The Guardian: Why would young British men go off to risk their lives fighting jihad in the Middle East, and perhaps then return home to commit atrocities here? A consensus has emerged that they have been “radicalised”. This is understood to involve a kind of brainwashing whereby impressionable young men are led astray by malicious manipulators.
Many parents unable to understand why their sons have gone to fight overseas buy into this explanation. Many have echoed the words of the father of 18-year-old Ali Kalantar from Coventry, who said: “Maybe somebody brainwashed him, because he was not like that.” Many in the media perpetuate the myth, with Evan Davis on Radio 4’s Today programme, for instance, asking how young Britons become “captured” by extremism.
This is at once both a terrifying and reassuring narrative. What is terrifying is the idea that anyone could have their free will neutralised by nefarious agents of evil. But what is reassuring is that this means these young men have not freely chosen their path, for reasons they believe to be good. This reassurance, however, is false. Radicalisation is not brainwashing and we cannot counter it if we pretend it is.
Brainwashing is changing someone’s beliefs against their will. It is a well-worn trope of dystopian fiction, from Nineteen Eighty-Four to A Clockwork Orange, but it is arguable whether or not such a feat is actually possible in the real world. Even if it were, it would require a great deal of time and effort. Supposed examples involve US soldiers subjected to prolonged, intense mistreatment in Korean prisoner of war camps, or people living entirely within closed cults.
This is nothing like the circumstances that led British men to fight inSyria. Aseel Muthana, for example, insisted to ITV News that he didn’t discuss his plans with imams at his local mosque in Cardiff or his parents because “we knew it would [have] brought us trouble”. Similarly, the father of Abdullah Deghayes, a jihadi from Brighton, insisted his son and his associates were not encouraged by anyone around them. “They went of their own free will,” he said. “They went without taking consent from their parents.”