“There is nothing more dangerous than to build a society, with a large segment of people in that society, who feel that they have no stake in it; who feel that they have nothing to lose. People who have a stake in their society, protect that society; but when they don’t have it, they unconsciously want to destroy it.”

Martin Luther King

 

Earlier today, I had the misfortune of finding a copy of The Daily Telegraph (yeah, I know), which led me to experience the displeasure that was Miranda Devine’s creative take on the London riots. I say “creative”, because she somehow managed to turn a riot that happened under a conservative government into another case of left-wing mismanagement. You gotta hand it to her, she doesn’t let reality get in the way of what they pay her so nicely to spew out. For Devine, it was all down to “politically correct policing”. Yes, that’s right, lovely Miranda actually proposed that, far from having too much racism and cruelty in our social policies, we have not had enough – and if we did have more, like… say… the freedom to basically lock away the immigrant portions of our society (they did that in Germany, once), then this damned riot wouldn’t have happened, because they’d all be… I don’t know…. locked up… or killed. Elsewhere in the paper, random fuckwits on the street (they’re not exactly thin on the ground in this country) answered the searing question: Could the riots happen in our own country? My favourite was the guy who answered, “No, because though they have the same problems, they have some on a much bigger scale that thankfully we don’t, like immigration.” And it struck me, really, because at the end of the day, everybody knows it – we know very well what this riot “was” – and yet the media, none of it, has had the guts to outright call this… hello… a race riot. It’s also a class riot, yes (we’ll discuss how aspirationalism has given birth to a new monster in a moment), and certainly there’ll no doubt be plenty of white looters and rioters. But class and race are ultimately inseparable in this society of ours, anyway. And if there is shown to be no element of race in the rioting – taking note of the current absence of race in the actual reporting (as opposed to the op ed pieces, where it’s perfectly acceptable to basically invoke genocide) – we have taken it upon ourselves to imagine it was (hence the mountain of racist op eds and abominable forum comments) – and that in itself says so very much about the racial divides in Post 9/11 West.

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