Was Axel Rudakubana really a lone wolf? By Mary Harrington

Satan's Spawn

Unherd : 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.

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