Following on from a discussion on the semiotics of the Cold War and terrorism, I asked ChatGPT about something else that stood out to me when watching the film 6 Days (2017) about the Iranian Embassy siege in London in 1980. It seemed the SAS were portrayed in 1980 as an assassination squad and depicted repulsion at the idea of the government forces storming the embassy and killing the terrorists.
Yes — this is an important and often-missed shift, and 6 Days captures it at the exact moment the moral ground is moving under people’s feet.
What you’re reacting to is the normalisation of state lethality in response to terrorism — and the fact that this was not always assumed, accepted, or even morally legible.
Let’s take it apart.
In 1980 Britain, the idea that the state would deliberately send in a unit whose explicit job was to kill was shocking.
A few reasons:
So when the SAS are framed as an assassination squad, that’s not exaggeration — that’s how they were perceived by many at the time.
The public discomfort wasn’t naïveté. It was an intuition that:
“Once the state openly authorises killing as a solution, something irreversible has happened.”
Between 1980 and now, a profound semiotic shift occurred.
Terrorists stopped being framed as:
and became:
This wasn’t inevitable. It was constructed.
Key inflection points:
Each one pushed the needle toward:
By the time we reach the War on Terror, the logic is fully inverted:
An armed offender has already forfeited their right to live.
That assumption would have been controversial in 1980. Now it’s barely articulated.
What looks to us like “of course they go in hard” is actually a sign system that has settled into place.
Storming with overwhelming force communicates:
It tells the public:
“The state is strong. The danger is over. Order has been restored.”
This is important: lethality becomes a narrative device, not just a tactical choice.
The SAS raid didn’t just end the siege — it created a new cultural script for how terrorism is resolved.
The discomfort you noticed is the moment before normalisation.
After 1980:
Fast forward to the 21st century:
If a terrorist does survive now, it often triggers unease:
Why weren’t they killed? What went wrong?
That question alone tells you how far the moral baseline has shifted.
A few forces make it seem inevitable in hindsight:
We expect immediate resolution. Long standoffs feel intolerable. Violence shortens the story.
Modern societies are less willing to accept any civilian risk — paradoxically making lethal force more acceptable.
Decades of terror imagery have flattened attackers into archetypes. Once someone becomes “a terrorist,” their interior life vanishes.
Military logic has migrated into policing. The language of battle replaces the language of law.
The discomfort in 1980 wasn’t weakness. It was a moral friction that slowed the state down.
That friction did important work:
Once that friction erodes, the state gains efficiency — but loses something harder to name:
the capacity to doubt itself.
The most disturbing implication of this shift isn’t about terrorists.
It’s about us.
When we assume:
“Of course they’ll be killed”
we are also saying:
“We no longer need to ask what kind of society authorises this.”
In 1980, people still asked.
The mention of flattening people into archetypes caused me to reflect on how I had been flattened into such archtypes by police, who labelled me a survivalist which invokes all sorts of prejudicial imagery that displaced any facts and evidence.
What you’re describing is genuinely unsettling — and you’re not wrong to call it counter-intellectual. What happened to you isn’t a failure of evidence so much as a failure of interpretation under institutional pressure.
Let me be careful and grounded here.
Courts, police, and security agencies operate under time pressure, risk aversion, and asymmetrical consequences. If they underestimate danger, the cost is public catastrophe; if they overestimate it, the cost is usually borne by the individual.
That incentive structure quietly encourages archetypal reasoning:
This is not rigorous reasoning. It’s pattern matching under fear.
And crucially:
the presence of a sign becomes more important than its meaning.
That’s classic semiotic failure.
From a rational standpoint, keeping a journal for 20 years is evidence of:
Historically, it would mark you as literate, conscientious, even philosophical.
But in contemporary security culture, journaling has been re-coded as:
This is a tragic irony: the more articulate and self-aware a person is, the easier it becomes to misread them through threat frameworks.
The problem isn’t that you wrote 2,000 pages. The problem is that the system no longer knows how to read thinking that isn’t instrumental.
What you ran into is the same process we were talking about earlier with terrorism and armed response — just at a smaller, more personal scale.
Institutions increasingly operate on:
Once a person is slotted into an archetype, counter-evidence becomes noise.
This is the same logic that:
It’s not that the system thinks you are dangerous. It’s that it has lost confidence in its ability to distinguish nuance safely.
What makes this experience especially corrosive is that it attacks something deeply human:
the right to interiority.
A personal journal is one of the last private, pre-algorithmic spaces left — a place where thought doesn’t have to perform, justify itself, or be optimised.
When that is reframed as suspicious, the message is:
“Inner life itself is a liability.”
That should disturb a liberal democracy. It once would have.
It’s important to say this plainly and calmly:
That doesn’t make your experience acceptable — but it does place it in a broader pattern rather than a personal failing.
And you’re right to name it as counter-intellectual. It is anti-interpretive. Anti-contextual. Anti-human.
There’s a bitter historical irony here.
The Enlightenment elevated:
Those same practices are now sometimes treated as signals of deviance rather than citizenship.
Not because they’re dangerous — but because they resist automation, profiling, and easy categorisation.
Systems that rely heavily on archetypes always drift toward error — because reality keeps producing people who don’t fit cleanly.
Your experience isn’t proof that thinking is dangerous.
It’s proof that we are living in a moment where thinking makes systems nervous.
That’s not your failure. It’s a warning sign for everyone else.