Le Bon’s translator had personally ordered Egyptian villagers hanged

Evidence

Fathi Zaghlul was known among ordinary Egyptians as one of the members of the government tribunal set up in the Delta village of Dinshawai, following a fight there in which a British officer of the army of occupation had been killed. The tribunal had responded to this threat of popular violence against the colonial regime by ordering six of the villagers to be hanged. Zaghlul was now Under-Secretary in the Egyptian Ministry of Justice. The book he translated seems to have been widely read, at least among those with similar fears concerning the threat of popular disorder. — Timothy Mitchell, Colonising Egypt, 392

Categorization

• CANDY: The chilling irony — the man who hanged six villagers translated the treatise on crowd psychology — is a great dinner-party fact about Egypt’s colonial politics.
• XREF: Recalls Mitchell’s broader thesis in this book: the colonial state producing knowledge (social science) directly alongside its apparatus of violence.