Buildings in flames, looting, violent attacks, torched vehicles, people cowering in their homes, the sound of sirens filling the air. It sounds like a horrific far-flung apocalyptic dystopian future, except that its not. It’s Tuesday.
Over the past three days London, or to be exact a small proportion of the people who reside there, has apparently gone insane. The catalyst for ‘The Rage’ (the 28 Days Later comparison seems apt) was due to the police fatally shooting a young man called Mark Duggan in Tottenham and what started as a relatively peaceful protest about the perceived injustice of his death, turned into an out-of-control domestic war zone (or what I my over-privileged sheltered mind envisages a war zone to look like). As the unrest spread across the capital, the rioters then decided it wasn’t just the police that were to blame, Greggs and Footlocker had played a part in the shooting too, so they attacked the shops and smashed their windows in revenge. They didn’t stop there however; the rioters took the possessions from the stores and emptied their contents, leaving them gutted and barren as an elaborate metaphor for the Mark Duggan’s death made them feel inside.
The poetic spin I have just put on the events is of course completely untrue, as it was in fact a greed-led anarchic rampage of idiotic proportions. From the footage I’ve seen and the reports I have read, it seems that any political motivation behind the violence has been lost to a group of people who basically just enjoy smashing stuff. This leads me to believe that all of this stems from the influence of a sub-level game in Street Fighter II where your chosen character has to smash a car to smithereens within 30 seconds. You probably think I’m an idiot and that is a ridiculous and unfounded explanation for the motivation behind the events, however that explanation is no more ludicrous than some of the utter nonsense that is currently being spouted across Facebook and Twitter.
Chief among them is that multiculturalism is the cause of the riots, with status updates and tweets along the lines of:
- ‘Welcome to a diverse and multicultural Britain…A BIG thank you to Tony Blair and Gordon Brown…u C*NTS’.
- ‘Peasants are revolting in England. This is the point to which banal, left-wing multiculturalism and political correctness have brought us’.
These are obviously baffling and moronic statements. Firstly, it is not made clear quite how they blame multiculturalism. Do they mean that the people rioting are from a multicultural background? Or are the people rioting against multiculturalism? In which case, they must support them. There should be more clarity in their hate. Perhaps they mean that the black and Asian rioters are a bad influence on the white rioters and that white people wouldn’t normally dare raise a brick if it wasn’t for the multicultural peer pressure. They obviously blame these dark-skinned barbarians for leading the usually pacifist, well-behaved white folk astray. They could be right, as before immigration laws became lax, Great Britain enjoyed centuries of uninterrupted peace and harmony. It must be multiculturalism.
Perhaps it is the fault of political correctness or as the right-wing one-woman insanity generator Melanie Phillips puts it, “…paralysing political correctness.” Our country’s liberalism and equality has led us to utter devastation and the only way to control the mob is through a totalitarian state governed by a dictator with an iron fist, where the death penalty is the only form of punishment and anyone who deviates from what is deemed a ‘perfect’ Englishman (pale skin, slightly over-weight, high-cholesterol and football-obsessed) is rounded up into camps where they must complete ten years of hard labour before being executed. It is the ONLY solution or as Nick Griffin calls it, the final solution.
Red Ken seems to believe that the government’s cuts and lack of career opportunities for the young is the source of the unrest. This argument probably holds some truth; however it is slightly undermined by the sheer moronic nature of the rioters, who seem more concerned with grabbing free electronic equipment and stealing a new pair of trainers (how do they know they have the right size? Do they try them on before looting?) than making a political statement. They come across as rebels without a cause but they actually have a cause, they are just too stupid to realise it. Any sensible rioter would be aware that an assault on Westminster would be much more fruitful than (excuse my language here) effectively shitting in your own back garden.
A large majority of the social media-verse doesn’t seem to care what the reasoning behind the violence is, they just want the situation dealt with and rightly so. The police seemed to be outnumbered at this time, so there have been calls for the army to be brought in. Martial law seems an extreme measure but people are scared for their own safety and livelihoods, so it is an understandable request. What is slightly alarming is the level of blood lust across Twitter and Facebook, with ‘shoot the c*nts’ appearing on more than one status update. To me that doesn’t seem a practical solution. The streets will be littered with dead teenagers in hoodies, which is frankly messy and impractical, and it would almost certainly incite more rioting, particularly as it was a bullet that kicked off this whole bloody thing in the first place.
While I have no solutions for the situation myself (although I can provide you with a baseless and futile rant), I genuinely do hope that everyone stays safe and this horrifying situation is dealt with as quickly and as bloodlessly as possible. And that ladies and gentleman is the first heartfelt genuine thing I have ever typed in this blog thingy but don’t worry, normal shallow service will resume next week.
