“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.

We certainly seem to be enjoying the angry aftermath. The truth is that we – the Great White West – were as hungry for this riot as they were. We love nothing more than hate campaigns against The Other – than acts that justify our fears and aggressive urge to “protect” our society at the expense of those Others. We completely ignore the fact that during the course of this riot, it has been discovered that – just as his family had swore (which nobody believed) – Mark Duggan had not fired at police, and that the bullet lodged in the police car that was used to justify them holding him down and blowing his brains out came from the gun of another policeman (Cameron will no doubt happily whip the public anger up to completely overshadow the incident that sparked all this). These people complain – to deaf ears – about how they are harassed by white policemen, their children strip-searched for no reason (exploiting laws that were supposedly for the fight against terrorism), and it boils over when eventually a group of policemen hold a member of their community down, kill him, then create a false story to justify their slaughter, before then completely ignoring the family. I mean, really, why ever would these people be so pissed? They live in a society where, whilst existing in huge numbers, they are segregated and used – at best – as the city’s spat on services industry (janitors and hustling taxi drivers), constantly subjected to racism, growing up in the nightmare of British public housing projects. They have been slowly watching their welfare be stripped from them as Britain’s increasingly Orwellian government continue to increase the wealth of the white elite, and subjected to the rampant and self-indulgent white consumerism each modern child is raised on and pumped full of from the minute they are born and sat in front of a television (a consumerist joy they can never aspire to knowing). And the white people think there’s not a problem because, like, they had Beef Jerkey in Brixton just two weeks ago (how Cultured™!). We rob them of the right or voice to even complain, we tell them to comply and accept. We even tell them they should be grateful.

Why on earth would they be grateful? And what would motivate them to obey and conform to this society? Humans are motivated by reward – I do A because I know it will lead to B. What do they have in front of them? We just think they will stick to our conditions because we told them to, even when those conditions screw them over? Of course, not. And they didn’t. And London went up in flames and fear. The Other rose up, in a terrifying and blinding meme of pain, and struck out. They were so driven by the culmination of emotion this riot was that they even destroyed parts of their own communities. They hated the world. They hated their world. All of it. That’s all that drove them to these riots – an existential angst that was not, as many are sighting, opportunistic, as much as it was simply triggered, the fuse lit, the explosion finally erupting, and their individual turmoil validated – empowered – by the collective. No longer would they comply, because with the power of numbers, they no longer had to. And, yes, they acted with a cold and vengeful indifference. Because that’s what the world they grew up in is like, after all; the generations born in this society will act as their world has shown them, a world where they are displaced because their fathers and mothers may have been a part of a different world. But they don’t know that other world of their parents, after all – they are a total product of this – our – society. And it has shown them nothing but savage indifference, and largely because of their connection to another world they themselves have never even known. That must seem awfully unfair, don’t you think? Hare dare we expect them to act with compassion? How has the world we’ve forced them to live in shown them compassion? It hasn’t.

I was sitting on the train, a couple of week ago, coming to the city from Western Sydney. I’ve never really been out that way much, so traveling to and from their for my latest contract has been a bit of an eye opener. I had the audacity to complain about the ridiculous ticket price ($12 return for me to travel from Western Sydney to the city) because I noted the need to actually purchase one – unlike traveling any other direction, transit guards and hordes of police jumped on and off the trains, leaving no stone unturned. Over my travels I began to witness groups of young boys – mostly of immigrant descent – being harassed by the police, endlessly grilled and taunted, whether they had tickets or not. I heard the groups of boys, and how they would talk of the police, after they’d finished harassing them and walked away – needless to say, the boys weren’t overly fond of them. And we’re talking boys as young as 9 here – perhaps, younger. What do we expect these boys to grow up and think of the society that looms down on them in such a way? What do we expect them to think of the righteousness of law? How do we expect the to have compassion for the society those white policemen “protect” and ultimately represent? Not much, I reckon.

Where are the police on the North Shore line? Nowhere. When I was working in St Leonards, I knew never to worry about buying a ticket. There were never any guards or police, and even if someone was standing at the gate, they’d do nothing more than tip their head and smile. What a different world it is when you’re white and affluent. And these boys from out West, they see this world, they know how they exist on the outskirts of a world they will never be able to know. You can’t honestly expect them to hold much respect for them, for their privilege, for their things.

In London, they decided to just take those things. The government and press knew to throw the word “violence” around – and while there was an element of violence, most certainly, it was still slightly unrepresentative to put it down to that, as the crowd were not hellbent on violence, but on theft. This was a looting riot – and that’s very different to aggressive physical riots. Looting will always happen around those, but in this instance the looting was the point. And that says so very much about the psychology of the meme (which is ultimately what a riot is – a physical manifestation, unification and mobilisation of a meme). They struck out at the consumer world, because to these kids, that is the world of the white and privileged. And it is the logical product of the same consumer culture they, being here, are still raised on, even if they can never attain it. Consumer culture is designed – every inch of it – to create anxiety within us, to make us strive for something, something someone is selling, as a perceived necessity to attaining wellbeing or joy. They are not immune. From the minute they are born, they are made to want it. Just like us. But, unlike us, they can’t have it. The only way any of them ever get to have it is through dealing, so the price of having it is either ending up locked away in our system, or – perhaps like Mark Duggan, depending on what the truth is – being slaughtered. But in the end, fuck you, they took it. They bust through the barriers that divide these things from us – all upheld by law – the windows that keep us out, the properties that house these things and relinquish them only for the exchange of cash – and they took them. In days gone by, they would riot to bring down a government. These kids rioted to get iPads. Grasp that for a moment. It’s all going terribly, terribly wrong.

And usual, we have lapped up the outrage. And we should be outraged. But we are allowing the powers that be to manufacture that outrage, a shallow outrage that does not see the bigger picture. We just can’t empathise – that’s how we got into this mess, after all – and so, nothing will be solved. We no doubt have more strange scenes ahead of us, god knows where. And this, just weeks after another manifestation of racism boiled over in an individual in Norway, a very different – but even more unsettling – consequence of conservative and capitalist culture. But we didn’t tie our outrage to the killer in Norway to the fact that he was a manifestation of us, heavens no. But this – this is those little monstrous immigrants. It was the immigrants the dude in Norway slaughtered in the name of getting rid of. It doesn’t matter what race it is we are trying to get rid of, whether the racism du jour is anti-Arab or anti-African or anti-whatever. It’s all The Other. But The Other is starting to rise. Push groups of people in large enough numbers into a corner and they’ll do that. The government won’t change anything because of London. Already, David Cameron has publicly vowed to wage brutal justice upon the rioters, calming our fears by telling us not to worry because “we will not let any phoney concerns about human rights get in the way.” Oh, good. For a second there, I thought the tax-dodging upper class elite who run the place might be considering human rights in the way they deal with the uproar of the lower classes they spit on. We can all rest easy. They won’t be.

And so, what will be changed? Nothing. The irony is that more fuel will be put on the fire. You think they hated us when we blew that guy’s head off? Wait til this is over, and see if they feel any better about us once we finally see an Orwellian England rise and put its foot on them. I’m thinking they won’t. I’m thinking times are about to get a little interesting in the mother country.

Further reading:

One of the more interesting commercial blog piece I’ve read on the riots: http://blogs.telegraph.co.uk/news/peteroborne/100100708/the-moral-decay-of-our-society-is-as-bad-at-the-top-as-the-bottom/

David Cameron’s incredibly scripted interview for the Telegraph, unashamedly and explicitly announcing the arrival of a “Nanny State”: http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/politics/david-cameron/8699770/UK-riots-zero-tolerance-promises-Cameron-but-will-this-be-his-finest-hour.html