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CHAPTER 5
A Fish Rots from the Head
How Powerful Moral Entrepreneurs
Manufacture Folk Devils
Matt Clement
University of Winchester
Introduction
Prejudice, the act of characterizing people in a stereotypical and derogatory
fashion to justify their persecution, is literally ‘pre-judging’. Being prejudiced
means refusing to allow a judgement based on the facts available to aect your
attitudes and actions towards a group of people: insisting on the right to have an
opinion based on mythmaking; listening to, believing and telling lies that oen
add up to conspiracy fantasies that turn reality on its head. Groups of people
who are oppressed and less powerful than others are described as either threat-
ening to dominate ‘us’, i.e. the rest of society, or as a risk, through their attitudes,
which are alleged to undermine social norms and established cultures. Many
sociologists have explored the way in which states categorize groups of people
– human gurations – into ‘established and outsiders’ (Elias and Scotson 2008)
or more commonly simply label the problem group as ‘outsiders’ (Becker 1963) or
‘hooligans’ (Pearson 1983). One overarching term applied to both 19th-century
Paris and the 21st-century global economy that captures the implicit application
How to cite this book chapter:
Clement, M. 2021. ‘A Fish Rots from the Head: How Powerful Moral Entrepreneurs
Manufacture Folk Devils’. In Modern Folk Devils: Contemporary Constructions of
Evil, edited by M. D. Frederiksen and I. Harboe Knudsen, 99–115. Helsinki:
Helsinki University Press. DOI: https://doi.org/10.33134/HUP-13-6.
100 Modern Folk Devils
of the politics of fear is that of the ‘dangerous classes’ (Chevalier 1973; Melossi
2008; Standing 2011).
For example, in the contemporary Czech Republic, ‘Roma are referred to in
mainstream discourse as the “inadaptable” – the term used by Reichsführer-SS
Heinrich Himmler in 1942 when he gave the order to deport all remaining
Roma and Sinti to Auschwitz because they were “inadaptable people”’ (Fekete
2018, 18; see also Slačálek, Chapter 9). As this example proves, rather than
being a threat, this ‘outsider’ group were themselves the victims of violent per-
secution. e other lesson, illustrated by the Nazis, is that oen those label-
ling others as folk devils themselves constitute the greatest threat – both to
the scapegoated and later to everyone else. is chapter will therefore discuss
contemporary folk devils through looking at the perspective from society’s
summit – describing the role of the state and corporate media as the actors and
institutions doing the victimizing, analysing the mechanisms they employ in an
attempt to inate the climate of moral panic that allows these bouts of emotion-
driven reaction that cause so much damage and division in social relations.
e question of the state is clearly very important when considering the man-
ufacture of folk devils. One of the most inuential studies that describes this
process is the groundbreaking Policing the Crisis: Mugging, the State and Law
and Order (Hall et al. 1978). is emerged from Birmingham University’s Cen-
tre for Contemporary Cultural Studies under the direction of the lead author,
Stuart Hall. Hall was an innovator who was a major inuence in the deconstruc-
tion of news media, beginning with his expert analysis of the demonization of
anti-Vietnam war protesters in 1968. rough the course of the 1970s, Hall and
his colleagues charted the growth of a moral panic around the fear of crime
that stigmatized young black men as the ‘mugger’ folk devil. ey explain how
the state is central by referring to Antonio Gramsci and hegemony, ‘the capital-
ist state involved the exercise of both types of power – coercion (domination)
and consent (direction) [which] functioned best when it operated “normally”
through leadership and consent, with coercion held, so to speak, as the “armour
of consent”’ (Hall et al. 1978, 203). e creation of these folk devils was, for
Hall, evidence of a new crisis of hegemony as the post-war boom in the West
came to a shuddering halt from 1973 onwards: ‘e forms of state intervention
have become more overt. … e masks of liberal consent and popular con-
sensus slip to reveal the reserves of coercion and force on which the cohesion
of the state and legal authority nally depends’ (Hall et al. 1978, 217). Sidney
Harring discusses the importance of policing in enforcing the state’s monopoly
of the use of violence in the day-to-day, a process that is integral to the suc-
cessful demonization of black people through disciplinary measures escalating
from stop and search to police use of ‘deadly force’: ‘e ruling class institutes
disorder when it imposes its power over others … to which the bourgeoisie
respond by creating new social institutions. ese institutions, in eect, help to
legitimate the new social order by rendering a valued “service” to all classes in
society’ (Harring 2017, 15).
A Fish Rots from the Head 101
e process is driven by the state machinery, principally dened here as
governments and the institutions gathered around them for the purposes of
keeping control of a society divided economically and politically along vectors
of social class, gender, nationality and the articial construct of ‘race’. Besides
the government, those directing the state include senior gures in control of the
army, the police, the judiciary and the civil service. State theorists such as Bob
Jessop and Nicos Poulantzas have analysed ‘the normal form of the capitalist
state, that is, the modern representative state, which oers a exible framework
to unify the long-term political interests of an otherwise ssiparous power bloc,
disorganize the subaltern classes, and secure popular consent based on plausible
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The PERMISSIVINESS threshold
The LEGALITY threshold
EXTREME VIOLENCE threshold
Figure 5.1: resholds of the ‘signication spiral’.
Source: Author, adapted from Hall et al. (1978, 226).
102 Modern Folk Devils
claims to represent the national-popular interest’ (Jessop 2021, 286). e cor-
porate media is controlled by key ideological allies of the state, and their propa-
ganda dovetailed with police statistics to create the image of the ‘mugger’ folk
devil. Hall’s discussion of thresholds explains: ‘In the public signication of
troubling events, there seem to be certain thresholds which mark out symboli-
cally the limits of societal tolerance. e higher … in the hierarchy of thresh-
olds, the greater is the threat to the social order, and the tougher and more
automatic is the coercive response’ (Hall et al. 1978, 225).
ey call the process by which thresholds are crossed in the public mind
‘signication spirals’ and represent them in Figure 5.1. is is reproduced here
in adapted form to include some of the contemporary folk devils discussed in
this chapter alongside Hall et al.’s earlier examples.
Related to social control is, of course, the question of who decides whom to
control? We are referring here to the idea of deviance, as explained by Erich
Goode in his classic study of deviant behaviour:
All societies on Earth are comprised of social circles, groups of peo-
ple, or scattered individuals, whose members judge and evaluate what
they see and hear about. When they encounter or hear about behaviour,
expressed beliefs, and even physical traits or characteristics that should
be considered oensive, improper, unseemly, or inappropriate, there’s
a likelihood that they will punish, denounce, or humiliate the violator.
(Goode 2016, 2)
State denitions of the deviant – the ‘anti-social’ or ‘radicalized’ person or
organization – are, of course, in themselves the products of political ideology.
ese are not eternal concepts – rather, they tend to shi with the times accord-
ing to rulers’ threat perceptions. French president Macron has let this devi-
ant or outsider trope guide his language, and the actions of the police force he
commands as head of state, towards the Gilets Jaunes or ‘Yellow Vests’ social
movement from the end of 2018 until the time of writing. Another ‘dangerous
class’ of people to European governments are their own Muslim populations,
and I will look at how folk devils are manufactured through an Islamophobic
discourse and practice. Sometimes the folk devil can be represented by a single
person who symbolizes all the marks of stigma that cast them out of the main-
stream, and I will also comment on the demonization of the UK Labour Party’s
leader in the 2019 election, Jeremy Corbyn.
A Climate of Fear
It is also worthwhile analysing the origins of the word panic. It derives from
Pan, ‘a god native to Arcadia’, according to the Oxford Classical Dictionary: ‘He
can induce panic – terror (like that of a frightened and stampeding ock or
A Fish Rots from the Head 103
herd)’ (1949, 640). Panic, then, is a condition associated with all living crea-
tures – an irrational, rather than planned reaction. ‘Collective fear stimulates
herd instinct, and tends to produce ferocity toward those who are not regarded
as members of the herd’ (Russell 1995, 121). e reference to a ock or herd
describes how the scale of mental disturbance becomes amplied – exaggerated
by its collective context. In the case of humans, the individual’s terror is mag-
nied through the echo chamber of the crowd. Like the proverbial lemmings
running over the cli’s edge, moral panics can sway masses of people into act-
ing against their own interests as their fear creates these folk devils – mythical
phantoms. ere are many advantages to manufacturing states of fear for those
in positions of power, as explained by the ancient Roman writer Livy, describ-
ing the benets of replacing democratic governance with authoritarian rule:
When they had named a dictator for the rst time at Rome, and men
saw the axes borne before them, a great fear came over the plebs and
caused them to be more zealous in obeying orders. (Livy II 1919, 8)
So a climate of fear has benets to those that give the orders. is goes beyond
the state itself and includes their allies running corporations if they believe
encouraging far-right scapegoating and violence will weaken resistance to aus-
terity and tarnish the appeal of the le. Take the case of the Golden Dawn Party
in the 2010s: this fascist grouping won seats in the Greek parliament and mass
support across the country’s police forces as it scapegoated migrants through
organizing attacks in markets and local communities along the lines of the anti-
Jewish pogroms of the early 20th century; ‘it was in the interests of the Greek
oligarchs (the shipping magnates, the bosses of the energy and construction
groups, and football club owners) to encourage the rise of a far-right political
party with a paramilitary wing. It was a kind of political safety net against the
radical le’ (Fekete 2018, 49). e political benets of manufacturing fear have
led to the election victories of right-wing populist presidents – Donald Trump
in the US and Jair Bolsonaro in Brazil – and also seen right populists or far-
right parties elected in much of Europe.
is new threat moves the politics of many countries further away from the
established pattern of governing through parliamentary democracy. Rising ine-
quality and poverty under the existing system has given more extreme critiques
greater traction. is raises the spectre of the rise of fascism in the 1930s. ‘More
than anything else, the Nazis were a nationalist protest against globalization’
(Hett 2019, 106). Benito Mussolini’s ambassador to London explained this to
e Times journalist A. L. Kennedy in December 1933:
We must get out of our heads all our old ideas about dictators. … e
new dictator is the representative of the people. He is not against
the people. He is against the oligarchy that had got the machinery of
government into its hands. (Kennedy 2000, 115)
104 Modern Folk Devils
Strong leaders are better than democracy, runs this argument. Fear makes peo-
ple more likely to believe they have little choice but to bow to the threats of the
powerful – i.e. to become ‘zealous in obeying orders’ (Livy II 1919, 8). ence
rulers’ domination or ‘hegemony’ becomes less contested. It may not quell the
obdurate opposition from a principled minority, but has a proven history of
limiting the horizons of broader groupings through the creation of a ‘climate
of fear’. Michael Welch spelled this out:
As a social psychological defense mechanism against confronting the
real source of frustration, scapegoating provides emotional relief for
people racked with fear and anxiety. at solace is inevitably short term,
prompting scapegoaters to step on the treadmill of endless bigotry and
victimization. (Welch 2006, 4)
us, one step of ‘othering’ can lead to another, especially as the far right’s polit-
ical rivals ‘shi the window’ of acceptable prescriptions and solutions towards
ever more radical hate speech and actions in order to demonstrate their politi-
cal virility. Examples from the 1930s demonstrate a more extreme version of
the manufacture of folk devils and an accompanying rationale that justies the
persecution of the dreaded outsider group. Journalist Aubrey Leo Kennedy’s
diary recounts conversations with Nazi foreign minister Joachim von Ribben-
trop on a visit to Berlin in 1936:
In regard to Jews, von Ribbentrop’s main contention was that the Jews
must not be allowed to dominate. I think that what the Germans want
is to be unmistakeably top dogs in their own house. ey are afraid of
Jews getting into key positions. Once they have got them under they
may leave them in peace. (Kennedy 2000, 194)
e last statement reects the hopeless wishful thinking of those who wished
to appease, rather than oppose, the dictators. It was as if they believed there
was no alternative: ‘I am afraid that the drive against the Jews is so strongly
backed that nobody can stop it for the present’ (Kennedy 2000, 199). History
tells us how this group paid the ultimate price – leading, of course, to many
other groups also being persecuted and invaded.
ere were many voices of opposition that sought to expose and explain the
rise of anti-Semitism. For example, the German Jewish sociologist Norbert
Elias wrote in 1929: ‘e Christian German middle class faces a struggle. …
In the form of anti-semitism it is ghting against those of its competitors &
bourgeois opponents of its own interests who seem easiest to strike against
& render harmless’ (Elias 2006, 82–3). Elias could clearly see the need to ght
this poisonous nationalistic anti-Semitism, while the establishment view,
reected in Kennedy’s diaries, was a mixture of mild concern combined with
positive approval towards the ‘sense of purpose’ he saw in the Nazi regime:
A Fish Rots from the Head 105
I understand now that the Germans regard Teutonism as something
sacred and something that is vitiated by the inmixture of Jewish blood or
Jewish inuence. is Teutonism is quite terric. I am more impressed
by it the more I look into German life. (Kennedy 2000, 199)
French Lessons
A contemporary example of scapegoating and manufacturing folk devils comes
not from the right but from the ‘extreme centre’ (Ali 2018) of neo-liberalism,
the government of French president Emmanuel Macron. is admirer of Tony
Blair and Margaret atcher defeated Marine Le Pen of the far-right Front
National in 2017. e spectre of Le Pen’s racist party, one with clear fascist
aliations, winning the presidency corralled the bulk of French voters into
supporting Macron, but an incident during the election campaign highlighted
the risk Le Pen’s message could undermine this former banker – unashamedly
wedded to neo-liberalism and ‘free market’ policies (Tonneau 2017). Macron is
from Amiens, northern France, and during the election campaign had agreed
to meet union representatives at the Amiens chamber of commerce to discuss
the proposed closure by the US corporation Whirlpool of their tumble dryer
factory, threatening 300 jobs:
Enter, stage le, Marine le Pen, the so-called people’s candidate for pres-
ident, in town to upstage Macron, speak out for workers and join the
picket line. To whistles and calls of ‘Marine for president!’, she turned
to the microphones, attacking Macron as being ‘with the oligarchs, with
the employers’. (Fekete 2018, 95)
is was a warning that Macron would face becoming a target for populist rhet-
oric if he stuck to the neo-liberal script of austerity and the imposition of labour
market restructuring. Indeed, the very fact that he formed his own new party
– En Marche – to contest the election, and abandoned his position as nance
minister in the previous government of Francois Hollande, shows the degree
to which all the established parties in France have been tarnished by their ties to
the existing state of society. Aer becoming president, Macron continued the
path he had taken as a minister, of arguing for extensive ‘labour market reform’
– which means in short more exibility and an anti-welfare discourse that seeks
to blame the poor for their fate. Novelist Édouard Louis describes an example:
27 May 2017 In a town in France, two union members – both in T-shirts
– are complaining to President Emmanuel Macron in the middle of a
crowded street. ey are angry, that much is clear from how they talk.
ey also seem to be suering. Emmanuel Macron dismisses them in a
106 Modern Folk Devils
voice full of contempt: ‘You’re not going to scare me with your T-shirts.
e best way to aord a suit is to get a job.’ Anyone who hasn’t got the
money to buy a suit he dismisses as worthless, useless, lazy. He shows
you a line – the violent line – between those who wear suits and those
who wear T-shirts, between the rulers and the ruled, between those who
have money and those who don’t, those who have everything and those
who have nothing. is kind of humiliation by the ruling class brings
you even lower than before. (Louis 2019, 74–5)
By 2018, Macron was considering his next step on ‘the treadmill of endless
bigotry’ (Welch 2006, 4). In order to win support from the growing climate
of French patriotism that had beneted Le Pen, he risked the rehabilitation of
Marshal Pétain, saying during the First World War armistice centenary cel-
ebrations ‘I consider it entirely legitimate that we pay homage to the marshals
who led our army to victory. … Marshal Pétain was a great soldier in world
war one’ (Reuters 2018). is attracted much criticism, as the ‘patriot’ Pétain
went on to betray his people in the Second World War by heading the pro-Nazi
collaborationist Vichy government in occupied France, but it may also signal
Macron’s desire to ride the wave of the far-right surge by claiming he shares
their values.
at was in November 2018, and Macron has since followed up this right-
ward shi by authorizing the police’s merciless attitude towards the new protest
movement of the Gilets Jaunes or Yellow Vests. One recent report had:
as of the 30th of January counted 144 veriable cases of gilets jaunes and
journalists severely injured by the riot police. At least 14 victims have
lost an eye and 92 of the 144 have been shot by ashballs. Flashballs are
rubber bullets red from a tube like weapon with the stopping power of
a .38 calibre handgun. (Haynes 2019)
Just in case the reader believes the president cannot be held responsible for
police violence, Macron recently went out of his way to assure the public that he
backs them, even in the controversial case of a 73-year-old pensioner who sus-
tained a fractured skull aer riot police charged demonstrators in an o-limits
area of Nice. When asked for his reaction, Macron replied:
When one is fragile and risks being shoved, one does not go to places
that are declared o-limits and one does not put oneself in that kind of
situation. is lady was not in contact with the forces of law and order.
She put herself in a situation where she went, quite deliberately, to an area
that was o-limits and was caught up in a movement of panic. I regret
this deeply, but we must respect public order everywhere. I wish her a
speedy recovery … and perhaps a kind of wisdom. (Willsher 2019a)
A Fish Rots from the Head 107
e ‘panic’, if that is what it was, was the action of the police themselves as
they rampaged through the streets, injuring citizens regardless of age or inten-
tion. e fact that this new and powerful social movement continues to attract
hundreds of thousands to its Saturday demonstrations across France week aer
week is clearly infuriating Macron and his government colleagues. As well as
sanctioning violence, they have also resolved to change the law to brand these
folk devils as an outrage to respectable citizens. In January 2019, the French
PM, Edouard Philippe, attempted to separate o the ‘legitimate’ protesters on
the streets from those folk devils – the Gilets Jaunes. is was reported by for-
eign correspondent Kim Willsher:
Speaking aer the weekend’s violence at gilets jaunes (yellow vests) dem-
onstrations, Edouard Philippe said tough new public order measures
were necessary to protect those wishing to exercise their fundamental
right to protest from the ‘scandalous’ behaviour of thugs and vandals. …
He would set up a register of rioters, similar to that used to deter football
hooligans, to force them to report to police and prevent them from join-
ing demonstrations. (Willsher 2019b; emphasis in original)
is demonizing measure is, of course, completely impractical to implement.
Who would decide who were the legitimate and illegitimate protesters and how
would they be forced into registering? Such realities are hardly the point, which
appears to be to justify state repression through a process of stigmatization.
e fact that politicians perennially seek approval from the public makes
them all potentially ‘populist’. is causes the situation to be doubly confusing
when the term itself is understood as an insult, an undesirable and manipula-
tive form of politics. us some scholars have suggested that the term should
not be used:
Indeed, we would suggest that the term ‘populism’ is a misnomer pre-
cisely because it fails to capture the empirical complexities that exist
when new belief systems emerge (or old belief systems re-emerge in new
ways). If we recognize the pluralistic nature of political dissent/assent,
then the term populism becomes a tool through which legitimate,
democratic expressions (of concrete, local problems) become ‘boxed-
o’ as illegitimate forms of political utterance, for example as popu-
list attitudes which must not be platformed. In eect, such a rhetorical
strategy only reifies the contradiction – of people’s concerns versus the
hegemonic political centre – without resolving its necessary conditions
for existence. (Pollock, Brock and Ellison 2015, 161)
In truth, the Yellow Vests are ‘populist’ in that they are a social movement ‘of
the people’ – the representatives of the poorest part of French society who
108 Modern Folk Devils
have taken to the streets as the only way to make their voices heard. As a
result, there is a mixture of political views within the movement, from the
anarchist and far le youth who grati-tagged the Arc de Triomphe and
smashed up-market shop windows in Paris in December 2018, through to
right-wing elements who have called for ‘Frexit’ and attempted to blame
migrants for their plight. But these ‘fake yellow vests’ have been challenged
and marginalized within the popular mobilizations, which oen make com-
mon cause with migrants and certainly target the rich. Some trade union
groups have gone on strike alongside the movement on occasion and the
attacks on welfare and working conditions have been the fuel that brought the
whole movement to the fore in the rst place. It is precisely because the gov-
ernment and the media have been unable to break this movement through
denouncing them as undesirable and outside the law that they have turned to
more blanket forms of police violence and incarceration in order to break the
spirit of today’s les miserables. roughout December 2019 and early January
2020, these ‘dangerous outsiders’ fought alongside their trade union allies
in a series of mass strikes and huge demonstrations against Macron’s pro-
posed reforms to pensions, which would raise the retirement age. With so
many workers striking, much of the country was severely aected by these
stoppages; the government’s popularity sunk so far that they announced a
government climbdown (Mallet 2020). e outcome is still uncertain, but
the lesson from France is that action in a united ght for social justice can
weaken the divisive discourse of demonization.
Britain’s ‘Suitable Enemies’
e world’s most powerful states continually manufacture their enemies
through their economic domination, oen facilitated by wars of conquest and
occupation. In the UK, those labelled as ethnic folk devils have oen been those
minorities: the Irish, from Britain’s oldest colony; the Jews; those of Caribbean
origin; and Muslims. Despite centuries of mixing together and the diversity of
today’s UK cities, which are oen the most multicultural in Europe, elements
of racism still stain our everyday language and customs, such that even those
communities that feel the most ‘integrated’ can experience the reality of Jewish
graves being desecrated, black footballers being subject to ‘monkey chants’ or
even the residual racist resentment of sections of the press at British paratroop-
ers facing criminal charges for shooting an unarmed Irish teenager on a civil
rights protest nearly half a century ago.
But the group most blatantly stigmatized as folk devils in recent years is
undoubtedly the Muslims. is is far less about ‘them’, i.e. the Muslim religion,
culture or attitude of Muslims themselves; rather, it reects the mindset of all
those who do not share that label. ese social divisions describe how hierar-
chical attitudes shape societies:
A Fish Rots from the Head 109
All over the world groups of people, great and small, huddle together as
it were, with a gleam in their eye and a nod of intimate understanding,
assure each other how much greater, better, stronger they themselves
are, than some particular other groups. (Elias 2007, 7–8)
e UK has made a substantial contribution to the manufacture of such a Mus-
lim moral panic with the infamous diatribe of Prime Minister Boris Johnson.
e title of his August 2018 article in the Daily Telegraph looked progressive:
‘Denmark Has Got It Wrong. Yes the Burka Is Oppressive and Ridiculous – but
at’s Still No Reason to Ban It’. Johnson initially appeared to be claiming to
explain why he would not ban the burka, but his real intent was revealed when
he included two or three phrases he knew would be amplied and repeated
ad nauseam across the media. ese were: ‘it is absolutely ridiculous that peo-
ple should choose to go around looking like letter boxes’ and ‘If a female stu-
dent turned up at school or at a university lecture looking like a bank robber’
(Johnson 2018). is was a classic piece of ‘dog-whistle’ politics: a senior states-
man describing Muslim women wearing the burka as looking like letterboxes
and bank robbers. is racist and provocative language is designed to encour-
age others to express their disapproval and prejudice, and feel legitimized by
his description of the item of clothing as ‘oppressive and ridiculous’. ere have
since been incidents where someone tried to ‘post’ a letter into a woman’s head-
gear in Leicester. is hate crime of assault would never have happened in that
form had it not been for Johnson’s irresponsible scapegoating of an economi-
cally marginalized group of women by a white man from Britain’s most privi-
leged enclave.
ese feelings of superiority are validated by the superior position society
accords to the ‘established’ group over the ‘outsider’ other. e price the former
pay for this privilege is their conformity:
e self-enhancing quality of a high power ratio atters the collective
self-love which is also the reward for submission to group-specic
norms, to patterns of aect restraint characteristic of that group and
believed to be lacking in less powerful ‘inferior’ groups, outsiders
and outcasts. (Elias 2008, 30)
Of course, if this superiority played out simply as a form of ‘self-love’ in the
established group, it would not necessarily be so damaging in its impact upon
the group they excluded. But it tends to lead to what Ruth Wodak calls ‘victim-
perpetrator reversal’ (Wodak 2015, 67; Clement and Mennell 2020). e more
powerful group, or guration, claim that they are the victim of the malicious
intent of those they are in fact marginalizing. A good example of this is the
actions of the established UK Conservative government towards one Mus-
lim teenage mother, Shamima Begum, who went to Syria, aged 15, to join the
Islamic State group. In early 2019, she expressed her wish to return to Britain
110 Modern Folk Devils
and her willingness to face justice for her membership of a banned organiza-
tion. e response of Home Secretary Sajid Javid was to refuse her entry and
revoke her UK citizenship. is was an illegal action as it made her stateless
and denied her fundamental human rights, but it serves the purpose of gratify-
ing the emotional needs of the ‘established’ group by exaggerating the threat
of allowing Shamima to retain her citizenship and sanctioning casting out the
Islamic folk devil. Media coverage of the aair has tended to amplify the vent-
ing of hate speech directed towards her. Unattributable secret service sources
claimed to have interrogated terror suspects who maintain Shamima stitched
on bombers’ suicide vests and patrolled ISIS camps with a rie, although the
article admitted ‘However, there are concerns that such evidence may not meet
the legal threshold for trial in Britain due to complications over whether it
would be permissible in court’ (Cole 2019). Evidence that does not ‘meet the
legal threshold’ is, of course, not evidence at all.
Besides the predictable rush to judgement on social media that overwhelm-
ingly condemns Begum and endorses her punishment, another concerning
trend is illustrated by a recent news headline in e Independent:
Shamima Begum: Isis Bride’s Face Used as Target at Merseyside Shoot-
ing Range
A spokesperson for the company who produced the targets, the Ultimate Air-
so Range, explained, ‘aer watching Ms Begum being interviewed, there was
a lack of empathy that she had shown and we decided to listen to our customers
and use them as targets’ (Dearden 2019).
Making targets of folk devils to gratify those wishing to punish them with
a symbolic outlet for their aggression has gone on throughout history. Mus-
lims may be the chief ‘scapegoats of 9/11’ (Welch 2006) but the 21st century
has seen the revival of another perennial hate gure. e communist/radical
leist/bearded demagogue folk devil, conjured up by the voices of the estab-
lishment as a dangerous threat to the status quo, has been with us since the
moral panic over the rst populists in ancient Rome, which climaxed with
the death of Julius Caesar (Clement 2021; Parenti 2003). In the UK today it
has taken the form of the ex-leader of the Labour Party, Jeremy Corbyn. e
election of this le-wing leader in 2015 was followed by a tirade of scaremon-
gering and accusations in the mainstream press. One of the incidents mirrored
the persecution of Shamima Begum: in April 2019, the army announced an
‘[i]nquiry aer soldiers use Corbyn as target practice’. Not literally, the reader
will be relieved to hear, but ‘footage shared on social media shows guardsmen
attached to the Parachute Regiment … ring their weapons [at] an image of
Mr Corbyn’ (Stubbs 2019).
As soon as Corbyn was elected, a serving British Army general claimed that
in the event of his becoming prime minister, there would be ‘the very real pros-
pect’ of ‘a mutiny’.
A Fish Rots from the Head 111
Feelings are running very high within the armed forces. You would see
a major break in convention with senior generals directly and publicly
challenging Corbyn over vital important policy decisions such as Tri-
dent, pulling out of Nato and any plans to emasculate and shrink the
size of the armed forces. e Army just wouldn’t stand for it. e general
sta would not allow a prime minister to jeopardise the security of this
country and I think people would use whatever means possible, fair or
foul to prevent that. You can’t put a maverick in charge of a country’s
security. (Shipman et al. 2015)
e military are not alone in their determination to make a scapegoat out
of Corbyn. e media ran articles ad nauseam portraying the prospect of a
Corbyn government in apocalyptic terms. Moreover, the fact that the most
economically powerful are also dominant in terms of the circulation of ideas
meant that Corbyn’s relatively mild reform programme with some limited
nationalization and a promise of a degree of tax redistribution towards the
poorer mass of the population led to apoplectic outbursts like the Mail on
Sunday’s ‘8-page wealth pull-out’ on ‘How to protect your cash from Corbyn’
(Prestridge 2019). e problem here, however, is that on occasion the public’s
opinion of those doing the scapegoating, or their view of the issue in question,
can run counter to the ‘common-sense’ view of the government and the media.
us, in the 2017 general election, Corbyn actually deed the experts and won
a lot for support for his socialist views, summed up by Labour’s manifesto
slogan, ‘For the Many, Not the Few’. e establishment realized that in any
future election they would do well to manufacture other negative labels and
slanders about Corbyn personally in order to toxify Labour’s message. One of
the most eective methods employed was to campaign aggressively to assert
that Corbyn – probably one of Labour’s most anti-racist and principled leaders
ever – was himself anti-Semitic. is began as soon as Corbyn became Labour
leader in 2015, as proven in a devastating critique by media analysts published
in summer 2019:
A search of eight national newspapers shows that from 12 June 2015 to
31 March 2019, there have been 5497 stories on the subject of Corbyn,
antisemistism and the Labour Party. (Philo et al. 2019, 1)
e authors of this study, ‘Bad News for Labour’, carried out focus groups
showing voters believed the coverage had been so substantial that the scale of
anti-Semitism within Labour – clearly, a very good reason for anyone being
reluctant to support such a political party – was high: ‘the answers ranged from
25–40 per cent of members. e interviewees also gave clear reasons for their
judgements which mostly focus on the very high level of media coverage, which
they assumed meant that many people were involved’ (Philo et al. 2019, 2)
e reality is that, at the most, 0.3 per cent of members have been identied as
112 Modern Folk Devils
needing to answer such charges. e mismatch is far too great to be anything
other than a product of a media ‘moral panic’ (Philo et al. 2019, 50).
Judging by the reactions of the focus groups, this tactic worked, not least
because so many Labour MPs who were to the right of Corbyn politically, such
as deputy leader Tom Watson, were more than willing to buy into the moral
panic and ceaselessly endorse claims about its scale and seriousness. e actors
involved included the Conservative government, many Labour MPs, the UK
media and indeed the Israeli government and media, who also believed their
interests beneted from the demonization of any leader advocating sanctions
against Israel’s military occupation of Palestinian territories. ese powerful
groups constituted what Howard Becker (1963, 19) calls the ‘moral entrepre-
neurs’ who promote the creation of ‘folk devils and moral panics … to con-
trol the means of cultural reproduction’ (Cohen 2011 [1972], 8). e spirals of
amplication surrounding Corbyn, branded a deviant and an anti-Semite by
his former cabinet colleague and new Labour Party leader Sir Keir Starmer, led
to his suspension from the party he led. Many of his supporters – some of them
Jewish – have followed (Harpin 2020).
Conclusion
Folk devils are manufactured, but they are more than mythical. ose who cre-
ate them want them to appear real to the mass of the population. Since Stan-
ley Cohen’s groundbreaking study of how and why they come into being, any
number of groups have been made visible by the processes of stigmatization
and demonization he observed, as he himself recognized in his introduction:
To a greater or lesser degree, these cultures have been associated with vio-
lence. … ere have been parallel reactions to the drug problem, student
militancy, political demonstrations, football hooliganism, vandalism of
various kinds and crime and violence in general. (Cohen 2011 [1972], 2)
e examples cited here – French welfare claimants and the social movement
clad in yellow vests, British Muslim women and the leader of the UK Labour
Party – have all been associated with threatening violent disruption to the
social fabric and thus t Cohen’s typology:
In the gallery of types that society erects to show its members which
roles should be avoided and which should be emulated, these groups
have occupied a constant position as folk devils: visible reminders of
what we should not be. (Cohen 2011 [1972], 2)
e purpose of this chapter is to extend Cohen’s original examination of folk
devils by looking at stigmatization processes initiated by those running the
A Fish Rots from the Head 113
state and the corporate media that acts in their interests. e irony here is that
it is these representatives of the ruling institutions – prime ministers, presi-
dents and generals – who themselves uphold a violent system of exploitation
that constantly divides one section of society against another. e victor in the
UK 2019 election, Boris Johnson, used his position as both prime minister and
journalist to remind his readers that:
the modern Labour Party under Jeremy Corbyn … detest the prot
motive so viscerally – and would raise taxes so wantonly – that they
would destroy the very basis of the country’s prosperity … they point
their ngers at individuals with a relish and a vindicativeness not seen
since Stalin persecuted the Kulaks. (Johnson 2019)
On 6 November 2019 – the day the Conservative government launched its
election campaign – on the front page of the Daily Telegraph, a large photo of
Johnson pointing his nger accompanies this quotation in very large typeface.
For the establishment, for now, their mission has been accomplished and the
folk devil is cast out into the wilderness.
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