RIOT: DEMOCRACY BEGINS TO BE DESTROYED FROM WITHIN.

Over four days in August 2011 the UK’s febrile multicultural and indigenous underclass rioted on a scale and with a ferocity that had never been seen before. Beginning in the borough of Tottenham on a Saturday, and culminating with widespread looting, arson, and general criminality across much of London on the following Monday, the underclass vanquished the police and evoked fear and chaos among the rest of the population. On that night Democracy was found wanting and vulnerable, while the chattering classes beloved liberalism collapsed as its champions temporarily ditched their faith in political correctness, cried out for the police and faced off hooded thugs whose rioting threatened to devalue their gentrified mansions, invaded their shops and restaurants and shoved a knife deep into their human rights. This wasn’t protest, it is was brutalism without rules; Capitalism at its most base and basic:  ‘I want what you have and I’m taking it now’. Simples...

The BBC, SKY and many in the wider media initially tried to give the rioters a veneer of respectability by calling them protesters and speculating that the riots were directly linked to cuts in social services, student grants, unemployment and the shooting dead of a young black man armed with a gun in Tottenham. This was all nonsense of course and as the violence and destruction escalated and with it footage of people being robbed or attacked in the street, of peoples homes and businesses burnt down even the most politically correct commentators reluctantly started to use the words ‘rioters’ and ‘looters’.

However there was also a palpable sense of relief among those same commentators when among the first rioters in Tottenham, a few white faces were spotted. Thank goodness! This wasn’t a ‘race riot’ in the sense that it was all black rioters, it’s a mixed, multiracial riot, so that’s alright. Politicians, police leaders, community groups, the chatterijng classes and Polly Toynbe et al, rejoiced. The riots in the 1980s “now they were ‘race’ riots”, but now thanks to our wonderful inclusive society the children of the white underclass are throwing petrol bombs and looting too. How proudly must the likes of David Cameron, Nick Clegg, Tony Blair, Gordon Brown, Shirley Williams, Boris Johnson, Ken Livingstone and co looked on as their theoretical offspring brought their ‘cry of rage’ to England’s milticultural never never land. 

And because most of the rioters had their faces covered and surprisingly weren’t taking part in round table discussions on Newsnight, commentators and politicians could attribute any views they liked to them. In fact a media intent on finding the ‘right’ answers for the riots has been only too happy to attribute a conventional malaise to the riots rather than hint at a darker and more nihilistic cause. So not only, as the passing of days lessened the shock of the riots, were the chattering classes warming to the rioters and their attacks on the ‘coalition’s cuts’ or whatever appropriate cause they wished to attribute, but, safe again for now, they could also begin the process of defending and finding causes for the riots that would put them back nicely into the ills that the UK’s massive welfare depended and bloated public sector are set up to deal with. The Coalition of course, keen to be seen as tough, but caring, concurs and we are all happy again.

Of course some commentators have broken the mould and spoken outside of the box, most noticeably, historian David Starkey who dared not only to evoke the words and memory of Enoch Powell but cited black gangster culture as another possible cause of the riots. This was Heresy! Powell’s now infamous ‘rivers of blood’ speech, made 43 years ago in 1968, predicted a time in England when, if immigration was allowed to continue unchecked, that, “like the Roman, I seem to see ‘the River Tiber foaming with much blood’. and that:

“There are among the Commonwealth immigrants who have come to live here in the last fifteen years or so, many thousands whose wish and purpose is to be integrated and whose every thought and endevour is bent in that direction. But to imagine that such a thing enters the heads of a great and growing majority of immigrants and their descendants is a ludicrous misconception, and a dangerous one to boot.

....Now we are seeing the growth of positive forces acting against integration, of vested interests in the preservation and sharpening of racial religious differences, with a view to the exercise of action and domination, first over fellow immigrants and then over the rest of the population.”

Powell’s speech, as with Starkey’s now, challenged the Establishment’s orthodox view that immigration and a multicultural society are desirable and such views when uttered by mainstream figures are not only rubbished and censured but where possible the figure that  spoke them is either destroyed, or humbled to the extend that he or she will recant their views and, like a sinner, beg forgiveness. Thereafter that person will do their best to 

reingratiate themselves with the mainstream, though like the sinner, forever tainted by their earlier utterances.

Starkey to his credit neither recanted or apologized and as such is to be ostracized by his peers and pushed to the margins of respectable society. The day after his appearance on Newsnight the Establishment reacted with fury to his words, with the Labour party leader Ed Miliband calling them “disgusting and outrageous” and that they were “racist comments”, and that “there should be condemnation from every politician and every politcial party”, the Guardian’s ghastly Dreda Say Mitchell felt that Starkey had “complete ignorance about the social dynamics of urban life in Britain” and that to understand the riots and their “causes”, we need “informed and articulate comment (even in Jamaican slang) from people who’ve lived life on the streets”. 

Even more hysterical was the reaction of 100 fellow ‘historians’ who felt that Starkey should never have been asked on to Newsnight given that he was a celebrity historian more suited to commenting on Elizabethans. Presumably there are now at least 100 historians with suitably diversity friendly views waiting in the wings should there be more riots to comment on. These historians also felt that Starkey’s views had “disgraced the academic world” and want the media to stop putting the word ‘historian’ next to his name.

This is our new Democracy at work, now any political party, politician, academic, celebrity or individual who dares to question, challenge or criticise the wisdom of a multicultural society is shunned at best, at worst they are ostracized and cast-out into the wilderness. There is no “frank discussion” or “informed and articulate comment”, there is only diversity hyberbole and multicultural zealotry where any criticism of our racially engineered utopia is crushed. In our new Democracies there is no protesting, no commenting, no discussion, no debating, no voting or any form of dissent allowed when it comes to multicuturalism and race. The State is right and everyone else is wrong.

The riots may have given pause to the multicultural zealots and a few of the chattering classes in Clapham and Camden may have doubted their beliefs momentarily. But a few soothing words from the BBC and the sight of hundreds of their fellow Cabernet Sauvignon drinking chums waving brooms around as they ‘bonded together’ to clean up the mess have reassured them. We love our culturally diverse, multicultural city and we’re going to understand why these riots happened and make sure that they don’t happened again. Hurrah! Which is great of course because if after our ‘understanding’ of the ‘causes’ the riots do happen again, and they will, then they be more violent and more destructive than anything so far and the people that bond together in future won’t need brooms to clean up their city, they’ll need guns. 

Simples.

© Nigel Wingrove 2011

ON VOICEMAIL EVERYONE CAN HEAR YOUR SCREAMS

Watching the hysteria and escalating media on media clusterfuck that was surrounding News International, and inparticular its founder Rupert Murdoch and his unfeasibly Pre-Raphaelitesque and now ex-Chief Executive Rebekah Brooks, over the last few weeks has been akin to watching a kind of Inquisition style Burn the Witch frenzy, with Tom Watson MP playing the role of WitchFinder and the Guardian and other dubious high-moral tone acolytes backing him up as his Papal Tribunal. That is not to decry or mediate either the seriousness or vileness of the phone hacking of murdered schoolgirl Milly Dowler's mobile phone or similar outrages perpetrated by the News of the World but rather to comment on the massive amount of cant, hypocrisy, sexism, agism and general ghastliness that were unleashed in its wake. In fact, what had begun as a wave of righteous outrage and moral indignation at journalism's descent into a sulphurous pit of, to quote Shakespeare, 'burning, scalding, stench, consumption', to which can now be added ' and phone-hacking', ended with few angels and many demons on display. 

I worked for a Murdoch subsidiary once, News International / Hatchet, in the mid 1980's where a magazine concept I had proposed had been taken up for development. It was in 1986 and Murdoch at that time was locked in an almost life and death struggle with the dinosaur-like luddites that made up the newspaper print unions. This was an era when newspaper print jobs were sold on, the wages and perks being so good that when a vacancy came up backhanders and money, not skill and worth, secured the position and the threatened introduction of new technology, that is computers, had made the print workers apoplectic with rage and for weeks and months Murdoch's Wapping headquarters and the location of his newspapers and print presses, had been the focus of bitter picketing and often serious violence. The miners may have failed in their clash with Margaret Thatcher's ideologically driven policies but the battle to stop Murdoch and his technologically driven capitalism would not fail or so the bastions of the old left had decried. 

I mention this as my brief six months or so working in this small outpost of Murdoch's then embryonic empire gave me some insight in the Murdoch way of doing things and how focussed he was. I had been taken out to lunch during this time with the specific purpose of being briefed and prepared for meeting Rupert Murdoch on the following Monday where, I was told, he would either like me and my magazine concept, in which case I was in, or... well there was no other option, if he didn't like it I was out. I was told that he wasn't a man to waste his time on frippery and sycophancy and that he would just be in London to sort out business issues and would be out again on the next plane. So no partying for him.

That weekend there was yet another very violent demonstration at Wapping, one of the worst, and Murdoch was said to be furious and was considering closing The Sun and pulling out of the UK for good. My meeting was cancelled and with no end in site to the dispute I was advised to take my concept title to another newspaper mogul, also expanding into magazines, his name, Robert Maxwell... And that's a whole other story!

What I did glean from this was just how close to the line Murdoch would go to win a battle and equally just how hated a man who chose to take on entrenched values and old orthodoxies could become. For Murdoch, the Wapping battle was about winning and about money, politics were secondary. For monetarists and free-marketeers Murdoch's almost pugnacious resistance to the unions was the stuff of which heroes are made and for a while Murdoch was not just the darling of the capitalist Right, but a champion, whether he liked it or not, of the Thatcherite revolution. To the Left Murdoch was an anathema and a figure to be hated and destroyed. 

It has taken a generation, but now 25 years later that old Left is taking its revenge and like any sense of wrong that has had too long to gestate it has become bitter and much of the indignation of the last few weeks has had little to do with the very real wrongs of phone-hacking and everything to do with settling old scores. A lot of those old scores came about because Murdoch eventually won his battle and introduced computers into the running of his papers, with the rest of the UK's newspaper industry following suit and introducing them as well. But in winning Murdoch defined himself as an enemy of the Left and a champion of pure, unmitigated captitalism, a capitalism that was defined by Murdoch's own prejudice's and which paradoxically are as anti-establishment and anti-Royalty as those of any Marxist driven revolutionary. 

Now two decades later Murdoch presides over a multi-state, multimedia empire with revenues and worth stretching into the billions and is courted by celebrities, politicians, the business world and by the vast multitudes that have, like fungi, sprouted and grown in the dark tributaries that feed his media organs. I have no doubt that many of the accusations of phone-hacking, deceitfulness and trickery that have been banded around over the last few weeks are true, though equally true, I am sure, are some of the denials from the Murdoch clan of culpability in them. Indeed it was exciting for a while to picture the 'flame-haired' Rebekah Brooks as some sort of Borg Queen whose News of the World minions fed her brian a constant diet of malicious gossip and tittle-tattle while her aged protector stroked her hair and whispered, over and over again, my precious, my precious...

But this is a fairy tale that has yet to reach its end, and the witch may yet become an angel and the covetous old King may end his days in peace and comfort. Yet equally the witch may be found to have used dark magic in pursuit of her dreams and be burned at the stake, the aged one and his brood may be cast out of the empire and usurped by stern-faced Inquisition types intent on upholding moral values. As a saga it is now worthy of becoming a top TV series and it is perhaps appropriate that in the midst of the scandal about News of the World, phone hackers, corrupt policemen, red-haired temptresses and the Murdoch family, that it was announced that Dallas was returning for a new series. JR is now an octogenarian patriarch trying to keep control over the Texan equivalent of the Borgias. Art imitating life or life imitating art? Who knows, but as I started with a quote from Shakespeare I'll end with one as he usually knows best: 'Forbear to judge, for we are sinners all'.

© Nigel Wingrove 2011

Brutal, stupid and cruel: The rise and rise of Generation Eloi

If the Nazi leadership famously cared for animals and were conversely capable of the utmost cruelty to people, then our post war, public sector driven, welfare dependent and 

excruciatingly politically correct caring society is becoming a savage, vile and foul place for both. Day in day out the UK’s papers carry stories of children, the disabled, the old, sick or just those in the wrong place at the wrong time who have been beaten up, abused or worse by our nations burgeoning brutalligentsia. 

Even more upsetting, given mankind’s supposed elevated status at the top of nature’s evolutionary ladder, is the increasing vileness with which many people mistreat, abuse, torture, maim and kill any animal defenseless or unlucky enough to fall within their vile, bestial grasp. From poisoned cats, stabbed horses, abused dogs and shot swans, few 

species of the animal kingdom escape the attention of the sadists in our midst. 

Yet our slow, and inextricable descent into a dystopian mire is not only of our own making, but its progress and acceleration is being driven by our government and societies lack of collective will to stop it. For years our inability to punish wrong doing with any sense of vengeance, or to chastise and set parameters for children’s behavior, or for parents to accept the responsibilities that come with parenthood and to discipline their children and set guidelines of what is and isn’t acceptable have created an inflexible, amoral mindset of self-serving apathy, viciousness and worthlessness. Our collective psyches slowly nullified by the combined forces of capitalism at its most crass and welfare statism at its most soporific and stultifying. Leaving us either incapable or unwilling to accept responsibility for  our own actions at best, and at worst allowing us to shirk adulthood altogether in preference for a life lived forever young; like a kind of Chav Eloi which prefers tattoos and trainers to whites and pumps.

In fact, decades of rejoicing in stupidity, deriding competitiveness, elevating failure, rubbishing elitism and swallowing in the antics of ‘celebrities’, whose every move is fawned over, analysed and mimicked by a population desperate for something to believe in have created a society and a mindset in which the ‘self’ and self-gratification transcends all. Now the ‘I’ want, ‘I’ need and ‘I’ am is everything. Our selfish desire to consume more and more, for recognition among our friends and for a bit of our own celebrity, coupled with a sense of worth are fueled by our ‘rights’. It is our ‘right’ to play music loud, to behave badly, to shout and scream and to seemingly do anything, even commit crime yet be protected from punishment by our Human Rights. Rights that allow a serial burglar freedom from prison because of his ‘rights’ to be with his children. Children that are in turn paid for by the State because of the criminals ‘right’ to create life. Rights, more rights, and more rights, rights ad nauseam... But no Wrongs.

This slow corruption or morphing of society from one which, if not perfect, that at least still had a moral compass and enforced a sense of right and wrong to one which, devoid of virtue, has replaced basic moral values with a set of legal ‘Rights’. Rights which can, unlike morals but like goalposts, be moved and tweaked by clever lawyers and which allow wrongdoers and those whose actions have broken the old morals to not only claim the ‘moral‘ high ground again and again, but often to punish and chastise those whose views or values society once protected. Clever lawyers have made black white and white black and helped drive society towards a new barbarism where all values are only as strong or as a weak as the lawyer defending them and where wrong can often be right.

Now as a generation born into a Rights obsessed society give birth and their children reach adulthood and exercise their right to be stupid, inarticulate, illiterate and unemployable, so these Darwinian throwbacks take out their frustration and sense of worthlessness on the few creatures in our litigious society who have no rights, the animals. 

Therefore when the fifteen year old thugs that destroyed, maimed and mutilated the defenseless animals in an inner city farm in Manchester are tried, their lawyers will defend their rights over all else and ensure that they are not punished as they deserve to be. As no doubt will the lawyers defending other representatives of the UK’s burgeoning Eloi population who are responsible for so much pain and suffering among our animal kingdom. 

Perhaps soon the moral pendulum that has swung so far in favour of our Rights, will finally start to swing back in favour of our Responsibilities and begin restoring not just a sense of wrong but of punishment as well. For the people that commit these terrible crimes are truly unworthy of ‘rights’, or in fact the right to create life at all. They have no function, their life’s are pointless and we as a society should begin the process of eradicating them with the same thoroughness with which they now seem to be eradicating England’s wildlife.

Generation XXX - Born to Porn

Years ago in 1967 or 1968, when I was maybe ten or eleven years old, I found a stack of porn magazines while exploring the families rambling home in which various members of our extended tribe resided, the house had seventeen bedrooms, labyrinthine cellars and extensive grounds and had been requisitioned by the army during the second world war so finding exciting items in some abandoned corner was not that unusual, though I never found a wardrobe into Narnia or some secret passage containing hidden treasure which is what I was usually looking for. On this occasion though I had found a fencing sword and was having imagery battles in one of the older and more dilapidated parts of the cellars when I rammed the sword into an old blanket that was lying on top of a pile of coal, and with a deft flick of my wrist had hurled the blanket into the air revealing a box full of porn magazines. Treasure indeed!

I can't remember much about the magazines now and think that probably they were mainly American strong softcore titles, which meant that they would have contained full nudity, women in stockings and fetish gear and strong sex scenes but not hordcore penetration, though they certainly contained much stronger and a lot more graphic material than was readily available in the UK at the time. I remember being very excited about my 'find' and took one or two of the magazines into my Church of England Primary School the next day to show my friends. This proved to be a big mistake... 

When I got to school I showed the magazines to a few chums in the playground, the children went mad, shouting and screaming and calling their friends over and within minutes I was at the centre of a huge scrum of excited, almost hysterical boys and girls all jostling and fighting with each other to get a look at some naked flesh. Of course even in the non PC nineteen sixties a huge mêlée involving half the school was not going to be tolerated and soon a couple of our teachers waded into the throng to see what was going on and there in the middle was me, clutching a couple of, by this time, rather disheveled pictures of breasts and bottoms. I was also, I expect, smirking gleefully. 

Then all hell broke lose. I was marched to the headmasters office, canned, my mother called in, my father notified and with stern faces all round I was cross-examined as to where I had got hold of such filth and threatened with expulsion. I stuck to my story that I had found the magazines in a bin on the way to school, this still being a time when children could walk to and from school without fear, and eventually the matter was dropped. I'm sure that there was a bit more fallout but if there is it is now lost in the mists of time and I suspect too that our coal bunker only contained coal in future.

I mention this story of my childhood because over the last few days newspapers and the BBC have been full of stories regarding the readily available amount of pornography on the internet and how easily accessible that material is to children, teenagers and young adults and wanted to illustrate that up until a few years ago the exact opposite was true. The main gist of these articles is the concern many parents, psychologists and the wider society have that children's attitudes to relationships and to each other are being harmed by exposure to often pretty extreme pornography. This concern is more focused now because the wider availability of pornography began with the arrival of Web2o in the early noughties and now almost a decade later we are beginning to see children and teenagers of the Web2o decade become adults. 

This is the first generation that has grown up with pornography so readily available to them, yet they are also bombarded with warnings as to the malign, predatory and dangerous nature of sex. So in an already confusing world, sex is good and available at the click of button and bad because because every email or approach from an unknown adult is a paedophile out to do harm.

A new survey for the BBC has also shown that 8 out of 10 young men between 18 and 24 have looked at porn which is hardly surprising given that men of almost any age are thinking about sex virtually nonstop and between 15 and 30 are almost ready to explode with sexual angst so drooling over porn whilst not exactly edifying is hardly surprising. Nor is the fact that at least a third of young women have look at porn as well given that contrary to popular belief women are just as highly sexed as men if not more so, they are just a bit more circumspect in their drooling and lusting than men.

What is inconvertible though is that young people are seeing pornography at a younger and younger age and that is having an effect. The fashion for women to shave off their public hair stems from pornography, as does breast augmentation, labiaplasty and vaginoplasty. So did the demystifying of anal sex, cunnilingus and the introducing to a once fairly straight public a pornucopia of sexual proclivities covering everything from double penetration to fisting and beyond.

Many of these aspects of pornography are enlightening and for many empowering,

and, personally having fought adult censorship in the courts and having begun the legal process that legalized pornography in the UK, would not want to see the pendulum begin swinging back the other way. However it is not good that young children are accessing hardcore porn, yet the censoring of the internet is neither desirable or easily achievable unless the UK Government wishes to bring in draconian laws on a par with China or Saudi Arabia. Far better that we learn how to educate and help this new generation absorb what is going on around them and to understand, explain and reason the effects of what they are or will be seeing.

For boys this may mean explaining to them that what they see in porn does automatically equate to how they have sex with their girlfriend and that equally a girl doesn’t have to make love like a pornstar. They can and should be themselves. Most of all they need to understand that pornography needs to shock to survive, and as its audience and they themselves becomes jaded and immune through over exposure, so pornography as stimuli has to become increasing jaded in turn as unfortunately that is the nature of the beast.

Yes pornography is desensitising and should not readily be available to children, but pornography is only one aspect of a sexualized media that is bombarding children and adults alike with sexual images and messages in everything we see. From pop videos to the marketing of clothes and make-up, through to the antics of celebrities and reality TV contestants. The message being that sex is at the centre of everything and more than ever that message is 'if you've got it, flaunt it!'. 

The internet sex genie is out of the bottle and nothing short of an authoritarian or religious revolution will put in back in again. I suspect that now if a smirking ten year old brought a porn magazine to school he would find few takers and in a way that lost excitement of innocence is sad but time moves on. Now most young people will see porn as a kind of rite of passage to adulthood, they will look and then move on, some will have a problem with it, like others have problems with drink and drugs, but that is life and we cannot legislate for a minority. Far better to trust Generation XXX with being better able to handle porn and let them get on with making Generation YYY in their own natural way...

LYING, VYING AND CRYING: POLITICIANS, IMMIGRATION & THE NATION STATE

As the UK’s Coalition government edges ever closer to collapse and its politician’s snipe and jostle with each other, maneuvering themselves into the best and most favourable  positions in which to jump ship or carry favour with the UK’s increasingly volatile media, so its leaders, Nick Clegg and David Cameron, appear ever more desperate and despairing. Clegg in particular seems to be on the verge of a breakdown, bursting into tears because he has become a hate figure to students for breaking his election pledge not to raise tuition fees, or getting hysterical and girly, worrying about all the anger ‘out there’. Yet it is his, and the nation’s, ridiculous leader David Cameron whose behaviour is really bordering on the manic. Cameron bigged it up with the Egyptian’s in Tahrir Square, then dressed down ‘man-of-the-people’ style with the Ryaniar regulars with nothing more than a change of socks for hand luggage for a long weekend holiday with his wife and as soon as he got back declared war on Libya. 

Then, with hardly time to pause or breath in between making dire threats against Colonel Gaddafi, Cameron, now wrapped in the robes of cultural diversity and multiculturalism, launched into a bitter diatribe against Oxford University describing it as a disgrace for only admitting one black student in the last academic year based on her merits - the implication being that from now on Oxford should dumb down to let in more ethnically desirable types regardless of their academic qualifications.  Then within days he had ditched the cultural diversity robes and wrapped himself in a Union Jack and set about attacking the number of immigrants in the UK, saying that Labour’s ‘open door policy’ was responsible and that the number of foreigners in the UK was dangerously high. 

No doubt in the days to come Cameron will threaten to invade Syria, announce further cutbacks in the armed forces, pledge to observe Ramadan and eat only Halal meat before denouncing the failure of immigrants to integrate and threatening to follow France and ban the burka. This is Cameron desperately playing to the gallery and failing as his inconsistency and insincerity make it impossible for anyone to know what he really means and what he really intends to do about any of these soundbite pronouncements. Nothing probably.

Yet in amongst these ramblings are real concerns that have been ignored for years and which should be addressed, which makes their being spewed out by Cameron like so much political ectoplasm all the more tragic. There are too many immigrants in the UK and successive governments not only opened the door, they wedged it open and no one, even now, has had the guts to close it. Likewise, as mentioned in an earlier Cameron rant, multiculturalism has failed, failed in ways that will potentially destroy our societies as the sinister Talabanisation of London’s Tower Hamlet’s and other UK cities shows. 

Here women, even non Muslim women, are being threatened and intimidated for wearing revealing Western clothes, and advertisements on billboards and bus shelters which feature scantily clad women are being painted black.  Yet as usual the politicians and police play it down, dismissing the threats as the actions of a small minority, a ‘minority’ that will one day knock on their door as well. This sort of action has been building for years, in Bradford over five years ago prostitutes were driven out of Muslim areas and Western girls were ‘advised’ to dress conservatively walking through them and, in a sign of things to come, advertisers avoided giving ‘offense’ by not booking ads in their area that showed women in underwear or bikinis. Always appeasement, always avoiding confrontation, always defeat.

Cameron’s reason for attacking multiculturalism and immigration is cynical in that there are elections coming up and he’s trying to win back Tory voters who have drifted away by talking tough on issues they care about, yet he will do nothing. Even when in Tower Hamlets again, Muslim radicals attacked another totem of our inclusive society, gay rights, the powers that be first blamed the mysterious ‘minority’ and then, once a paper had suggested that members of the ‘far right’ had done it to stir up trouble, blamed members of the English Defense League. Of course they had done it, they or anyone other than the crazed Islamists in our midst who can do no wrong in the eyes of our weak and increasingly impotent democracy. 

Again and again we are seeing the English revert to type, not the brave, bold warriors of legend, but the craven, subservient appeasers personified by Neville Chamberlain and the little man, the health and safety politically correct busy bodies that infest our councils and local government, whose aim is to facilitate our colonization as smoothly as possible. Yet nothing is done? Newspapers, websites and forums are full of vague threats and talk of people rising up, yet nothing happens. We are like the willing victims of massacres like Babi Yar, whereby thousands of people allow themselves to be marched out of their towns and villages, to be stripped and shot by a comparatively small number of soldiers. They often knew what was coming, heard the shots as they lined up over trenches of bodies and yet did nothing accept wait for death. The executioners often thought it was because the victims knew that their fate was to die and accepted it. 

Perhaps our fate, like England’s, is to die too... 

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.

Muscles in Search of a Tussle

Cameron and Obama having been caught like a rabbits in a cars headlights during the uprisings in Tunisia and Egypt now seem determined to show the world that not only are they on the side of protest but that they stand shoulder to shoulder with the rebels in Libya. That they are, verbally at least, ready to fight and shed blood to topple the dreaded Gaddafi. Cameron in particularly seems to have been pumping himself full of testosterone and watching old Jean-Claude Van Damme movies with the result that he seems to be issuing blood-curdling threats against Gaddafi's regime on a daily basis. 

Issuing threats is fine of course if one can back them up, playing to the world's gallery and saying that you're going to bomb Lybia, or send in troops or unilaterally enforce a no fly zone, when the UK's armed forces are so depleted that they'd now be hard-pushed enforcing a no-fly zone over the Isle of Wight let alone Libya is just crass. In fact all Cameron has done is draw attention to the UK's military weakness, his own volatility and capacity for decision making by petulance.    

Obama too, along with his coterie of diversity experts and human rights advisers, has been falling over himself to look at one with Libya's rebel fighters and cool and caring to the rest of the world. Image and how that plays out on YouTube and Twitter rather than realpolitik now seem to obsess the West's leaders with Obama now so cautious not to be seen putting a foot wrong that he made himself look shallow and vacuous during Egypt 's uprising and then overzealous trying to compensate for past errors when Libya's protests escalated into civil  war. 

This is sound bite politics with foreign policy now being dictated by how it plays out on Twitter, with solutions wanted in days and alliances that were built up over decades now

abandoned with a click of the delete button. In France, President Sarkozy, who like Obama had been all over the place during Tunisia's and Egypt's uprisings, has gone even further in his attempts to be 'in' with Libya's rebels First France recognized them as Libya's rightful leaders and then sending in France's jets to bomb Libya within seconds of securing UN support for a no fly zone. No doubt we will soon see Sarkozy and Carli wearing matching Keffiyeh scarfs. Tres Cool.

Yet who are the rebels that Obama and company are so keen to be associated with? Are they really the ernest young Facebook, pro democracy crusaders so beloved of the West's media  or are they Islamist fanatics who will replace Gaddafi's dictatorship with one of their own? The West has no idea. Certainly not the CIA whose director was reduced to watching Al Jezeera and CNN to find out what was happening during Mubarack's final days or the UK's Foreign Secretary Willaim Hague,  whose overseeing and involvement in the sending of a 'small diplomatic team' to Libya which was then captured by Libya's rebel forces along with an SAS squad sent to rescue them made Hague and the UK look ridiculous. 

More riduculous still is the West's rush to recognize, endorse and interfere in Middle East affairs at a stage where existing order is still in a state of flux and new rulers and governments have yet to emerge. In both Tunisia and Egypt it is very unclear who or what grouping will end up in control though in both countries the radical forces of Islam are increasingly showing their hand with many symbols of Western and Christian culture being attacked, closed or abolished. Yet within days of Mubarack's forced exit Britain's monarchial leader David Cameron was in Egypt shaking every hand presented to him without the faintest idea of who they were and what they represented. What mattered was that he was there first, in the flesh and on TV with the Tahrir Square celebs. 

Yemen and Syria are now subject to daily protests and violent state put downs and in Bahrain protest has been virtually crushed thanks to nearby Saudi Arabia loaning tanks and soldiers to Bahrain's ruling royal family. Yet in Libya, where nature was taking its course and Gaddafi's forces were on the verge of winning their internal civil war against the rebels, the West has seen fit to interfere militarily, enforcing a no fly zone and bombing Gaffafi's troops into oblivion.

The result has been a reversal in the rebels forces fortunes, with the rebels recapturing cities thanks to Nato air support meaning that the country could end up split in two or, possibly, depending on how much Nato wants to big it up, the use of ground forces to ensure Gaddafi's demise and defeat.  Whatever happens what would have been a violent but quick ending is now in all probability going to be a long drawn out, inconclusive mess with the West faffing around trying to maintain the moral high-ground while the Libya people continue suffering.

Yet this new liberal-left moral jingoism is also totally selective, with no help for Bahrain's Shia rebels who were being mowed down by the King's forces or the slaughtered in Yemen being offered. It is also ill conceived  with the West's might seemingly being committed on an emotional whim rather than national or strategic interests and with no planned exits or long term goal other than being seen to have been good in righting a selective, morally approved, wrong. 

That the move into Libya's affairs was orchestrated by France's vainglorious Sarkozy and backed by a reluctant US President should have been warning enough that this was probably not the best move. That it wasn't was obvious after Obama's brazen attempts to distance the US within days of the first bombings. That, and the emerging news that many of the rebels are sympathetic to, or supporters of, Al Qaeda show that far from Cameron bigging up our foreign policy he's actually dumbing it down.