London riots
This post should have been a retrospective on Charlton’s League Cup game, which selfishly I am still pissed off at missing, with the added annoyance of having spent money on a hotel room and match ticket. It’s the third game that has been moved or postponed that I’ve come back for in past year…. ok, selfish rant over.
After the game Saturday my son and I stayed at my brother’s in Hackney, and when I woke on Sunday morning I truly thought he was watching some library clips from the 1985 Broadwater Farm riots. I was in Hornchurch Sunday night but my brother spent most of it stood looking out of his window with his baseball bat as groups of yobs roamed the streets outside. Fortunately the police unsettled them enough to move the low-life’s toward Bethnal Green Road.
I’ve been trying to put into writing my thoughts on the rioting for a couple of days but have been unable to muster the words, although both Marco and Dave expressed some of my feelings excellently and far better than me in the heat of the moment.
We are now left with the blame game – the government, society, parents, the heat, police but no ones to blame except the scumbags who on some conceit of a cause are gratuitously looting, mugging, smashing things up and burning things down.
There is no cause, no reason, it is just some sort of sickening violent bandwagon. The word riot would indicate that these criminals have some sort of grudge or they are poverty stricken, as they carry flat screen televisions over their shoulders and would struggle I am sure to remember the name of the man, shot dead by police.
Ordinary people are disgusted and I hope those with hoods over their heads and scarves covering their faces get hunted down and are severely dealt with in the courts.
Met Police Flickr site
The Guardian Flickr site
Force is only justified in self-defense of one’s legitimate, individual rights.
Anything more is simply immoral, and this rioting is nothing more than gratuitous violence and theft from young thugs in an industrialized nation hiding behind claims of poverty and freedom from state oppression – a quick examination of the third world is all that’s needed to determine that these individuals are not abused. They are the abusers.
Many on the fringes of libertarianism have come out in support of these riots, but that is a mistake – it’s not a revolution for any cause, for the defense of any liberty, or for the overthrowing of a tyrant.
Just violence, exactly as you pointed out.
And to lower the tone a little bit, in the midst of all the riots Man City still found time to sign a new striker. Mario Grabatelli