http://www.guardian.co.uk/commentisfree/2011/aug/08/tottenham-riots-not-unexpected
Oh behold the heroes of Tottenham against the vile, fascist, brutal, idiotic pigs from the Met. Nothing makes me laugh harder than these animals getting a taste of their own medicine, surely the public is allowed to kettle too ?
Revenge for the mass breaches of human rights against those that dare fight the Tory led capitalist empire. Justice for the beaten and bruised students. This is what happens when you oppress a nation Dave with your neo-feudalism, and it's only going to get worse.
Stafford Scott seems to think that the Metropolitan police have an obligation to enter into a dialogue with 'the community', as if the shooting of Mark Duggan automatically means the police have a special obligation to 'the community' and not to just to carry out a thorough investigation.
I was one of those who went to Tottenham police station on Saturday, with members of his family, to get an official acknowledgement that Mark had been killed. No official confirmation had been given to the family. As a community we were outraged they were being treated with such disregard by both the Met and the IPCC.
They are holding an enquiry and to ratchet up pressure by rationalising violence in order to upgrade the political and ideological points of 'community leaders' is actually part of the problem as London fractures along fault lines created by communalist politics.
If the EDL went on the rampage in Luton, those like Stafford Scott would call it reprehensible, evil, racist violence. Any attempt to rationalise the violence would be seen as pandering to racism. But if black youths do it, then that is somehow different.
The culture of rap, resentment and 'ghetto culture' has made this outbreak of violence across London inevitable and it is not surprising, given the way 'racism' is wheeled in as a pretext to supposedly explain the deficiencies of this retarded subculture of machismo, gangs, guns and nihilistic hatred.
This has, it is true, been fostered by consumerism and a failure to criticise this subculture instead of pandering to it.
Michael Foley argues in 'The Age of Absurdity' that we are now living in an Age of Entitlement. We expect to be able to have everything, we expect to have the respect of our peers and be famous, we expect all the consumerist good things in life, we don't expect to have to work for these things. We are inevitably disappointed.
What happened in Tottenham, on that day, in that community was by definition a riot. But a more useful definition would have been a temper tantrum. Too big to throw their rattles out of the pram and big enough to grab the 'sweeties' they wanted.
Foley also writes ( pages 32-33 )
"Marx was too simplistic in assuming that conditioning always comes from the right. In recent times it has just as often come from the left. The 1970s was the decade of liberation, of anger at injustice and demands for recognition and rights degraded into a generalised sense of entitlement, the demand for specific recognitions into a generalised feeling of grievance and resentment. The result is a culture of entitlement.
The demand for attention is increasingly strong and various, a consequence of inner emptiness requiring identity conferred from without: I am seen, therefore I am....
....at the level above the individual is the demand for group identity. Here attention seeking, entitlement and complaint combine in the increasingly common phenomenon of taking offence, where some powerful group decides that it's right to appropriate reverent recognition has been violated and that due retribution. The beauty of taking offence is that the threats of the bully can be presented as the protests of the victim so that the ego can bask in virtue while the id exults in aggression".