In chaos and riots

"I have great sympathy for the oppressed but I do not expect them to be morally superior to the oppressors. I merely expect them to be oppressed."
Jerome Barkow

A timely post of something that was stuck as a draft for years, now that the argument is being attempted for the use of water cannons in London. So far the Assembly Police and Crime Committee has found there is no case to use them, but with a Tory-led government and Boris as mayor, let's wait and see.
http://www.london.gov.uk/media/assembly-press-releases/2014/02/assembly-says-no-to-case-for-water-cannon

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So, riots and looting.
Lots of people are eager to offer their tuppence worth, "send in the army", "it's because of the cuts, youth workers are losing funding, the EMA is being taken away", "mindless thugs", "take away their benefits and housing".

Once again attempts at identifying the problems, usually in an effort to avoid repetition, are often shouted down as attempts to excuse idiots of their idiotic actions. No, how do people get to the point of thinking that acting idiotically is okay? If you aren't interested in the reasons then you are effectively writing off a whole subsection of people and you may as well just arrest any young people in hooded tops who live in estates, and their children and their children's children and so on. Is it more important to perpetually deal with the symptoms or the illness (or sickness to quote Cameron)?

Panic on the streets of London

As Laurie Penny says in the above article: "Violence is rarely mindless. The politics of a burning building, a smashed-in shop or a young man shot by police may be obscured even to those who lit the rags or fired the gun, but the politics are there."

Laurie mentions watching an NBC report where a man is interviewed, asking if the riots achieved anything.
"Yes," said the young man. "You wouldn't be talking to me now if we didn't riot, would you?"
"Two months ago we marched to Scotland Yard, more than 2,000 of us, all blacks, and it was peaceful and calm and you know what? Not a word in the press. Last night a bit of rioting and looting and look around you."

Surely not? When was there a march on Scotland Yard of all places, of over 2000 people, just a couple of months ago and surely when marches are prime time, after the student and union marches we've had in the last year? I haven't heard of it, have you?

Smiley Culture march

Smiley Culture was a reggae star. To quote the linked article "The reggae star, real name David Emmanuel, who grew up in Tulse Hill, died of a single stab wound to the heart in the kitchen of his home in Warlingham on March 15.
The 80s star allegedly plunged a carving knife into his chest when he went to make himself a cup of tea during a police drug raid on his home."

A couple of thousand people, mostly Black, went on a protest march to Scotland Yard to demand justice for another suspicious police-related death.

Deaths in police custody

So there have been 193 deaths in the custody of the Metropolitan police (link to Wikipedia, main source is a Houses of Parliament report) from 1993 to 2010, more than 10 a year for 17 years. No one is going to claim that anyone was rioting and looting as a direct result of Mark Duggan's death during an arrest, but it's indicative of a general atmosphere that exists in the places that most people do their best not to think about. The kids who took to the streets did so out of greed, out of anger, and stupidity, and there was obviously no desire to 'make a statement' beyond the usual machismo swagger, but these are the kids who live in a world of gangs and petty crime, of real and imminent fear of violence and police being a threat rather than a source of help.

So many people are speedy to rebuff the explanations involving poverty and deprivation as if the only sign is literally being too poor to eat and that the kids should have been stealing staple foods if it was about poverty. But why has the threat been made to take away the looters' benefits unless it's implicitly accepted that these kids are at the bottom of our society?
When you grow up in a culture of endemic unemployment, surrounded by the relatively easy money of drug crime, in an area like Tottenham (where unemployment in June 2011 runs at 8.3% compared to the London average of 4.2% based on claimants source).

Is their poverty a literal cause of their looting? No, but it's a reason for fostering a state of mind where such behaviour is seen as desirable, let alone tolerable. Many people have questioned how people can attack their own communities - but what is their sense of community? The insane idea of postcode violence and the idea of the boundaries that creates might help to understand how hostile the world could become, especially if your family is barely that, your substitute family is a gang and the police are hostile rather than helpful. Could the Fairy Jobmother Hayley Taylor help these kids?

Pawing at the door frame.

Tim Roth's controversial directorial debut, The War Zone, captures the desolation and gloom of the English countryside with an uncanny eye. The vast, overcast skies seem to speak of impending doom or hidden terrors, except 'terror' is too exciting a word to describe the kind of inevitable, mundane horror, like the South London wifebeater Winstone plays in the de facto companion piece, Nil By Mouth, which shares having both a gritty and uncompromising English setting and being the solitary directing effort from an established actor (to date). Even the scenes set back in London share the same quiet desperation in the locations of a scraggy dive and a tower-block council flat, where an awkward, aborted seduction takes place.


The War Zone has numerous beautiful landscape shots, especially on opening and closing, but their beauty doesn't stop them being depressing as hell.

A London family relocates to a ramshackle farmhouse and experience turbulence as a new baby girl is born amidst a car accident and dad and his first daughter seem a little too close for comfort. Told through the eyes of the son Tom, the classicly glum and sullen, gangly teen, who already feels isolated at being taken from his old life and dumped in the middle of nowhere, he becomes understandably upset as his relations with his family deteriorate after discovering the secret.

Ray Winstone who usually seems incapable of playing anything but the cockney wide-boy (three-dimensional or not), yet displays here a range in the difficulties of fatherhood (outside of incest) and in his dealings with business people on the phone, catering for what he thinks they expect to hear and proves that he's capable of more than that fackin' accent.
Colin Farrell makes a brief appearance as the local catch who woos Jess to the beach and the war-time pill box, later the scene for the abuse between Jess and her father, but does little besides looking pretty and not sounding Irish.
In keeping with it's 'challenging' indie roots, the main cast all spend some time in states of undress in a decidedly non-tittilating fashion.
Choice quote: "Does he do it up your arse all the time?"
The War Zone can justifiably be called bleak and uncompromising, but despite the controversy surrounding its release, the child abuse/incest is only betrayed as a terrible act, though it's a shame that more isn't made of the father's motivations - leaving him little more than a self-denying monster.

Throughout the film you get the sense that there's something missing in the family home, with the strained, awkward silences as they slouch in the living room, and it took an hour before it struck me - they don't have a telly. Whether it was a part of the back-to-nature impulse of the characters or not, it sends a clear message that if you don't get a TV for the family to sit around, you will Rape Your Kids.