Mon 12 Dec 2005
Excellent piece on the French riots and ongoing reasons for the mass violence. Of course this was widely mis-reported, misinterpreted and misunderstood from here. And the nazi-ass right crowed about the violence in a country that had a totally different political and economic system to the US. “They have a welfare state, so a welfare state doesn’t stop people rioting.” Of course there are many similarities. Increasingly heavy-handed militarization of the police, ongoing, everyday racism, economic deprivation and ghettoisation. These are the things that minorities, whether immigrant or home grown, receive daily, as a matter of course. When you are treated like scum (and called such by relevant Government figures in times of stress) then anger and violence will often tend to follow. Of course in an environment of continuing and escalating anti-muslem sentiment and racist violence, well, we’ve seen in Cronulla yesterday what happens when “ordinary people” (which they are, but that doesn’t mean they have some intrinsic down-to-earth sensibleness and moderateness, or intrinsic quality of goodness) start following the real messages of ‘non-racists’ like our glorious fuhrer. He and others wind up the rhetoric, and then deny all knowledge. Of course, as John Howard says, we mustn’t “rush to judge” the racist scum who try to “take back their” beaches (never stolen because there weren’t any white people already here). No, we only rush to judge asylum seekers, and Iraqis defending their country, and anyone too different. This is only a more overt example of the treatment meeted out to those minorities who try to defend themselves, and under the current federal and state juntas, it’s only going to get worse.
Posted by Francis under Uncategorized1 Comment
