John Hudson Aug 10, 2011 5,617 Views Comments (19)

With British Prime Minister David Cameron authorizing the use of rubber bullets and water canons in wake of the turbulent London riots spreading through Britain, questions have been raised about how authorities in the U.S. would respond to a similar domestic disturbance threatening the nation’s stability. According to National Journal’s White House correspondent Marc Ambinder the U.S. already has a game plan in place. “If what happened in London ever happened in the US, the military has plans — CONPLAN 3501 and 3502 — to suppress the ‘insurrection,’ he tweeted. The mysterious reference to a numbered military plan generated a flurry of interest on Twitter as NPR hostMichele Norris shot back:”I want to know more about the military’s plan to suppress any potential ‘insurrection.’— CONPLAN 3501 and 3502????”

Later in the article is a copy of a military document that reads:

Indicators of potential violence:

1) High unemployment rate among minority groups.

2) Increased crime rates among minority groups.

3) Protests arising from income disparities between minority and majority groups.

4) Declining rapport between local officials and minority groups.

5) Migrations of large numbers of minority groups.

6) Protests by minority groups to such conditions as slum conditions, segregation in housing and schools, lack of jobs, lack of recreational facilities, police brutality, and local overpricing practices.

So overall, who does it look like the culprit is, across the board? Minority groups!

torayot:

iamwhoiamandidontgiveadamn:

sugaredvenom:

cheesethatiscake:

I’m sorry. But at this point there is no reason behind the riots. It’s a mob mentality and it is ignorance at an incredibly sad level.

You want to fight your government… Do so. But don’t destroy innocent peoples lives in the process. The ideals you think you are raging against are lost because of the piss poor tactics being used: violence and mayhem just for the sake of violence and mayhem.

I really like how you used those stats as a springboard to add nothing of relevance to a conversation about police racism and brutality.

No-one’s saying the violence against other people is jsutified for FUCKS SAKE, all we’re saying is there’s a political, social and economic backdrop to this that can’t be ignored.

So stop rushing to feel smug about how you’ve told everyone how bad you think it is at every fucking opportunity.

Okay so wait, is the headline and the first entry…is that like someone posted the fact and then the person up there responded?  or is that the non sequitor of non sequitors?  What the hell?

Anyways, all about sugaredvenom’s response right there.

Sibz is being awesome again.

Also, I don’t buy the idea that all of the groups of youths involved are one cohesive movement despite the mainstream media’s attempt to paint them all as one threatening monolith. They are not merely a horde of creatures who cannot understand human decency - it is absolutely loaded to describe them in comparison to animals. I imagine that, for at least some of them, the people involved are simply doing what makes sense. And unless you’ve been in their marginalised position, you cannot possibly understand why rioting would make sense. This doesn’t mean that what they’re doing is absolutely right, or that their position purchases them indemnity. It does mean, however, that we have to understand the context and actually listen to communities, because people obviously don’t suddenly go around destroying things if they’re busy having fulfilling lives.

You don’t give people less than the bare minimum, ignore their complaints when they try to play by your rules, shun them for not being acceptable, and then be surprised when there’s backlash.

There are “friends” on my Facebook page who are joining groups named ‘Not rioting because you have more than 1 GCSE’ or ‘Looting your gyal a weave cos you think she’s da one’. I see retweets of a quote by a Waterstone’s employee saying that the book shop will stay open so that the rioting youths will hopefully learn something. Apparently, being poor and/or black and being given sub-par life opportunities and education is just so funny! /sarcasm

And then you get still others saying that any of these people absolutely can’t be as poor and oppressed as they think they are because they have smartphones and wear expensive trainers which cost hundreds of pounds. Actually, you can get Blackberries for free if you pay something like a £20-30/month mobile phone tariff, so people aren’t dropping hundreds at once. The conspicious consumption of expensive trainers and up-to-date smartphones is anyway due to capitalism and consumerist culture. And they’re just nice things. I mean, do poor people not deserve nice things? Does it make them “dishonest” poor people who do not fulfil the Tiny Tim fantasy that privileged people like to indulge in? Hmmm.

So there’s an acknowledgement that the people involved in the riots are marginalised and have limited opportunities and resources… and that this is funny. This somehow co-exists with the denial that the people’s lives are actually that bad because they have the temerity to have nice things.

People need to understand that class is more than about possessing status goods: being middle class also comes with a sense of self-satisfaction, having connections, speaking the “right” way, expecting certain things from life and so on. Just because someone has a fairly fancy phone doesn’t mean that they can actually afford food at the end of the month, or that they can have the education/job/future they want, or even that they’ll be respected if they open their mouths to speak their minds.

British people are fed the myth that anyone can make it. So you go to your shitty state school and somehow make sense of an irrelevant and unengaging curriculum. You get your handful of A* - C GCSEs and go onto a better sixthform or further education college. You do your A-levels, get into university with your 360 points, try to make sense of an educational content and style that’s meant for better-off people used to more rigorous and encouraging schooling, and then graduate with your 2:1. You get a good graduate job with a good graduate salary. Congratulations, young parvenu, you’ve made it! And if you’ve made it, anyone can, right?

No. They can’t. And they shouldn’t be shamed for that. Despite the fact that I have essentially outlined my life story in that paragraph there (save actually getting a job), I resent that there ought to be any prescribed path to respectability, or that middle-class “respectability” should be on the cards at all. But the unfortunate fact is that you’re more likely to be listened to if you are the “good” working-class kind who want to “better” and “lift” yourselves. Ugh. My parents had internalised this racism and classism, and have always been eager for me to differentiate between us and those poor brown people. I went to school with people who grew up on estates and were gang members, and where there were police officers outside the school at hometime. I thought I knew the difference between us and them. I looked down on them, not knowing the damage I was doing. Once upon a time, my opinions would have matched the classist and/or racist shoutings and roaring going on in my Facebook and Twitter feeds.

The riots probably fulfilled some atavistic white and/or middle-class fantasy where the unwashed dark masses rise up and desecrate everything — without acknowledging their own contribution to the marginalisation of those communities. These attitudes help no-one and there needs to be change.

Bolding is mine.

I do not live in the UK. I have never been to the UK! I am not trying to say the riots are good, bad, justified, terrible. That is not my decision to make; it is not my fight and no one asked me to referee. That is exactly what I was responding to, how quickly outsiders will condemn a situation that they are completely removed from—so much more removed from it than they even know—either geographically, or along class, race, or other social lines.

My purpose in doing any amount of writing about the riots has solely been with the aim of people asking more questions about why this is happening, why things have come to this point, instead of assuming it is more destructive than people’s everyday lives already are.

If you ignore someone until they pick up a weapon and point it at you to get you to listen, it seems like at that point you should at least half-assedly listen for once.

guerrillamamamedicine:

—and any comparison (esp among folks who live in the global west) between the arab spring (esp the egyptian revolution) and the riots in london in which the arab spring is held up as the more correct way to stage a rebellion (more organized, or better politically articulate, or whatever) is a comparison of apples and oranges. 

the egyptian revolution-especially the face that global west saw—was heavily influenced by the middle class, educated youth in egypt.  this is why social media was used as one of the primary platforms for organizing.  while yes the lack of economic opportunities in the country was one of the main fuels for the ouster of mubarak and regime change, these were not working class/poor kids from immigrant families.  instead egyptian youth identified themselves as egyptian and saw themselves as saving egypt from the oligarchy. 

while, from what i understand, the kids in tottenham and elsewhere throughout london, do not - in simple terms - ‘love england/uk/london/etc’.  and cant leave - physically or metaphorically. 

—i guess what i am saying is — when your home is your prison.  and you have already tried to organize nonviolently for years to change the conditions of the prison.  do you not sooner or later just burn the prison down?

which means you are destroying other folks’ home as well. 

—i also want to point out that the pics and the video streaming looks worse than it is on the ground.  that is something ive learned over the past decade.  it always looks bad on television.  even during the ouster of mubarak id come home from tahrir and see the images on the news and be like, damn.  where the fuck did all that happen, and then read that it was on tahrir. 

—oh and i think it is the laziest of lazy to sit around and wait for a riot to happen.  like, when is this going to happen in the states?  fuck you.  how dare you sit around and wait for conditions to get so bad that the only choice people have is to destroy their own neighborhoods because we sat around and let their homes become prisons.  rather than doing the hard work of organizing to resist the powers that be that create the prisons, the police force, the systemic daily heartbreaking violence under which the most vulnerable live. 

asking when is this going to happen here.  is asking, expecting, waiting, allowing for the conditions to continue, in which the most poor and disenfranchised do our dirty work/rioting, as if the poor are just born to do other people’s dirty work.  oh wait.  thats why we keep folks poor right? 

Bolding is mine. I think, again, it comes down to having something at stake in where you are and what is around you, having a sense of place and belonging where you live, to the extent that you want to have those things. Being allowed to feel like you belong or have a right to be where you are. People pointing out that they do not belong, have never been allowed to belong, and don’t necessarily desire to assimilate into a culture that would put them in that situation, subvert the kind of liberal multiculturalism that is actually built on white middle-class nationalism.

(via robot-heart-politics)

If poor urban people of color rioted in the areas they live in, in cities in the US, in a serious huge way, what fraction of property destroyed would be their own? What fraction of people rioting would be destroying property of their own, their friends and families, people they’d ever even met? A tenth? A hundredth? What must that look like in the UK right now—whose property is being destroyed?

I’m wondering this because of the argument that people are destroying “their own neighborhood,” which has always come off to me as being steeped in a middle-class misunderstanding of other people’s poverty. Who owns the house they live in? In New Haven, almost all the houses in the POC neighborhoods are subdivided to be rented as separate floors. I literally know 3 couples in the city who own the house they live in; 2 of those couples are either my past or present landlords. If my block rioted, for the most part we would not be destroying our own property.

Are the riots destroying more than the police do? (They’re the only ones within this story who have killed someone.) Are they destroying more than unemployment and hunger do? Are they destroying more than developers would; are they doing the developers’ work for them anyway? What about the community being destroyed when people are evicted, when people hide out or move away because of racism or xenophobia, when people are convicted of crimes and locked up under a penal system built on oppression, when people are taught collective self-loathing in school, when people are forbidden to speak their own languages?

And what does that mean, “their own neighborhood?” What does ownership of the place you live mean, if you don’t even have the money or skin color to own it? What does ownership mean if you live in public housing and know that, any day now, the city can sign it over to real estate holders who will tear it down and build condos with no remorse? What does ownership mean when there is no longer a place to get sufficiently healthy food in your neighborhood, or there is but the only people who shop there come from other parts of town, or there is but only because the white people moving in aren’t being ignored the way your family was for generations?

How can you force ownership, from afar, onto communities that have been made this deeply alienated from where they are and how they relate to the people and places around them, if they have never before been allowed or encouraged to own anything, property or otherwise?

If you loot a shoe store of a company run by a white man overseas that makes billions of dollars, that cuts costs by using sweatshop labor of people of color and then marketing them back to a different demographic of people of color; if you steal a pair of pants from a clothing store that won’t hire people of color from the neighborhood and follows them around the store when they come in; if you break the window of a multi-billion dollar fast food chain restaurant whose $1 meals are, on a bad day, all you have money and time to feed your kids, knowing that the food you are feeding them is damn near toxic but having no alternatives; are you doing anything to your real community? Will you ever meet the people who actually own all of that?

For real. And even then, not sure I wanna hear about it from anyone besides the people who have reason to riot, who are going to face the repercussions of the riots when it’s over, regardless of their participation or not or their support for it. Cause I also am not curious about what white reporters or cops or the middle class have to say about it, not just on tumblr but everywhere. “OMG how dare you respond to your life in your city in a way that I’ve never had to do” is not constructive discourse.

robot-heart-politics:

sinnary:

why the fuck are these people even rioting

tell me at least 5 things they will accomplish from this chaos

Funny thing about people who feel they have nothing to lose: they don’t care if they gain nothing. They didn’t have anything to begin with.

You’re exactly right. “Why the fuck are other people dangerously desperate to change their surroundings and I’m not?” is a very important question to be asking if your life is not that desperate. As a rule, I refuse (with very few exceptions) to tell people how they should be responding to things like systemic desperation, state violence, hunger, or grief. Maybe it’s time for everyone to start doing some research.

radicallyhottoff:

and one last thing. anybody ever notice that there are never riots over a woman who killed her abusive husband being murdered by the nation/state? or riots over yet another woman at university being raped? or riots over yet another police officer raping a trans woman? or riots over yet another trans woman being murdered by a “duped” boyfriend? Or riots over yet another sex worker being found dead only after months of pressure on the police by family? Or riots over yet another mother getting thrown in prison for “attempted homicide” aka drug dependency while pregnant?

yeah. i’ve noticed that shit. and I mean to have a little critical dialogue about that shit before i go throwing cocktails and getting my ass arrested.

Compton’s Donut Riot! But that’s the closest I can think of.

(via kiriamaya)

Tuesday, August 9, 2011 - 04:52 - UK Riots - Al-Jazeera UK Riots Live Blog

How’s that for some understanding, huh?

sugaredvenom:

Few places not on there yet, including the Angel and Essex Rd.

:-O

samuelfromtheshire:

Two police cars, a bus and ­several shops were attacked and set ablaze in north London on Saturday night as violence erupted following a protest demanding “justice” over a fatal police shooting.

Officers on horseback and others in riot gear clashed with hundreds of ­rioters armed with makeshift missiles in the centre of Tottenham after Mark Duggan, 29, a father of four, was killed on Thursday.

At one point, rioters broke through police ranks and attempted to storm Tottenham’s police station, pelting officers with bricks, bottles and eggs. As a police helicopter flew over Tottenham High Road, youths in masks and hoods added combustible material to two burned out police cars, included a bundle of documents and an awning ripped down from one of the shops. Some attempted to persuade the rioters to disperse, one young man shouting: “Go home now people.”

But others filled bottles with petrol to throw at the police lines. Many lined up with makeshift weapons including metal bars and baseball bats to confront the line of police, but others seemed more interested in looting. At one stage a safe was dragged out of a book­makers, while others were seen with a television set and an electric guitar. Several arrived with shopping trollies to take away what they had stolen.

“It wasn’t like this before,” said one woman standing close to one of the two burned-out police cars. “It started out as a peaceful demonstration. The police shot a guy here last week and they lied about what happened. They said he pulled a gun but he wouldn’t have done that with armed police. They shot him so badly that his mother could not recognise him.” …

Read More: The Guardian

Since I am currently visiting a city in which fatal shootings by cops have become the norm, I’m really interested in how it is that some places just accept it, or do protest but within certain guidelines, and how it becomes an all-out revolt. Definitely social identities and classes are going to determine, to some extent, people’s ability to raise the stakes like this. But I’m really curious as to why, in certain spaces and times, people explode. Thoughts?

(via verbalresistance)

Bahrain has begun the trials of 48 medical professionals accused of attempting to topple the monarchy.

Those on trial include some of the country’s top surgeons, accused of supporting weeks of pro-democracy protests in the country.

It is the latest trial at a special security tribunal set up by Bahrain’s rulers amid a far-reaching crackdown in the kingdom, which is home to the US Navy’s 5th Fleet.

Human rights organisations have condemned the trials, saying the staff are being hounded for treating hundreds of wounded protesters.

darling80m:

Third World Protest as US Spectator Sport?

afghanipoppy:

4si4:

zuky:

I’m not a fan of the US cultural habit of turning political turmoil in faraway lands into a gawkworthy spectator sport. I came to this realization in the aftermath of the 1989 protests in Tiananmen Square, as it gradually dawned on me that sheltered, largely clueless people who had no stake in what was happening had little business pushing their intrusive, hungry gaze into such multi-faceted, multi-context, volatile, dangerous matters.

The most disturbing aspect of this habit is, in my opinion, the undercurrent of bloodlust, which of course underlies all US “news reporting”, best summarized by the cliche “if it bleeds, it leads”. In the 1989 protests in China, organizers explicitly stated amongst themselves that the world’s eyes were watching and those eyes wanted blood. Protesters knew that if the demonstrations simply ended peacefully, the previously enthralled Western media would be disappointed. They knew that they had to push matters to the point of violence in order to make a lasting point. The Western gaze got what it wanted. As usual, it wasn’t Westerners who paid the price.

I’m not making any particular statement about uprisings in Tunisia or Egypt or Yemen or Lebanon or Xinjiang or Tibet or Myanmar or Thailand or Kenya or South Africa or Indonesia. And I’m definitely not saying that people should not be paying attention to important world events. As I often make clear in all my writings, I vehemently believe that US Americans need to pay much, much more attention to political events throughout the Third World — but not just when there’s a media melee to gawk at and cheer on, in the manner of kids rushing toward a crowd standing on cafeteria tables shouting “Fight! Fight! Fight!”

The attention that many U.S. citizens are now paying to state repression in Egypt, for which U.S. taxpayers are responsible, is a good thing and does not fit the usual pattern of U.S. media “bloodlust.” And if people in the U.S. have the opportunity to join local demonstrations opposing U.S. support for dictators like Mubarak, they should do so as a matter of moral obligation undeterred by recommendations of resignation to their “sheltered” status.

The idea that “Third World protest” is a “US spectator sport” is almost entirely false. As a matter of “U.S. cultural habit,” the complaints of the ‘third world’ are ignored except in the few cases where ‘third world’ protests are against official enemies of U.S. power (China, Iran, etc). In those cases there does indeed seem to be a morbid fascination with the suffering of the victims of our enemies. But this is a microscopic fraction of total actual ‘third world’ protest, the majority of which is against the U.S. and its clients and is therefore not even known about in the U.S. It’s a very fortunate thing that the U.S. media was not able to ignore Egypt.

Was it a U.S. spectator sport yesterday in Pakistan when Pakistani men protested against U.S. consular employees killing three people in the crowded streets of the capital? No. Did anybody even know? Was it a U.S. spectator sport two weeks ago when Iraqis took to the streets in protest against Joe Biden’s visit? No. Did people in the U.S. know? Was it a U.S. spectator sport less than two months ago when Filipinos confronted riot police outside the U.S. embassy in Manila? Does anybody notice that Filipinos are in the streets of Manila protesting U.S. power year in year out? Was it a U.S. spectator sport two months ago when South Koreans (not in the ‘third world’ but therefore perhaps all the more remarkably) protested against the U.S.-South Korea joint military exercises that nearly started a war? No. Did people in the U.S. even know that South Koreans protested against U.S. policy on that occasion, or that South Koreans protest against U.S. power year in year out and sometimes spectacularly? Was it a U.S. spectator sport when Iraqis and Afghans, under very dangerous circumstances, protested nonviolently against U.S. occupation (1, 2, 3)? No. This is just a tiny sampling of the non-accidental absence of U.S. “spectators” for significant instances of contemporary “turmoil.” I could go on at length.

It’s an orthodox conceit to think U.S. media is addicted to conflict. The truth is that U.S. media avoids most conflicts because it avoids, whenever it can, any suggestion that U.S. power can be opposed effectively by normal people. The cliche, “if it bleeds it leads,” is a closely related conceit. The truth once again is that, with very few exceptions, the only blood that makes it to the news is blood spilt by the violence of undesirables (mostly poor people) and official enemies. Meanwhile the oceans of blood spilt by U.S. military aggression and corporate power never “leads.”

Was it a U.S. spectator sport when Guantanamo detainees peacefully protested their conditions for the past few weeks? I could only find a small paragraph dedicated to this issue within another article on AJE HERE.

Meanwhile on Wednesday, a lawyer for a Syrian national held at Guantanamo said inmates had been staging protests at the facility for more than a week.

Ramzi Kassem, an assistant professor of law at the City University of New York, said his client had told him over the phone that the protests were inspired by the recent uprising in Tunisia.

“What he explained to me was that these peaceful protests, these sit-ins by the Guantanamo prisoners, have been going on for 12 days at this point,” Kassem said. 

“The prisoners are refusing to return to their cells and are putting up signs in English.

“They’re essentially protesting the fact that they’ve been continuously imprisoned at Guantanamo for nearly a decade … even though there are 170 prisoners at Guantanamo who were approved for release by the [George] Bush administration four years ago and then another group who were approved for release by the Obama administration two years ago.

“These men still sit at Guantanamo with no end in sight.”

If media coverage is pushing people to do things, however small, to revolt and take power, or even just to question the notion that those things are impossible or shouldn’t be done, then I think that’s a good thing. Even shitty problematic media coverage (which I’m not condoning) can help cause that to happen. But there’s a very fine line between seeing something that is very removed from your life—or more often, that you perceive to be very removed from your life—and accepting it as normal or unchangeable, and seeing those same things and questioning what happens around you and your roles in it. It is also a fine line between being excited about something happening outside your life, and fetishizing that same action.

I see this a lot in white anarchism/radicalism, where people will fetishize violence in its more glamorous moments without seeing its day-to-day effects that are far less glamorous, or fetishize protest without needing to be around for its backlash or being the target of its backlash. I wrote about it before in the context of queer, mostly white anarchists wanting to learn to shoot guns, which I understand, but how I can’t get behind it until I see some acknowledgement of the violence that communities of color are often plagued by, and until that point it just strikes me as fetishization. Likewise I see white anarchists (the zine Fire to the Prisons comes to mind) fetishizing poc protest, appropriating bits and pieces of hip-hop culture because it’s seen as tough (i.e. because black men are scary), addressing racism only in the context where white men still get to be heroes (i.e. anti-racism is all about beating up racist skinheads), and then ultimately shooting down people of color calling out racism as we see it, and where white guys don’t get to be the heroes.

Can’t remember where I was going now. I think what I was trying to say was that I’ve known too many white radicals who want to show me riot porn from the “Third World” but then can’t carry on a respectful conversation with a person who comes from that place or whose lineage comes from that place. In fact, that is how I’d describe most white radicals I’ve ever known. It is extra insulting when that person then wants to tell me all the things they know about hip-hop, or something else about my race that is supposed to be scary or tough, that I don’t know (they’re wrong!).

I don’t think that the idea of being wary of poc protest being fetishized and the idea that this needs to be reported so people can be inspired to do the same elsewhere are ideas that are opposed to each other. I think they’re two really important questions that need to be asked constantly. I’m very happy to see reporting done by people affected by these movements, and I’m very happy to see other people saying, “We can do this too.” Those are both great!

(via darling80m-deactivated20110318-)