Burning Britain: New Rules to the Goose, Same Roles for Gander

Black youth in Britain rise up and lead a rebellion against the capitalist economic crisis and police brutality. The unrest has struck numerous cities including London, Birmingham, Liverpool, Bristol, Manchester and others., a photo by Pan-African News Wire File Photos on Flickr.

Saturday, 13 August 2011 02:00
Zimbabwe Herald Editorial

The symmetry is striking. Revolutions in North Africa and the Middle East; Riots in Britain. Revolutionary Youths bloggers in North Africa and the Middle East; Destructive Yobs in Britain.

Repression in North Africa and Middle East; restoration of law and order in Britain. Arab Spring in North Africa and the Middle East; Plain Criminality in Britain. Democracy in North Africa and the Middle East; destruction in Britain.

So same yet so different!...Western hypocrisy... I have been accused of being anti-white, anti-British, anti-western. I don't regret the accusations, themselves a clear tribute.

But I detest any suggestion that I am mindless in my anti-western stance, that I am the problem. Today I do no more than give you leaders of the much-vaunted West, leaders of the Free World, in their own words, so everyone makes their own judgment...

Triggers of North Africa and Middle East

Before this, a bit of factual background. Nearly mid this year, we faced tumultuous events in North Africa, all commissioned by dramatic unrest in Tunisia, following a case of self-immolation by an embittered 26-year old Tunisian graduate vendor, one Mohammed Bouazizi, after needless harassment by the Tunisian Police. This dramatic turning point set Tunisia alight, all leading to a mighty conflagration that torched many more North African States, most notably Algeria, Egypt and Libya, leaving the Arab world much reshaped, much altered.

National Governments were shaken, as in Algeria. Or fell, as in Egypt. Or came under armed opposition and then foreign invasion, as in Libya. I will not seek to characterize how this same conflagration smoldered, blazed and burned throughout the Middle East. That is a story for another day.

When it was good for the goose

Suffice it to say elite Europe and America celebrated, leading to an unprecedented triad article by Obama, Sarkozy and Cameron in the British Times, New York Times and the French Le Monde, all to show a thrice-steeled determination to pep this so-called Arab Spring. At the G-8 Meeting held in France towards the end of May, Britain pledged £110m towards ensuring this so-called Arab Spring succeeded.

No one saw this as subversion, as a gross instigation to revolution by an imperial power seeking and pursuing own interests in the ensuing mayhem. Much more was pledged by other westerners, Obama included, which is how Egypt fell, continues to fall to this day.

The heroes of the so-called Arab Spring were both animate and inanimate, The Arab Youths became the animate side of the equation.

The social media became the inanimate component. Today we talk as if Twitter, YouTube, Facebook or some such I.T names have replaced or rival Robespierre, Marx and Engels as revolutionary personages.

Blackberry Messenger (BBM) was still to make itself known and felt as an apparatus for cataclysmic social change. It had to wait for the British Spring. The social media thus found a pride of place in the whole cosmology of democracy.

It was celebrated, with all those trying to interfere with its game-changing logic passing utterly condemned as enemies of democracy. These skeletal facts should suffice for now.

Britain in Falstaffian abyss

This week Britain went up in flames, triggered by the mortal shooting of one Mark Duggan by police in north London on Thursday last week.

Earlier claims that Duggan had shot at the police were disproved, meaning the young man was a victim of police brutality, itself something endemic to the British establishment. What followed was an overflow of raw anger, initially confined to Tottenham but soon to snowball into a firestorm that engulfed the United Kingdom as from Saturday last week to the smoulder that it has become about now.

The massive protests were led by the youths, now called Yobs in the vocabulary of British stigmatization and social control. While early attempts sought to impart a color to these Yobs, reality imposed itself so unremittingly and uncharitably, to bring out a very disturbing collective profile of those involved.

The players were variegated: by race, by age, by class, by immigration status, by geography. The very young, the young, the middle-aged, the old, the very old, all were involved. Black, blue, brown, yellow, green, red and white, all went towards this flaming rainbow of social protest, social mayhem.

If London's underclass was involved, so was Britain's literati. Indeed so was England's millionaires' daughters and sons. Even gender became a mere physiognomical detail, too superficial to differentiate in social terms, in bahaviors.

Britain's angry, looting demos came from all regions, in all forms and shapes, prompted by a variety of motives. Equally, the targets of this spectacular, uniting social anger are most revealing. Police stations were attacked.

Police officers were savaged. Police vehicles were torched, as were fire brigade units and ambulances. London wanted to see itself burning, burning, burning. London wanted to see itself dying, dying, dying, without any medical intervention. The law died, pulling Britain towards a lawless, Falstaffian abyss

When the whole country was Tahrir

But the targets were wider, more. McDonalds. Tesco. Post Offices, phone shops, grocery shops, etc, etc. I quite enjoyed one piece which reported that in one instance the demos attacked a cycle outlet, helping themselves to bicycles!

London, itself the city of automobiles, craved for mere bicycles and risked the law to get them! The attack targeted the whole gamut, with forces of law and order concentrating their defences on protecting big businesses. Which is why there is so much community anger.

Unlike Egypt where protestors rendezvoused at Tahrir Square, here was a highly mobile social action, implying well sedimented incendiary across that small, great Island.

As in both Tunisia and Egypt, the law enforcement agencies were overwhelmed, and even considered more drastic options, including deploying the Army. That vaunted British Army!

True, Britain burned, burned and burned, well beyond buildings, all towards the pith of her globally famed honor. I want to leave it at this point, to allow the British leadership to address us, in their own words.

Criminalizing dissent

David Cameron was on holiday when London's Demos went wild. So was the Lord Mayor, Boris. Both had to come back, apparently too late for life, limb, property and tempers. Significantly, Cameron was in no mood to grant this across-the-gamut protest any decency, cause or reason beyond the venal: "It is criminality pure and simple. And there is absolutely no excuse for it." If you have read a bit on the sociology of the British State, it is easy to relate to this one. Faced with a major rupture, a dissensus, Britain deploys the language of social deviance to criminalize demands for social change. It is not an autocratic Government which is under attack, a capitalist ethos which is being challenged. Rather, it is a few deviants, few bad apples who must be eliminated. Except this time around the scale was too much.

Rights versus responsibilities

He went much further, blaming this mass mayhem possibly on televisual mass media with its accent on a culture of violence, its fetishizing rights versus its fatal silence on the ennobling values of responsibility: "This is not about poverty, it's about culture. A culture that glorifies violence, shows disrespect to authority, and says everything about rights but nothing about responsibilities."

Except for the rest of us less mankind, Britain is that bad tube that nourishes violence, fetishizing rights over stability and responsibility. Except a culture of violence needs a social bedrock of violence.

Someone asked Cameron, why were the rioting children not in school, rioting youths not at work? Why were the rioters so hungry, going for very basic items like clothing, food, bicycles? You could not miss the bid by the elite to abstract the protests from the very social conditions that had bred them

The cost of foreign adventures

Whilst all this anger was overflowing in this most destructive way, something else was happening to British coffers. British military spending in Afghanistan was creeping beyond the cumulative total of £18bn, with her spending on a smaller war which Gaddafi had foist on her most reluctantly, smoldering towards the modest figure of £260m, or £6m per week. The things that selfless Britain does for Afro-Arabs, while her own sons are aspiring to steal mere bicycles!

But the firm Cameron had a chilling message for any Britons who had other ideas. The problem was not the billions detonating as bombs and bullets, serrating the tender flesh of innocent Afghans and Libyans, billions whose opportunity cost for an average British household was by way of bread and butter foregone, was by way of jobs and opportunities foregone.

The problem was a deep moral lapse: "When you have deep moral failures you don't hit them with a wall of money," angrily asserted Cameron

The day democracy died

And faced with such a blameworthy grave threat to the British social order, Her Majesty's most Democratic Government had little options left to it. With a clenched lower lip, Cameroon poured his democratic heart out: "It is the government's responsibility to make sure that every future contingency is looked at, including whether there are tasks that the army could undertake that might free up more police for the frontline." And: "On dealing with crowds, we are looking at the use of existing dispersal powers and whether any wider power of curfew is necessary."

So the military can be deployed in a democracy? So curfew can be declared to protect a democracy? So greater powers can be brought to bear in order to equip the police?

Running the courts

Then came the real double-shocker against any in the world with a naive view of human rights. Said our polished British Premier: "...we will not let any phony concerns about human rights get in the way of the publication of these pictures and the arrest of these individuals." Or a naive view of the Rule of Law: "It is for the courts to sentence, but I would expect anyone convicted of violent disorder will be sent to prison. We need to fight back and a fight back is underway."

Listen who is talking? Some tinpot dictator? No, leader of the Free World, none other than the Prime Minister of Great Britain. What has happened to the doctrine of separation of powers, that of rule of law, that of fair justice, independent Judiciary untrammeled by expectations of the Executive?

COBRA versus JOC

But Cameron had another one for you and me as Zimbabweans. If you hear anyone in ZANU (PF) wooly attempting to defend Mugabe's most repressive JOC, just tell him straight that the ultra-democratic British after whose best practices we in the colonies must take after, have nothing called JOC. Or like it. Instead they have something imaginatively called COBRA.

And COBRA is not about British venom, merely a designation of where this creature meets, namely Cabinet Office Briefing Room A! After one such meeting of Cabinet Office Briefing Room A, COBRA for short, Prime Minister Cameron emerged frothing non-venomously: "At COBRA this morning we agreed full contingency planning is going ahead. Whatever resources the police need they will get.

Whatever tactics the police feel they need to employ they will have legal backing to do so. We will do whatever is necessary to restore law and order onto the streets. Every contingency is being looked at. Nothing is off the table." Who dares call Britain a Police State?

New ethos

For London's Demos and some such in the world, PM Cameron had an existential message: "People allowed to feel that the world owes them something, that their rights outweigh their responsibilities and that their actions do not have consequences. Well, they do have consequences. We need to have a clearer code of values and standards that we expect people to live by and stronger penalties if they cross the line. Restoring a stronger sense of responsibility across our society, in every town, in every street, in every estate is something I'm determined to do." Clearly a new ethic is about to be born, one sure to overturn idealistic indulgences of human rights for a more austere one called "responsibilities", which is much more user-friendly to civilized Governments of the West whose citizenry has, until now, been overfed by a surfeit of democracy.

The end of social media

Much worse, Prime Minister Cameron had a dire message for our technology savvy generation. No longer would it be allowed to abuse it in the name of democracy: "Everyone watching these horrific actions will be struck by how they were organized via social media.... Free flow of information can be used for good. But it can also be used for ill. And when people are using social media for violence we need to stop them.

So we are working with the police, the intelligence services and industry to look at whether it would be right to stop people communicating via these Web sites and services when we know they plotting violence, disorder and criminality." The gentle reader should be reminded that during the May G-8 Summit, Nicholas Sarkozy had preached the gospel of a "civilized Internet", stressing the Internet "is not a parallel universe which is free of rules of law or ethics or of any of the fundamental principles that must govern and do govern social lives of our democratic states." Sarkozy's vision has now been wafted across the channel, onto the small, great Isle!

Amen from corporates

And once the Princes of western power have edicted, so shall it be. The British media have been carrying responses from owners and drivers of this new technology which this week threatened the peace of Albion. The British Guardian quoted Facebook spokesperson saying "We look forward to meeting with the Home Secretary to explain the measures we have been taking to ensure that Facebook is safe and positive platform for people in the UK at this challenging time.

In recent days we have ensured an credible threats of violence are removed from Facebook and we have been pleased to see the very positive uses millions of people have been making of our service to let friends and family know they ate safe and to strengthen their communities." Not to be outdone, Twitter intoned: "If the government would like to get in touch, we'd be happy to listen."

Goose versus the gander

If these are the new rules for the goose, what roles were laid out for the gander by these our willy-nilly leaders of the world? I have already demonstrated an uncanny symmetry between what happened in the regions of North Africa and the Middle East and what is unfolding in Britain. As I write the whole of Europe is a tinder box. It could explode any day.

Yet no one talks about a British Spring, a European Spring. Faced with mayhem in the Arab world, Cameron, Sarkozy and Obama in May underlined: "We will stand with those who want to bring light into dark, support those who seek freedom in place of repression, aid those laying the building blocks of democracy." Clearly back then in May 2011, far from being a menace, the Arab spring was an inviting, inspirational prospect for lesser beings.

The three leaders added: "We will not stand by as their aspirations get crushed in a hail of bombs, bullets and mortar fire. We are reluctant to use force, but when our interests and values come together, we know that we have a responsibility to act."

Cameroon went much further, in the process laying groundwork for what by hindsight passes for savage dramatic irony. Speaking at the G-8 Summit in France, Cameron said: "There is a real case for saying if you can secure greater democracy and freedom in countries like Egypt and Tunisia, that is good for us back at home. That will mean less extemism, it will mean more peace and prosperity, it will mean there will not be the pressure on immigration that may otherwise face our country." Little did the man know that he had brought in a log infested with ants, meaning the lizard was on its way

Concert of repression

This week's disturbances in Britain amount to a second 9/11 for the western world.

Today UK and USA stand together but this time not for greater democracy and freedom. They are coming together to jointly plan how to roll back the avalanche of democracy, all riding on information, communication technologies as their corporates have given them to them and the rest of the world.

Reports from USA indicate that Obama has activated plans for dealing with London-like unrest. It is called CONPLAN 3501 and 3502. Its constitutional root is Article 1 of the American Constitution which reads: "Congress shall have power...to provide for calling forth the Militia to execute laws of the Union, suppress insurrections, and repel Invasions."

Another roll-back for civil liberties

The conclusion is clear. This week's disturbances in Britain amount to a second 9/11 for the western world. The only difference is that whilst the first 9/11 had a devil called Osama bin Laden and his Al Qaeda, this time around Europe criminalizes everyone else outside the governing elite.

The hungry, the poor, the marginalized, the excluded are the collective threat to social stability. To contain this sprawling threat, the response must expansively mobilize the military, the police, the politician and more importantly the judiciary in an overwhelming response.

But this is only the beginning. The ensuing weeks shall see a net retreat of civil liberties through a raft of laws and measures which recall the enactment of security laws after the first 9/11. The value of law and order shall replace democracy and human rights as capitalism battles social discontent to preserve itself.

The much vaunted knowledge-society shall be dethroned as IT-based technological tools begin to be withdrawn from the public domain. Suppression of expression shall largely be implemented through willing, obliging corporates who now realize that the quest for IT super profits should never be pursued in ways that imperil the whole capitalist structure.

The misdemeanors of News of the World reinforced by the initial but soon-to-be-stopped attempt at "live" coverage by Murdoch's Sky News shall justify a raft of media laws which shall include statutory control in newsrooms. The argument for self-regulation has been lost, lost forever! A brave new world indeed! Icho!