‘We shall squeeze you empty, and then we shall fill you with ourselves.’

The dangerous drift towards the type of ideological conformism foreshadowed by George Orwell in 1984 continues in the wake of the government’s recent announcement of who or what is deemed ‘extremist’. In the latest set of ‘counterterrorism’ proposals, people would be considered extremists if they advocated a caliphate, promote sharia law, believe in Jihad or support armed resistance – most notably armed resistance by Palestinians against the Israeli military – or fail to condemn the killing of British soldiers in Iraq or Afghanistan.

The proposals also seek to broaden the definition of ‘extremists’ to those who hold views that clash with what the government defines as ‘shared British values’. Indeed, this ‘new’ initiative has eerie parallels to proposals introduced under the previous Prime Minister, Tony Blair, who crafted a ‘script of British values’ to fight a propaganda war against al-Qaeda for the hearts and minds of a ‘lost generation’ of Muslims in November 2006.

As well as being patronising, this focus quite worryingly implied that Muslims must necessarily have some inherent conflict with Western values and ought to engage in activities that somehow provide overt, convincing evidence that they accept them. The idea that Muslims or any group must assimilate to a ‘common template’ contains within it the seeds of intolerance and polarisation. As James Baldwin once said:

‘Assimilation was frequently but another name for the very special brand of relations between human beings which had been imposed by colonialism. These relations demanded that the individual, torn from the context to which he owed his identity, should replace his habits of feeling, thinking and acting by another set of habits which belonged to the strangers who dominated him.’

This represents the continuation of a long and unrelenting campaign to identify and criminalise any subversive ideas as ‘thought-crime’. The unseemly source of these latest proposals have been laid over the past few years in attempts to ‘de-radicalise’, ‘de-programme’ or, as one security minister put it, ‘end radicalisation of Muslims in Britain’. The government extended this last June with the announcement that it was to pledge £12.5 million to support ‘de-radicalisation’ programmes in the UK.

The normalisation of these initiatives, first introduced in Yemen, has been part of the government’s broader initiative to tackle ‘extremist ideology’. Existing attempts at ‘de-programming Jihadists’ have gained popular currency in Saudi Arabia, where there is an ‘effort to correct theological misunderstandings’. As a New York Times article claims, many young men ‘have become the subjects of a continuing experiment in counterterrorism’ (1). The success of these programmes is often highlighted with the case of Egypt, which is thought to boast the largest de-radicalisation programme in the Arab world, cited as having ‘reformed’ or changed the minds of numerous Islamic militants.

The idea of ‘de-programming’ in itself has a long and ugly history, often associated with practices of brainwashing, thought reform or mind control as used by New Religious Movements and other cultish groups in attempts to convert members of a faith. Such programmes attempt to ‘gut-check’ participants into thinking along more ‘appropriate’ lines that serve to inhibit critical thinking and express support for the status quo. Inspired by such initiatives, it was claimed last October that psychologists in the prison service will attempt to ‘cure’ Muslim inmates of their political beliefs through the use of these therapies. As one widely cited authority on radicalisation put it, ‘you replace one sound bite with another sound bite’ (2).

Ironically, such processes of indoctrination or mind control represent the same process as often suggested of those involved in terrorist activity. Sustained by stock phrases and popular metaphors couched in notions of ‘our’ way of life and ‘our’ imposed notions of liberty and democracy, they represent efforts to hijack the mind and ‘think like us’ (the majority of citizens), exacerbating the very issue they claim to tackle and further imprison rather than empower individual choice. As one expert on brainwashing in religious movements remarked: ‘You are saying, “You are a victim of terrible psychological forces that robbed you of your reason, and in order for us to fix you we are going to do it to you again, but we are the good guys and what we do is really good for you”’ (3). With disturbing parallels to the ‘special interrogation techniques’ used by the CIA to ‘remake minds’ in the 1950s, the notion that one can populate the mind with ‘counter-messages’ and transform individuals into passive, benficent, conformist individuals has been described by some civil libertarians in Australia as tantamount to torture (4).

However, that these practices have become so ingrained in ‘counterterrorism’ discourse means that there has been little or no systematic attempt to challenge the ethical dimensions and foundations of these practices, continually justified on the pretext of national or international security. While those who support the programmes maintain that they aren’t about dissuading ideology but dissuading violence, its clear that this assertion contradicts the government’s focus on ‘the battle of ideas’ and recently suggested proposals, in addition to those ‘moderate’ organisations that the government has done much to support including the Quilliam Foundation and the Radical Middle Way, who are virtually sustained by the premise that ‘extremist’ ideas lie at the heart of political violence.

These methods are problematic in practical and ethical terms, and also lie upon a misleading theoretical basis in its unequivocal and linear connection between ideas and actions. Just as one cannot separate Pol Pot from Marxism or Pinochet from Christianity, the ideological content cannot be divorced from the deed in question, but the more significant issue concerns the function and application of ideology involved. As the Carl Jung once said, ‘I do not want anyone to be a Jungian…I want people above all to be themselves’. The focus ought to lie in this respect on the use of ideas rather than their structure or content, as John Dewey reminds us: ‘It is an idea because of what it does in clearing up a perplexity or in harmonizing what is otherwise fragmentary, not because of its psychical make-up’ (5).

Attempts to provide counter-narratives to subversive discourses and police seditious ideas and to ‘moderate’ or tame expressions of ideology have been and will continue to be futile approaches. As Amin Maalouf once claimed, ‘instead of pondering the essence of a doctrine you need to look at the behaviour … of those who claim to believe in it’ (6). In any case, suppressing individuality is not and cannot be the way forward. Until more systematic attempts to challenge these initiatives are put forward the Orwellian nightmare promises to persist and worsen.

1) Deprogramming Jihadists , by Katherine ZoepfNew York Times, 7 November 2008
2) Marc Sageman quoted in How to defuse a human bomb, by Drake Bennett, Boston Globe, 13 April 2008
3) Govt considers deprogramming terrorists, The Age, 9 March 2006
4) ibid
5)  Dewey, John (1933). ‘How We Think’, The Later Works 1925-1953, Volume 8: 1933/1989, Southern Illinois University Press
6) Maalouf, Amin (2001). In the Name of Identity: Violence and the Need to Belong, Arcade Publishing