January 23, 2025 - 7:00am

Is it really Jeff Bezos’s fault that Axel Rudakubana did what he did? The teenager was stopped on multiple occasions with a knife, including one he bought on Amazon, prompting a fresh round of silly headlines about new controls on knife sales. These have been widely denounced as deflection, and there is indeed something about the Rudakubana story that feels off. In particular, Keir Starmer’s insistence on the suspect’s lone-wolf status and pivot to “knife control” is driving a proliferation of conspiratorial thinking. But is there really a sinister cover-up?

Watching the pandemonium over recent days, I recalled the book I was reading as Britain erupted in riots following the Southport murders last July. Written by Australian ex-soldier and military consultant David Kilcullen, The Dragons and the Snakes explores the tactics used by anti-Western states such as Russia, and para-states such as Isis and Hezbollah, since the end of the Cold War. Kilcullen argues that the West grew complacent after defeating the large, slow-moving “dragon” of the Soviet Union. It was therefore slow to notice its replacement by a swarm of nimbler, smaller enemy “snakes”.

These, he argues, have kept up pressure on the West, usually by operating just below a level of hostility that would become legible in Western terms as “war”. Kilcullen characterises the core strategy as “liminal warfare”: a bundle of hybrid or “grey zone” tactics that ride on the edge of detectable, attributable hostility. Liminal warfare seeks to exploit the gap between realising an attack is planned, and being able either to take action or prove who is to blame for it. An attack may appear as a “lone wolf” act of terrorism, information warfare, or perhaps DDoS (distributed denial-of-service) assaults on IT systems or other infrastructure sabotage. By the time anyone figures out who is to blame, the actors themselves have moved on, leaving chaos in their wake.

One of the methods employed by the “snakes” to conduct “liminal warfare”, Kilcullen argues, is the strategic encouragement of attacks by individuals or groups living in the West but subject to “remote radicalisation” via the internet. Such individuals may have no formal chain-of-command links to anti-Western “snakes”. But they may still be mobilised, via hard-to-trace digital communications to embark on spontaneous-looking “lone wolf” attacks — including, Kilcullen suggests, as a means of diverting domestic Western media and official attention from more conventional action in military theatres overseas.

It is of course possible that we can take everything Starmer says at face value. It’s possible Rudakubana really was just a lonely, disturbed young man who spent too much time online, and that the only sensible response is more internet censorship and tightening the controls on knife shopping. But just days after the Southport atrocity, Taylor Swift cancelled three Vienna concert dates because international security services identified a credible plot to attack the event. The target was, once again, associated with arguably the contemporary West’s most famous pop-culture export.

In the Vienna plot, the suspects were — like Rudakubana — teenagers and Western citizens. They appear to have experienced some form of remote radicalisation and to have “sworn allegiance” to Islamic State. Similarly, while Rudakubana’s trial is ongoing, he is known to have possessed an IS manual, to have manufactured ricin, and to have pled guilty on all the charges brought, including under the Terrorism Act. It is possible that he too has experienced some kind of “remote radicalisation”.

Let’s imagine, for a moment, that these incidents were linked, via the Kilcullen “liminal warfare” template. Let’s suppose there really are enemies of the West encouraging remote-radicalised sympathisers embedded in British society to create diversionary chaos in the interests of wider paramilitary goals. In that context, if I were a member of the British intelligence services, I doubt I’d be talking frankly to the general public about any of this, no matter how loud and angry the calls for transparency. And it could well be this need for intelligence discretion, rather than any conspiratorial stuff about Rudakubana’s parents, that accounts for the feel of censorship that has smothered the Southport atrocity since it happened.

But even if there is no Starmer-specific cover-up, the “snakes” explanation still raises unpalatable questions. How should ordinary British folk respond to the prospect that practitioners of “liminal warfare” are working to weaponise Muslim-sympathising Western minorities against the rest of us? For authorities who regard their central duty as the management of “multiculturalism”, public discussion of such hypotheticals can lead nowhere good. With this in mind, we can probably expect the diversionary headlines about Jeff Bezos to continue for the foreseeable future.


Mary Harrington is a contributing editor at UnHerd.

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