The "revolution" that never happened: the London Riots of 2011, and the Russian Revolution of 1905

Last month I wrote here about the root causes of the riots that swept through London and England in general over five days in August, 2011.
I also recently read an excellent article in "Newsweek" here, assessing the effect (or lack of) that the riots have had on British psyche.

What were "the riots"? We can't assess their effect if we still haven't figured out why they happened. Prime Minister David Cameron said it was an outbreak of "criminality, pure and simple". In other words, there's no explanation necessary, because it was just criminal opportunism.
To an extent, he is is right that there was an element of opportunism: it was the protests and riots in Tottenham that gave the "opportunity" for anarchy to spontaneously break out across London and England in general. Some people seemed to have suddenly realised that if too many break the law at the same time (through looting and violence), then the justice system is incapable of stopping them.

To the extent that the riots represented an "insurrection", as Darcus Howe called it, this was a "revolution" of anarchy. There was no plan, no agenda - looting was the main activity, along with violence against the police. Everyone involved in the riots was getting involved either for their own personal gain, or to "settle scores" with the police. Order was restored only after a mass mobilisation of the police; justice was only restored after draconian and excessive punishments for meted out on those caught. So "the riots" were a classic case of spontaneous anarchy, taking advantage of a specific situation.

One historical comparison that bears considering is the 1905 Russian revolution; not in the sense that there were very many similarities (there are few), but it's worth considering for the underlying causes; the form of the "revolution"; and the aftermath, or legacy it left.
The 1905 Russian revolution is considered a side-show compared to that in 1917, but in 1905, the Tsarist government faced virtual anarchy in many parts of the empire for a prolonged period of time. The prime spark was the defeat to Japan in the Russo-Japanese War, that caused a massive shell-shock to the establishment and the reputation of the conservative and authoritarian government. With respect for the government dissolved, various "revolutionary-terrorist" groups took advantage of the vacuum of perceived authority to wreak havoc and chaos across the empire: mass strikes were the most common method, though there were many political assassinations, some soldiers also mutinied, and this encouraged other disgruntled parts of society (such as peasants) to try and seize land, or just settle old scores. This was also where the Bolsheviks had their first stab at power, with Stalin playing his own role as mischief-maker in the Caucasus, and Russia's source of oil, Baku.
The government eventually responded, as an authoritarian regime does, with a massive show of power to crush the "revolution" - though much of the "revolution" was anarchy and criminal opportunism disguised behind ideology. The Tsar made some democratic concessions by granting a parliament, but the longer legacy, as we know, was the 1917 Bolshevik revolution - because the Tsar learned too little from the experience of 1905.

Zooming forward to 2011, we see a similar pattern of anarchy stemming from opportunism, but there are still underlying issues like there were in Russia in 1905. As in Russia, the UK has a corrupt establishment (of bankers and a corporate oligarchy) that disguises its self-preservation behind a smokescreen of decency and traditional values, but using the full force of the law to protect its interests if it feels threatened. It preaches these same traditional values (that it itself ignores) to the wider population, while privately being indifferent to their fate, and creating a situation that allows them to prosper but slowly bleeds the "lower orders" white.

Yes, Britain is a "multi-party democracy", but we also are the only Western power that still has a fully-unelected upper house, an electoral system that perpetuates a static political establishment of the same two parties (as has existed for the last hundred years); a value system that discourages a challenging of the status quo; and an economic system that has created the most unequal society in the West, except for the USA (which also has a very similar system).
So, put into that context, what's not for a self-respecting, ordinary British person to dislike? Yes, on the surface, the UK is a "civilised" country; our reputation abroad has come from the British culture that we have fed to the world. But this is a rose-tinted illusion that masks the underlying reality, as I described above.

From the 2011 riots, the British government learned nothing; because it was not listening, and didn't want to listen - just like the Russian Tsar in 1905. All the British government (and the media) wanted to say, just like in Russia in 1905, was that this "anarchy" was about people losing respect for authority and other people. The only way to deal with this was through the iron fist of justice. A year on from the 2011 riots, the London Olympics has dissolved the pessimism that had existed in society, at least temporarily. This has had the effect of distracting people from the underlying issues, but changes nothing.
The fact that the "anarchy" by some of the opportunistic "lower orders" was simply a mirror for the much larger "corrupt anarchy" that existed in the establishment was either forgotten or intentionally ignored: the disproportionate response of the establishment and judiciary to the riots was a response out of existential fear, to make sure that the "lower orders" would not dare to challenge the "moral code" that perpetuates their existence. But as I suggested in my article about the riots last month, if there is no morality at the top, then why should anyone lower down have any?
The riots of 2011 were a damning indictment of the moral collapse and corruption of British society; but more precisely, like the "Arab Spring" of last year, this was opportunism. Neither the "Arab Spring", nor the 2011 riots were predicted by the experts; and yet, the signs were all there under the surface - they just needed a spark. While the "Arab Spring" was about introducing Western-style democracy, the 2011 riots were about a more primeval and selfish instinct that had been unwittingly encouraged in the British psyche - if those at the top are living it large and ignoring the rules, then why not me? What makes those at the top "better" than the rest of us? If the London riots displayed an uglier side of British society, it was because British society had allowed itself to become ugly; because the establishment is ugly.

It took the Russians twelve years to make the Tsarist government pay the price for their ignorance and arrogance in 1905. How long will it take the British people to do the same thing after the "revolution" of 2011?

Nearly a year on from the riots, England has learned nothing

Last August, riots enveloped London and various cities in England, the worst civil unrest for decades.

At the time, the rioters were demonised as the worst of our feral youth, epitomising what was wrong with the lack of morals in our society.
In many ways, the young people who rioted and looted did symbolise a lot about our society: but people read the riots the wrong way. The fact that rioters were looting shamelessly was seized upon by politicians and media commentators as a sign that family values had been destroyed; that the younger generations believed in nothing but what they could get for themselves.
That may well have been true; but the resulting judicial backlash, where many looters were given over-the-top sentences, said as much about the mood of the establishment. Many of the establishment couldn't believe that these hordes of young people, from the lowest rungs of society and intermingled with gangs and petty crime, were capable of causing so much anarchy in just a few days. But they did. And so the response from the establishment was as knee-jerk as possible to nip this mood of anarchic uprising in the bud.

At the time, left-wing apologists like Ken Livingstone and others, blamed the cuts, the moral crisis in banking and government indifference as underlying causes for the riots, only to be shouted down as Marxists. But when we look at what has been discovered about the banks, government and the "establishment" since then, those "Marxists" have, if anything, been shown to be over-cautious in their analysis of moral breakdown in society.
Because moral authority and values, by definition, is supposed to come from the top: a value system functions as a top-down system. In other words, expecting those at the bottom of the social order to follow the rules set down by authority, when the country's supposed "moral authority" ignores the concept entirely, is not only absurd, it is completely abhorrent to any concept of civilisation.

This is the reality of the UK in 2012: Britain's establishment allowed the country to to held hostage by a cartel. Mexico has been terrorised and held hostage by a drug cartel for nearly fifteen years. For the past fifteen years, the UK has been held to ransom by its financial sector. The five leading banks who now control the vast majority of the banking sector of the UK have been extorting the UK government: unless you give us what we want and do as we say, the banks have said, we will leave your country to the dogs and go elsewhere. In other words, the banks have simply modified a Mafia "racket" in order to seem respectable. As a result, they have destroyed the UK economy, then terrified the government into a further "racket" called the "bailout" to pay for the banking sector's economic stupidity - for which everyone else in the country is paying for, in the form of public sector cuts.

Let's be straight here: because the UK government has no effective control of the banking sector, as there are virtually no regulations whatsoever, the government cannot send people to prison: you can't be sent to prison if there is no law to break in the first place. This is the financial anarchy that is the UK banking system. And under such conditions, amorality and recklessness are bound to follow as night follows day.

This "anarchy" goes on. Another major factor that led to the UK economic collapse was the banking sector's inflation of the property market. Again, as there are virtually no government controls in this sector, prices can rise as much as the banks or landlords wish. Houses, compared to average earnings, are nearly twice as expensive as they were forty years ago. So banks have forced many onto the (also uncontrolled) rental sector, further pushing up rental prices. Again, because the government has no appetite to interfere to improve the lot of its own people, everyone suffers.

Then there is price inflation, of essentials like food and fuel. Although inflation is on average low, for essentials prices have been increasing many times above inflation year on year since the financial crisis started. Again, the government does nothing.
Then there is the economy and unemployment situation generally, for which the government does little to improve. As the financial sector is a major political contributor to the governing party, the stink of corruption runs deep. Government incompetence piled upon indifference towards the poor, and an ideological war to destroy employee's rights, educational aspiration and the British sense of "fair play", makes it no surprise that people have such little faith or trust in government or the establishment in general. Why should they?

Given that the government is keen to sell-off public assets like our schools, railways, health service to private (even foreign) companies, while also destroying the military and police service in the name of "cuts" (the same cuts that are deemed necessary because the government surrendered its authority to extortion from the banks), what moral authority does the government have left?

The reality, therefore, is this: that the government and the "establishment" of the banking sector, sections of the amoral media sector, as well as those at the tip of the economic hierarchy in general (meaning those who avoid paying their dues to the state by stashing their money off-shore), do not deserve the respect of average people on the street. They deserve our contempt.

Instead of focussing on "benefit cheats" and the "feral youths" behind the riots, the government should be focussing on bringing the real criminals to justice: those like the bankers, who have destroyed the country, yet still hold the entire country to ransom in an extortion racket; who cheat the public purse of billions each year; whose indifference to the plight of the young family trying to get a house or the small business trying to get a loan should be made criminal.
But the government won't, at least not until it is forced to by the public. The truth about politics is this: that politicians only do things they don't like when they feel it is absolutely necessary.

How do you make them listen? Last August, some people thought they had an answer.

The real tragedy about the riots last year was that the raw anger that those young people felt was directed at the wrong targets, at least in terms of getting their point made. Since this government came to power two years ago, we've had student protests that resulted in Conservative HQ being surrounded and damaged; we've had strikes by a welter of public sector workers; we had the riots by young people who felt they had nothing to lose and everything to gain from opportune looting and destruction; we've had police officers marching in protest against the government.
Last August saw young people looting, while others saw a chance to "get even" with the police. In both these actions, their anger was tragically misdirected. Looting local shops only destroys the local economy, while attacking the police solves nothing.

The real source of the country's damnation is the amoral banking sector, the sector which is most responsible for the vast inequality that has mushroomed in the last thirty years, as well as being responsible for the economic crisis, the property bubble, the government's cuts, not to mention the "me" culture and everything that symbolises. The government's moral emptiness, in selling their soul to the banks, indulging the banks whenever they could, at the expense of everyone else, is the other main culprit.

 Both are morally culpable; it would only be fair, then, for them to be made fully aware of their culpability in this crime against the people of Britain. For too long, people in this country have been meek: meek in their unquestioning respect for "authority" and the "establishment".
Every self-respecting ordinary person in the country has a good reason to despise this government and the banking sector it supports: from young people, students, the poor, the "working poor", the public sector, even the military and the police. All these different sections of society have a legitimate grievance against the situation the government has perpetuated. The government, in the past two years, has succeeded in alienating most sectors of society. Only the rich, the heartless, and the indifferent in society support it.
The Conservative government remains in power due to the spineless acquiescence of the LibDems. If all these aggrieved segments of society united, then an unmistakeable point could be made: it is only the meekness of those segments by failing to unite that the government remains in power, and the banks remain beyond the reach of justice, free to continue their reign of terror.

It's time for British people to find their courage again. Last August, the government succeeded in victimising the rioters and looters through divide and rule, placing those rioters against the ordinary law-abiding people struggling to make ends meet. We should not allow the government to pull the wool over our eyes again.

If they want to talk up the threat of "class war", then the government should be careful not to insult our intelligence. Even a man on his knees knows something about self-respect.

How To Raise A Generation Of Psychopaths

In my last post, I talked about why it was wrong to blame "Liberalism" for the August riots, saying that both the left and right who had part of the correct answer.

The left blame social deprivation and government under-investment; the right blame a culture of liberal indulgence. Both are correct, but I want to explain exactly why, and how this creates a psychopathic psychology in some of our youngsters.

Listening to young people who are also from deprived backgrounds, asked why they chose not to get involved in the riots, they shrugged and said "Cos I had good parents, I guess". If you want to hear why it's happening, ask those who choose NOT to do it, then the answer will become clearer.

Listening to parents who choose not to discipline their children, one of them said "Because the government doesn't give me the right to be a proper parent". What this parent means, is that because of a culture that defends the right of the child, the parents feels (and in a legal sense, this could be true) that they are subordinate to the rights of their children.

The extention of the rights of the child is one of the major things (as well as women's rights and the rights of gays and ethnic minorities) that seperates modern times from decades such as the 1950s and earlier, when children were beaten behind closed doors. Some on the right wish for a return to those values; it that would be simplistic and lazy thinking, as it ignores the truth that while for some children raised in that environment it enforced a strong discipline and fear of punishment, it gave a green light to any parent of a violent temper to indulge their weaknesses onto their offspring. So let's not return to that era.

The historic result of that was the "baby boomer" generation, who wanted everything to be better for their children; a harmless enough wish, but not when implemented at a goverment-sanctioned level.

The "rights" pendulum swung to the other extreme, where any teacher was obliged to tell social services of any incident of parental violence reported by children. Furthermore, teachers themselves could be reported for any perceived "violence" in the classroom. Added to that, children are legally immune from effective punishment, and those punishments that exist are more influenced by preventative "behavioral science".

In this environment, with children being told that they are worth more than the earth, and at the same time being protected by law from their own parents, a certain psychology develops in the mind of the child. But more on that later.

I should also mention the fact that since the 1950s, and especially in the last thirty years, the gap between the top ten percent and the bottom ten percent has grown to an unbridgeable gulf. It is therefore not surprising if some of the parents at the bottom therefore think that since the government has taken away their rights as parents and transferred them to their children, they have a common excuse to hand the parenting of their children onto the government themselves, and society in general. So a culture of government dependency is born. And also a culture of lack of responsibility. The children raised in the "sink estates have few real chances at the advancement that has been fed into and encouraged by their parents' generation; the frustration grows, with a psychology of interal all-empowerment and external impotence.

So some parents feel disempowered by the law; some parents use that same sense of disempowerment as an excuse to abrogate on their responsibilities; and many parents feel the need to indulge their children (either because they instinctively feel the need to give a better upbringing than they got themselves, or simply through lazy discipline). Either way, it's the children who are psychologically changed from that.

Add something else to this psychological cocktail: as well as the growing gap between rich and poor (by many estimates, one of the largest in the developed world), there is the change in the moral guide that keeps our culture together; I'm talking about amoral materialist capitalism.

This may seem like an easy target, but it's also a pertinent question. Why did so many teenagers go on a mass looting spree (in the French riots, they burned cars rather than looted, although that may also be because their deprived neighbourhoods had so few shops ready to loot) rather than indulge in other violent activities?

They did so because, as many of them put it, it was their way to stick it to the rich and get their own back. For the past thirty years in particular, British culture has been fed a morality of getting rich by any means; the only key to happiness is to get rich, and get lots of stuff. Some on the left blame Thatcher's long legacy for these riots. Again, that's too simplistic, as I've mentioned in the points above; there are a number of components that all need to be in place, rather like a necessary compound to make a dangerous substance.

They all need to be in place in order for this to happen. But now, in August 2011, it DID happen.

So, to summarise: we created a generation of youngsters, many of whom have no sense of right or wrong; who have a sense all-powerful impunity; who feel conversely angry and disconnected from the success enjoyed by those celebrated in the media, and the false sense of opportunity encouraged by their parents.

In other words, these are the bones of the psychology of a psychopath. They are fearless; boundless; and angry.

This is contemporary Britain's bastard creation: a "lost" generation, disconnected from their parents; disconnected from morality; disconnected from material reality. Their only connection is to their peers, the "gang", and whatever they can grab for themselves. Without role models, the only "role model" is the one they create from fake "media reality".

A Clockwork Orange, come to life.

The English Riots and the "Death Of Liberalism"

So now that the smoke has disappated, the police are in force, and calm has been restored to the streets, the inquest has begun. Or the blame game. Depends on your point of view.

The riots of the past four days have been the worst in the UK (and possibly in Europe) for decades. Certainly, I doubt there has been such widespread breakdown of law and order in Britain for a hundred years or more. During the Depression, I didn't read of any such looting and destruction ever happening on such a scale as England has witnessed in the last week.

Why did it happen, and what can we do to prevent it from being repeated? This is what people from opposite ends of the political spectrum have been debating endlessly.

The Conservatives, not surprisingly, and those at the extreme right, say that a culture of Liberalism is to blame. When there is a culture of criminals being able to claim benefits from the state, and when there is a culture of lack of responsibility in general, this feeds into this wicked cycle of a breakdown of values.

On the "liberal" left, people like Ken Livingstone have been talking of a culture of cuts creating anger and resentment from the poor, added to the decades of underinvestment and a culture of ignorance that institutions such as the police and the government have shown to the poor.

Clearly, both of these views can't be completely right. Blaming "liberalism" completely does not provide the full picture; there are plenty of other "liberal" countries in the world that have not had riots - Scandinavia being the obvious one; Germany also provides a fairly positive example (considering that nearly ten percent of the German population is ethnic Turkish, there are relatively few racial issues; though the fact that Germany is culturally pacifist since the Second World War also helps).

At the same time, emphasizing social issues as a root cause (as the left does) also fails to deal with the full issue; again, there is plenty of poverty in the developed world as a whole, yet there has been no similar breakdown in law and order elsewhere on this scale.

The closest comparison is the French riots in the middle of the 2000s (when Sarkozy was the interior minister); that went on for weeks, and the spark was also a controversial death blamed on the police.

As most of our leading politiicans have pointed out (rightly, as I mentioned in my previous post), it is about a gang culture, that has grown out of a lack of moral leadership from parents and other authority figures.

This issue cannot be blamed on the left or right, because being taught social and moral responsibility is not a political issue; it is a family issue. If parents choose to abrogate their responsibilities as parents, that is not only their problem, it becomes a social problem. It is how children turn into potential criminals; it is how children turn into potential sociopaths.

So it would be wrong to blame a "culture of liberalism" for these riots; nowhere does liberalism as an ideology tell parents that they have the right to not be parents. This is not about liberalism or conservatism, this is about basic parental responsibilty and children being given positive moral examples from their family.

There are plenty of families struggling in poverty because of social deprivation that bring up perfectly good, law-abiding children. Interestingly, many of those children are the families of immigrants; judging from some of the teenagers seen looting and rioting, many of them were not the children of immigrants - they were the children of "chavs".

It depends on the moral code that the parents teach their children; if they tell their children that it is OK to commit crime because they are poor, then these parents are passing on their own responsibilities to society; if they choose not to care what their children are doing once they walk out the door of their home, they are no longer acting as parents.

Any decent person, regardless of political persuasion, I think would find it difficult to argue with that. The scenes in Peckham, where people were going out of their way NOT to blame multiculturalism for the riots, shows us that some people at least, do not want to find quick scapegoats for the unrest. On the other hand, the scenes in the London suburb of Eltham, where vigilanteism was hijacked by the thugs of the anti-immigrant English Defence League, was another reminder that some people ARE susceptible to the easy answers of reactionary politics.

So, Liberalism is far from dead; but Liberalism was never about excusing common criminality and parental ignorance. Only an anarchist or nihilist would support the actions of the past few days in England.

Liberalism is about giving people the freedom to do want they want within the commonly accepted boundaries of lawful behavior; it is about accepting that the market does not provide all the answers for society, and that people sometimes need goverment to provide services that the private sector cannot fairly provide; it is about goverment providing a helping hand where needed to those who follow the law and respect others, while providing an effective punishment to those who do not.

Riots, Damned Riots, and Revolutions

Tottenham, London, can now be added to the list of cities in the Western world (i.e Europe and America) that have seen riots in recent years.

In the last week, even Tel Aviv, Israel (of all places) has joined the ranks of the more famous anarchy-prone metropoli such as Athens an Madrid, to name two.

That's not to mention the riots and civil strife happening on a daily basis in Syria, sporadically in Yemen, Egypt; civil war in Libya etc. etc.

Of course, the riots of the last few years each have there own roots, and are not directly related to each other, and I don't want to go into each set of events in too much detail, for the sake of space. But some things are worth talking about.

Starting most recent first, the riots in Tottenham and around.

It was the shooting of an armed criminal with gang links a few days before that was meant to be the spark. A protest walk in the Tottenham high street became hijacked by what appear to have been gang elements (many of them immigrant origin), and the end result was nearly twelve hours of mayhem in three seperate locations in the Haringey district of North London, resulting in looted and burned out shops, supermakets and retail outlets, as well as burned out police cars and a bus.

It may be tempting to ink these riots to those happening around the same time in places like Tel Aviv, Athens and Madrid. Tempting, but not entirely fair or accurate. The riots/ demonstrations in these other places are people (either young or old, or both) venting their frustration at their respective government's response to the economic and social effects of the financial crisis - unemployment, rising prices, cost of living etc.

In the case of the Tottenham riots, there are direct criminal elements involved. In that respect in bears a closer resemblance to the riots that took place in France several years ago (long before the financial crisis, as I remember); a teenager of North African origin was killed by a policeman; riots broke out across some deprived suburbs of Paris, quickly multiplying to other cities around France (Sarkozy called the rioters "scum" at the time); it got to the extent that by the tail end of weeks of the national riots there were "only" 1,000 cars that had been burned out in one day.

Those riots were also likely instigated by gangs seeing an opprtunity to wreak their own sense of "revenge" on the police and the establishment.

The essential question is: why do gangs exist in these circumstances? The answer doesn't take a PhD in Sociology to get to. Gangs exist as social networks to occupy a wider social vacuum (i.e. through dysfuctional family networks, community networks, lack of other connection to the social ladder etc.).

Am I making excuses for criminality? Of course not. I'm simply looking at the issue through a cause-and-effect rationality, in coming to understand why it happens. The police do the same thing: that's why when there is proper engagement with a community; when there are real opportunities for community improvement; when a community works together; when families work together, the levels of gang activity usually go down. That has been proven to be the case in Glasgow (the police did a successful programme there a couple of years ago).

So, back to Tottenham. As was reported, over the last few years, the suburb has seen rising levels of unemployment and falling levels of police interaction. You go figure what happens. Create the vacuum, and see who takes up the space.

So in an indirect way, yes, there is a link to all these riots over the "post-crisis years" (I just invented that phrase). The seperate make-up and triggers are different, but the underlying causes remain somewhat similar.

It is fair to say that without the financial crisis, the Arab Spring may well not have happened (as it took everyone, even the "experts" by surprise); the demos and riots across Europe are all direct consequences of the crisis. While the Gangs Of Tottenham can never dare to claim to hold the same legitimacy for their openly criminal behaviour, the gangs exist indirectly because of the social vacuum in the community in Tottenham itself, which has been exacurbated by the effects and government policy since the financial crisis.

Of course, the same community vacuum exists in other parts of London; exists in other inner cities around the UK; and exists in other inner cities around the Western world as a whole. Let me say again: there can never be a justification for the criminal behavior that we have seen in Tottenham.

The problem is that if these "community vacuums" are allowed to fester while the government continues to cut back on sevices like law and order and investing in social cohesion, the only growth economy we can expect in these places is further gang warfare and anarchy.