Having been interned as a child in a Japanese prisoner of war camp in World War II (the source of Empire of the Sun), Ballard has always been interested in what happens when you strip the veneer of civilization away. Much of Fox’s piece concerns Ballard’s later novels, which I have not read, “all of which feature middle class professionals either diving into or being pulled into revolutionary, nihilistic violence due to ennui, boredom, or a cancerlike consumerism which has replaced religion and patriotism at the center of their psyche.” (Though I have a number of Ballard first editions, I’m still catching up on the reading them, having just finished The Crystal World earlier this year.) Ballard’s penultimate novel, Millennium People, evidently features “middle class professionals in suburban London instigating terrorism and revolution in an effort to shock a sense of meaning back into their lives.” Which does tie rather neatly into the London riots of the last week…
In the first case of its kind, Daniel Sartain-Clarke, 18, and his mother have been served with an eviction notice as council bosses seek to turf them out of their £225,000 taxpayer-subsidised flat.
Sartain-Clarke is charged with violent disorder and attempting to steal electronic goods from the Currys store at Clapham Junction, South London, on Monday night.
I think if the UK were to implement a policy that anyone caught looting would be kicked off all government benefits (the dole, housing, NHS, etc.) for life, I believe you’d see the last of rioting there for a very long time.
I’ve cited him several times as a particularly acute observer of the British underclass, so its worth noting that he’s weighed in on the riots here:
The ferocious criminality exhibited by an uncomfortably large section of the English population during the current riots has not surprised me in the least. I have been writing about it, in its slightly less acute manifestations, for the past 20 years. To have spotted it required no great perspicacity on my part; rather, it took a peculiar cowardly blindness, one regularly displayed by the British intelligentsia and political class, not to see it and not to realize its significance. There is nothing that an intellectual less likes to change than his mind, or a politician his policy….Only someone who never looked around him and never drew any conclusions from the faces and manner of the young men he saw would have been surprised.
The riots are the apotheosis of the welfare state and popular culture in their British form. A population thinks (because it has often been told so by intellectuals and the political class) that it is entitled to a high standard of consumption, irrespective of its personal efforts; and therefore it regards the fact that it does not receive that high standard, by comparison with the rest of society, as a sign of injustice….
Long experience of impunity has taught the rioters that they have nothing to fear from the law, which in England has become almost comically lax—except, that is, for the victims of crime. For the rioters, crime has become the default setting of their behavior; the surprising thing about the riots is not that they have occurred, but that they did not occur sooner and did not become chronic.
London and the rest of the UK seems quiet tonight, with rains helping to dampen the spirits of looters. The only new flare-up seems to be Eltham in south-east London, and which seems to already have calmed down.
A few more random links of interesting on the rioting:
Anthony Daniels, AKA Theodore Dalrymple, on how he’s not at all surprised by the riots. He’s been warning about the increasing irrationality and violence of the British underclass for years.
Brendan O’Niell: “Only two groups of people seem to be getting a kick out of the rioting in England. Firstly the rioters themselves, the nihilistic urban youth who are getting cheap thrills from looting shops, bashing bus stops, and burning down houses. And secondly middle-class radicals, trustafarians who live off daddy’s cash, who get a rush of political adrenalin whenever they see blacks burning stuff.”
Allister Heath in City A.M.: “What they wanted is free money and free goods and so they helped themselves. They were driven by greed, a culture of entitlement, of rights without responsibility, combined with a complete detachment from traditional morality, generalised teenage anger and a sense that anything goes in the current climate. This wasn’t a political protest, it was thievery….We need to see New York style zero tolerance policing, with all offences, however minor, prosecuted. But what matters right now is to regain control, to stamp out the violence and to arrest, prosecute and jail as many thugs as possible.”
The Telegraph’s live newsfeed reports that rioting has spread to “Birmingham, West Bromwich, Manchester, Wolverhampton and Salford.”
And here’s audio of two drunk female rioters describing the “good times” they had burning things and drinking stolen wine. “It’s the government’s fault!” “Yeah, conservatives.” It’s hard for me to tell if this is real, or a parody of mindless British underclass hooligans.
Now some videos from the riots. Cheerful looters hauling away goods:
Rioters attacked outnumbered police in Tottingham:
Croyden on fire:
Cars and shops on fire in Lewisham and Hackney:
More rioters looting, and the police response:
Very recent footage of looted shops tonight on Woolwich High Street:
So newspapers are reporting. Maybe rioters are going back to pick up sound systems to go with their new plasma TVs, or going after those arrogant buildings that remain so rudely unburned.
Painting these riots as some kind of action replay of historic political streetfights against capitalist bosses or racist cops might allow armchair radicals to get their intellectual rocks off, as they lift their noses from dusty tomes about the Levellers or the Suffragettes and fantasise that a political upheaval of equal worth is now occurring outside their windows. But such shameless projection misses what is new and peculiar and deeply worrying about these riots. The political context is not the cuts agenda or racist policing – it is the welfare state, which, it is now clear, has nurtured a new generation that has absolutely no sense of community spirit or social solidarity.
What we have on the streets of London and elsewhere are welfare-state mobs. The youth who are ‘rising up’ – actually they are simply shattering their own communities – represent a generation that has been more suckled by the state than any generation before it. They live in those urban territories where the sharp-elbowed intrusion of the welfare state over the past 30 years has pushed aside older ideals of self-reliance and community spirit. The march of the welfare state into every aspect of less well-off urban people’s existences, from their financial wellbeing to their childrearing habits and even into their emotional lives, with the rise of therapeutic welfarism designed to ensure that the poor remain ‘mentally fit’, has helped to undermine such things as individual resourcefulness and social bonding. The anti-social youthful rioters look to me like the end product of such an anti-social system of state intervention.
It would be nice not to have to do another update on this story, but I suspect I will…
It’s not yet sunset in the UK, so we don’t know if a fourth night of rioting will follow the first three. But the glee and impunity with which rioters torched and looted large sections of London are an indictment of two beloved projects of British and other European elites: a disarmed citizenry and an all-encompassing, cradle-to-grave welfare state.
It’s hard to imagine riots of these size going on for days on end in the American South or Midwest simply because so many armed, law-abiding citizens would stand ready to defend their lives, liberty and property. Once you’ve shot a few rioters dead, it does rather tend to put a damper on the festive mood of the others. An armed shop owner in Texas or Ohio wouldn’t have to stand idly by while his life work burned, waiting vainly for police that never come.
But London shopkeepers and home-owners never had that choice. As Instapundit noted, “Unlike L.A., there are no Korean shopkeepers with AR-15s to help contain the looting.” Since handguns were banned in the UK in 1997 (tightening already restrictive firearm laws), their per capita crime rate has skyrocketed compared to ours.
Will this be a wake-up call for those pushing for an ever-larger welfare state? Of course not. My liberal British friends on Facebook are already trotting out the classic liberal phrases. “Underclass,” “powerless,” etc. Why “powerlessness” leads inevitably to someone looting a plasma TV is never adequately explained, nor how an ever-more-expansive welfare state would prevent this, unless they expect that taxpayers buying a plasma TV for every single person on the dole would remove the temptation.
Riots in London continue to increase in size, spreading to most of the city. There seems to be no particular reason, except they provide the UK’s permanent dole chav culture a chance to burn and smash things and loot shops.
What set it off was the death of black gang member Mark Duggan, who decided have a shoot-out after being stopped by the police while carrying a gun. (This being the UK, needless to say Mr. Duggan’s gun was illegal.)
I do not see any report of particular Jihadi involvement, though I would not be at all surprised to learn some joined in the opportunistic violence.
Here’s the Dead Kennedy’s “Riot,” for some old-school-punk perspective on the phenomena.
The big Jihad news this week, of course, was the Moscow bombing. But that was hardly the only thing of note:
The Moscow bombers were evidently trained in Pakistan. “An al-Qaeda linked website said that the group Islamic Caucasus Emirate, led by the rebe Doku Umarov, was poised to claim it had staged the attack. It said that Russia’s harsh military measures against independence activists in the Caucasus had provoked the attack. It said: ‘You disbelievers are the firewood of Hell. You will enter it.'” (I’m guessing “rebe” is short for “rebel,” though I have not heretofore heard it used.)
Dokka Umerov has repeatedly made it very clear that he wants nothing to do with al Qaeda, or bin Laden.
The latter point reveals the following about the global War on Terror. First, the US and British efforts in Afghanistan and Iraq have succeeded in destroying al Qaeda’s reputation amongst Islamist organizations. If an Islamist cause as major as the Caucasus Emirate wants to stay clean of al Qaeda, it means that al Qaeda equals trouble. Al Qaeda involvement means interference from the world’s great powers.
Second, Russia’s situation reveals that the US and British efforts have failed to do significant damage to the ideology of Islamism. If a nationalist movement turns itself into a movement with Islamist objectives in order to make itself stronger, then it proves that the ideals to which al Qaeda subscribes have not been significantly damaged.
Australian artist receives death threats from left-wingers and islamists for anti-burqua mural. Once again we see the alliance of the left and radical Islam.
New Imam of Ground Zero Mosque says that all apostates from Islam should be jailed. This is a great improvement from the standard clerical opinion that they should be killed…
All you Islamophobes who say Mohammed was a pedophile are way off base. Sure, Mohammed married a 6 year old, but all Islamic experts agree that he refrained from having sex with her until she reached the ripe old age of 9.
Islamic man in Buffalo texts his wife that he can’t live without her. Twenty minutes later he beheaded her.
(Hat tip: The usual suspects under “Jihad” on your right.)
As a side note, I would be interested to hear if anyone actually finds these weekly roundups useful. I put these up and get very little feedback on them…
