I Saw, I Filmed, I Ran Riot - Violence as Celebrity

About 5 or 6 six years ago when I lived in London's Soho overlooking a street plagued by crackheads and drug dealers I remember hearing more shouting than usual and looked out of my window to see two junkies fighting and rolling on the ground. This wasn't an unusual sight but being early evening there were lots of people about and what was unusual, at least to my eyes at that time, was that the majority of the crowd who had stopped to watch, had taken out their mobile phones and were filming the fight. Needless to say no one intervened but thousands more would have watched the sight of these wretches rolling in the dirt as the video clips were uploaded to the net in the days to come, for violence, like sex, is something many people like to watch.

Six years on it is as if nothing is real unless it has been filmed and uploaded to YouTube, Twitter or Facebook, and yet with the reality has come an unreality as the line between film as fantasy and entertainment has increasingly crossed with film as a record of truth and real events. So it was that March 26th's anti-cuts riot had the bizarre spectacle of being both riot and entertainment, as news crews and the general public along with anarchists jostled with each other not to throw things but to get the best angle in which to film the 'action'. Equally each rioter seemed to have one eye on the police and the other on the nearest news crew so that he or she could be captured in their best revolutionary pose. 

This was unrest for a generation weened on X-Factor and Glee, not so much the children of Che Guevara but of Simon Cowell.  Every moment is captured, analysed and discussed, every pose, flame and flicker, blood and bruise is a potential front page image or Youtube sensation and another step up the blooded ladder of protest stardom. Now, as youth cults have all but been consigned to the past, and sad old punks, teddyboys, goths and skinheads look like anachronisms from Grannies attic so finally has a generation that had all but been written off as apolitical, narcissistic and obsessed with posting inanities on Facebook found itself taking the world by surprise, and creating something, that if not exactly new, then reinvented for their generation; Moral, Righteous Violence and Organised Anarchist Chic. Protest as a virtue and anger as a state of mind.

Suddenly the old mainstream Left and Right had to take notice, as first Millbank Tower and then Prince Charles and Carmilla, found themselves caught up in a wave of anger and destruction than was both unpredicted and unpredictable. For many this was a new entertainment, a new adrenaline rush that mixed violence, camaraderie and infamy into a heady brew of celebrity with a cause. If Cheryl Cole was 19 now and wanted to to get on the front page of the nation's papers what better way than to dress in black neo-Red Army Faction, radical-urban-terrorist-off-the-peg-at-Chelsea Girl Class War chic and wow the press with a bit of posing and teasing while lobbing a brick through the window of the nearest Ann Summers or Barclays. Within days every teenage boy, and quite a few girls, would have their anarchy sex symbol poster up on the wall and their heads filled with thoughts of love on the barricades. 

For the hundreds of young, black-clad, masked-up anarchy-angries racing from bank to bank, pausing only long enough to smash-up symbols of wealth like the Porsche showrooms in Mayfair on the way, their main pursers were not the police but film crews and photographers. For every black-blocer smashing a window there were between ten and twenty photographers, maybe six or seven film crews, a few 'legal observers' making sure that the niceties of rioting  were upheld and possibly the odd policemen looking self-concious and irrelevant. This was anarchy chic and riot-lite, no one gets killed and the only buildings trashed belong to the behemoths of bad capitalism, the banks and tax-avoiders. Collateral damage was limited to the odd tourist in the wrong place at the wrong time and the occasional bystander who got kettled. For everyone else this was a chance to go wild, keep the moral high-ground and watch it all on TV and your smart phone later on.

Yet so far this has generally been a very civilized, middle class kind of rioting with the police seemingly preferring the role of benevolent prefects rather than fascistic stormtrooper, and with the media literally interviewing plummy-voiced rioters as they smashed in windows and hurled bricks at the police it has so far been a very jolly affair all round. Virtually all the arrests made on the 26th March consisted of UK Uncut unfortunates who had peacefully occupied Fortnam and Masons and then 'surrendered' only to be arrested en masse by a police force desperate to be seen doing something other than getting hit by paint bombs and arriving outside wrecked banks long after the wreckers had moved on. The other arrests amounted to less than fifty in total and are unlikely to deter anyone from turning up again apart from the police who might decide they would be more effective if they stayed away.

Yet this is now, riot and protest, as with films, sex and violence, lose their edge when you've seen the same theme repeated again and again, sooner or later you have to raise the ante and that is particularly true of protest as adrenaline rush. Shortly those clips of black-blocers smashing windows or black-clad anarchists pontificating and posting pretentious drivel as to why they've targeted this or that store will just sound like so much self-centred waffle. People will escalate the violence and the state will escalate its response and then hopefully the reality and fantasy of what we watch on screen will separate and people will realise that protest at this level is both real and dangerous and that actions have consequences. 

I have no doubt that our new generation will make mistakes and for myself would wish that the philosophy and motivation behind the protests had a more libertarian, right wing direction, but while capitalism's bloated banks continue to hold out their cosseted and profligate hands for ever bigger helpings of the States money to bail them out and save them from their mistakes, that can never be. In fact when the leading trends magazine, The Trends Journal, and its outspoken publisher Gerald Celente, begin predicting the virtual collapse of Western society due to its mismanagement by our current rulers, then perhaps it is probably time to stop watching and start doing and we all take to the streets.

"When the money stops flowing to mainstreet, the blood starts flowing on the street"

Gerald Celente.

LET'S PARTY LIKE IT'S 1848

In 1848, a revolution in France acted as a catalyst for a whole wave of uprisings and revolutions that erupted across Europe in its wake, with the year becoming known as the Springtime of the Peoples, the Spring of Nations and the Year of Revolutions depending on which country you happened to be in and how poetic the local historians were. Revolts against the old order spread from country to country via the 19th Century equivalent of Facebook and Twitter; word of mouth and newspapers. Revolutions and uprisings followed France's across Europe: in many of the states that would help form Italy and Germany, and in Schleswig, Denmark, the Hapsburg Empire, Hungary, Slovakia, Switzerland, Greater Poland, Wallachia, Ireland and amazingly Belgium.

Most of these uprising were bloody, violent and put down quickly but they led to changes, to the eventual creation of Italy and Germany, to a widening of the electoral franchise and the slow devolution of power to classes below the ruling elites and so on. 1848 was ultimately a watershed moment for Europe and one whose legacy would be felt for decades following. Fast forward past the Russian revolution of 1917 and the Fascist and Nazi ideological revolutions of the 1920s and 1930s, to 2011 and revolution is in the air again. Spreading from country to country like wildfire, the flames fanned by the new sirens of revolt: Twitter, Facebook and 24 hour news channels and suddenly everyone is a protestor with one eye on CNN and the other on his Twitter update.

The Tunisian uprising took just about everyone by surprise and drew attention to a regime that most westerners only know about from holidays, if at all, and yet in a few days the sight of people bravely battling brutal police thugs and amazingly winning, inspired many and led to the toppling of the country's dictator-like President Ben Ali after 23 years in power. Then came uprisings in Egypt and the unthinkable ousting of President Mubarak after 30 years in power and suddenly as a result almost the whole of the Middle East is galvanized into rebellion. Now rulers across the region are quaking in their palaces, while Israel watches nervously from the sidelines and western powers, in particularly the United States, are shown to be treacherous fair weather friends and hopelessly lost and out-of-touch when it comes to this new and radical Middle East. A Middle East where old tribal allegiances and religious beliefs are morphing with 21st Century social networking sites and instant media access in ways unthinkable only months ago.

Yet this wave of protest, national angst and Facebook fury is gathering pace and spreading, its tentacles reaching into Africa, Western Europe and the US and threatening yet more violence and ever greater unrest. For the financial crisis hasn't gone away its just moving into the second phase as the implications and impact of a decade incautious lending, greed and toxic debt come home to roost. The printing of obscene amounts of money may have calmed the financial crisis in the short term but its causing inflation, particularly of food, oil and other important commodities, bankers, bailed out by tax payers only two years ago, are paying themselves massive bonuses and bigging it up again, and with our societies cutting back and making increasing numbers redundant, people are beginning to get scared and angry.

Scared of losing their job, their home, their income and their security people in the West are losing faith in their traditional leaders ability to put things right. Years of affluence, easy credit and government benevolence has weakened our societies collective will and now cutbacks are threatening to erode our national resolve still further. Now the threat of cuts is met with incredibility and hostility, as if the financial crisis were some vagary in our distant past that had no meaning on the present and that our governments largesse was infinite. Yet criticism of those who oppose attempts to rain in government spending is now hampered by comparisons with the profligacy of our banks, bailed out as they were by the same taxpayers whose jobs and livelihoods are now under threat. How can one champion the free market when the heart of capitalism went cap-in-hand to the State at the first sign of trouble? You can't, and in the words of the UK Uncut protesters attempting to occupy High Street branches of Barclays on the 19th February,  it's not the banks that our too big to fail, its society. The banks and our decision to save them in the manner we did have made arguing for radical change more difficult, but not impossible.

The truth is that Western societies are beginning to fail because our Governments failed us, they failed us through unchecked immigration, through multiculturalism and enforced societal changes driven by a radical adherence to political correctness that has empowered criminality and emasculated our police, subverted  excellence, indoctrinated our teachers and undermined our national psyche. They have failed us by creating welfare dependency and a massively overburdened health service whose budgets are unaffordable and untenable, and most of all they are failing to lead and to govern, preferring instead the sound bite and opinion poll driven policies. This is the government of the weak for the meek which is fine when the meek are performing to type, but having been spoiled for the last twenty or so years and with their wealth and security under threat, the cries of revolt from the meek are getting louder by the day. 

In the US the Democrats in Wisconsin have gone into hiding rather than participate in the voting through of cuts to public employees incomes and in doing so have brought in thousands of their fellow Americans for their protection and in doing so are whipping up a storm of protest and ludicrously evoking Egypt as they do so. That storm of protest is currently being directed at Republicans and members of the Tea Party and both groups are getting very angry... In the UK March 26th, the day of the TUC's anti cuts demonstration, is being seen as a massive chance for serious protest with leaflets and flyers depicting burning buildings and general anarchy under the new heading the 'Battle of Britain'. In fact across Europe discontent and disgust with mainstream governments is growing with groups and individuals on all sides of the political spectrum seeing events in the Middle East as the start of something big. How big, and whether they'll party like its 1848, remains to be seen