It seems that with any disaster that comes as a shock the pseudo-intellectuals and various hacks almost instantly try use the disaster to push their own agenda. The massacre in Norway was all the fault of Muslims! Oh wait, it was a white racist Christian? Well maybe multiculturalism is still to blame. Thanks Andrew Bolt! Last weeks riots in England have been much the same. Whilst the violence was still ongoing the usual suspects immediately tried to distil an incredibly complex issue as either the fault of the right because of austerity cuts or the fault of the left because of a culture of welfare dependency. Once the violence ended and regular Londoners wanted to return to a sense of normality a collective clean up was organised over social media. Fair enough right? Well no, apparently these cleanups are the real threat and represent “the sweepers appear to enact the closest thing to popular fascism that we have seen on the streets of certain ‘leafy’ bits of London for years.”
Yes, she compared people volunteering to clean their neighbourhoods to fascism. I. Dont. Even.
The author somehow links community inspired gentrification in urban neighbourhoods to fascism, so somehow sweeping the streets is also fascist. How dare people try to actively improve ones community!
I don’t think fascism means what you think it means. Hitler had more in store for Europe than an elaborate street cleaning and gentrification operation.
It continues to then romanticise the rioters as fighting against the big bad corporate greed.
It is no coincidence that the primary target of rioters, despite a media-narrative keen to play up the social impact of these events on small retailers, was large retail warehouse stores that cling parasitically to neighbourhoods at the periphery of inner cities. These are stores that far from being the ‘heart of the community’, largely suck wealth out of it into overseas tax havens.
The reason that the larger chain stores were targeted was not some sign of class solidarity or some such bullshit but because the larger shops are more likely to have the high end electrical goods that people are after. If you want to steal an lcd tv or an iphone a big electrical chain would be a better bet than the corner store. And its not like the supposedly socially conscious rioters exclusively attacked multinational shops. The family owned Reeves furniture store may not have been looted but it was burnt to the ground. Not to mention the numerous independent, migrant owned shops that were simply trashed even if they had little of value to steal. I dont think many of these rioters did it in the name of social justice.
Further lunacy in the comments.
Wit PERMALINKAugust 10, 2011 9:54 pmThis is really very good. Thanks for writing this. Everyone who reads it: disseminate by all means necessary!
The Left needs to defend the riots; not to valourise the burning of grannies’ cars, but to make clear that we reject the whole bourgeois construction of events, that we stand in solidarity with the oppressed and that, when it comes to it, we will, without hesitation, join the “rioters” to overthrow the legitimised exploitation, state-sanctioned violence and sham “democracy” that oppress us all.
Username is “Wit”. At least they are half right.
It’s not democracy when I don’t get the government that I like. So set fire to stuff.
Somehow I dont see how murder the destruction of businesses is really going to help the lot of the urban poor in London. But maybe that’s just me.
ALSO: Although the author of the post has since changed the photo back she was caught by commenters sneakily photoshopping black people out of the photo of the riot clean up, so it would better fit the narrative of it somehow being a white power fascist demonstration.
