This programme can be modified to suit local circumstances.
Step 1: Invent an enemy, such as ‘migrants’. The purpose of this early but fundamental move is to provide a focus group upon which to heap blame for a variety of issues which exist across society. These can include crime, ill-health, unemployment, cultural change etc.
Most importantly, they are there to routinely create a diversion from other pressing issues (e.g. criminality and corruption, inequality, inadequate health services, lack of ‘real’ policy etc.)
Step 2: Isolate your chosen enemy, dehumanise and demonise them frequently using verbal abuse, slogans, myths and coded name-calling. Make sure that from time to time such attacks are couched in terms of ‘real’ substantive criticism and even charges of ‘illegality’ – use this latter phrase time and time again.
Step 3: Involve others - individuals, groups, networks, social media or party members - willing to gossip, tell tales, share posts and build the story among their own friends, families and networks. Keep building an agenda of unquestioned (and unquestionable) myths, assumptions as well as general suspicion and hostility.
Students pray in the aftermath of two apparent racially motivated student brawls at Thomas Jefferson High School 21 April 2005 in Los Angeles, California. Photo: AFPStep 4: Monitor, discredit and attack any report, expression or act of charity or humanity that questions, denies or challenges the demonisation agenda.
Dismiss and ridicule all organisations or institutions that link with or defend or assist your chosen enemy. Brand them as either ‘naïve’, ‘sinister’ or ‘traitorous’.
Step 5: Undermine and attack all representatives of the ‘enemy’. Ridicule their countries, cultures, languages and traditions, especially in the name of ‘defending’ ours, even if we are unsure what that is.
Step 6: Talk about integration policies and initiatives, but do not act in any strategic or resourced way to bring them about, Praise church, school or association educational initiatives that speak positively about multiculturalism and its benefits, but make sure they remain peripheral.
Step 7: Recycle old myths, old theories, half theories and ideas about race, history, superiority and inferiority. Cite dubious research and apparently ‘intellectual’ sources to justify the agenda and the process and to give it the appearance of substance and thought.
Step 8: Routinely criminalise the ‘enemy’ using the term ‘illegal’ over and over again. Use this to justify ‘special measures’ or the use of holding areas, as a means of ‘protecting’ society.
Step 9: At all costs, remain silent on any substantive context, background, evidence and explanation that paints your chosen ‘enemy’ in a different light.
Deny any historical parallels or similarities; insist on the ‘uniqueness’ of the current situation.
Step 10: Deny everything.
The description of the 10 steps above is by no means original: it is based on the work and analysis of diverse writers, commentators and historians from Australia to Britain, Germany to Ireland, Rwanda to Zimbabwe and the US. It is also based on the experiences described by its victims.