These have to be some of the wettest and most craven riots I have ever seen. I have seen a few over the years and each one had an element of justification. A central principle that stood apart from the trouble as a reasoning, a battle cry. There were principles and rights at stake or the just vengeance backed by angry protesters who were quelled and unheard.
Here we seem to have a mobility of youth after mobile phones and burning. Some of the footage shows sparse groups of skinny children with badly fitting trousers hurl grossly un-aerodynamic objects like they were javelins. Worse still I see large groups of riot gear police crowd up and back away.
Sure the setting of fires and burning of cars cannot be ignored but even that represents no fundamental goal, no just cause; merely the ruination of the small business. I don’t think it is just because I have aged either. Though I may find myself uttering the same admonishments as any conservative age troll, this just seems so… childish! Look at this list of Riots through the ages. You can see a long list of violence and unjust laws being protested and escalating to violence. You can also see a long list of authoritarian atrocity: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_riots
Right at the start you can see the earlist of them in London. Evil May Day of 1517: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Evil_May_Day – That was a riot. This is anarchy for assholes.
Londoners resented foreigners, especially the wealthy foreign merchants and bankers of Lombard Street. Over the proceding two weeks there were sporadic attacks … approximately a thousand young male apprentices had congregated in Cheapside. Here they were met by the under-sheriff of London, Thomas More, who attempted in vain to persuade them to return to their homes. As soon as More had calmed them, however, the inhabitants of St Martin started to throw stones, bricks, bats and boiling water from their windows… This sparked panic in the mob and they looted foreigners’ houses there and elsewhere in the city, although no one was killed. By 3am the riot had died down, and the three hundred people arrested were pardoned. However thirteen of the rioters were convicted of treason and executed … Sir Richard Cholmeley, the Lieutenant of the Tower of London furiously ordered the firing of some of the Tower’s artillery at the city.
Have the police had their claws removed? I don’t want violence of any sort but I remember the casual and over zealous use of brutality. The immediate arrival of mounted police, the unbreakable chain of riot shields, the gas and the water cannon. Did we just run out of cash to deal with any threat? Have the disaffected generation called the bluff of the establishment?
Perhaps the worse kind of police state is one that seems to be justified. I can imagine the backing down and ineffectuality of the police being matched by a huge call to arms of the state. Sudden and irrevocable powers to search and hold without just cause.
It is also wrong to call this a lost generation. I don’t believe it. For every so called rioter I am sure there is an upstanding citizen of Britain, who would gladly support the return to civilisation. Pensioner and student, there are more righteously justified and able bodied people who could take up arms to defend their own way of life. Some are saying to bring in the army. Perhaps the unified vigilantism of the working man is what is needed. Bring about peace and order by arming the average joe. Give every shop keeper a riot suit and let them defend their business. Let everyone come out en masse and quell the riots directly. The anti-riot.
And if you want to know where I will be when the call to arms is raised? I will be indoors, playing Call of Duty: Modern Warfare on the Xbox. I’m not going out after tea, frak that for a game of soldiers.
