{"id":32367,"date":"2015-08-15T04:00:55","date_gmt":"2015-08-15T08:00:55","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/?p=32367"},"modified":"2019-05-20T09:31:30","modified_gmt":"2019-05-20T13:31:30","slug":"impersonal-forces-acting-on-passive-innocents","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/2015\/08\/15\/impersonal-forces-acting-on-passive-innocents\/","title":{"rendered":"Impersonal forces acting on passive innocents"},"content":{"rendered":"

We’ve seen plenty of examples of this kind of “reporting”, where the presentation of the case absolves the actors in advance of any motive or action … they’re always implicit victims of circumstances beyond their control. Theodore Dalrymple<\/a> points to a recent example:<\/p>\n

Sometimes the employment of a single word in common use gives away an entire worldview. There was just such a usage in the headline of a story in the Guardian<\/em> newspaper late last month: \u201cHow the \u2018Pompey Lads\u2019 fell into the hands of Isis.\u201d<\/p>\n

Pompey is the colloquial name for Portsmouth, the naval town on the south coast of England, and the \u201clads\u201d of the headline were five young men of Bangladeshi origin who grew up there and later joined Isis in Syria. The article describes how the last of the five has now been killed, three others having been killed before him and one, who returned to Britain, having been sentenced to a four-year prison sentence (in effect two years, with remission for good behavior). The use of the word \u201clads\u201d is intended to imply to the newspaper\u2019s readers that there was nothing special or different about these five young men, nothing that distinguished them from the other young men of Portsmouth. Its use was a manifestation of wishful or even magical thinking, as if reality itself could be altered in a desired way by the mere employment of language.<\/p>\n

But the word that implied a whole worldview was \u201cfell.\u201d According to the headline, the young men \u201cfell\u201d into the hands of Isis as an apple falls passively to the ground by gravitational force. The word suggests that it could have happened to anybody, this going to Syria via Turkey to join a movement that delights in decapitation and other such activities in the name of a religion \u2014 their religion. Joining Isis is like multiple sclerosis; it\u2019s something that just happens to people.<\/p>\n

The word \u201cfell\u201d denies agency to the young men, as if they had no choice in the matter. They were victims of circumstance by virtue of their membership of a minority, for minorities are by definition victims without agency.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

We’ve seen plenty of examples of this kind of “reporting”, where the presentation of the case absolves the actors in advance of any motive or action … they’re always implicit victims of circumstances beyond their control. Theodore Dalrymple points to a recent example: Sometimes the employment of a single word in common use gives away […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":35193,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[4,28,370,11],"tags":[706,982,47,213,257,1289],"class_list":["post-32367","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-britain","category-media","category-middle-east","category-religion","tag-bangladesh","tag-isis","tag-islam","tag-newspapers","tag-terrorism","tag-theodoredalrymple"],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-content\/uploads\/2016\/06\/favicon.png","jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/p2hpV6-8q3","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/32367","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=32367"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/32367\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":32368,"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/32367\/revisions\/32368"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/35193"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=32367"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=32367"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=32367"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}