August 09, 2011
Let's resist the urge to "contextualize" looters
Self described lefty Brendan O'Neill delivers a sharp rebuke to those who seek to "contextualize" -- Orwellian new speak for excuse and justify -- the amoral and thuggish lowlifes rampaging throughout London and other cities, looting, burning and pillaging whilst the hapless police stand by and wring their hands.
O'Neill is willing to put the lawlessness into a broader political context, but he reaches some conclusions that are most assuredly anathema to the Left: the riots are clear evidence of the corrosive influence of the welfare state on the very fabric of society itself.
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.
But it’s more than childish destructiveness motivating the rioters. At a more fundamental level, these are youngsters who are uniquely alienated from the communities they grew up in ... We have a saying in Britain for people who undermine their own living quarters – we call it ‘shitting on your own doorstep’. And this rioting suggests that the welfare state has given rise to a generation perfectly happy to do that.
This is not a political rebellion; it is a mollycoddled mob, a riotous expression of carelessness for one’s own community. And as a left-winger, I refuse to celebrate nihilistic behaviour that has a profoundly negative impact on working people’s lives.
O'Neill also addresses an aspect of the riots that highlights for me the importance of the Second Amendment, the right to defend yourself -- or others -- from attack, including the right to protect your home or business, a right most assuredly denied to our English cousins.
There is one more important part to this story: the reaction of the cops. Their inability to handle the riots effectively reveals the extent to which the British police are far better adapted to consensual policing than conflictual policing. It also demonstrates how far they have been paralysed in our era of the politics of victimhood, where virtually no police activity fails to get followed up by a complaint or a legal case. Their kid-glove approach to the rioters of course only fuels the riots, because as one observer put it, when the rioters ‘see that the police cannot control the situation, [that] leads to a sort of adrenalin-fuelled euphoria’.
The rioters set fire to a family owned department store, a business they'd run for 150 years; today it's gone, destroyed by the mobs, abandoned by the same police who abandoned the British social contract: give up your weapons and we'll protect you.
During the Los Angeles riots after the Rodney King verdict, Korean business owners grabbed pistols, rifles and shotguns; to no one's surprise (other than gun ban proponents), their businesses and property survived almost completely unscathed, passed over by the rioters and looters for easier targets.
But you don't have to be a businessman to see the value of being able to defend yourself from the mob, especially when the police have run away, the rule of law replaced by the rule of the jungle.
It's interesting that these riots -- and the flash mobs in the previous post -- seem to be on the increase in areas where the citizenry is unarmed and dependent on the state for protection.
Posted by Mike Lief at August 9, 2011 01:13 PM
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