“It’s a war over narrative,” says Maajid Nawaz, “and whoever gets to define the narratives around world events gets to define how those events are perceived and how we respond to them.”
It’s a war over narrative, and whoever gets to define the narratives around world events gets to define how those events are perceived and how we respond to them.
There’s a concerted effort to destroy the idea that there is any way of agreeing upon truth.
Those who push this ideology of relativism and materialism are obsessed with attaining power. If they take power, they can shape the reality they find objectionable into their own interests. And that explains the ideological war we’re in.
During the COVID mandates, traditional disciplines that relied on their own set of standards in the pursuit of truth were weaponized to achieve political objectives. Narratives were deployed.
I helped to set up Islamist revolutionary groups in the UK, Pakistan, and Denmark. I was in Egypt when I was detained after the 9/11 attacks.
That was the time of the Bosnia genocide. The Srebrenica Massacre left 6,000 Bosnian Muslims in a mass grave.
Islamist revolutionary groups began recruiting young, angry Muslims like me who felt we were being attacked on our own continent. And it was true. The genocide was happening and nobody was doing anything about it. That was the beginning of my journey of anger.
We arrived at the conclusion that we needed an Islamist ideological state. We took the word caliphate from traditional Muslim theology, but we modified it for our ideological purpose. We organized ideological groups and tried recruiting from the armed forces. We believed that once we had enough recruits, we might incite military coups in those countries and establish this caliphate.
My house was raided around 3 a.m. They ripped my infant son from my arms, blindfolded me, tied my hands behind my back with rags, and put me in this van. The journey from there was a nightmare.
When Amnesty campaigned for our release, it softened my heart. It was a human-to-human bond, as opposed to an ideological bond. And then I began debating in prison with liberal political prisoners, communists, jihadis, Islamists. And I read everything I could get my hands on.
It was those kinds of debates—and the softening of the heart caused by Amnesty—that eventually led me to no longer being able to subscribe to this ideology. I served my full sentence and got back to the UK.
I am still a Muslim, but I can no longer subscribe to the ideology of Islamism, of forcing Islam on society.
Anyway, this is how you weaponize arguments for the purposes of serving an agenda. You have to destroy before you build. You undermine the belief system of people to a point where they don’t know who they are anymore, and then you package an alternative for them. This process of radicalization relies on a grievance.
The Bosnian genocide is a classic case in point. The U.N. troops stood by and 6,000 Muslims were killed. So now you’ve got a grievance, and the solution isn’t found in the democratic setup. That’s where we brought in the idea of a caliphate.
You can see how nefarious actors could use legitimate grievances to radicalize society. If we don’t want that to happen, then we have to make sure those grievances are addressed.
Otherwise, you end up with radicalization and what we might call the cycle of violence.
Keep in mind, for example, that Klaus Schwab says half the Canadian Cabinet had been penetrated by the World Economic Forum. Under Trudeau, they started freezing the bank accounts, the corporate accounts, of truckers protesting mandates. They made threats about taking their licenses.
That’s called tyranny.
If Trudeau got his way, the vaccine passports would be used to put an infrastructure in place for the QR code checking-in and checking-out system. And as we now know, governments are seeking to replace paper money with government-controlled digital money, which is how you end up with a Chinese social credit system. So if you oppose that government, as happened in Canada, government can switch off your money. That’s how you get total control over society.
Why would you destroy your own open democratic societies? It’s because we’ve come to a crossroads.
Remember the beginning of our chat. Whoever controls the narrative controls your perception of reality. The state can no longer control the narrative, because the internet has democratized access to information. Add cryptocurrency to that, and you’ve lost control. When you’re losing control, like an abusive husband, you get violent. You clamp down. You try and maintain your grip on power. So that’s why I think we are in for a bit of a rough ride, unfortunately, until the dust settles.