The Rioting Underclass: Product of a Diseased Culture

The riots that have gripped London and swept other major cities in the UK are the product of a diseased culture that leads to violence and mayhem which ultimately only serves to benefit the ruling elite in its bid to eviscerate the middle class by manipulating them to demand their own enslavement.
Firstly, anyone who truly believes that the rioters are burning and looting to protest any legitimate grievances, at least ones that they are consciously aware of, needs their head examining.

A BBC video clip features audio of a group of drunk teenage girls describing how fun it is to engage in wanton violence and thieving. In a transparent and moronic attempt to justify their actions, the girls begin babbling about “the government….conservatives or whatever….I don’t know,” before responding to a question about why they are attacking local residents of their own community by snorting, “It’s the rich people, the people that have got businesses and that’s why all of this happened because of rich people.”

Those “rich people” include a local family-owned furniture store in Croydon that survived two world wars yet has now been burned to the ground, a charity shop that raises revenue for the elderly, and a cat rescue center based in Enfield, amongst scores of other homes, charities and small businesses owned by innocent and far from “rich” people.

To claim that these disaffected youths are the vanguard of some organic revolutionary movement is completely asinine. If this is a genuine backlash against the establishment, why are the mobs not congregating around Downing Street, the Houses of Parliament or Buckingham Palace, the real culprits of Britain’s economic degradation. Why instead are they busy filling trolleys full of tennis shoes, mobile phones, along with plentiful supplies of booze and cigarettes from tiny local off-licenses?

The rioters are composed predominantly of nihilistic, aggressive, vapid and intellectually castrated youths that have come to represent the very term “broken Britain”.

This is like a bad zombie movie – it’s the rise of the idiots. The plague started in Tottenham. It rapidly spread to other areas of London, and soon the hordes were rampaging around major cities nationwide. But these zombies weren’t scavenging for brains, they were in search of JD Sports chav-wear, 40 inch TVs and iPads. The police stood by and watched. The petrified public welcomed troops on the streets, curfews, more surveillance and control with open arms. Thanks a lot, idiots.

The cause of this mayhem cannot be traced to any legitimate political grievance, it is almost entirely the product of a diseased culture, fostered by multinational corporations and the celebrity-obsessed entertainment industry, that brainwashes young people to aspire to lifestyles they can never possibly attain.

The social decline of young people becomes a self-fulfilling prophecy as a result of constant media fascination with demonizing youngsters and presenting them with a putrid diet of “heroes,” vacuous footballers and drug-addled musicians, whose behavior makes impressionable kids think that life revolves around being constantly trashed, engaging in amoral sexual conquests and proving their manhood by pointless displays of animal-like aggression.

MTV-manufactured rap icons, movies and video games have trained an entire generation of disadvantaged kids to grow up as wannabe gangsters, marauding around town with their jeans half-way down their thighs in huge mobs intimidating the public. Rampant consumerism is also to blame. Deprived kids on benefits cannot afford the iPods and laptops they are told they must own to be accepted by their peers, so an opportunity like this cannot be wasted. As the Guardian reports today, “Where we used to be defined by what we did, now we are defined by what we buy. These big stores are in the business of tempting [the consumer] and then suddenly these people find they can just walk into the shop and have it all.”

This army of Clockwork Orange-style droogs are then played off against the general public who, suitably terrified by the media’s incessant hyping of the problem, openly welcome troops on the streets, more surveillance, curfews and whatever else is necessary ‘just to keep us safe’.

But if the last few nights have proven nothing else, they have proven that the police and the authorities cannot keep us safe. Almost every eyewitness who described the violence and looting said the police sat back and did nothing.

The establishment only benefits from allowing the chaos to spread because the call from the public for a more brutal response gets louder and louder. Now Parliament has been recalled for one day to ensure the opportunity to pass more draconian legislation that will only impact law-abiding people is not passed up.

This is how the middle class is habitually manipulated to support the very police state that is ultimately used to oppress the middle class itself. It’s also a perfect example of pressure from below – the cultural cultivation of an underclass of yobs who are let loose by the system to generate the crisis it needs to clamp down with an iron fist.

We all need to wake up and realize we are being played off against each other by an establishment that craves the kind of pointless rioting we have seen over the last three nights, because it creates the perfect pretext for the establishment to entrench and expand its power in the name of safety and security.

http://www.prisonplanet.com/the-rioting-underclass-product-of-a-diseased-culture.html

 

Approval of History

 

Pretty good write up. Thanks for the link ladyfrancy

 

From the economist

This week’s multiplying riots had some common features—looting, arson, attacks on the police—but they spanned different places, races, ages and sexes. Race was not the defining issue, as it was in many of the disturbances of the 1980s. One of the first to appear in court for looting was a 31-year-old teaching assistant: hardly an identikit hooligan. That left politicians free to project their own rationales on the carnage.

For some on the left, the real villain was the government’s public-spending cuts. This view is given superficial support by the fact that the 1980s outbreaks happened during the “Thatcher cuts”. But it is still a lazy fantasy. It might be comforting to think of the riots as an extension of a familiar debate—and to argue that the underlying ills can be easily remedied with a little more state largesse—but there is little reason to do so. Unlike the riots in Britain in the 1980s, Los Angeles in 1992 or France in 2005, these were not overtly political or racial. And since the cuts have barely bitten yet, that explanation doesn’t wash.

But the right’s knee-jerk response—that this is criminality, pure and simple, and that to seek a deeper explanation is to excuse the culprits—is also wrong. There is clearly a cadre of young people in Britain who feel they have little or no stake in the country’s future or their own. The barriers that prevent most youngsters from running amok—an inherent sense of right and wrong; concern for their job and education prospects; shame—seem not to exist in the minds of the rioters. Britain needs to try to understand why that is so.

It is unlikely that the closure of, say, a local youth club has caused that alienation. Perhaps it has something to do with the changing nature of the economy and consequent shortage of low-skilled jobs, or the long crumbling of family structures and discipline. Technology, too, may have had a role, for BlackBerrys were widely used to summon mobs. Digital communications have tipped the balance of power away from the authorities towards the streets, as they did in the Arab spring; but in Britain, the effect has been terrifying rather than inspiring.

If technology is a major factor, perhaps such scenes will be replicated in other countries. On the other hand, a peculiarly British set of conditions may be at work. Near-American levels of inequality may have combined with laxer European attitudes to criminal justice to create an incendiary mix of rage and boldness. Whatever the reasons, a moral malaise has gripped a minority of young Britons, a subgroup that is nevertheless big enough to terrorise and humiliate the country.

The thin blue line
David Cameron, the prime minister, recalled Parliament to discuss the crisis, declaring that pockets of Britain were “frankly sick”. Politicians will no doubt come up with all manner of responses over the weeks to come. Job-creation and welfare schemes will surely play a part in the debate. But the immediate focus was on policing, and why, especially on the first few nights of trouble and particularly in London, the police seemed unable to cope.

The spark for the initial incident in Tottenham was a fatal shooting by police officers; some hooligans cited resentment of the police as a motive. But as the violence spiralled and spread, the main criticism levelled at them—particularly London’s Metropolitan Police—was that they were too soft. That criticism was partly justified. The Met was caught out by the scale of the unrest and unable to respond quickly enough. In some parts of the capital the police were outnumbered, outmanoeuvred and unable or unwilling to prevent looting.

With suitable reinforcements and better tactics, they and other forces performed better on subsequent nights. Nevertheless, there were widespread calls for much more draconian measures. One opinion poll suggested a third of respondents favoured the use not only of rubber bullets but of live ones. The imposition of curfews and the deployment of the army were discussed but thankfully not implemented.

Thankfully, because that sort of response would make Britain a different place from the open, liberal country most of its citizens want it to be. Yet one message of this week’s events is that the reality of modern Britain doesn’t quite live up to that hope. The widespread assumption that, for all their inequalities and fissures, the country and its capital are fundamentally orderly and harmonious, has been revealed to be complacent. The cracks in British society—economic and moral—have opened up, and they are deeper than they seemed.

The riots have been bad for Britain’s already stuttering economy. They have been ruinous for the people whose homes and businesses have been damaged and destroyed. They have tarnished Britain’s image around the world. But most of all, they have been desperately disorienting for the country’s own sense of itself.

 

Brand

Lottie did you see Russell Brand's piece? I was truly both surprised, and impressed. Second part to follow as it's a bit long

London Riots

I no longer live in London. I've been transplanted to Los Angeles by a combination of love and money; such good fortune and opportunity, in both cases, you might think disqualify me from commenting on matters in my homeland. Even the results of Britain's Got Ice-Factor may lay prettily glistening beyond my remit now that I am self-banished.

To be honest when I lived in England I didn't really care too much for the fabricated theatrics of reality TV. Except when I worked for Big Brother, then it was my job to slosh about in the amplified trivia of the housemates/inmates. Sometimes it was actually quite bloody interesting. Particularly the year that Nadia won. She was the Portuguese transsexual. Remember? No? Well, that's the nature of the medium; as it whizzes past the eyes it seems very relevant but the malady of reality TV stars is that their shelf life expires, like dog years, by the power of seven. To me it seems as if Nadia's triumph took place during the silver jubilee, we had a street party.

Early in that series there was an incident of excitement and high tension. The testosteronal, alpha figures of the house – a Scot called Jason and a Londoner called Victor – incited by the teasing conditions and a camp lad called Marco (wow, it's all coming back) kicked off in the house, smashed some crockery and a few doors. Police were called, tapes were edited and the carnival rolled on. When I was warned to be discreet on-air about the extent of the violence, I quoted a British first-world-war general who, reflecting on the inability of his returning troops to adapt to civilian life, said: "You cannot rouse the animal in man then expect it to be put aside at a moment's notice."

"Yeah, that's exactly the kind of thing we want you to say the opposite of," said the channel's representative.

This week's riots are sad and frightening and, if I have by virtue of my temporary displacement forgone the right to speak about the behaviour of my countrymen, then this is gonna be irksome. I mean even David Cameron came back from his holiday. Eventually. The Tuscan truffles lost their succulence when the breaking glass became too loud to ignore. Then dopey ol' Boris came cycling back into the London clutter with his spun gold hair and his spun shit logic as it became apparent that the holiday was over.

In fact, it isn't my absence from the territory of London that bothers me; it's my absence from the economic class that is being affected that itches in my gut because, as I looked at the online incident maps, the boroughs that were suffering all, for me, had some resonance. I've lived in Dalston, Hackney, Elephant, Camden and Bethnal Green. I grew up round Dagenham and Romford and, whilst I could never claim to be from the demographic most obviously affected, I feel guilty that I'm not there now.

I feel proud to be English, proud to be a Londoner (all right, an Essex boy), never more so than since being in exile, and I naturally began to wonder what would make young people destroy their communities.

I have spoken to mates in London and Manchester and they sound genuinely frightened and hopeless, and the details of their stories place this outbreak beyond the realms of any political idealism or rationalisation. But I can't, from my ivory tower in the Hollywood Hills, compete with the understandable yet futile rhetoric, describing the rioters as mindless. Nor do I want to dwell on the sadness of our beautiful cities being tarnished and people's shops and livelihoods, sometimes generations old, being immolated. The tragic and inevitable deaths ought to be left for eulogies and grieving. Tariq Jahan has spoken so eloquently from his position of painful proximity, with such compassion, that nearly all else is redundant.

The only question I can legitimately ask is: why is this happening? Mark Duggan's death has been badly handled but no one is contesting that is a reason for these conflagrations beyond the initial flash of activity in Tottenham. I've heard Theresa May and the Old Etonians whose hols have been curtailed (many would say they're the real victims) saying the behaviour is "unjustifiable" and "unacceptable". Wow! Thanks guys! What a wonderful use of the planet's fast-depleting oxygen resources. Now that's been dealt with can we move on to more taxing matters such as whether or not Jack The Ripper was a ladies' man. And what the hell do bears get up to in those woods?

However "unacceptable" and "unjustifiable" it might be, it has happened so we better accept it and, whilst we can't justify it, we should kick around a few neurons and work out why so many people feel utterly disconnected from the cities they live in.

Unless on the news tomorrow it's revealed that there's been a freaky "criminal creating" chemical leak in London and Manchester and Liverpool and Birmingham that's causing young people to spontaneously and simultaneously violate their environments – in which case we can park the ol' brainboxes, stop worrying and get on with the football season, but I suspect there hasn't – we have, as human beings, got a few things to consider together.

I should here admit that I have been arrested for criminal damage for my part in anti-capitalist protest earlier in this decade. I often attended protests and then, in my early 20s, and on drugs, I enjoyed it when the protests lost direction and became chaotic, hostile even. I was intrigued by the anarchist "Black bloc", hooded and masked, as, in retrospect, was their agenda, but was more viscerally affected by the football "casuals" who'd turn up because the veneer of the protest's idealistic objective gave them the perfect opportunity to wreck stuff and have a row with the Old Bill.

That was never my cup of tea though. For one thing, policemen are generally pretty good fighters and second, it registered that the accent they shouted at me with was closer to my own than that of some of those singing about the red flag making the wall of plastic shields between us seem thinner.

I found those protests exciting, yes, because I was young and a bit of a twerp but also, I suppose, because there was a void in me. A lack of direction, a sense that I was not invested in the dominant culture, that government existed not to look after the interests of the people it was elected to represent but the big businesses that they were in bed with.

I felt that, and I had a mum who loved me, a dad who told me that nothing was beyond my reach, an education, a grant from Essex council (to train as an actor of all things!!!) and several charities that gave me money for maintenance. I shudder to think how disenfranchised I would have felt if I had been deprived of that long list of privileges.

That state of deprivation though is, of course, the condition that many of those rioting endure as their unbending reality. No education, a weakened family unit, no money and no way of getting any. JD Sports is probably easier to desecrate if you can't afford what's in there and the few poorly paid jobs there are taken. Amidst the bleakness of this social landscape, squinting all the while in the glare of a culture that radiates ultraviolet consumerism and infrared celebrity. That daily, hourly, incessantly enforces the egregious, deceitful message that you are what you wear, what you drive, what you watch and what you watch it on, in livid, neon pixels. The only light in their lives comes from these luminous corporate messages. No wonder they have their fucking hoods up.

I remember Cameron saying "hug a hoodie" but I haven't seen him doing it. Why would he? Hoodies don't vote, they've realised it's pointless, that whoever gets elected will just be a different shade of the "we don't give a toss about you" party.

Politicians don't represent the interests of people who don't vote. They barely care about the people who do vote. They look after the corporations who get them elected. Cameron only spoke out against News International when it became evident to us, US, the people, not to him (like Rose West, "He must've known") that the newspapers Murdoch controlled were happy to desecrate the dead in the pursuit of another exploitative, distracting story.

Why am I surprised that these young people behave destructively, "mindlessly", motivated only by self-interest? How should we describe the actions of the city bankers who brought our economy to its knees in 2010? Altruistic? Mindful? Kind? But then again, they do wear suits, so they deserve to be bailed out, perhaps that's why not one of them has been imprisoned. And they got away with a lot more than a few fucking pairs of trainers.

These young people have no sense of community because they haven't been given one. They have no stake in society because Cameron's mentor Margaret Thatcher told us there's no such thing.

If we don't want our young people to tear apart our communities then don't let people in power tear apart the values that hold our communities together.

 

Brand two

As you have by now surely noticed, I don't know enough about politics to ponder a solution and my hands are sticky with blood money from representing corporate interests through film, television and commercials, venerating, through my endorsements and celebrity, products and a lifestyle that contributes to the alienation of an increasingly dissatisfied underclass. But I know, as we all intuitively know, the solution is all around us and it isn't political, it is spiritual. Gandhi said: "Be the change you want to see in the world."

In this simple sentiment we can find hope, as we can in the efforts of those cleaning up the debris and ash in bonhomous, broom-wielding posses. If we want to live in a society where people feel included, we must include them, where they feel represented, we must represent them and where they feel love and compassion for their communities then we, the members of that community, must find love and compassion for them.

As we sweep away the mistakes made in the selfish, nocturnal darkness we must ensure that, amidst the broken glass and sadness, we don't sweep away the youth lost amongst the shards in the shadows cast by the new dawn.

Russell Brand is donating his fee for this article to a clean-up project.

 

He actually wrote that? Wow...I guess he's not some cookie-cutter individual with an overly-eccentric personality and pass it off as comedic gold after all. Nice piece there.

 

Yeah, I freely admit I was a tad stunned. I didn't expect that much insight out of him.

 

This may seem like a poor comparison, but it's akin to Lincoln Theodore Monroe Andrew Perry whom we all know better as Stepin Fetchit.

 

Or Jayne Mansfield, who had an IQ of 163, spoke 5 languages, and consistently played the dumb blonde bombshell throughout her short career. One of her children is Mariska Hargitay, from Law & Order Special Victims Unit

 

That's the other odd thing. Apparently, you can't be smart AND sexy at the same time. But that's been proving wrong time and time again. Even though I wouldn't really use IQs to determine one's intelligence, I would say her credentials on intelligence far exceeds what expectations people may have.

 

Agreed on both counts.

The riots made me sad. And angry. Im glad it is over but I wish people would be more open minded and try to see beyond the overt behaviour to realise it isnt just about dickheads being fuckwits but a clear indication of a greater problem. I dont claim to understand it, nor do I claim do have any form of solution. But what I am afraid of is that rather than trying to learn from it and make improvements to society, instead it will be used to justify further intrusion into civil liberties and people will, out of fear, accept these incursions. And little by little the power of the State grows and the rights of the individual diminish. The poor stay poor, the rich get richer and the divide in society grows. It's all part of the same disease for me and it makes me sad.

 

If you are not aware of her, you should look up Hedy Lamarr. Not only quite possibly one of the most beautiful women ever on film, but brilliant. Her invention during WWII still has applications today.

 

Me too. And while we're not having the rioting here - yet, anyway - it's because the government has already so diminished privacy and increased state power to a point where most people feel paralyzed. :-(

 

From Cameron the people hear is how hard everything is going to be (and how it's not his fault), how we all need to tighten our belts. There seems to be no give and no message to young people that says things can get better. No positive message to say "work hard and you will achieve and succeed" message from him.

All that is given is a further limitation of advice, choice in education, training opportunities and just a big disincentive to go to uni.Let's encourage further debt! yey! Of course going to Eton, makes him know everything!

 

Same thing is going on here, only with the added bonus of not having an actual social safety net to begin with. Now they're trying to cut Social Security, the only income a lot of elderly and disabled people have, and Medicare, which is the corresponding woefully inadequate health care program for the same people.

Why people here are still playing dumb about all of this is beyond me. Everytime someone suggests this is perhaps not the best way to fix the economy, they are accused of "class warfare." Well, guess what?

As Warren Buffett, who is both a billionaire and a liberal said ""There’s class warfare, all right, but it’s my class, the rich class, that’s making war, and we’re winning." "

 

I remember her face actually. She's the one who invented Morse Code. And all this was done on a napkin and pen. Frequency hopping it was called back then. That was impressive.

 

It wasn't Morse Code, that was long since invented, but it was indeed a frequency hopping technology. It was for a torpedo guidance system, and it was well ahead of its time. The same theory is still used for jamming radio signals to this day

 

Thank you for the correction! I mistook FHT with decoding data from protected sources.