Look at it like this.

In a city there’s a nice large green public park, where families and individuals stroll around happily.

One day a group of leather-jacketed aggressive foul-mouthed types and some snarly dogs turn up and postion themselves prominently in one corner.

This happens day after day.

Gradually the people who used to enoy the park start to steer clear of that corner. An unspoken sense of subtle anxiety develops among them.

Who are those people, and what are their intentions? Are we safe there any longer? And do we need the hassle in our lives of having to worry about it? Why not go elsewhere for a walk?

I was talking to someone who works in the EU system and lives here in Brussels. She has moved away from the Brussels centre because (as a ‘white’ European) she does not want to be jeered at and spat at by gangs of Moroccans and other immigrants hanging around on street corners. If necessary she’ll leave Brussels and move to join her husband in a part of the EU where these issues do not arise.

Back to the park scenario. The point is that whereas the municipality/public own the park, the arrival of the nasty gang on a regular basis means that the psychological ownership of the park quickly starts to shift. 

Like an evil miasma, the gang’s sneeringly malign influence spreads across that space, the more so for being ostensibly aimless and unfocused. 

The legal owners of the park (here in the form of the police) have to decide. Do they compel the aggressive new element to leave the park? Not easy. The gang members are committing no clear offence worth all the hassle of going to court; they may not go quietly; and above all the problem is not a Priority Target for government resource-allocation purposes.

Thus inch by inch the values of the more aggessive element come to prevail in the minds of all concerned. And if the gang hang around for long enough and erect a temporary structure unchallenged, the formal legal ownership of the park itself will start to mutate into something less clear. 

Even if the gang leaves and goes somewhere else, the underlying anxiety within the public will linger – maybe they’ll come back one day. 

One way or the other, the gang wins. The public ‘retreats’.

Which of course also goes to explain Russia/Georgia and many other issues of global politics. We are moving into a dangerous phase where the symbolism of will-power and sheer determination seem to matter as much as who formally owns what.

This is the deep sense of Russian policy towards the former Soviet republics and eg the Orthodox parts of former Yugoslavia (ie Serb-dominated areas). Moscow is aiming to assert that those territories may be legally independent but in fact they are under Moscow’s psychological ‘protection’ – if the EU/US/West tries to push its values into those regions, they will face Resistance.

Ditto the new surge in open naval piracy. These nimble pirate gangsters are asserting that they define the operational and psychological order on the high seas – and if merchant ships do not repel them by force, they will use force to take them over.

So are the exceptionalist demands of eg Islamist extremists (and not-so-extremists) in Western countries all about establishing a psychological force field around their activities, as the first stage in establishing a quasi-judicial space outside normal national jurisdiction? In form and substance a process of incremental territorial conquest?

And as Mark Steyn argues, do we know it’s really working when we see it happening and simply ignore it?

You didn’t have to be “alert” to spot Major Nidal Hasan. He’d spent most of the last half-decade walking around with a big neon sign on his head saying “JIHADIST. STAND WELL BACK”. But we (that’s to say, almost all of us; and certainly almost anyone who matters in national security and the broader political culture) are now reflexively conditioned to ignore the flashing neon sign.

Like those apocryphal Victorian ladies discreetly draping the lasciviously curved legs of their pianos, if a glimpse of hard unpleasant reality peeps through we simply veil it in another layer of fluffy illusions.

Two joint terrorism task forces became aware almost a year ago that Major Hasan was in regular email contact with Anwar al-Awlaqi, the American-born but now Yemeni-based cleric who served as imam to three of the 9/11 hijackers and supports all-out holy war against the United States. But the expert analysts in the Pentagon determined that this lively correspondence was consistent with Major Hasan’s “research interests”, so there was no need to worry.

That’s America: Technologically superior, money no object (not one but two “joint terrorism task forces” stumbled across him). Yet no action was taken…

The truth is we’re not prepared to draw a line even after he’s gone ahead and committed mass murder. “What happened at Fort Hood was a tragedy,” said General Casey, the US Army’s Chief of Staff, “but I believe it would be an even greater tragedy if our diversity becomes a casualty here.”

A “greater tragedy” than 14 dead and dozens of wounded? Translating from the original brain-addled multicult-speak, the Army Chief of Staff is saying that the same fatuous prostration before marshmallow illusions that led to the “tragedy” must remain in place. If it leads to occasional mass murder, well, hopefully it can be held to what cynical British civil servants used to call, during the Northern Irish “Troubles”, “an acceptable level of violence”.

Fourteen dead is evidently acceptable. A hundred and forty? Fourteen hundred? I guess we’ll find out…