World August Riots Newswire Archive

It takes one very simple sentence, to explain -how- an Inquest Jury in the High Court, erroneously produced the widely reported media headlines, that Mark Duggan was "lawfully" killed by the Metropolitan Police.

The Judge improperly -directed- the Inquest Jury, over what could be called evidence, and the Duggans' lawyers, did not properly challenge that.

Ultimately if the Duggan family had proper legal representation, a European Court ruling, would lead to the proper verdict of unlawful killing.

Sheffield anarchobass label serves up it two penneth on the UK summer of rage...

The rebellious anarchist magazine is back with another 92 pages of resistance and revolution to keep you ticking. D.I.Y and not for profit, this magazine aims to be a voice from the uncontrollables.

System failure

In light of these conflicting interests it is puzzling to see so many - among them Anarchists - defending "communities" and denouncing attacks on them. These communities are not communes, no free associations of producers and consumers, not groups with common interests, but ensembles of conflicting ones. Shop owners, workers, estate kids, council workers, small and large scale capitalists, they do not have the same interests, many of them have directly conflicting ones. The call for community spirit in disregard of what these communities are is, in essence, the same as a nationalist call for unity: a call to subject ones' own interests to that of the "common good". A common good that asks for subordination and restriction. This appreciation of the moralistic collective is what appeals to right-wing, left-wing and some radical writers alike.

For a few days in August 2011, the riots in Britain's cities flashed a searing light across the troubled sleep to which we, the ordinary people of that country, have been reduced by three decades of spiritless submission to the logic of capitalism. The only meaningful questions to ask about the riots are: how far did they go in repudiating the society that dominates us, and how can that repudiation be extended and deepened? Everything else is the howling of dogs.

In this article, Takis sees the tremendous explosion of anger by the British underclass as part of similar recent explosions in France and Greece of the main victims of neoliberal globalisation and particularly those who have not yet been integrated into it.

Three follow-up comments on the London riots, drawn in part from astute comments from friends and strangers.

At five: discussing the big stories in Bristol, Britain and around the world
After six: straight talking and investigative reports with Martin Summers and Marina Morris

First, this recurrent accusation of "materialistic" signals a broader refusal not of consumerism - with which you are well familiar and for which you cheerlead full-throated - but of the material fact of social disruption. To speak, with disdain, at the materialistic nature of these days is to speak, beneath your tongue, of a desire that people should go back to "protesting" in ways that remain representational: be counted, be seen, be ignored, go back to the places they live, remain there. It marks your horror at what it looks like for "protest" to become material, and, at that point, no longer protest.

Dear you all,

I fear we have nothing to say to each other.

What follows may therefore represent one half of a dialogue in the way that yelling at a jukebox made of ice does. Perhaps the sheer exertion of speaking - a certain quantity of hot air - will soften the surface a bit, but it's a pretty one-sided discussion. And it doesn't mean you can or will stop repeating the records you have been given to play, those looping phrases and evasions.

More bombs drop on Tripoli and across Libya tonight. Theses bombs dropped by the British government whose own youth are setting that country on fire in protest at their abandonment.

Music + words released about the riots - and forward thinking, and a better place.

As social war erupts in the UK, we torched a BBC Radio transmission mast in the early hours of August 11th 2011. The mast was located in the Bedminster Down area of Bristol and is managed by Arquiva.

Prime Minister David Cameron chaired a meeting of the governmental emergency COBRA committee yesterday and called a special sitting in parliament for Thursday, in response to continuing rioting in London that has spread to other towns and cities in England.

“One formula [...] can be that of the mob: gullible, fickle, herdlike, low in taste and habit. [...] If [...] our purpsoe is manipulation – the persuasion of a large number of people to act, feel, think, known in certain ways – the convenient formula will be that of the masses”. — Raymond Williams

NIck Griffin, surrounded by a group of convicted, racist thugs, is visiting Smithdown Road to peddle his own brand of violent racism.

The rioting and looting which followed the shooting of Mark Duggan by the police has been called an 'outrage' and an 'atrocity', terms usually reserved for murder and genocide rather than the burning of department stores.

Britain saw its third consecutive night of widespread burning of properties and looting as riot police failed to contain gangs of masked youths marauding several parts of the capital, London. There were reports too of violence fanning out to other cities across Britain.

Britain’s social decay has been seething over several decades, overseen by Conservative and Labour governments alike. The burning issues that need to be addressed to explain the outburst of arson, looting and rioting are endemic racism endured by Britain’s black community and, more generally, the deepening poverty that is increasingly racking British society.

Theresa May making a fool of herself on the BBC prompted a phone call to BBC saying 1911 Tonypandy were followed in 1912 by the Minimum Wages Act.