Editor's Blog

Malice in wonderland 3: eugenics and self-harming

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Details: Parent Category: Editor; Category: Editor's blog; Last Updated: Wednesday, 03 June 2026 17:45; Published: Tuesday, 07 July 2020 16:42; Written by Colin Sumner; Hits: 1965

In Part One of this series, we explored the madness behind Brexit and the mishandling of CV19, and how it looks from a criminological perspective. We saw that a far-right Tory government is resurrecting an imperial ideology of English supremacism that legitimates economic suicide and at the same time accelerates the spread of the CV19 in England, or wherever we go to get drunk. Is this the plot from the next Bond film? We were aghast at the collusion between this government and a supine mass media, a conflicted Labour Party and many older Labour voters - with the effect of producing dangerously high levels of gullibility, self-harming and general susceptibility to future schemes by the evil Boris. Or is it just a cartoon fable about Boris Badenov and Natasha playing stupid as directed by Bullwinkle J. Trump? Will the capitalist party destroy English capitalism? Did the offshore Rees-Mogg pay any tax last year? Does he know what the NHS is for? Why is horse-loving Hancock MP for Newmarket? Does he like a bet? Why didn't the government look into what the Russians were doing here during the UK elections and back in the Referendum?

In Part Two, we went deeper into the roots of the current insanity, looking at the role of Dominic Cummings, as his élitist eugenic ideology steered his 'boss' or puppet Boris Badenov into both a xenophobic rejection of our EU neighbours and of the benefits of EU membership, and also an archaic approach to population management which meant killing most people off first, or seeking herd immunity without a vaccination. Both are gambles that were unlikely to fly and are expensively failing, just like his airline between Vienna and Samara. We noted how the Johnson-Cummings-Trump gang were similar to the cast of the cartoon Bullwinkle, playing the parts of Boris Badenov, Natasha and Bullwinkle J. Moose respectively. After the Russian Report, we know Badenov, Bullwinkle and Natasha ignored any Russian interventions in our internal affairs so that their cunning Brexit plan would not be de-railed. But Sky News reported that MI6 might want the role of Russian money and power in London investigated. Boris today denounced Starmer (Rocky, the flying squirrel, in the Bullwinkle cartoons) as a 'Remainer' for being at all concerned with national security; just as Trumpwinkle accused medics of ruining his re-election campaign by worrying about the escalating rate of CV infection. Threats to national security and massive death tolls take a back seat to re-election and 'getting Brexit done'.

In the final Part of this truly tragic story, we will explore the question of why turkeys vote for Christmas, why people vote for clowns and reality tv stars, and whether national self-harming could be caused solely by Boris and Natasha and whether, like crime, it actually takes choice, inertia, collusion or compliance from below to join with power from above to create a disaster. We look at research on suicide bombers and compliance with authoritarianism to help us understand self-harming. Today, as the sociopathic Tories take us hurtling towards a no-deal Brexit and a second wave of CV-19 deaths, the signs are that some people can see that a re-unified Labour Party, combining union aspirations with a return to democracy, environmentalism and anti-racism, would be far better than another COVID massacre, widespread depression, political unrest and economic collapse.

Eugenics, ethology and the dukes of misrule

On 2 June 2020, the Guardian reported that Johnson told the Italian Health Minister, Giuseppe Conte, in early March, that he wanted 'herd immunity', a eugenics idea from the distant past. Eugenics, despite all contrary evidence, supposed that skills and qualities, diseases and infirmities, are mostly genetically inherited, fairly fixed and attached to specific ethnicities. In Canada, it led to the compulsory sterilization of female immigrants and indigenous natives seen as too 'feeble-minded' to produce offspring with low risk of criminality and high employment potential - right up to the 1970's (McLaren 1990 and Sumner 1994/2012, pp. 35-9, on eugenics and immigration; Virdi 2018 on "Canada's shame: the coerced sterilization of indigenous women"; Dyck 2013; Stote 2015). Such women often had too poor English to defend themselves. Screening out unwanted sections of the population for assistance and/or healthcare, and in the final solution selection for murderous liquidation, reached its head of course in the Nazi Holocaust. Eugenics and authoritarianism are always partners.

There are many issues in drawing conclusions from ethology, the study of animal behaviour, in order to control human behaviour socially or politically; none the least being that people become aware of their habits and flaws and adapt to them. Both ethology and eugenics have a history of being closely tied to unscientific and racist assumptions in making 'selection' decisions, whether it be for immigration, the gas chamber or being denied hospital treatment such as a ventilator and transferred to a care home. In supposing that herd immunity was possible without a vaccination, Johnson and Cummings were, to put it mildly, taking a huge risk with other people's lives, yet at no point revealing their evidence, or their elitist theories to justify such a risk (see Mayo Clinic comments on herd immunity).

I was taught, and read, the ethology of Konrad Lorenz on my LLM in Criminology in 1970-1 and it was fun, at the time, looking at the habits of the grey-lagged geese [see his On Aggression 1963] but in my recent research I discovered that Prof. Dr Lorenz went on to become one of Hitler's advisers. Lorenz won the Nobel Prize for his work on animals but once drafted into the Wehrmacht he was told to study the biological characteristics of Polish-German half-breeds to see if they had the same work ethic as Germans. Such are the unnatural 'selections' that get made in human history. The pfennig dropped. Once he saw the concentration camps, with their 'ethnic cleansing', he grasped the inhumanity of Nazi 'science'.

"Back on 13 March, Patrick Vallance, the UK’s chief scientific adviser, told the BBC the 'aim' was to 'not suppress (coronavirus) completely... to build up some kind of herd immunity so more people are immune to this disease, while still reducing the peak number of infections to protect the NHS......However, merely a week after the position was declared, Johnson, who had tested positive for coronavirus, opted to put the UK on lockdown after getting expert modelling predicting Britain was on course to lose 250,000 people during the pandemic unless stringent measures were taken." (The Guardian, 1 April, 2020)

There is no doubt in my mind that Cummings and Johnson in February 2020 saw a permanent or final solution in adopting an easy-going stance to the coronavirus - "take it on the chin" Johnson immortally said. But they had not really anticipated the emotional and political effects of 250,000 deaths before herd immunity kicked in nor the impact of the fact that the NHS would collapse in the process (yet they had been running it down or privatising sections of it since 2010). Boris Badenov and Natasha were behaving like cartoon characters, with Bullwinkle the Moose over in America cheering them on. So, lockdown! The corpses had piled up and people were prevented from being with dying parents. The UK had the highest death rate in the world per capita of population. American deaths currently escalate over 150,000 towards the 200,000 Trump saw as a 'good result'. Boris later discovered that government or the NHS had done nothing to protect people in care homes from CV19, e.g. by supplying PPE or by testing. So his 'good result' of 20,000 has long since been surpassed, England has proven it has a world-leading system for ensuring its residents die early, particularly the BAME and the elderly, and yet Boris still declares we're winning! In that sense, they are guilty of criminal negligence leading to many deaths. And if they still maintain they are successful we must ask what their target is - are they aiming at the world's best kill rate? The New Zealand PM, Jacinta Ardern, said that she would not want so many deaths on her hands, so she closed down airports and ports early, got a lot of tests and contact tracing done, and her country hardly suffered much at all, with only 22 deaths and 1154 cases [in July] compared to the UK's at a guess ( poor stats) 50,000 deaths and 280,000 cases. My stepson is an intensive care nurse in New Zealand. Herd immunity is not a twentieth-century public health approach. It is lazy, unscientific and avoids state planning and inter-agency coordination.

When Johnson changed the strategy to try to contain the virus via lockdown, the NHS was not ready with beds, ventilators or PPE. Pandemic stocks had been run down since 2010, despite more pandemics expected; some were past their use-by dates (although new labels were often pasted over); frontline staff died without PPE; some care homes were sites of multiple deaths, and, overall, care home deaths amounted to a third of the UK total; organization and messaging has been shambolic with little clarity, insufficient testing, little contact tracing, empty new hospitals, and scaring people from reporting even heart attacks and 'normal' serious illnesses, the official rate of which have decreased in many places, as people fear entry into hospital, and there is a back-up now of expected future deaths from the 'normal' causes.

In Madness and Civilization, Foucault (1967) indicated how epidemics of contagious disease in urban areas is a catalyst for fundamental political and social change. In that case of mid-17th century Europe, we see the emergence of the 'great confinement", the growth of institutions of mass exclusion, such as the prisons and the mental hospitals, and the creation of a "carceral archipelago". Today we see a reduction in civil liberty and liberal democracy in general, with the accelerated militarization of policing and its consequent brutality. The murder of George Floyd was not a 'one-off' but an outcome of the new militarized normal in police practice, a US execution on a spectacular global scale. Racism and authoritarianism again partnering to amplify the number of multi-cultural, international, multi-generational pan-ideological rebels and to expand the meaning of 'extinction rebellion'. Don't authorities ever learn? But Cummings and his puppet will no doubt try to avoid any meaningful future elections, having by-passed or replaced senior civil servants, having more or less closed down Parliament, redrawing constituency boundaries, denouncing the idea of opposition and ensuring all opposition is ineffective with lttle voice or position, and selectively increasing or decreasing local authority budgets to protect Tory majorities and marginals. We are all set for a thousand-year Reich. The parallels with Germany in the 1930's are frightening.

Cummings broke lockdown rules without apology or regret, revealing a government with one rule for them and another for us. But it won't fly; many hated being taken for fools; many can see that Boris, Natasha and, obviously, Bullwinkle do not care about us or what we think and feel. Their infantile egocentrism is stunningly obvious. Boris openly admitted he had only just discovered that society was real but seems still to behave, as always, just ignoring opposition, criticism and loss of support, braying like a 'hooray Henry' at a perceived enemy in an Oxbridge college.

"They appear to be like children who keep trying postpone reality. I suppose that's because the Brexit ideology is built on lies and fantasies. Fighting an imagined enemy for imaginary freedom. And it trumps everything, peace, lives, livelihoods, covid, everything.

Only now reality is here re covid and deaths, and rapidly approaching re Brexit." (Claballia, a Comment in The Guardian, 14 July 2020)

Reality is indeed now hitting hard, not that Boris and Natasha care about how hard. But polls suggest the public are alarmed at their complacency and arrogance, with a declining and ageing minority saying 'poor lamb, he's doing his best; it's all so unexpected'. Boris's personal ratings are now at a minus figure. The penny is dropping....

Brexit is obviously self-harming, at least for the 60% of the people who do not want it - no-one has ever managed to give a good reason for it. Exposing oneself to the virus is even more obviously self-harming, showing a gullibility to the government's too-early easing of lockdown. Scotland and Wales do not want to leave the EU, are much stricter or more precise in wanting virus elimination, and their death and infection rates are much lower than England's. Northern Ireland will soon need to decide if it feels neglected enough to reunite with the rest of Ireland. We, whoever 'we' are, now appear to have less control than ever over our own lives, as this government becomes increasingly authoritarian to get its own way on Brexit and to misdirect us on the corona virus: threatening the judges, lying to the Queen, running down Parliamentary power over the executive, casually dismantling civil liberties, further privatising the NHS, invasive and selective directives on public interaction and selling off taxpayers' assets. Little is being spent on greener practices to protect our environment, totally ignoring the reduced air pollution reached during lockdown.

Self-harming and harming others: why do turkeys vote for Xmas?

Why do we Brits queue quietly and put up with authoritarianism with apparently infinite patience? Why do working people, who struggle to make ends meet or get a doctor's appointment or elective surgery, tolerate undemocratic methods, bullying and a party that plainly cannot resolve their problems? A party of millionaires that says it's the people's party? A party openly committed to protecting the Establishment, the rich, the foreign multi-nationals, the status quo whilst simultaneously selling off our national assets to the highest bidder? It is not simply that Labour is no better, because we showed in Part 2 that Labour have gained a lot of support over the last 5 years and Jeremy Corbyn has the satisfaction of knowing he built the biggest socialist party in Europe with very left-wing economic and social commitments and around a third of votes cast. If we had electoral reform towards proportional representation, Corbyn would now be PM in a progressive coalition of UK unity.

Ideology and culture emerge from practice and find their resonance in practice. Ideology is not a number plate on a class's back, like on a soccer shirt, that stays the same forever, never developing with the situation, travel or movement. It is a form of consciousness that reflects thoroughly the social practices its subject is immersed in and in 2020 that includes the culture, or the accumulated meanings of history. Today, all practice is to some extent swathed in cultural and even multicultural forms. Water has passed under many bridges, and the UK has travelled all those canals and rivers, so one would expect a respect for others after polyglot experience and one might even expect a recurrent desire to return to a 'pure England' that seems to have been sold out to foreigners and tourists. Even the water is owned by foreign companies! The Tories and the far right sold the Brexit idea to a receptive public between 2016 and 2019 in the UK - it spoke to real practical needs: the needs to reduce immigration, to increase the availability of jobs, to regain control over water, electricity, gas, transport etc, to renew English identity and to increase local control over communities. They repeated it robotically with no debate permitted, following Cummings' ideas of data dissemination as a one-way street, in the crudest, most simplistic way, drilling right down to the totally meaningless slogan "Get Brexit done!". That level of childish talk by the highly educated, with form on Euroscepticism, can be designated as malicious and cynical - or as the ramblings of sociopaths. But the message fell on fertile ground! To deny that would lead to bad politics.

Sure, Tory leaders had mens rea and so malice aforethought - to leave the EU without a deal and to allow the virus to run amok. These Oxbridge/Eton graduates, even though obvious fantasists and knowing little about harsh reality, did know that the much simpler Canada trade deal took 7 years. Boris was deceptively dishonest in saying 'this is only the beginning', for in the real world a proper Brexit deal would take a decade to do. He really meant he was happy or indifferent with 'no deal'. It's not him that will suffer. He will have retired to leisure, whilst the Farageist working classes wait until eternity for their Nirvana and in severe pain from bad backs and hips, knowing they have destroyed or at least deferred the future their children wanted. Johnson also is setting up everybody else to take the blame when his fantasy fails - he avoids tough interviews and even mildly critical journalists.

All this was fairly obvious to many before the last election, but not to many English voters who put Johnson in power despite their preferences for Labour or the Lib-Dems. Or did they deliberately self-harm? I believe they did. The Farageist working class voter really is not stupid, although of course some have had little education and are naive about the upper classes whom they have rarely met if ever. They chose to leave the EU just like they crowd the beaches and bars too soon and without protection from the virus. They chose an option in the 2016 Referendum, and again in the 2019 election, which many had not thought through or were well-informed about but which appealed. It appears for them life is too short and there is little to have faith in so they might as well vote for the risky but attractive option: a return to the golden age or the chance of not dying from the virus even if granma' does. It isn't quite attempted suicide but it is sailing close to the sun. Just like Cummings. No wonder there is some alignment! Chancers of the world unite! Both sides are like Icarus. Icarus, Icarus, give us a wave!

In trying to understand "Islamist suicide Terrorism", Emad El-Din Aysha, researching in a Sustainable Development Centre in Cairo, drew on Erich Fromm's view that "the more modernity advances, the smaller you feel" (2017, p.85). Fromm, a clinical psychologist, was a founder of psychoanalytic sociology. Having lost all "mediaeval ties" (Fromm's phrase), the individual often feels "defenceless, alone and alienated against his opposite society" (Aysha, p. 85), insignificant and isolated from human community. This is basic modernity. In my view, it is worse today for individuals, in a complex post-truth age of digital bullshit and a sheer excess of information requiring choice, locked away with their own obsessions and niche knowledges, not knowing how to choose between plausibilities, deprived of the light of proper sustained public debate and sane leadership in the national cause not self-interest. To survive this computerized penal servitude in fog, a kind of virtual solitary confinement heading for environmental extinction and confusion, we must reach desperately for a golden age or at least a vision of happier, authentic, less complex times. It is a strategy that unifies people in many different parts of the world. But it unifies to destroy the new.

Aysha (ibid. p.86) quotes Funk (2000, p.5) quite usefully on the subject of "brutal excesses" and what better name than Funk to express this: "xenophobia, at football matches, at black masses, in cases of collective suicide or of violence that is completely unprovoked...can be read as compensations for an ability to love life". How very England! At least since the Tories took power and inflicted 'austerity' on us after 2010! The pushback against alienation and misery is of course never a pure resistance against the actual enemy, oppressive social relationships. Like theLuddites' mistaken attacks on machinery, the wrong target, people can only think in terms of their ideology or culture - so, if they have prejudices rather than good knowledge, the perceived but vague Other or 'bad spirit' is blamed and cast out. Radical Islamists/foreigners/immigrants and Tory imperialists blame each other and cast each other out.

Before Brexit and the corona virus, we ordinary people in the UK were down, stressed out, alienated, a bit or a lot ill and lacking in much hope. Labour had failed us and our war in Iraq was a national disgrace. All we had was the football, our anaesthetics and religions. Funk said, sadly and so rightly: "If I cannot love and confer life...then I at least want to experience myself through the act of destruction" (ibid.). Hence the joyous football chant aimed at a defeated foe: "you're not singing any more". Many 'only sing when they are winning'. But there is a difference between the destruction of others and self-destruction; between harming the planet or the society and self-harming, which at least seems idealistic and noble in not harming the public or the world and not pointlessly negative and barbaric. However I accept that Fromm, in his Anatomy of Human Destructiveness, saw masochism as one of its roots in a "need for excitement", noting that some couples stay together because of their quarrels (1973, p. 272). Self-harming can unify the self with the cause of its discomfort, in a condition of not loving life, being superfluous and feeling unwanted.

Aysha (2017, p.86) states flatly that "People who suffer from this sense of superfluousness positively enjoy the 'images of the horrendous death and destruction rained on the earth during the so-called last days, vivid and graphic accounts of the unbearable pain and suffering of non-believers, the burning and melting of the flesh [of] sinners, and the destruction of billions of lives of those who are not members of the right religion' (Wilson, 2009, p.18)". I've never had that much fun myself. Does that mean I am not superfluous? Well, I feel very loved and that may be the point. All that pain and suffering seems mad but may actually be the direct result of feeling hated, used and rejected by Others. Japanese soldiers laughed as they beheaded or raped their 300,000 Chinese victims in the barbaric and horrific Rape of Nanking, that "forgotten Holocaust" of 1937 (Chang 1997). Abuse begets abuse.

Laughing at other people's pain works well for winners, and we all know how badly Leavers behaved after they won the Brexit game, as they saw it, with their 'get over it, you lost', as though this were actually a game that you could win. Of course, any serious sportsman knows that winners have to look after losers and be able to maintain decent relations with them, usually in the bar afterwards with a drink or six, otherwise there is no future game! We Remainers didn't see Brexit as a game but as a criminally induced social disaster that would ruin the rest of our lives and those of our children. Leavers had no care for that. Not one jot. To this day, they laugh and bray like donkeys with their brain-dead 'move on, get over it, you lost'. These are the pathological attitudes of sociopathic winners who will not maintain relationships with the losers. These sociopaths seem absolutely insensitive to the pain they are inflicting on over half the UK population. Like the murderous Japanese soldiers in Nanking, have they become immune to their brutality and their power? What do they imagine they will do with us after they get their fantasy 'done'? At present, they simply enjoy our pain and wallow in our declining mental health, playing virtual football with our heads. Because they feel small and superfluous? NO, obviously not. Or because they are brought up to believe they can do anything and get away with it? I believe the destruction of others is based more on the latter: the executioners of this world are arrogant supremacists who think they are genetically superior, usually intellectuals who can construct abstract justifications for their murderous mayhem (see Waller 2015 on the Nazi leaders).

For those who believe their lives are already destroyed or hopeless or pointless, but are not 'under orders' like genocide soldiers, self-harming is a way to connect with the universe. Like suicide bombers, working-class Leave voters feel their lives have gone or have no serious meaning; a fantasy to return to a golden age is all some have got. The Tory millionaires with their aim of a 'no-deal Brexit' sustained by an ideology of English exceptionalism, where football and democracy both 'come home', hit them repeatedly in the sweet spot of their desolation. But the golden age will never return, because you cannot reverse history and because Brexit is a con. Self-destructive political action, for that is what voting for Brexit was, amounted in real terms to a self-sacrifice, a sacrifice of their children's futures, justified by some vague idea of recovering a lost world, an attempt to turn back time instead of learning from history.

As if the callous inertia over the Grenfell tragedy was not enough, the Tory government actually seems to have a macabre enjoyment at watching national self-harming. Journalists have noticed that Tory ministers frequently laugh when delivering their bullshit (see Sutton on bullshit), and none more than the Minister of Death (or Health), Matt Hancock, a liar and the most incompetent man seen in government since 'failing Grayling' a year or two back. Such laughter is authentic, I believe. Hancock truly thinks that our national disaster is amusing, because, as Aysha suggests, it is irrelevant to him, an entrepreneur who has long been linked with NHS privatizations and endorsing company products used by the NHS. To suggest his laughing is mere stupidity or lack of social skills is to miss the point of his fun exploitation of others' despondency and vulnerability. He enjoys his power. It is like saying Cummings did not really laugh at the public in his breach of lockdown expedition to Durham, in his expecting us to believe his driving around was to test his eyesight, and in his smirk as he walked away from the press conference he was not actually permitted to hold as a government adviser. Yes, they laugh. Because they are parasites on living bodies, not the ones dying but the ones profiting. They are the overseers of capital who have renounced integrity and truth and laugh as we suffer.

The “individual overcomes the feeling of insignificance in comparison with the overwhelming power of the world outside of himself either by renouncing his individual integrity, or by destroying others so that the world ceases to be threatening” (Fromm, 1941, pp. 208-9). The Northern 'wall' of constituencies that voted Tory after decades of being disappointed by Labour were trying to recover meaning in their lives and their golden age. The capitalistic overseers, like Hancock and Minister of Care Management, Helen Whately, ex-management consultant and like Hancock patently empty and care-less, obviously do not flinch at observing others' suffering. To make their world less threatening, they are prepared to risk hundreds of thousands of lives with their herd immunity theory without a vaccine, and thousands of others by the terrible effects of a no-deal Brexit. Like Field Marshall Haig, they will send tens of thousands to their deaths because of their other-worldly miseducated and cocooned stupidity. They are what Brexit and the mishandled virus have in common.

People are politically disenfranchised and their world is run by idiots and crooks with decreasing amounts of real-life experience. They lack hope and will vote even for unrealistic change. Northerners are survivors, victims of sustained and massive regional discrimination in and out of 'austerity', and have nothing to lose. The ruling class needed our forebears in 1939-45, and since, for fighting that war and dying in large numbers, the NHS was our reward, yet now the Tories privatise and underfund it so it now functions badly except in emergencies and much of it is now out of reach without cheap healthcare insurance. So, 'let's go with Boris or the Brexit party', the ordinary punters said, and see if we can return some sense, some control and some identity. Mistake. However a gun to the head will enhance concentration in the months ahead.

Embracing the pain of Brexit and a mishandled virus: the censure of the criminal state

In his study of suicide bombers, Aysha concludes: "what suicide recruits are trying to do is conquer their (carefully stocked) fears of death by embracing them. Nothing quietens death-related fears and anxious suicide thinking like putting yourself in the line of fire, if not the firing range itself" (2017, p.90). Yes, "seemingly irrational factors", such as dignity and stubborn pride, can be a critical motivation for self-harming: "..masochistic sacrifice sees the fulfilment of life in its very negation" (Fromm, 1941, p.295). Like the bearded guy on the street with his 'we are doomed' message: 'The end of the world is nigh'. A depressive fantasy is a way to find a connection with the universe when all around is completely fucked. Ernest Becker portrayed the ideology of self-sacrifice this way: it "transmutes the fear of death into the security of self-perpetuation" (1975, p. 217). Voting for Boris Badenov to be your part-time PM secures absolute existential security? Turkeys do vote for Christmas. Time to watch Love Island.

Alas, there will be more sadness in this "vale of tears" (Engels), where depression is delusional and John Cooper Clarke is our guide, the study of suicide bombers, or "brotherhoods of violence", supposedly shows that they only provide "temporary balm" (Aysha, 2017, p.95). This reinforces my personal inclination to believe that there is nothing temporary, or balmy, about blowing yourself to pieces. I may be just a typically pragmatic Northerner but I prefer the idea of sustainable development, with or without me, over reincarnation; because of our future. When do turkeys vote for Christmas? When do dogs decide they must die? When they have no longer any hope to live on.

Brexit and the exceptionally clueless mishandling of the corona virus pandemic look like a national suicide on every level; economic, political and cultural. But the cause is not just a corrupt and venal capitalist élite but also a disillusioned, alienated and cynical electorate with few remnants of the positive in their past, plenty of poverty, an NHS in crisis, education in crisis, the crisis in crisis, no political voice and a growing sense of the irrelevance of everything. In the 1930's, in a similar situation, people reached for an ubermensch, Superman and Batman were invented, and Hitler and Mussolini propagandized, bullied and swaggered their way to power. One delusional and dependent alternative to self-harming is to reach for the superman, the strong man, the Messiah.

Terry Jones, the great Monty Python comic, director and writer, died recently and as he said, in one of the funniest films of all time, The Life of Brian, in character as Jesus's Mum, when confronting the peasant mob calling for their Messiah: "He's not the Messiah, he's a very naughty boy. Now go away!". Johnson and Cummings, Boris and Natasha, are certainly the demonic duo, but soon it will be time to say goodbye to public school pranks, government by stupid ideas, bad data and inhumanity, and send the pair, along with their incompetent accomplices, for de-radicalisation, preferably in an under-budgeted prison where the officers have gone feral and have CV-19. They will find people will never call for their 'early release' or premature ejection until they are old and impotent, say in 20 years, and only then when Johnson can recite the Communist Manifesto in ancient Greek.

Moral of our little fable: it takes two to do self-harming properly. It is one thing to censure the Tory leadership for destroying everything in sight, including their own Party; it is another to explain why sections of the population voted for Brexit and tolerated Johnson's appalling creation, handling and ideological spinning of the CV19 crisis. They are two different explanations but they need to be brought together to explain the whole disaster and to enable a politics that effectively re-unifies people to progress beyond this.

Criminology has to understand two things in order to move into the twenty-first century, to reflect and explain accurately the changing meaning of crime and the acceleration of injustice:

[1] there is such a thing as a pathological and criminal state and therefore that, insofaras criminology works within statist parameters and does not question and contravene them, it is part of the problem not the solution; it retains the focus on the poor and vulnerable, the criminalized victims of history rather than the criminalizing criminals who run the state;

[2] crime is a two-sided entity, not an arbitrary label with no ontological element; it sees disapproved behaviour through the lens of an ideology of disapproval. When crime is seen as just a category or label it lacks ontology, or reference to real victimizations, but when we grasp it as a social censure we see that it has a material reality; disapproval is usually not for nothing, there is a point of connection. Political censure must specify the details of its target criminality and, on the other side of the same coin, supporting criminal or negligent government requires moral justification not mere wishful thinking.

References

Emad El-Din Aysha (2017) "Islamist suicide terrorism and Erich Fromm's social psychology of modern times". Journal of Social and Political Psychology. Vol. 5(1), pp.82-106.

Becker, E. (1975) The Denial of Death. New York: Free Press.

Erika Dyck (2013) Facing Eugenics: Reproduction, Sterilization, and the Politics of Choice (Toronto: University of Toronto Press).

Foucault, M. (1967) Madness and Civilization. London: Tavistock.

Fromm, E. (1941) Escape from Freedom. New York, NY, USA: Farrar & Rinehart.

Fromm, E. (1973) The Anatomy of Human Destructuiveness. New York: Holt.

Funk, R. (2000). The continuing relevance of Erich Fromm (B. Allen, Trans.). Fromm Forum (English edition), 4, 9-14. Retrieved from http://opus4.kobv.de/opus4-Fromm/files/10020/Funk_R_2000g.pdf

Lorenz, K. (1966) On Aggression. London: Methuen.

McLaren, A. (1990) Our Master Race: Eugenics in Canada 1885-1945. Toronto: McClelland & Stewart.

Karen Stote, An Act of Genocide: Colonialism and the Sterilization of Aboriginal Women (Halifax & Winnipeg, Fernwood Publishing, 2015).

Sumner, C.S. (1994/2012) The Sociology of Deviance: an Obituary. Buckingham: Open UP and North Somercotes: CrimeTalk Books.

Virdi, J. (2018) "Canada's shame: the coerced sterilization of indigenous women", New Internationalist, 30 November.

Wilson, C. A. (2009, February). "Erich Fromm revisited: The tension between religious humanism and religious pathology". Paper presented at the annual meeting of the Midwest Political Science Association 67th Annual National Conference, The Palmer House Hilton, Chicago, IL, USA.

Written by Colin Sumner, Editor of CrimeTalk, former professor of criminology, law and sociology. Not a member of any political party, merely a depressed observer. Currently writing Reclaiming Criminology: For the Victims of History (2021 Emerald).

Postscript

Johnson has finally admitted today, in somewhat limited fashion and begrudgingly, and too late, that the government got it wrong from the beginning. He still cannot see that his lethal errors were because he was and is obsessed with Brexit, a crucial link made in my long essay. Sir Ed Davey, leader of the Liberal Democrats had this to say in a BBC interview:

At last Boris Johnson has admitted what we have all known for some time - this government made fundamental mistakes in their handling of the coronavirus crisis. However, to try and minimise this as there were some things they could have done differently is not only an enormous understatement, but it is an insult to all those who tragically lost loved ones to the virus. This interview has given people more questions than answers.

With no remorse for the catastrophic mistakes such as the failure to protect our care homes or a refusal to put a comprehensive plan in place for a second wave, it is clear the Prime Minster has learnt nothing over the course of the last few months. Boris Johnson’s comments today prove why an immediate independent inquiry is so essential.

The prime minister and his government must be faced with the reality of where they went wrong, so that they can learn from their mistakes which have led to tragic consequences.