Sunday 26 March 2017

Just Looking For An Excuse: Adrian Elms aka Khalid Masood, The Westminster Killer.

The most revealing things that have been published about Adrian Elms, so far, are that his former friends say that he expressed a strong desire to kill people at about age nineteen, years before he became a Muslim under the name Khalid Masood, and that his behavioural pattern centred on massive drugs binges. The latter fits the pattern of nearly all known Jihadee killers in the West: massive drugs use (usually but not exclusively skunk, sometimes amphetamine or cocaine) is always found: actual religious observance much less so. 

People who are pre-disposed to kill and who use massive amounts of drugs before going out to kill someone largely at random, are not exclusively or even mainly Jihadees: the majority of them are simply mentally ill: their drug-aggravated psychosis either not diagnosed or inadequately treated, and they are usually given hospital orders and quietly put away indefinitely, without ever making national front page headlines. Because they are entitled to privacy, as patients rather than suspects, there is rarely much public examination of evidence, and the inevitable "safeguarding" inquiry always says the same things and never leads to any reduction in the likelihood of a similar event occurring in the future. None of them is labelled as a Jihadee, because they aren't, but they were only ever a website click away from potentially becoming one.

Most human beings, even highly trained soldiers, find it very difficult to kill another human being, and statistics from World War Two show that only a minority of soldiers ever aimed their weapons to intentionally kill in combat. Not even when fighting the evil SS! Psychopaths, however, often have no difficulty killing and even find it difficult to understand how others would have a problem with it. The US Army, not wishing to rely on psychopaths for its combat efficiency, has spent billions of dollars devising elaborate training programmes to make ordinary non-psychopathic recruits into instinctive killers when they are presented with a clear-cut combat situation. (It's less effective when things are more muddled.) The policeman who unhesitatingly shot Adrian Elms dead last week probably benefited from a variant of this training.

The leaders of ISIS, like the leaders of the ALF before them, have less money, less time and fewer behavioural psychologists with which to break down the natural barriers against killing in the minds of their supporters, than the US Army had. The erstwhile leaders of the ALF used to urge their supporters to "knife researchers to death on their own doorsteps" but it never actually happened for them. None of their supporters was ill enough, though some of them were quite unwell by any normal standard. The leaders of ISIS, however, had the advice of at least one competent but unethical psychiatrist, who devised a recruitment strategy and materials that circumvented the problem by targeting and attracting those who were already disposed to kill. This is why their supposedly "Islamic" doctrine makes no attempt to discourage the use of strong mind altering drugs by their "soldiers", because heavy drug abusers are probably the best bet for ruthless killing.

ISIS are not, actually, guilty of a plot to radicalise Western or even Muslim youth in general. They are only really interested in the psychopaths, because they are the only ones where the investment of time and money pays off. ISIS have internet access to thousands of young people in the United Kingdom and many of these will express extreme opinions, when asked. But only a handful of them will actually go out and kill someone as an act of Jihad. Only the ones who already have a drug aggravated psychosis, in fact.

The appearance of "brainwashing" is simply because it is fairly difficult to make a very disturbed mind accept a new obsession, and repetition is required. The aim is to select, exploit, guide and "empower" the disturbed person, firstly to commit violence as an act of Jihad rather than simply at random, and secondly to make some sort of effort at targeting victims who fit the ISIS demonology. Thousands of non-psychopaths dabble with the material intended to do this, without actually leaving their computer screens and doing anything in the real world. They form extreme opinions, but take no action. Because they would find it very hard to do. What ISIS are after, are the tiny minority who cannot see what the problem is. 

To actually deal with Jihadeeism, it is necessary to reduce the pool of drug-aggravated psychopaths available to terrorist groups. That means much better mental healthcare, and in particular much better follow-up when somebody's Mum or Dad goes to the doctor and says that their offspring is in a dangerous state of mind. Hardly ever does the medical profession react as if relatives of an emerging psychopath know what they are talking about! When the relatives are always the first ones to know! And people who do have a relative who is showing signs of emerging as a psychopath, need to persist, even if nobody listens at first.

Secondly, the psychosis is practically always aggravated by drugs, at a time when many top policemen are surrendering in the war on drugs and campaigning for legalization. Make no mistake: legal Skunk, for that's what it will be, and legal Cocaine, because that's what the Luvvies will lobby for, will make many more killers for ISIS or something like it to recruit. We need to actually fight the war on drugs, and this has never actually been done before. It has all been a pretence by politicians who had something to gain (either directly or indirectly) from the trade in dangerous drugs.