DEATHWISH...

In Africa they starve their children,
In China they dump them,
In Brazil they shoot them,
In the UK they stab them...

The full extent of Britain’s violent crime epidemic, to date claiming the lives of some 40 teenagers - including that of Sophie Lancaster, kicked to death by a pack of feral, pubescent mutants - was brought home again, when a 15-year-old schoolgirl from south London described how no fewer than seven of her friends and relatives had been murdered in the past two years.

Meanwhile, of course, we have the collective contagion of an entire country with a virus that causes its children to treat each other like feral strays; or, to put it differently, the freeing and revitalisation of precisely those atavistic instincts whose control and humanisation has been the work of some ten millennia of domestication.

Insofar as we are the product of a system of thought control so constraining that our personal compliance appears to proceed, not from our own free choice, but from this very era of “freedom” with its inflationary consequences, the question of guilt is of course beside the point. But one is justifiably apprehensive about the subversive psychological effects of years of relentless and unceasing agitation for the freedom of a permissive moral idealism as a recognizable social creed: The unflustered, cynical imagination, the nihilistic pleasure in freedom for its own sake, and the violence that has become an end in itself. As a matter of fact if freedom of any kind is anything to go by, society has a regrettable tendency to deceive itself about what is a personal indulgence and what a collective aberration.

What is indeed bizarre about it is that between constraining and being constrained it has caught men in the grip of an invisible rage and entangled them in some decidedly psychotic forces, unimpeded by any law. Forces which, almost like something alien, something not human, makes men strive compulsively and determinedly towards paranoid and deadly self-destruction. Nor are we perhaps sufficiently alert to the fact that the conventional sociology of crime is unlikely to settle the ambiguities surrounding what has meanwhile developed into the gravest forensic crisis the world has experienced, combining, as it does, martial with homicidal impulses and taking the whole subject out of the strictly criminological frame of reference by placing it into a psychologically different category, making it ominous, alien and universal: a most unpropitious preliminary for a homicidal process of “contraceptive” Malthusian attrition.

And so the pressure builds. History's biggest bloodbath is in the making!

For the ultimate cause of the conditions under which violence seems inevitable is demographic congestion. Everything takes place under a form of stress. Great rents in normality are appearing everywhere. And while there may never have been a bleaker rendition of the orderly governance of murder than that witnessed by the first half of the twentieth century, probably at no time in the history of man have so many alien communities been so bent on plans of mutual annihilation, mass deportations, civil repression and ethnic cleansings as in the opening years of the twenty-first. Indeed, it is altogether impossible to assess what this century might still be capable of in its moral, psychotic and ecological derangement. Its history has yet to be written...

Dreamy