On Vigilantism — Part One

As a follow-up to his series “On the Failure of Law Enforcement”, El Inglés examines the likely emergence of vigilante activity as a response to the ever-increasing inability of European political authorities to protect their citizens from violent lawlessness.


On Vigilantism — Part One
by El Inglés

Introduction

I have argued in an earlier series of essays, appropriately titled “On the Failure of Law Enforcement”, that the law enforcement institutions of European countries faced with ever-larger Muslim populations are incapable, in a deep, structural sense, of adequately addressing the criminality of those populations while they continue to operate under extant paradigms. If this conclusion is accepted, then one arrives without particular difficulty at a further conclusion: that vigilante activity is likely to emerge in response. This being the case, I propose to present in this essay a speculative initial analysis of the likely characteristics of the vigilantes and vigilantism that will soon be seen in Europe as a consequence of pressures we are all too familiar with.


1. Strategic Options — Realistic and Unrealistic

Any serious would-be vigilante must be expected to consider, before engaging in any vigilante activity, precisely what he thinks can be gained by it in a deep, strategic sense. Bursts of rage that manifest themselves in the targeting of criminals may well serve to make the vigilantes in question feel better for a while, but disproportionately criminal Muslims are unlikely to start behaving themselves because a few of them get killed whilst engaged in their illegal activities. After all, they are already undoubtedly being killed at some rate by their competitors, and this does not seem to have persuaded them to mend their ways. Why should be vigilante activity be any more effective in this regard?

In principle, one could kill off such vast numbers of, say, Somali gang members in the UK as to make it difficult for these gangs to continue to function at all. However, such an objective would only be feasible in the context of a complete breakdown of civil order in the area in question. Given that vigilantism will commence in the context of an intact apparatus of state that either will not or cannot enforce the law with respect to criminal minorities, what objectives are serious vigilantes likely to set themselves? We can imagine various possibilities in this regard.

Realistic Objective 1 — Response of Apparatus of State

Far from being some sort of objective and evenhanded applier of the law, the law enforcement apparatus of any country occupies itself with criminal behaviour (or not) on the basis of a large set of criteria, including: seriousness of the crime in question (littering vs. murder); visibility of crime (selling drugs in back alleys vs. selling drugs in front of Buckingham Palace); perceived enforceability of the law in question (illegal hunting vs. armed robbery); taboos regarding the perpetrators (Pakistanis pimping white girls vs. white skinheads attacking black people); political influence of the victims (working class white girls being pimped vs. members of the royal family being pimped); expected consequences of enforcing the law (riots from ‘oppressed’ groups vs. acquiescence from native Britons); and simple awareness of the possibility that a crime is being committed (Muslim girls committing ‘suicide’ just before arranged marriages vs. Muslim girls being thrown off balconies for refusing to participate in said marriages). This being the case, the seriousness of the response to minority crime simply cannot be taken for granted, an observation which will hardly be news to those who pay attention to such matters.

It is for this reason that altering the response of the apparatus of state to Muslim crime may well emerge as one of the most obvious motivations for vigilante activity. If one is concerned about Somali drug-dealing and the lack of effective response by the state, then executing a few Somali drug-dealers and then calling a national newspaper with a) the justification for the killing and b) the calibre of the handgun used in the executions (for purposes of establishing one’s identity) will be likely to focus a certain amount of attention on the problem. Governments seem to be very good at pretending that certain types of crime do not exist apart from in the imaginations of bigots and meanies like the current author, but there are undoubtedly ways of suggesting the opposite that will be difficult for them to ignore.

Realistic Objective 2 — Polarization
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I have argued in past essays that it is extremely unlikely that extant political elites and mainstream political parties will be up to the task of dealing with the existential problems Islam and Muslims pose to Europe. If this argument proves to be correct, then it is highly probable that non-state actors will emerge who believe they can do so. Should such an organization exist in embryonic form in some European country (and if they do not, they soon will), then polarizing the situation beyond the point of repair and trying to force a confrontation while the demographic situation favours natives to the greatest extent possible may come to be seen as a valid objective.

Whether this confrontation would be violent or non-violent in nature would depend on the specific situation in question. One can imagine violent vigilante action bringing things to a boil on the political scene. Equally, one can imagine it pushing matters past a tipping point and resulting in a breakdown of civil order and concomitant unpleasantness. Either way, political polarization of this sort will probably turn out to be one of the objectives of European vigilantes.

Unrealistic Objective 1 — Significant Depression of Crime Rates

Ironically, one thing that vigilante action will almost certainly not accomplish in and of itself will be a significant reduction in the criminality of the relevant group. Overwhelming violence could cow people into behaving, but as I have already pointed out, violence of this sort is well beyond vigilantism and into full-blown tribal conflict. Vigilantism as commonly understood will not have this effect.

As I will argue below when discussing the tactical options available to vigilantes, the targets of such action are likely to be extremely violent, ruthless, and vicious criminals, who are thoroughly committed to their criminal ways and have already accepted that their lifestyle is accompanied by a degree of risk, both legal and physical. Such people are unlikely to consider the enhancing of the physical side of these risks by vigilantes a reason for a sudden career change. Accordingly, such depression of crime rates as takes place will take place through the apparatus of state ‘awakening’ to the existence of hitherto unsuspected criminal activity.

Unrealistic Objective 2 — Patrolling Crime-Ridden Areas

Vigilante activity will not be significantly useful in ensuring that Europeans can pass through public spaces or use public facilities where and when criminal Muslims have made it difficult for them to do so. Trying to achieve this particular goal would require a patrolling presence, which would bring with it insurmountable difficulties. Briefly listing these difficulties should make it clear exactly why this objective will not be realistic.

Any attempt to patrol an urban area or public facility will bring the patrolling group into immediate and potentially serious conflict with the police, especially in and around public facilities such as public transport infrastructure. The patrolling group will have no legal authority to do anything whatsoever with respect to crime, and could well be legal liable in some fashion for altercations and the like which break out in relation to its patrolling activities. Furthermore, the mere existence of such a presence is likely to invite violent attacks from the groups whose criminality has provoked the patrolling efforts in the first place. If the police, with all their resources, have such difficulty ensuring that public spaces can be used without the risk of violent crime, how will a vigilante organization do better?


2. Tactical Options — Suicidal and Homicidal

There are two different ways in which a vigilante group could target other groups it considers to be problematic. The first us to target specific individuals with respect to whom it has specific intelligence, or who are obviously members of criminal organizations. The second of concern is to target random members of the problematic community themselves in an attempt to address the criminality of group members who either cannot be identified, cannot be targeted, or both. However, this second type of violence moves away from vigilantism and towards unrelenting tribal conflict, and as such is slightly outside the scope of this essay. Thus we will focus on activity targeted directly at criminals themselves, what we might call ‘pure’ vigilantism.

It is humbling to observe the sheer variety of options open to the state when it seeks to punish those who have transgressed against its laws. Incarceration with or without the possibility of parole, suspended sentences, official cautions, fines, community service, corporal punishment, execution, and virtually any combination thereof; the possibilities are endless.

However, it needs to be clearly understood that the state only has these options open to it because of the vast resources at its disposal. Should it ever prove to be the case that vigilante action is forthcoming on any significant scale in European countries, it is obvious that the overwhelming majority of these options and combinations of options will not be open to any vigilantes keen to do what the forces of law and order either cannot or will not with respect to criminal Muslims. This being the case, it is interesting to consider what options are in fact likely to be open to vigilantes. To rephrase: what will it mean to take vigilante action in Europe against Muslims? What will such action consist of? What can any vigilante action ever consist of?

Warnings

The first and most obvious type of attempt that a vigilante can make to bring an end to undesirable behaviour is to warn the perpetrators that a continuation of that behaviour will result in unpleasant consequences for its perpetrators. Of course, in the absence of a willingness to resort to the other options we will consider below, this will be a hollow threat indeed, but it remains the case that warnings are the entry-level vigilante activity. They therefore bear mentioning here.

Property Damage

The first escalation of vigilante action from warnings is that of property damage. If one is unfortunate enough to live in proximity to some idiot who likes to drive at 60mph in residential areas, sending him a message by puncturing his tyres one night might increase his respect for the Highway Code. Of course, he would need to be able to link his actions and the punishment they evoked or the lesson might go unlearnt, but this would not be that difficult to arrange. Note that it is necessary to be able to identify the offender, his whereabouts, and his property to utilize this option. If any one of these things proves to be impossible, vigilantes cannot avail themselves of this option.

Property damage could perhaps be considered a warning with bite. In its extreme forms, it could consist of the infliction of significant financial damage on the perpetrator of the undesirable behaviour, and a very serious deterrent to repetitions of said behaviour. Nonetheless, one would have to pick one’s target well. The objective of vigilante behaviour is to prevent repetitions of the undesirable behaviour, no more or less than that. Smashing the windscreen of a reckless driver might induce him to see the error of his ways. Smashing the windscreen of the neighbourhood drug lord is likely to have slightly different effects, as a drug lord is a) unlikely to mend his wicked ways over a broken windscreen, and b) very likely to search out the vigilante(s) in question and seek redress for the damage to his vehicle. Ill-considered vigilante action is likely to do more harm than good from the perspective of the vigilante’s original objectives.

Beatings/Maimings

Next up is the infliction of physical damage on the perpetrators themselves without the intention of killing them. The IRA were notorious for kneecapping serious criminals and recidivists in their areas of influence in Northern Ireland during the Troubles. However, there is an interesting difference to be observed here. The IRA was operating within communities it considered itself to be a part of, in some sense, i.e. the Republican communities of Northern Ireland. Heavily dependent on the support of those communities and vulnerable to infiltration and informers, it was undoubtedly restricted in the extent to which it could engage in this sort of behaviour. Brutality cannot be inflicted arbitrarily on the members of a community whose favour one needs.

In contrast, any group of European vigilantes intent on taking the law into their own hands vis-à-vis Muslim crime would not suffer this restriction. Exceptional brutality will always have the potential to repel supporters and potential supporters, but it stands to reason that vigilantes in, say, Denmark, visiting impromptu justice on Arab street thugs in Copenhagen will have a much higher threshold of violence they have to cross before such revulsion starts to work against them. Indeed, everyday Danes tired of the Muslim crime now contaminating their country may well look to such people as their saviours, affording them support of various types. This will open up the potential for exceptional violence.

Executions

The ultimate sanction that can be brought to bear on any given individual is that of execution. Execution has a certain finality to it that would allow vigilantes to avoid the problem posed by property damage above, to wit, that vigilante action that does not decrease the future likelihood of criminal behaviour is likely to simply be counterproductive. Moreover, if one were dealing not just with individuals but with groups, be they informal street gangs or more formal organized crime syndicates, it would strain credulity to suggest that, say, breaking the legs of a single member would be likely to have a particularly strong effect on the activities of the gangs as a whole. The members of criminal organizations tend to operate under the threat of violence from competing organizations anyway. From this we can conclude that they a) are at least somewhat hardened to the possibility of being on the receiving end of violence, and b) that they are prepared to use, and almost certainly do use, violence against these competitors to protect themselves and their criminal activities.

As such, the efficacy of non-lethal violence in persuading these people to behave themselves in a more civilized manner is likely to be close to be zero. This leaves vigilantes with only one obvious option, which is to kill off the people in question. This will have the twin effects of a) making it impossible for them to engage in further crime, and b) creating at least some possibility that others like them might decide on a change of career. Either way, this is the nuclear option for vigilantes. However, this should not be taken to imply that it will be a last resort for anti-Muslim vigilantes. It seems likely that any serious would-be vigilante will think his options through carefully enough in advance to realize that certain types of action are likely to be ineffective. Those who think that knocking on the door of the local Pakistani heroin-dealer’s door and advising him to see the error of his ways will constitute effective vigilante action will not last long enough to have much of an effect on the proceedings either way. People of good faith can only hope that such folk recognize their lack of suitability for vigilante action in advance, and support the struggle against the Islamization of their countries in other ways.


3. Image Is Everything

I have already suggested that there are likely to be two key goals on the part of serious vigilantes, to which the objective of culling the criminal Muslim population will probably be secondary: eliciting specific responses from the apparatus of state, and polarizing the political situation to bring matters to a head sooner rather than later. Vigilantes pursuing either of these two goals will find that effective PR will be crucial to their efforts.

The likely importance of a good PR campaign to serious vigilantes cannot be overestimated, and the reasons for this importance should be clearly understood. As soon as a group embarks on any sort of vigilante activity, they are unilaterally scrapping the implicit contract that exists between state and people in the country in question. This is a) an obvious threat to the authority of the state, and b) something that has to potential to be interpreted as fairly ominous by the people themselves, even those not in the group being targeted. There will be few activities that can more easily be challenged by the state than vigilante action — only insurrection, secession and terrorism come to mind.

This being the case, would-be vigilantes will need to understand that their ability to maintain vigilante efforts and achieve the goals they have set themselves will be heavily dependent upon two things: the extent to which they can bring attention to the inability/refusal of the state to enforce the law with respect to Muslims, and the degree of popular support they can muster for their efforts from native Europeans outraged at what is being inflicted upon them by Muslim crime. Neither of these things will be achievable without a robust, well-argued, and entirely unapologetic presentation of the vigilante case against both the disproportionate criminality of Muslims and the neglect of the issue by the government.

If the actions of vigilantes can successfully be presented as mindless acts of tribally-motivated violence, then the response of the apparatus of state will simply be to crack down on them with its full resources. If, on the other hand, they can effectively engage in counter-PR, then everything will change. This is best explained with a hypothetical example.

Imagine two parallel Britains identical to each other in every regard, but about to go undergo a divergence with respect to vigilante action. Two groups of ten individuals, one in each Britain, have decided that the systematic, widespread pimping of white girls by Pakistanis, long downplayed and, when possible, ignored by the authorities, can no longer be tolerated. Both groups devise superficially similar plans to address the problem. They will locate and stake out one of the ‘slag dens’ in which the unfortunate girls so preyed upon are forced to prostitute themselves. Having performed the necessary surveillance and planning, they will storm it, kill all the Pakistanis inside (security, clients, waiters, receptionists, etc.) and beat a hasty retreat.

Both groups pick the same house, storm it in identical fashion, kill exactly the same people in exactly the same way, and make a successful getaway. Here though, they part company.

Group A, in response to the consequent furore and police investigation, issue a video statement to the effect that all Pakistanis are scum and have to be destroyed. Government and police officials are quietly delighted. Pulling long faces about how taking the law into one’s own hands is never acceptable, especially when it is done in such a homicidal fashion, they pull out all the stops in pursuing the vigilantes. Soon thereafter, an acquaintance of one of the vigilantes who has had some doubts about said vigilante and his respect for the law contacts the police with his concerns. The police devote themselves to this new lead and eventually convict the members of the group for murder and other crimes. There is some hand-wringing about the Pakistani crime that initiated the whole affair, but it continues to be largely ignored by the powers-that-be, and the initial killings and aftermath are processed by the British people and media as an aberration best forgotten.

Group B, in contrast, is much more thoughtful than Group A about how exactly it should present itself and its activities to the world. Its members wait for a week after the killings, observing the debate, seeing what is said about them, about the probable motivations for their actions, and their probable identities. Throughout this week, they are putting the final touches to an official statement, a lengthy explanation and justification of their actions. The statement is burnt onto a number of CDs, and copies are sent to every major newspaper in the country, all major TV channels, the local police force, the BBC, the Home Office, and Scotland Yard. The content of the statement is as follows:

1.		A detailed description of the pimping activities of the Pakistani gangs in the North of England, based on NGO reports, mainstream media reports, statements of government officials, and victim statements in the public domain;
2.		A more general description of the criminality and dysfunctionality of Pakistanis in the UK, including analysis of their crime and incarceration rates (both disproportionately high), their seditious and terrorist tendencies, and social pathologies (‘honour’ violence, incestuous marriage, welfare dependency, educational and professional underachievement, etc.);
3.		A description of the repeated, consistent, and long-term attempts of politicians, journalists, and police officers to deny there was a problem;
4.		A list naming the people most responsible for the current state of affairs on the British side (local MPs, local police chiefs, civil servants, local councillors, etc.), who can themselves be considered the enablers of the sexual destroyers of white British girls;
5.		A discussion of the relationship between the state and the people, the social contract, and the moral rights and obligations a people enjoy when their government is a) negligent enough to allow large numbers of alien sexual predators into their country, and b) negligent enough to ignore its responsibility to enforce the law with respect to these predators;
6.		A declaration to the effect that the current unofficial tolerance extended to Pakistani activities in this vein will no longer be endured;
7.		An assertion of the right of the British people to use violence to protect themselves from alien invasion and predation in those cases where the state had failed to so protect them;
8.		A statement of the intent of the group to continue violently eradicating those it considered to be the enemies of the British people.

The CDs also include video clips of the surveillance conducted by the vigilante group, showing large numbers of men coming and going all night at what is otherwise supposed to be a normal residence, as evidence of the nature of the activities taking place within. This video footage would also help establish that the group having distributed the statement and the group having conducted the attack were one and the same. Further evidence would be adduced as necessary.

What sort of response could we expect to all of this taken together? Quite a different one, I imagine, to the response to Group A described above. Even if the government tried to clamp down on the statement, it could be sent to other organizations until its existence could no longer be hidden. Of course, as soon as any media outlet did decide to report on what they had received, the others would have to follow suit, blowing the whole issue wide open. There would be a huge focus of attention on the issues raised in the statement, with all sorts of people coming forward to share what they knew about the Pakistani pimping scene in the north of England.

The police will still be going after the vigilantes as hard as they possibly can (murder remains murder, after all). However, the police chief in the area in question is now facing a perfect storm of professional difficulties. He has perhaps ten or twelve murders constituting a single mass murder to solve, a mass murder committed by highly professional and committed people. He has a very high probability indeed of communal riots which could easily spiral out of control. He has his own gross neglect and culpability for the situation to try and defend, and his job to keep (if he can). He has the possibility of similar actions taking place again in his area, whether by the same organization or by other actors inspired by it. He has a British public that will be significantly approving of the action of the vigilantes, and that would probably like to see his own head on a spike for his professional malfeasance. He has, in short, precisely what he jolly well deserves. And these problems will not now be limited to him. Police chiefs across a vast swathe of the country will be giving thanks that it was not in their jurisdiction that it happened and will start cracking down hard on the extracurricular activities of Pakistanis and others across the country lest anything unpleasant should happen on their watch.

For their part, politicians will either be enjoying the ensuing brouhaha a great deal or not at all, depending on what their track records are on such thorny subjects as the one the vigilantes decided to address. They will be well aware, or will soon become aware, of the general negligence of the government and police vis-à-vis Pakistani pimping of white girls, and the likely surge of support and admiration for them among a broad swathe of the British public.

Political and police priorities can therefore be expected to be quite different in response to the activities of Group B than they were to Group A. And maybe, just maybe, the individual who informed on one of the vigilantes in our first example decides that he has no wish to stir up trouble for his friend over what is probably nothing, and is perhaps deserving of tacit support rather than police attention even if it is not nothing. The importance of this last point cannot be stressed enough.

Lastly, we should observe that Group B has a very significant chance of stimulating similar efforts on the part of other patriots concerned about the trajectory their country was tracing with respect to Islam and Islamization. These efforts, if forthcoming, will further serve the cause, diffuse police attention and resources, and heighten the state’s sense that things are rapidly spiralling out of control. In short, Group B’s correct understanding of the importance of PR efforts in vigilante activity will make all the difference to its ability to shape the course events take. Even if worse comes to worst and the group finds itself awaiting trial for its actions, it will have a fantastic chance to whip the political scandal up further still through turning the trial into an indictment of immigration and law enforcement policy.

Could Group A have done the same?