There has been a "potential act of terrorism" in London, in which potential terrorists potentially ran over potential infidels with a potential van, and apparently also stabbed potential victims and slashed some people's potential throats.

In response to this potential act, the London police "shepherded" (the word repeated through the British news reports) hundreds of people through the streets with their hands over their heads.  No, those being forced to surrender were not the potential terrorists, but the potential victims.

For their own safety, you understand, the innocent citizens of one of history's greatest nations, fountainhead of Western liberty, having been disarmed by their government, and while being continuously surveilled in all their daily activities by government cameras on every street corner, are now being murdered at will, and in quantity, by bloodthirsty peace-loving potential Muslims who have been allowed to occupy their country and live off their welfare state without limits – and the nanny state's response is to demand that all those who haven't yet been run over or slashed walk slowly where police can keep a close eye on them.

The most telling part is one report, on Sky News, explaining the video footage of people walking with their hands over their heads.  Asked by the reporter whether the police had demanded this, they say no, they simply thought that would be the "safest" posture.  And so hundreds of innocent people, knowing that killers were in the area, and not knowing whence the next attack might occur, were voluntarily assuming a posture of surrender.  That, in a nutshell, is the product of a generation of progressive propaganda, nanny-statism, and political correctness.  That's the mindset of a people who have been trained to believe that their souls – not their physical survival, but their dignity – have no ultimate value.  Welcome to the brave new world.

The next step will come tomorrow, if not sooner: the state will begin issuing harsh warnings against any sort of "Islamophobic" backlash, such as feeling a little nervous when a group of Muslim men enters the restaurant where you are eating dinner or taking a "racist" second glance at a Muslim man behind the wheel of a van.

London is reputed to be the most surveilled city on Earth.  And of course, British progressives are just appalled by America's backwardness in continuing to allow private citizens to own firearms.  The result of all that state-imposed safety-first paternalism is just what you see: Britons terrorized by religious fanatics with their own less "progressive" notions of paternalism and left with no means, whether moral or physical, of self-defense precisely when their government has ceased to care about defending them.

Oh, and all those liberty-crushing surveillance cameras?  They provide wonderful TV footage of mass murder for the six o'clock news, don't they?

Daren Jonescu writes about politics, philosophy, education, and the decline of civilization at www.darenjonescu.com.