Terrorists – or just drugged-up losers?

BEFORE anyone knew anything about any details of the Barcelona killings, all media had decided it was a terrorist attack.

They had also plastered it all over the top of every bulletin and every newspaper. Why do we do this? As I don’t know the full facts, I accept that the culprits of the Barcelona massacre may turn out to be active and engaged terrorists, quite sane and acting under the orders of an Islamist high command.

But I should add that it is at least equally likely that, like the culprits of the Nice, Berlin and London attacks, they will turn out to be petty criminal losers with a history of violence and longstanding drug habits, unconnected to any organisation.

I have looked into all these past assassins. That is what they were, despite vigorous attempts by securocrats (and their media mouthpieces) to give them a serious purpose. Something similar, by the way, is true of the alleged culprit of the car attack in Charlottesville – a troubled army reject who was (and probably still is) on potent antipsychotic drugs after being diagnosed with serious mental illness, though you’d need a microscope to find any mention of this fact in most of the coverage.

What purpose do we serve by leaping to conclusions as we do? Any deranged fantasist with access to a motor vehicle now knows that all he needs to do is drive that vehicle at speed into a crowd of pedestrians, and he will achieve the ghastly fame that all such people desire.

We cannot ban cars or vans. We cannot put obstacles on every major street in every city.

The more we portray these events as big and significant, the more they happen. The more we say we’re not going to let them change our way of life, the more we load ourselves with futile ‘security’ measures. And the more we ignore drug-taking in our society, the more unhinged people we have on our streets.