The police just happened to shoot an unarmed black man. They did it just when all national leaders and the Mayor of London were on vacation. Then, as vocal outrage brewed, they stayed away.
“There wasn’t a single policeman here last night” one outraged woman told a seemingly drunk Boris Johnson, the Mayor, who made a disastrous public relations foray into the streets of London after returning from his vacation on the third day of the so-called riots. The television cameras caught him mumbling incoherently as another angry citizen demanded "Why are you here now! Why are you here now!".
The Prime Minister staged a more decorous outing, popping out of his official residence to speak to the Press and then going right back in.
By then “copycat riots” had spread around the country. In London, a car driven by a black man mowed down and killed three Asian Muslims.
There is no ideology to it, no real social force. “Greed” is the watchword of media pundits. Disaffected young people driven by the desire for the latest Nike sneakers and colour television sets, they said, were behind the arson and violence. They could not explain the seemingly organized manner in which rioters avoided police. "Social media" was the explanation.
Strangely, no one noted that the “riots” occurred just weeks after the “troubles” started up in Northern Ireland, for no reason at all.
Looks to me like someone dusted off an old “Divide and Rule” playbook. In colonial India, whenever the nationalists got too united, the British would set off “Hindu Muslim riots.”
Chicago Tribune correspondent William Shirer noted in his book on Gandhi that it was difficult to find out how many of the communal riots “were incited by the British in their effort to keep both communities at each other’s throats so that they could not unite in their drive for self-rule.” He reported that the “British Chief of Police in Bombay once told me – almost as a joke – that it was very easy to provoke a Hindu-Muslim riot. For a hundred dollars, he said, you could start something really savage. Pay some Muslims to throw the carcass of a cow into a Hindu temple, or some Hindus to toss a dead pig into a mosque, and you could have, he said, a bloody mess, in which a lot of people would be knifed, beaten and killed.”
As with the current Nike riots, those in India spread quite spontaneously. They were a major factor in splitting India and creating Pakistan as a British proxy.
The current spate of riots are aimed at the British people. The massive social discontent at the cuts in social services and employment, followed by the revelations of elite corruption in the Murdoch hearings, could spell disaster for those squirreling around in the corridors of sleaze.
How conveniently the riots have diverted the attention of British society from the fact that the “austerity” forced on it is not for the general good but to save a political-financial elite whose greed and lust for power are legendary: it got Britain to the top of the list of slave traders, opium traffickers and colonists. And oh yes, brought on two World Wars.
Street riots? Pshaw, it's child's play for this crowd.
“There wasn’t a single policeman here last night” one outraged woman told a seemingly drunk Boris Johnson, the Mayor, who made a disastrous public relations foray into the streets of London after returning from his vacation on the third day of the so-called riots. The television cameras caught him mumbling incoherently as another angry citizen demanded "Why are you here now! Why are you here now!".
The Prime Minister staged a more decorous outing, popping out of his official residence to speak to the Press and then going right back in.
By then “copycat riots” had spread around the country. In London, a car driven by a black man mowed down and killed three Asian Muslims.
There is no ideology to it, no real social force. “Greed” is the watchword of media pundits. Disaffected young people driven by the desire for the latest Nike sneakers and colour television sets, they said, were behind the arson and violence. They could not explain the seemingly organized manner in which rioters avoided police. "Social media" was the explanation.
Strangely, no one noted that the “riots” occurred just weeks after the “troubles” started up in Northern Ireland, for no reason at all.
Looks to me like someone dusted off an old “Divide and Rule” playbook. In colonial India, whenever the nationalists got too united, the British would set off “Hindu Muslim riots.”
Chicago Tribune correspondent William Shirer noted in his book on Gandhi that it was difficult to find out how many of the communal riots “were incited by the British in their effort to keep both communities at each other’s throats so that they could not unite in their drive for self-rule.” He reported that the “British Chief of Police in Bombay once told me – almost as a joke – that it was very easy to provoke a Hindu-Muslim riot. For a hundred dollars, he said, you could start something really savage. Pay some Muslims to throw the carcass of a cow into a Hindu temple, or some Hindus to toss a dead pig into a mosque, and you could have, he said, a bloody mess, in which a lot of people would be knifed, beaten and killed.”
As with the current Nike riots, those in India spread quite spontaneously. They were a major factor in splitting India and creating Pakistan as a British proxy.
The current spate of riots are aimed at the British people. The massive social discontent at the cuts in social services and employment, followed by the revelations of elite corruption in the Murdoch hearings, could spell disaster for those squirreling around in the corridors of sleaze.
How conveniently the riots have diverted the attention of British society from the fact that the “austerity” forced on it is not for the general good but to save a political-financial elite whose greed and lust for power are legendary: it got Britain to the top of the list of slave traders, opium traffickers and colonists. And oh yes, brought on two World Wars.
Street riots? Pshaw, it's child's play for this crowd.
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