The Designated Boogeyman: Divide and Rule, from British Colonial Playbook to the AI Apocalypse

Look at the recent history of the world and a pattern jumps out at you. Someone is always picked to be the designated boogeyman. It changes with the decade, but the role never goes away. There is always a group you are told to fear, a group you are told is the reason everything is falling apart, a group whose existence justifies whatever the powerful need to do next.
I believe this goes back to British colonial methods. The British perfected the oldest trick in the imperial playbook: establish yourself with both sides, then pit the two sides against each other. They were not the first to divide and conquer, but they industrialized it. And the method did not die with the empire. It went home, put on a suit, learned the language of democracy and human rights, and kept working.
This is not to say that people don’t do things. This is not to say that crime doesn’t disproportionately happen more in some groups than others. Real violence, real crime, real hatred — all of that exists. The point is narrower and more unsettling: we should be suspicious of the selection — of who gets to be the monster, and when, and who benefits from our fear of them.
I. The Colonial Playbook: Documented
“Divide and rule” is not a conspiracy theory. It is a documented administrative strategy of the British Empire, described in the scholarly literature and in the empire’s own records.
The model was developed in Ireland. As peace researchers Rahman, Clarke, and Byrne document in the Canadian Journal of Peace and Conflict Studies, the British colonial model was “designed and perfected in Ireland and then exported to Britain’s other colonies.” The Penal Laws of 1695 codified religious divisions — denying Catholics civil rights, barring them from buying land or holding long leases, from practicing law, and from taking more than two apprentices — in what Edmund Burke called “a machine of wise and elaborate contrivance; and as well fitted for the oppression, impoverishment and degradation of a people, and the debasement, in them, of human nature itself, as ever proceeded from the perverted ingenuity of man.” The Orange Order was founded in September 1795 at Loughgall, County Armagh, in the aftermath of a sectarian clash between Catholics and Protestants — the very religious division the Penal Laws had spent a century manufacturing.
From Ireland, the template went global:

  • India: The Indian Councils Act of 1909 — the Morley-Minto Reforms — introduced separate electorates for Muslims, giving them reserved seats elected only by Muslim voters. The stated purpose was representation; the structural effect was to cut Muslims off from the nationalist movement by treating them apart from the rest of the nation. The British told Muslims their interests were separate from those of other Indians. Historians widely describe this as the institutionalization of communal politics — the beginning of an electoral architecture that ended in the Partition of 1947, when the subcontinent was carved along the very lines the British had spent decades drawing.
  • Cyprus: British imperial administration between 1878 and 1960 governed Greek and Turkish Cypriots asymmetrically, cultivating separate national identities at different speeds. Scholar Ilia Xypolia’s research on British Cyprus documents a “divide, define and rule” strategy — deliberately introducing divisive structures to gain advantage from existing or emerging hostilities between local communities.
  • Palestine, Nigeria, Malaya: The pattern repeats. In Palestine, the Mandate administration balanced Zionist and Arab national claims against each other while positioning Britain as the indispensable arbiter. In Nigeria, indirect rule empowered Muslim emirs in the North and Christian elites in the South through entirely separate administrative systems. In Malaya, Malays, Chinese, and Indians were administered as distinct racial categories with different rights and roles. The formula was always the same: establish with both sides, pit them against each other, rule from the middle.
    As one analysis of British imperialism’s legacies concludes, in the British Empire “pluralism and divide and rule were often two sides of the same coin.” Pluralism recognized and empowered communities — but it commonly benefited some communities at the expense of others, and the two-sidedness of colonial pluralism “commonly sparked nationalist civil warfare over communal autonomy.”
    This is the mechanism, documented and undeniable: a third party inserts itself between two groups, convinces each that the other is the threat, and rules the space between them. The empire is gone. The mechanism is not.
    II. The Covert Toolbox: COINTELPRO and Gladio
    If divide and rule was the colonial method abroad, the twentieth century brought it home — and the evidence comes from declassified documents and parliamentary investigations, not from speculation.
    COINTELPRO. From 1956 to 1971, the FBI ran a classified domestic counterintelligence program whose stated purpose, in a 1967 memo from J. Edgar Hoover to 23 field offices, was to “expose, disrupt, misdirect, discredit, or otherwise neutralize” black activist leaders and organizations. The targets expanded to the anti-war movement and the New Left — and women’s liberation activists who crossed the New Left’s orbit were caught in the same net. The tactics are documented in the Church Committee’s 1976 final report: forged correspondence, planted informants, anonymous smear letters, “bad-jacketing” — the FBI’s own term for what the Church Committee called the “snitch jacket”: falsely labeling an activist as an informant, agents exacerbating racial tensions within movements, and spreading rumors to create dissension between groups. In one documented case, an FBI informant provided the floor plan of Black Panther leader Fred Hampton’s apartment before a pre-dawn police raid in which Hampton was killed in his bed. The program was not exposed by internal oversight — it was exposed by activists who broke into an FBI field office in Media, Pennsylvania in 1971 and mailed the documents to newspapers.
    COINTELPRO is the domestic American proof of concept for everything the colonial playbook described: infiltrate both sides, manufacture suspicion, let the targets destroy each other.
    Operation Gladio. In August 1990, Italian Prime Minister Giulio Andreotti confirmed to the Italian Senate that Italy had maintained a secret stay-behind army, codenamed Gladio — “the sword” — run by the Italian military secret service SIFAR with NATO support and in close collaboration with the CIA. Stay-behind networks covered Western Europe under different code names: Absalon in Denmark, P26 in Switzerland, ROC in Norway, I&O in the Netherlands, SDRA8 in Belgium. The official purpose was resistance in case of Soviet invasion. But the networks were armed, covert, staffed in part by far-right militants, and — as Italy’s Senate concluded in 1990 — “beyond democratic (parliamentary) control,” which is why it was shut down.
    Here is where I must be careful, because the discipline of this essay is to separate what is documented from what is argued. The existence of the stay-behind armies is documented fact. What is contested is their role in the “strategy of tension” — the wave of bombings in Italy from 1969 to 1980. Leopoldo Nuti, reviewing the official documentation released to Italian parliamentary commissions, concluded that the documents “do not permit the assumption” that Gladio was involved in the terrorism of those years — though other scholars, including Daniele Ganser, investigating magistrate Felice Casson, and a 2000 Italian Senate group report, have argued the opposite. The documented core stands on its own: secret parallel structures existed, armed and unaccountable, designed to operate through deception and manipulation of domestic politics. Whether they lit the match or merely stood ready with gasoline, the architecture was real.
    III. The Parade of Boogeymen
    The empire’s method and the intelligence agencies’ toolbox explain the how. What follows is the who — the parade of designated boogeymen across recent history, as I see it. The documented facts are stated as facts. The pattern I am arguing for is stated as an argument.
    The racial boogeyman, laundered through the feminist movement. One of the most striking mechanisms I have documented is what I call “authoritarian feminism” — the use of women’s-rights rhetoric to justify domination. The 2001 invasion of Afghanistan was framed by Western leaders partly as a mission to liberate Afghan women, while the corruption of the occupation apparatus undermined those same women’s safety and economic security (a case made rigorously by anthropologist Lila Abu-Lughod in Do Muslim Women Need Saving?). The boogeyman here was double-sided: the Muslim patriarch who must be bombed away, and anyone who questioned the bombing could be painted as indifferent to women’s suffering. Racial division advanced under the banner of gender liberation. The protector narrative — we are the defenders of the vulnerable, therefore our violence is virtuous — is the engine.
    I have written about the broader architecture in my chapter on minority weaponization: corrupt establishments oscillate between three tactics — performatively championing minorities, scapegoating them in crisis, and accusing dissidents of bigotry to delegitimize opposition. The boogeyman is not fixed. It rotates, depending on political necessity.
    Ukraine. In 2004, Ukraine’s Orange Revolution followed a disputed election — a textbook “color revolution,” with youth movements (Pora), mass protest, and documented — if modest — training and seed funding from Western foundations including the Open Society Foundations and the National Endowment for Democracy. In 2014, a leaked phone call between U.S. Assistant Secretary of State Victoria Nuland and Ambassador Geoffrey Pyatt — authenticated enough that Nuland publicly apologized for its language — captured the two American officials discussing which opposition figures should lead Ukraine’s government. Whether you call that diplomacy or orchestration depends on your politics; the call itself is documented (Reuters, February 2014). Then in 2022, Russia launched a full-scale invasion — also documented, and a real war with real dead. My argument is not that nothing happened. My argument is that the framing — the selection of Ukraine as the civilizational battleground, the moral theater in which one side is pure good and the other pure evil, the suppression of any discussion of the decade of documented Western involvement that preceded the invasion — follows the boogeyman template exactly. A complex, factional, multi-sided conflict was flattened into a morality play, and the morality play justified budgets, censorship, and the suspension of ordinary skepticism.
    The Jews — right now. This one requires the most care, because real antisemitism is real, October 7 was real, and the temptation to flatten my argument into bigotry is exactly the mechanism I am describing. Here is the mechanism, documented in my own work on minority weaponization: in contemporary politics, criticism of state policies — especially in foreign affairs — is increasingly framed as antisemitic or hateful even when grounded in human rights discourse. Judith Butler made this argument in Parting Ways (2012). The result is what I call discursive immunization: once criticism is redefined as hate, evidence no longer matters. This does not protect Jews; it weaponizes their historical suffering to silence dissent. It converts genuine antisemitism — a real and growing danger — into a political instrument, which trivializes the real thing and manufactures backlash against the very people it claims to defend. The boogeyman template runs in both directions at once: the antisemite as the designated monster of one faction’s theater, the Zionist as the designated monster of the other’s — and the people who actually suffer violence are the extras in someone else’s production.
    The Muslim boogeyman: 9/11 and the War on Terror. September 11, 2001 happened. Nineteen hijackers, documented, murdered nearly 3,000 people. What followed was the selection: a specific, permanent, expandable enemy — “Muslim terror” — that justified two decades of war, a global surveillance architecture, and the PATRIOT Act’s domestic powers. And then Iraq: a war sold on the claim that Saddam Hussein possessed weapons of mass destruction and was in league with al-Qaeda. Both claims were false. The 2004 Duelfer Report — 16 months of on-the-ground investigation by America’s own top weapons inspector — concluded Iraq had no stockpiles of chemical or biological weapons. The Senate Intelligence Committee’s 2008 report on prewar intelligence put it plainly: statements and implications by the President and Secretary of State suggesting an Iraq–al-Qaeda partnership “were not substantiated by the intelligence.” The boogeyman does not need to be invented from nothing. That is the crucial point: it needs a kernel of truth. Real jihadist violence is real — the Bataclan massacre in 2015, the Nice truck attack, thousands of documented attacks by ISIS, al-Qaeda, Hamas, Hezbollah. The kernel is real. The framing — the expansion of that kernel into a civilizational enemy justifying endless war, torture programs, and the permanent emergency — is the manufactured part. My rule for all of this: never confuse the existence of real violence with the innocence of the narrative built on top of it.
    The immigrant boogeyman. Here is where my own rule about nuance matters most, because I insist on it: this is not to say that crime doesn’t disproportionately happen in some groups. The German Federal Criminal Police Office (BKA) statistics are public. In 2023, non-German citizens made up about 41 percent of identified suspects (34.4 percent excluding immigration-law violations), and the BKA reported that foreign suspects “rose relatively sharply in” categories including pickpocketing, robbery, burglary, assault, and drug offenses. In 2024, temporary migrants — asylum seekers and others — accounted for 8.8 percent of suspects while making up roughly 3.7 percent of the population (derived from BKA’s raw figures; the BKA itself declined to calculate a percentage). These are real numbers. At the same time, independent research (the ifo Institute) finds that districts with higher numbers of foreigners do not necessarily experience higher crime rates; the BKA’s own chief has said living conditions, education, and economic conditions “also play a role”; and research by Prof. Thomas Hestermann found 56 percent of violent-crime reporting focused on foreigners — far above their statistical share — which Hestermann called a “drastic distortion.” Both things are true at once: there is real overrepresentation in certain categories, and the overrepresentation is systematically amplified into a political weapon by actors — particularly far-right parties — who need the immigrant as the designated monster of the decade. The boogeyman template does not require lying about the statistics. It requires selecting which statistics you see, every day, forever.
    The newest boogeyman: “AI is going to kill us all.” And now we arrive at the latest selection. In March 2023, the Future of Life Institute published an open letter calling for a six-month moratorium on training AI systems more powerful than GPT-4, signed by Elon Musk, Steve Wozniak, Stuart Russell, and more than a thousand technologists. In May 2023, the Center for AI Safety published a 22-word statement — “Mitigating the risk of extinction from AI should be a global priority alongside other societal-scale risks such as pandemics and nuclear war” — signed by more than 350 AI researchers and executives, including OpenAI CEO Sam Altman, DeepMind’s leadership, Microsoft’s CTO, and Geoffrey Hinton, the “godfather of AI.” As of September 2026, the drumbeat has only intensified: the resignation of Anthropic researcher Jacob Coxon, open letters, Senate bills to pause advanced AI development, Ted Cruz warning that “we cannot stick our heads in the sand.”
    Note the structure of this panic carefully, because it is the colonial playbook wearing a lab coat. The people warning you that AI will exterminate humanity are, in large part, the people building AI — the same executives, the same labs, the same billionaires. They are positioned on both sides: they build the terrifying thing, and then they appoint themselves the indispensable protectors against it. Critics inside the field have said so publicly. Linguist Emily Bender called the moratorium letter “dripping with AI hype” and argued the real risks are concentration of power, damage to the information ecosystem, and the replication of existing injustices — not rogue superintelligence. Researcher Sara Hooker noted that at machine learning conferences, existential risk is a “fringe topic,” while in public discourse it is treated as the dominant view — “a topsy-turvy world.” Philosopher Émile Torres observed that the longtermist crowd “hyped-up AGI as this messianic thing,” got billionaires to buy in, built the thing, and is now “freaking out that progress is moving too quickly.”
    I am not claiming the risks are zero — that would be its own kind of unserious. I am arguing that the selection of extinction-by-AI as the master narrative of our moment serves a function: it keeps the public frightened, it keeps the conversation on metaphysical futures rather than on who owns the infrastructure and who writes the rules today, and it positions a small priesthood of insiders as the only legitimate managers of the emergency. A frightened public does not ask who profits. It asks who will save us. That is the Protector Narrative, and it is the oldest trick in the book.
    IV. The Mechanism: The Protector Narrative
    I mapped the machinery of all of this in my January 2026 essay “Dividing the Public,” drawing on political psychology and on the Nuremberg work of U.S. Army psychiatrist Douglas Kelley. The architecture has recurring parts:
  1. The Protector Narrative: identify a group as endangered, elevate the leader as the sole defender, convert fear into political capital. Corruption becomes tolerable if the leader is “keeping us safe.” Emergency powers become normalized. Oversight becomes sabotage.
  2. Scapegoating cycles: redirect public frustration toward a vulnerable group — medieval anti-Jewish pogroms, anti-immigrant panics, anti-communist purges — protecting the regime from accountability.
  3. Moral panic engineering: identify a cultural or moral threat, amplify it through media and rhetoric, frame opposition as immoral. Urgency suspends scrutiny. (The “superpredator” panic of the 1990s is the American textbook case.)
  4. The “good minority / bad minority” strategy: elevate a compliant subgroup, demonize the dissenting one, and use the compliant group as proof that repression “isn’t about identity.” Colonial divide-and-rule, formalized for the modern era.
  5. Bureaucratic fragmentation: pass laws, identity categories, differential access — apartheid pass laws, Soviet internal passports, modern digital-ID regimes — dividing the population into categories that are easy to monitor and control.
  6. Foreign propaganda as external partitioning force: amplify both extremes, impersonate activists, flood the zone with contradictory content, launder narratives through domestic voices. As I wrote then: these tactics “mirror Kelley’s formula: divide, destabilize, disable collective action.”
    The throughline: partition is a strategy, not an accident. A divided public cannot hold power accountable, because it is too busy fearing the designated boogeyman of the season — and too busy hating the neighbors who disagree about which boogeyman is real.
    V. The Nuance That Keeps This Honest
    Let me say it again, because the entire essay depends on it: this is not to say that people don’t do things. Terrorists commit terrorism. Criminals commit crimes, and the statistics on who commits which crimes are real and deserve honest discussion. Antisemitism is real. Jihadist violence is real — thousands of documented attacks. Some groups do have disproportionate crime rates, for reasons that include poverty, demography, broken institutions, and failed integration — all of which are discussable without being a bigot.
    The manipulation thesis does not require denying any of that. It requires only this observation: the powerful select which real dangers get the full theatrical treatment, and when. The same establishment that ignored warnings before one catastrophe will hyperventilate about another, depending on what the moment requires. The danger is real; the spotlight is managed. And the spotlight is what produces policy — wars, surveillance laws, censorship regimes, emergency powers — that would never survive a calm public conversation.
    The boogeyman needs the kernel of truth. Without it, the fear doesn’t take. A competent manipulator does not invent the monster from nothing; she finds a real monster, points the cameras at it, and keeps them pointed there until you have forgotten to look at who is holding the camera.
    VI. Solidarity Is a Counter-Strategy
    So what do we do with this? The first step is recognition: learn to spot the template. When you see a complex conflict flattened into a morality play — pure victims, pure monsters, and a protector demanding emergency powers — you are looking at the playbook. When the same voices appear on both sides of the panic, building the threat and selling the protection, you are looking at the playbook. When dissent from the panic is treated not as disagreement but as moral deviance — as bigotry, as treason, as “denialism” — you are looking at the playbook. When the monster of the decade is replaced by a new monster just as the old one’s usefulness expires, you are looking at the playbook.
    The second step is refusing the partition. Every version of this trick depends on you hating the other half of the public more than you distrust the people managing the fear. The British needed Hindus to fear Muslims and Muslims to fear Hindus. COINTELPRO needed activists to suspect each other. The modern version needs you to believe that your neighbor — the immigrant, the Jew, the Muslim, the feminist, the AI doomer, the AI skeptic — is the reason your life is harder, rather than the managed economy of fear itself.
    None of this means there are no real conflicts, no real enemies, no real dangers. It means the danger is doubled: there is the boogeyman, and there is the hand pointing at the boogeyman. Watch both.
    I ended “Dividing the Public” with a line I still believe: solidarity is not sentimental. It is a counter-strategy. The empire’s oldest weapon is our division. The only defense ever discovered is refusing to be divided — not by pretending our differences don’t exist, but by insisting on facing the people who profit from them, together.

Sources

The author’s own research

  • “Dividing the Public” (Jan. 3, 2026) — the Protector Narrative, scapegoating cycles, moral panic engineering, “good minority / bad minority” strategy, bureaucratic fragmentation
  • “Minority Weaponization” (chapter) — performative championing vs. scapegoating of minorities; “discursive immunization”
  • “Racism as Corruption’s Veil” — liberation rhetoric as cover for control: Zimbabwe, Venezuela, South Africa (BEE), U.S. machine politics, Brazil, Tower Hamlets
  • “Common Features of Progressivist-Islamist Cults” (Dec. 31, 2025) — operational convergence of radical Islamism and radical progressivism
  • “Color Revolutions: Patterns of Mobilization and Regime Change” — Orange Revolution 2004; Western foundation training programs
  • “Police Brutality — A Manufactured Race War” (blog, June 10, 2020) — the manufactured-division thesis with 2019 U.S. policing statistics

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