Weaponised Narratives
How History’s Oldest Trick Still Divides Us
Across centuries and continents, one political tactic has remained depressingly consistent: blaming the outsider. When economies falter, governments stumble, or social cohesion fractures, the simplest salve for public anger is to redirect it. You point to a minority, cloak your accusation in distorted history or crude statistics, and present the problem as theirs. The method never changes. Only the target does.
In recent years, the internet has amplified these tactics into sharp, viral memes. Antisemitic conspiracies, anti-immigration slogans, and racial stereotypes are now packaged as shareable "facts," divorced from context but potent enough to sow division. Yet these modern distortions have deep, blood-soaked roots.
Take the notorious "110" claim circulating through extremist channels. It suggests that Jewish communities have been expelled from 109 countries due to their alleged behaviour, with the United States set to become the 110th. This narrative is not just historically false; it is designed to evoke inevitability, as if persecution were somehow a justified consequence rather than an act of bigotry. Serious historians reject the list entirely. Many so-called expulsions were regional, temporary, or unrelated to Jewish communities at all. More importantly, they occurred in radically different historical contexts from feudal Europe’s religious purges to modern fascist regimes united only by the scapegoating instinct.
Similar memes infect discourse around immigration. The so-called "Great Replacement" theory, birthed in France and now parroted by far-right movements across Britain, claims that white populations are being "replaced" through immigration and birth rates of minority communities, particularly Muslims and Africans. Never mind that the UK's Office for National Statistics projects that by 2050, the white British population will remain the majority by a significant margin. The myth persists because it offers fearful simplicity. In 2023 alone, politicians from Reform UK to fringe Tories toyed with this rhetoric, despite clear data showing that Britain's economic survival is increasingly reliant on skilled migration. The NHS, for instance, would collapse overnight without foreign-born staff, with over 16% of its workforce born outside the UK, including nearly 30% of doctors.
The trick also thrives in subtler forms. The so-called "model minority" myth frames East Asian communities as obedient, industrious, and quietly successful. On the surface, it appears flattering. Yet beneath lies division. It fosters resentment, pits minorities against each other, and erases the racism and barriers many East Asians still face. During the COVID-19 pandemic, hate crimes against people of East Asian descent in the UK spiked by nearly 300%, driven by crude "Chinese virus" narratives. The model minority myth did nothing to shield them — it only disguised systemic prejudice until the crisis peeled back the mask.
The Romani, or so-called "gypsy" communities, face older, uglier stereotypes. The centuries-old myth that they are inherently criminal still shapes public policy today. Across Europe, including parts of Britain, Romani settlements are routinely targeted for eviction, and access to healthcare and education remains appallingly limited. A 2021 report by the European Union found that 80% of Romani in certain member states live below the poverty line. Yet, discussions of their plight are still clouded by old prejudices rather than honest policy debate.
The LGBTQ+ community knows this cycle all too well. From the "groomer" slurs hurled at Pride events to far-right claims that queer people are recruiting children, the language may have evolved, but the underlying paranoia remains unchanged. In 2022, over 3,000 hate crimes targeting LGBTQ+ individuals were reported in England and Wales, a 41% increase from the previous year. Politicians and media figures fanned these flames under the guise of "protecting children," but the statistics expose the real danger: vilification leading to violence.
Even historical groups like the Irish have not escaped this weaponisation. During the 19th and early 20th centuries, Irish migrants to Britain were smeared as drunk, violent, and politically suspect, a legacy that justified exclusion from jobs, housing, and public life. The echoes of that rhetoric still ripple today in debates about migration and integration.
Perhaps the most chilling modern example concerns the Palestinians. In some political circles, their very existence is denied. "A made-up people," some claim, erasing centuries of cultural and historical presence. Such narratives grease the wheels of displacement, settlement expansion, and human rights abuses. In Britain, public sympathy for Palestinians remains significant, yet official discourse often contorts itself to sidestep the question of Palestinian statehood entirely, mirroring the dangerous erasure happening elsewhere.
These weaponised narratives, whether disguised as memes or wrapped in pseudo-academic language, serve one purpose: they fracture societies. They turn neighbour against neighbour, distract from government failure, and offer scapegoats when real answers prove inconvenient.
But here lies the uncomfortable truth. Often, the seeds of these narratives don’t materialise from thin air. Sometimes, individuals or fringe groups within a community do engage in actions, economic, political, or criminal, that fuel resentment. Jewish financiers did play prominent roles in European banking; some Pakistani grooming gangs in the UK committed horrific crimes; militant groups do operate in the Palestinian territories. These facts, in isolation, are undeniable.
But what follows is where the manipulation festers. The actions of the few are twisted into the identity of the many. An entire people, millions of individuals, most with no connection to those acts, become a convenient caricature. Suspicion metastasises into hatred, and before long, history repeats itself: violence, exclusion, displacement, and worse.
So yes, people’s instincts to question or feel uneasy are often rooted in fragments of reality. But the moment those fragments are wielded to justify treating entire communities as a threat, that is no longer vigilance, it is manipulation, dressed in the language of common sense.
The enemy isn’t your neighbour. It’s the quiet voice in politics, media, or online telling you they always were.
And that brings us to the unavoidable question: what’s the solution? Truthfully, there isn’t a neat one. These narratives cannot be legislated out of existence, nor can human nature, with its tribal fears and insecurities, be conveniently uninstalled. But history shows the cycle can be interrupted.
The real antidote isn’t naïve calls for unity or censorship, but cold, deliberate disruption of how profitable these narratives are politically, socially, and economically.
In Britain, as elsewhere, this means making it more costly for parties, media outlets, and opportunists to exploit division. It means building genuine economic self-reliance within marginalised communities, not performative victimhood. It means confronting the uncomfortable conversations within those communities, acknowledging when individuals or groups fuel resentment, without surrendering to collective blame.
History proves it works. Civil rights movements didn’t eliminate racism, but they shattered the political consensus that open segregation was acceptable. The Good Friday Agreement didn’t end all sectarianism, but it made it politically suicidal to whip up the old hate for short-term gain. Even LGBTQ+ rights were never secured by sentimental appeals alone; they were won by sustained cultural visibility, economic influence, and public pressure that made bigotry an expensive position to hold.
You don’t erase prejudice. But you can starve it. You make the machinery of division unworkable economically, socially, and politically until the architects of hate find themselves bankrupt, irrelevant, or outnumbered.
It won’t be quick. It won’t be clean. But it is achievable not through slogans, but through the quiet, unglamorous work of making hate bad for business.