A Lesson in Right-Wing Sociology.

For the press the riots of recent days were a spontaneous, random and unfathomably violent explosion with no connection to any substantial events or issues in British society. It is true that the mass-looting of shops is hardly a form of political activism. But the moral panic around the riots has the potential to drown out the social context in which these riots irrupted. The riot in Tottenham was connected to the death of Mark Duggan because it was a peaceful protest against what had happened that degenerated into violence. The shooting caused the Tottenham protests, which in turn led to the current situation as the protest descended violent. You're not going to convince me that if Mark Duggan were alive and there was no issue of police brutality historically there would still be looting going on. The commentariat are ignorant of the legitimate grievances behind the riots and refuse to even address them except to deride them as "excuses" for criminality. The urgency for change in our society is clear, we can't prevent future riots without addressing the issues which have festered for years.

On Newsnight Gavin Esler asked Kelvin MacKenzie "Should we try to understand this?" and the former editor of The Sun responded "No, I don't think we should..." That response is the example of everything wrong with the right-wing commentary on the riots. With that MacKenzie proceeded to call for shooting the rioters, at first he's less clear on that and then stresses "rubber bullets"; then he calls for legal punishments to make them "weep" because they won't "weep" at home or at school. It's clear that MacKenzie pins the blame on a lack of discipline at home and at school, no doubt beatings and canings are in order in those places. Of course the rioters should be arrested and prosecuted, but if we turned schools and homes into prisons for children would that prevent future riots? I think not. There are often references in the press to the "excuses" peddled by the Left in the form of sociological claptrap about 'social exclusion' and 'deprivation'. But the Right has it's sociology on this. In the case of Melanie Phillips it's the "chickens coming home to roost" for the liberal intelligenstia who have undermined British society in the last 30 years.

The line which Kelvin MacKenzie took falls back on assumptions which focus on the development of social problems, it's all about a serious lack of discipline in the home and in schools. So if daddy hadn't beaten the ever-living-shit out of Kelvin MacKenzie he would've been in on the mass-plot to raid JD Sports across the country with the help of a Volkswagen GTI no doubt. It is a severe lack of domestic violence and child abuse in schools which has led to thousands of people looting and attacking police. If only daddy had beaten them then they might have grown up to be a journalist who can write lies for Rupert Murdoch and smear the dead after outbursts of football violence, just like Kelvin MacKenzie. This line of thought is just as absurd as when Peter Hitchens claims that these are not 'riots' because riots have an origin in deprivation and then notes that the participants, who have been arrested, are "losers". Apparently the "criminal masterminds" of this spontaneous looting spree have all gotten away, so it only appears that the looters are from "pockets of deprivation". None of these gutless twerps can admit that if you are from a more stable and secure background then you are probably less likely to go around torching buildings.

 We've heard a lot of things said about the riots, e.g. that it is being perpetrated by "feral animals" who need to be put down and that the mob are just "mindless" thugs who should be shot. For Pat Condell the root cause is "stupidity" and a lack of "imagination", a "feral view of the world" which is a product of a rampant entitlement culture. So when you're 'pampered scum' by the state you just have to go out and raid JD Sports even though you can afford to shop at Ted Baker with those 'generous hand-outs' from the state. The rioters are drug-addled "vermin" running amok because the police don't have access to water cannons, rubber bullets and tear gas. Condell went on to call for the repeal of benefits for life to anyone who participated in the riots as well as the demolition of their homes. At the same time there is the claim that these people are "opportunists" with no excuses and have been in waiting for a moment to go out on a spree of looting. Oh and these people express the violent tendencies of the Left, especially groups like UK Uncut.

Note 'order' has to be maintained no matter what people are going through in society, the grievances will never be resolved and the poor should just put up with it so the facade of 'order' can carry on. Beneath the 'order' that the police are defending there is disorder on a huge scale and occasionally it ruptures the appearance of peace. The riots are subjective violence in the same sense that terrorism is subjective, just like terrorism it is the product of a history of imperialism and political stagnancy in the Middle East. That is not a justification for terrorism, it is an explanation which is better than the right-wing line that it is simply the result of a barbaric culture which needs to be dealt with. In reaction to the attacks on the Twin Towers the US invaded Afghanistan and Iraq which has exacerbated the threat of terrorism even more. The Coalition are about to slash public services to the bone and will no doubt increase the power of police, which will only lead to a situation where there is greater social deprivation and a higher chance of police violence to the urban poor.

The only excuse for violence to be found in the press is when it's police violence. If the cops shot a black man then there must be a good reason. It must've been self-defence, he shot at them and then they shot him - he got what was coming to him! There is always an excuse for these officers, even when the bullet fired at officers was found to be 'police issue' then Mark Duggan must've had the same ammunition as the police. When it turns out Mark Duggan never fired his gun then the line is he must've gone for his gun and they shot him. Thus, we should just unleash the water cannons, rubber bullets and even the military on the rioters. But then it gets uglier as the line turns to the ethnicity of the rioters. In the words of Nick Griffin "Feral black gangstas and Islamist fast-breeding sex pests are the problem." Why is it the people cleaning up after these people are all white? Consistently the Right are taking advantage of the riots to further pursue an agenda of social cleansing. The political class is flocking above to peddle easy answers which have failed and will continue to fail.

Where are the Police?

Would you agree with the following statement?

"That's crap, I don't buy that for a minute. Calling a riot an irrational expression of rage is such a cop-out, it's opportunism at it's worst, it's just a bunch of people grabbing any excuse they can find to go out and loot a store. Nothing more. The fact that these people ripped off the stores in their own communities, all that reflects is the degree to which these people have absolutely no respect for the law at all and certainly no concept of like community or civic responsibility."

I hope you don't agree with this line because it is never simply the case that a riot is just the decision of free individuals to go out on a rampage, there is always something bigger going on regardless of what the media will tell you. The quote is lifted from the film American History X and specifically the words of Derek Vinyard, played by Ed Norton, on the LA riots of 1992 which were sparked by the assault on Rodney King by police officers. I refer you to the good words of Bill Hicks on that particular affair. The reactionary birdsong around the riots we are witnessing are not so different from this line, though the racist element is subsumed beneath words such as "scum", "thug" and so on. The Right are going completely bat-shit over the riots, consistently arguing that the riots are completely unrelated to the death of Mark Duggan and simply we're witnessing the rational actions of free individuals. This has been pointed out about Twitter by Richard Seymour and the same is true all over the web. It is being fueled by mainstream rags of the Right.
 

I was in a recent argument on the Facebook group 'R.I.P. Mark Duggan' with a member of the EDL, who has since been banned for racist remarks, and another user who described his political views as "common sense". I initially got involved to shoot down the EDL mouthpiece who claimed that "No Muslim nation would tolerate this?" so I responded "No Muslim nation would tolerate this? I thought you want us to be different from Muslims??" At the same time, the proponent of "common sense" was arguing that the riots began because "an armed criminal called mr duggan did whether he fired his gun or didn't he still had it in him." He then exclaimed that the army should be sent in to "fuck up these idiots". When I gave these guys a prod about Mark Duggan and Charles de Menezes the immediate line was that both of them deserved to die because Duggan was an "armed criminal" and Menezes was an "illegal immigrant". Beware "common sense"!

Of course, when I pointed out the facts that Mark Duggan fired no shots at the officers and the gun he had on him was in his sock when he died the purveyor of "common sense" had another line to spew. The words he had were simple "He had a gun end of legitimate shoot", the logic was clear: a young black man was shot to death by cops, so it must be a good thing! We now know that the weapon Duggan was a replica that had been converted into a working gun, bare in mind that the bullet which was fired into a police radio turned out to be 'police issued'. I pointed out some of these facts in the argument and witnessed an interesting response "if he hadn't been carrying a gun he would be alive he made a choice." I even said I think Mark Duggan should've been arrested for possessing the weapon (though we now know it was hardly a weapon at all) but it was not enough and apparently I just had no problem with men carrying guns on the streets of London. The thought-process was clear "your an idiot if you carry a gun you are making a choice to live outside the law."

My response was "An idiot who thinks a man who has a gun in his shoe should be arrested and not shot repeatedly by officers who then try to make it look like self-defence... Interesting logic there again." Naturally this commonsensical fopdoodle continued to accuse me of condoning the possession of firearms. The Right has no room for the context of the situation that we're in today, for them it is simply a bunch of yobs going on a crime spree and the police or army need to restore order. These riots would have never have happened if Mark Duggan was not killed and there were serious efforts to resolve the grievances of the community. We'll no doubt see more riots before the decade is over. Finally I had him cornered "I don't think it's okay for people to carry guns, I'll repeat to you: Mark Duggan was carrying a gun and should've charged for doing so. What's so difficult to understand about my position? You think he should've been killed and, from what I gather, you'd like to see more people killed in this way." I'm still waiting for that response.

Angry White Men in Riotous Tottenham.

I Predict a Riot!

The riot in Tottenham has been all over the news since last night, though it initially had to compete with the recent polar bear attack in Norway especially at the Mail's website. Perhaps it is because the source of the rage was not adequately covered at all, the death of just another black man at in a city of over 7 million people was insignificant. Even though it was the police who fired four rounds into the mini-cab, the media seemed baffled at first. Of course, The Daily Mail has since jumped at the opportunity to go on about how Mark Duggan fired on a police officer and therefore forfeited his human rights. The killing of a white student by a bear in Scandinavia seemed to deserve a higher level of coverage than the death of a black father at the hands of police officers. Yet it should be noted that the death of a young black man only lit the match, Tottenham already has an unemployment rate of 8.8% and the community is being subjected to a series of huge cutbacks. Keep in mind a history of racism and police brutality that precedes the riot of 1985.

The exact details of the death of Mark Duggan are not clear, the police were from Operation Trident - the unit that deals with gun crime "in the black community" - who stopped the cab and shot him four times in the midst of an arrest. Incidentally, Operation Trident largely goes by the 'stop and search' approach when it comes to young black men and the point of the unit is to police the black community which requires "special policing" of course. The police have since let the media know that the shots were fired in self-defence because Duggan fired on them first. The police officer who was supposedly shot was in hospital over night and then the police claimed that the shot was absorbed by the officer's radio. An eyewitness claimed that the police had restrained Duggan on the ground when the shots were fired. It wouldn't be the first time the police have killed a man in this way, as we have seen with Charles de Menezes who was shot seven times in the head as he was restrained on the tube. Both men were excluded as targets which could be legitimately killed, by the police and chunks of the media.

Update: The bullet lodged in the police radio was a police issue bullet. So much for the claim that he was a 'stone-cold gangster' who shot at a couple of innocent 'bobbies' only to get what was coming to him. Apparently, the gun was still in his sock when he was killed and the weapon is only capable of firing blanks.

The protest outside the police station was a peaceful one at first. It turned violent after the police set upon a 16 year-old girl with batons. Apparently she had come towards the police lines yelling something about "justice", though the The Daily Mail is currently running with the line that she threw a rock at the coppers. Then there is the police claim that the violence started when the protesters began throwing missiles at police cars and vans, which some might say were 'bait' left there to provoke an attack as seen in the student protests. Of course, the Right are running with the line that the looting is not an expression of a 'legitimate grievance' and not only was it right that the police killed Mark Duggan but these people just wanted to go ape. The looting of shops and burning of houses is not an expression of anything, it is just the cheap opportunism of people who have no conception of community or civic duty. It's a line that has a lot in common with what Derek Vinyard said about the LA riots in American History X.

Karl Marx says "Men make their own history, but they do not make it as they please; they do not make it under self-selected circumstances, but under circumstances existing already, given and transmitted from the past." The Right will never understand this quote because they adhere to a conception of free-choice which eliminates all room for even the minimal level of context and determinants. For them these people simply chose to trash their own community, if Mark Duggan was still alive and there was no history of police brutality would this have happened? I think not. The legitimate grievances are socio-economic as well as racial and that is undeniable given the nature of events, unless you subscribe to 'free-choice' in which case it was just coincidental that the riot followed the death of Mark Duggan. This is bigger than Tottenham as poverty is not just ghettoised into a neat section of the City waiting to explode, which is the reason for fears that this could spread to other parts of London.

My Email Exchange with Noam Chomsky.

A few days after the massive student demonstration against cuts and tuition fees I emailed Noam Chomsky, who has been involved in activism and civil disobedience for almost 50 years, to see what he thought to the protests in London. But also other issues such as the European approach to deficit reduction and the "special relationship" between Britain and America. Have a read and please comment.

JW: There was a mass-demonstration in London yesterday organised by the National Union of Students and others in response to the cuts to public education and tuition fee hikes by the Con-Dem Coalition. Turn-out is said to have been 52,000 or maybe more, which is a considerable turn-out given that the Coalition has only been in power since May. The media gave the demonstrations some coverage but it was only when students smashed windows at Millbank Towers and broke into the Conservative Party HQ that the press really began to "focus" on the story. The media covered the story as if there had been a terrorist attack on Millbank Towers and hundreds of Conservatives had been killed, when in actuality only 14 people were injured - 7 police officers and 7 students. Do you think the students undermined the cause by resorting to, what the press calls, violence?

Many European countries, including Britain, are implementing "austerity measures" that could amount to the end of the welfare state and social democracy. It is often emphasised by commentators that these "austerity measures" are not being followed in the United States. In the UK the Coalition has "ring-fenced" defence spending and it has been suggested that is because the US government is opposed to cuts to defence budgets in Britain. This may also explain why the Liberals in the government have gone back on their campaign promises to scrap the Trident missile system, in Britain we call this the "special relationship" without irony. What do you think of the "special relationship" between Britain and America?

NC: I noticed that an international anarchist federation, which strongly supported the protest, condemned the resort to force and suggested it might have been provocateurs.  If so, it wouldn’t have been the first time.  At best, it’s a tactical error, in my opinion, achieving nothing positive and offering the media the opportunity to suppress the issues and concentrate on injuring people.  That’s an old story.

The austerity measures in the UK are, I believe, class war.  Even conservative economists recognize that England’s deficit is not large by historical standards.  I think the UK and the EU generally are making a serious mistake – or more cynically, a class-based policy -- by focusing on austerity rather than stimulating the economy in which case the deficit, such as it is, will be taken care of naturally down the road.  I’m not usually a cheer-leader for Obama, but his position on this issue at G-20 was better than that of Europe, though he didn’t go anywhere near far enough.  Obama picked a deficit commission headed by two right-wing deficit hawks, who just released a report that has pretty much the Cameron-style class war character.  It’s not as bad as the UK – yet.  As for the “special relationship,” that was defined by a high-level JFK adviser at the peak of the missile crisis in 1962, when US planners were taking actions that they knew might incinerate England while leaving the US untouched, and were refusing even to inform the British government.  The “special relationship” means that “Britain is our lieutenant, the fashionable word is `partner’.” The British prefer to hear the fashionable word.