streets of Kabul, whilst 29 (including 19 policemen) were charged with involvement in her death. Amongst the verdicts reached were four death sentences, although these have been subsequently commuted to prison sentences. The location where Farkhunda’s body was set alight has now become a unique shrine and Farkhunda herself has been awarded martyr status, a posthumous honour rarely reserved for women in Islam.
It would be easy to condemn the terrible events in Kabul that day in March as an example of the intolerance of Islam and how it is rooted in primitive superstition that the sophisticated west long ago left behind. Yet, lest we forget, this ‘civilised’ nation of ours is currently drowning in an irreligious wave of collective hysteria regarding child sexual abuse, one that resulted in a murder by a mob of a man wrongly accused of being a paedophile, whose body – like that of Farkhunda Malikzada – was set on fire as the culmination of vigilante justice. Strip away the excuse or motivation for either of these two repulsive murders and we are left with the same result – a crowd attacking an individual on the basis of an unfounded accusation, one person’s word against another with no evidence required and the will of the mob to believe the worst. It doesn’t matter if they think the individual has burned a copy of the Quran or has interfered with neighbourhood children; when mob mania on this scale strikes, there can be only one eventual outcome.
In a climate of heightened hysteria generated (in this country) by financial gain, the furthering of careers and the deep-seated desire for an urban bogeyman when the Devil is exluded by secularism, anyone who encourages this reversion to the law of the jungle, knowingly whipping-up the mob by making provocative public statements that tap into the chosen obsession, is playing with fire and will eventually end up with blood on their hands. And these hatemongers know who they are.
Petunia Winegum
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August 13, 2015 at 10:11 am -
Excellent piece
But let’s not forget that the mob in Westminster, too, can perpetrate their own form of, slightly more civilised, group and personal violence in their production of the sort of hate legislation churned up to please the ill educated, ill informed, foaming at the mouth electorate stirred up by whatever pressure group wants to impose its will on the rest of us. There may be no blood shed, but the use of a legal rather than a physical club is no different in principle
And if anyone needs proof that the sole cause for mankind’s direct physical inhumanity to man does not just rest in religious extremism, a few hours on Liveleak should be enough to convince you
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August 13, 2015 at 10:21 am -
I certainly wouldn’t recommend watching the linked-to video, the comments are horrific enough.
http://www.dreamindemon.com/community/threads/paedophile-in-parana-mob-justice-burned-alive.75900/“As long as there was proof he actually committed the crimes, I’m all for it. But if there was a chance at all he was falsely accused then this was a terrible thing.”
“He burned those 4 young girls he raped childhoods up. He definetly deserved this. If he did that to my kids id of done the same thing to him. No sympathy from this mom”
“They let the big-boobed lady spray water on him because a pedophile wouldn’t be interested in mature boobs. That aside, that was pretty fucking gruesome…especially when I noticed he was on fire and alive! I, too, am all for it if the guy did, indeed, commit the crime. But not knowing the particulars of how the crime was proven makes me feel uneasy. When I was younger, I watched a lot of this stuff. Now, I’ve softened up or something, and it’s difficult for me to watch. Is this what they call an “Old Softee’??”
“Hate chomos, really hate them. Perhaps countries like Brazil don’t have enough resources to hunt pervs down, given the size of Brazil. Perhaps LE doesn’t take it seriously enough. Maybe that’s what leads people to enforce their own punishments. ”
“I sure wish we didnt have to obide by rule of law in child abuse. Rape. Stuff like that should be under the eye for an eye rule. If he did this he deserved it. If he didnt do it then he didnt deserve it. Its as simple as that”
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August 13, 2015 at 10:47 am -
A good argument for an education that develops the capacity for independent critical thinking, perhaps? Also a reminder that theology (of whatever religion) should be aiming at improving morality rather than the blind observance of arbitrary rules.
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August 13, 2015 at 11:06 am -
I suspect all those commenters would blithely say they were against the death penalty if polled.
That aside, I think that if the Farkunda massacre was just a case of ‘mob mentality’, one would here expressions of regret once the individuals concerned had recovered their senses. From your description, this doesn’t appear to have been the case.
So it would seem that the mob is only releasing something that is already there in all the participants.
Yuck.
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August 13, 2015 at 11:25 am -
“will of the mob to believe the worst…deep-seated desire for an urban bogeyman”
Unless I’m misinterpreting this recent tweet, what you say here about will and desire seems to be encapsulated in the word “sadly”:
https://mobile.twitter.com/mwilliamsthomas/status/631218887074430976?p=v
You’d think that anyone who didn’t want to believe the worst would welcome this news. -
August 13, 2015 at 12:12 pm -
Islam is the mob personified, which is why, I guess the EU is doing its best to install it here.
Indeed., some Leftard in the EU made it clear recently that “political Islam” is a part of the future of Europe (remond me to get that shotgun)
Ah, play the victim card, do…
Happily, there are those who live there who do not subscribe to this vision of the future, and are quite clear why the Middle East is a fuck up.
http://gatesofvienna.net/2015/08/we-did-not-cause-the-refugee-misery/#comment-421470
ritamalik
on August 11, 2015 at 4:07 pm said:
I certainly disagree with you on so many levels, RonaldB. First let me say that I am an Iranian ex-pat and I want to tell you my perspective on these issues as an outsider to Western culture:As I have observed, you, Westerners now for close to 20 year that I have lived amongst you, I have learned that you are a people that think you are responsible for all the things that go on in the world.
You are obsessively solution oriented people, which means you think for any problem that we have in this world, there must be a solution and you implement various solutions to international problems that you see around you. Sometimes they work and sometimes they don’t.
You also are a highly responsible people and when even the slightest thing goes wrong you are very angry and indignant about it and you quickly want to find the one responsible for it and punish him. You quickly look for someone to sue.
Being a guilt oriented culture (as oppose to shame and honour oriented) also you are very quick to take responsibility when you feel (real or imagined) that you did something wrong and quickly start to beat your chests in a public mea culpa and engage in a proverbial self-flagellation.
All of the above make you incapable of understanding people from my neck of the woods and yours and our tendencies have made a really toxic combination on the world stage.
Why? Because we in the Middle East are a very irresponsible and fatal lot. When things go wrong for us (as they often do) we never fuss over why they went wrong too much. We expect things to go wrong all the time as part of the natural process of things and when they do we don’t try to find the guilty party to sue him. Analysis and self reflection and making sure it will never happen again and stuff like that are highly alien activities to us.
Unless of course what went wrong causes us shame and embarrassment, in which case we will do anything possible to deflect blame from ourselves, especially if we have a hunch that it actually was our fault. We will make a lot of noise, give lots of excuses and engage in a lot of blame shifting. We role up in fetal position and pretend that we are actually the prime victims of what went wrong, all the while knowing full well that we have caused the damn thing to go wrong ourselves!
All of that dysfunctional behaviour is highly exacerbated if there is a willing person (or country or culture) who is gladly taking all the blame for our behaviour on himself and has the peculiar tendency to totally disregard our role in what went wrong.
Now this toxic mix applies to the politics and wars in the Middle East and in the 3rd world in general in this following way:
We in the Middle East have a problem for example we have a brutal dictator like Saddam.Then you see that we are suffering and people are being tortured in his prison and you wonder how you could help. Then Saddam invades Kuwait. You decide, enough is enough and attack and free Kuwait, but you decide not to go all the way in and remove Saddam. Then Saddam, angrier than ever lashes out even more at his own people and kills2 lots of dissidents and gases the Kurds.
Now all of this becomes your fault, because you didn’t finish the job and didn’t remove Saddam. Then Saddam continues his bad behaviour and now he is even trying to develop WMDs. This time you say, enough is enough and you go in and remove him. You offer democracy and financial aid on a plater to the Iraqis. Now in post Saddam Iraq Shias and Sunnis start to fight and chaos starts to reign and no matter how much you try you cannot properly pacify the country. So now all of this chaos becomes your fault. Everybody says that you should not have intervened and removed Saddam because even though he was brutal, he was keeping everyone in line and preventing Shias and Sunnis from killing each other. So now what do you do? You say OK! Enough is enough, we leave and won’t intervene again because we just made a mess. So you pull out your troops, and now what? The Shia vs. Sunni fight exacerbates and even war and chaos spreads to the rest of the region. In Syria you decided not to intervene and now ISIS has taken over. So now you assume that the rise of ISIS was somehow your fault as well. But had you actually intervened and tried to put a regime that was a bit more manageable than ISIS, you would have been blaming yourself for having installed a puppet regime who would predictably torture everyone and make people miserable and want to leave their country. Damed if you do, damned if you don’t seems to be the destiny of any policy that you pursue in the 3rd World.
People are still blaming the West for not having intervened in Rwanda in the 90s when 800 thousand people where killed, while simultaneously blaming the West for intervening in Iraq, Somalia and elsewhere.
In all of these blame and regrets one thing is missing, assigning responsibility to the people of the 3rd world themselves, who are actually the primary causes of the chaos and mayhem in their own countries, as if we are passive objects that if you push the wrong button in us we will inevitably act in a certain way. West was NOT at fault for the genocide in Rwanda! The Rwandans were! West is not at fault for the chaos in the Middle East, we Middle Easterners are! We are the one’s who have a bloodlust and long to shed each other’s blood for silly reasons. Your “failure” to stop us from destroying ourselves IS NOT YOUR FAULT!!!!! We are a confusing and hard to deal with lot! Please get that!!!
In dealing with us, people of the Middle East, you have had, and will have one long series of lose-lose options. There are no win-lose options! None! When dealing with irresponsible and bloodthirsty cultures you cannot have good outcomes, no matter how much you wreck your heads and try to come up with a policy that would work and bring peace and prosperity to us! It will not happen! We are the ones who have to change and do some self-reflection and soul-searching in order to maybe,… just maybe, learn to be a bit more civilised!
Meanwhile, all that I ask of you is that, whether you decide to intervene or not in our affairs, keep your expectation of the outcome low, accept no responsibility for the outcome, put the blame for the negative outcome of what ever policy you pursued where it belongs (on us!) so that we won’t have the chance to save our face despite our countries being in an embarrassing mess, and feel like victims when we should be soul-searching, and for the sake of anything that you hold holy and dear, please don’t wreck your nice and orderly and civilised societies and advanced cultures, by taking millions of refugees, in order to save us from the mess thad has nothing to do with you and came about despite your best efforts, that we have caused with our own hands, and given half the chance, we will cause in your countries as well as soon as we settle down here, or even sooner!
Thank you!
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August 13, 2015 at 12:37 pm -
* bookmarks *
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August 13, 2015 at 5:04 pm -
Indeed, very well worth a second and third read.
However We expect things to go wrong all the time as part of the natural process of things means you’re either British or your Great Granddad was a a British Trooper who mistook your Grandma for an olive skinned Son Of The Desert that night down old Cairo way….
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August 13, 2015 at 6:20 pm -
Excellent post thank you.
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August 13, 2015 at 8:16 pm -
I guess we can expect this to be much quoted by Tony Blair if ever the Chilcott Report appears – it could almost have been ghosted by Alistair Campbell in readiness……
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August 13, 2015 at 12:51 pm -
“It would be easy to condemn the terrible events in Kabul that day in March as an example of the intolerance of Islam and how it is rooted in primitive superstition that the sophisticated west long ago left behind. Yet, lest we forget, this ‘civilised’ nation of ours is currently drowning in an irreligious wave of collective hysteria regarding child sexual abuse, one that resulted in a murder by a mob of a man wrongly accused of being a paedophile, whose body – like that of Farkhunda Malikzada – was set on fire as the culmination of vigilante justice.”
Once again, Petunia, utter bollocks!
Those who killed the man (two of the tiny mob) were put on trial and imprisoned. The killing was routinely condemned, and no-one was boasting of it on YouTube unmolested by the law.
Whereas this mob behaviour isn’t unknown wherever the cancer of Islam spreads.
You’re comparing apples and…well, not even oranges, which are at least also fruit.
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August 13, 2015 at 1:12 pm -
August 13, 2015 at 2:05 pm -
The killing went largely unreported. The eventual trial and verdict was reported as if media savilisation had nothing to do with it and everyone pretended shock and complete bafflement. It has been by no means the only one. Fire is a recurring theme.
http://swns.com/news/man-24-killed-gay-paedophile-firebombing-home-vigilante-attack-35791/
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August 13, 2015 at 2:54 pm -
Is everybody forgetting the long and nasty history of lynching in good old Christian America? If you have a strong stomach, try googling “Jesse Washington”. Washington was a young black man who was arrested in Waco (yes THAT Waco) in 1916, quickly tried and found guilty of the murder of a white woman. Immediately, a huge mob that had gathered for the trial burst into the courtroom and dragged him out; there was zero resistance from the sheriff and police. Washington was beaten, stabbed and mutilated before being hung over a bonfire for two hours (what IS it with mobs and their setting people on fire?). The whole white population of the town turned out to watch this spectacle; the crowd included children , who later gathered up souvenir teeth and bone fragments.
This was far from an isolated incident. During the period 1888 – 1968, there were an estimated 4000 lynchings in America, mostly of black people. During the early part of the 20thC, lynchings were quite the popular entertainment in some places, with whole families picnicking within yards of a hideous murder while photographers snapped away (later selling those delightful images as postcards).
Here in Britain, we’re not too far away from our own lynchings – in 1727, a senile old woman in Sutherland, Scotland was accused of witchcraft and burned alive; she was the last in a long line of accused witches who were variously hung or burned in front of a usually cheering crowd.-
August 13, 2015 at 3:13 pm -
No were note, but we have got past that, and what is happening in Islamia is on a totally different scale.
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August 13, 2015 at 3:45 pm -
Gotta love the origins of the word “Lynching” however…
“It was during the American Revolution that the term lynch law originated with Colonel Charles Lynch, a Virginia planter and his associates, who began to make their own vigilante rules for confronting the British Tories, loyalists to England, and other criminal elements.”
http://www.legendsofamerica.com/ah-lynching.html
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August 13, 2015 at 3:10 pm -
Perhaps if you had lived in foreign lands yourself, you wouldn’t find this type of thing so shocking. To be clear, I’m calibrating it, not condoning it.
For example, I was driving through a village in an East African country a few years ago, and noticed a pall of black smoke coming from the side of the road. I stopped to ask what had happened. A thief had been caught red-handed, and mob justice had been summarily dispensed, in the form of a “necklacing”. Here, the victim’s hands are tied and a burning car tyre is placed over his shoulders, from where it slides down the torso as combustion takes hold and the fire consumes the body. A particularly nasty way to die. I learnt a lesson that day: African people detest thieves just as much as anybody else does.
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August 13, 2015 at 3:16 pm -
The ANC’s infamous necklace. I think you missed out the petrol poured into the tyre interior first.
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August 13, 2015 at 3:26 pm -
More likely paraffin, widely used as a cooking fuel and less volatile/explosive than petrol.
Apropos, I can remember seeing a lazy gardener who poured petrol on to some long grass, having decided it was less bother to burn it rather than to cut it as requested. When he threw a lighted match, the resulting explosion put him in hospital with severe burns.
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August 13, 2015 at 3:36 pm -
Maybe. maybe not
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Necklacing
“Necklacing is the practice of summary execution and torture carried out by forcing a rubber tire, filled with gasoline, around a victim’s chest and arms, and setting it on fire. The victim may take up to 20 minutes to die, suffering severe burns in the process…The practice appears to have begun in the Eastern Cape area of South Africa in the mid-1980s.”
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August 13, 2015 at 3:53 pm -
I defer to the omniscient Wikipedia, though the incident I referred to took place in equatorial East Africa in about 1987.
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August 13, 2015 at 4:11 pm -
Yes, I know it is not 100% reliable, rather a good starting point, but I recall many instances of necklacing happening SA, and petrol was almost always involved. Regardless, utterly inhuman, paraffin or petroleum.
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August 13, 2015 at 5:27 pm -
Definitely happening in RSA when I was there, especially from about ’86 on. I don’t recall that many being reported though, but intimidation was rife. Widespread stories in those days of Winnie M. & her young friends settling scores this way, but who knows?
The point made about summary justice(?) reminds me of the levels of violence during a strike around that time. Outside the factory gate attempts were made to kill a man identified as having been involved in burning the homes of strike breakers & attacking their wives & families. The alleged attacker was held on the ground with his head on the kerb and his head was beaten savagely with bricks. Yes we rescued him & patched him up, but another reminder of the foolishness of handwringing & judging events far off from the comfort of one’s Islington kitchen(s).
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August 13, 2015 at 3:32 pm -
What did he steal in such a place I wonder. A chicken? If it’s standard policy though, it does make one wonder about the power of deterrent sentencing, that anyone actually does still steal over there.
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August 13, 2015 at 4:05 pm -
What he stole would probably have been of little value by our standards but of significant worth to an African villager. The thief saw an opportunity and took it, but was unlucky enough to be caught.
A case of MANURE (huMAN natURE), for any Bernard Trink fans.
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August 13, 2015 at 4:48 pm -
I spent a fair amount of time guarding people, places and things. Quite often people, places and things of such ‘value’ that most of my colleagues were former special forces , our cellphones speed dial functions set to *1.Pizza Service and *2.GSG9. The professional ‘Guard’ or Sec-man fears one thing above all others; Mass Panic/Mass Hysteria. You can survive a terrorist attack, a bomb, a fire or an armed robbery but very few survive being in an enclosed space with a mass of humanity ODing on mainlined Limbic fluid cut with adrenaline . Thankfully it never happened to me but the accounts of colleagues made me realise why we walk round a building every hour and check the emergency exits aren’t blocked by some twat who has ‘just pulled over to answer his phone, you f**kin plastic policeman, Jobsworth’.
I’m told that even shooting the ‘ring leaders’ of a mass panic -if you could identify them -won’t stop the crowd, they will trample their twitching bodies underfoot in their fear to escape or their desire to shag whichever Boy from the Boyband has taken his tshirt off to flaunt his pubescent 6 pack.
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August 13, 2015 at 5:45 pm -
A curious irony that the scary crowd scenes at the end of the 70’s movie “Day of the Locust” were sparked by Homer Simpson killing (a rather nastily behaved) child…
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BQO5Xy2ebhs
Justifiable Homicide I guess, yet back then I think we were meant to feel sorry a little for Homie… and scared for what the bright lights of celebrity worship can do to a society.
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August 13, 2015 at 8:37 pm -
A football crowd is a strange mob, but even stranger when it is viewing the match on TV. They seem to take great delight in shouting their opinions at an inanimate TV set, almost as if expecting someone on the other end of it, an offending player perhaps, to hear their passionate pleas and respond by playing better. Surely these numbskulls all know that a TV is mono-directional, but yet they persist in yelling at it in one of mankind’s most futile expenditures of effort since the invention of gay sex. I often wonder if such football fans, when watching alone, still yell at the TV, or whether it’s simply the ‘being in a mob’ mentality which causes them to feel the need to attempt an interface with the uninterfaceable to impress their peers with their evidenced passion.
Of course we see other types of ‘mob’ in other spheres. The SNP succeeded in developing a ‘mob’ after their failed referendum, going on to gain an astonishing result at the general election. We now see a similar ‘mob’ being assembled in support of Jeremy Corbyn for the Labour leadership. These political mobs may not display the horrific violence of the lynch-mobs or the futility of the soccer-mobs, but they are still forms of mob behaviour, where a potentially normal individual can become carried along on some wave of mass-hysteria to do things which they would otherwise never have considered doing. Mobs which use religion as their primary support vehicle have a long history and, regrettably it would seem, a long future ahead too.
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