UK Riots' Resource and Cultural Roots: an in-the-trenches report |
by Jan Lundberg and Chris Dilworth | |
10 August 2011 | |
Publisher's note: Thanks to the submission of a report from a UK youth/homeless counselor and educator who sees the big picture consistent with Culture Change, we present his poignant and profound observations (see Chris Dilworth's section at end). - Jan Lundberg
I have stayed in Hackney, a poor section of London where rioting has been going on. It was a squat turned into a quasi-public word-of-mouth home, shared with revolving travelers and seekers. In the neighborhood I noticed anti-landlord graffiti. I was impressed by the conviviality and mutual aid of the squat. Needless to say, there was no bureaucracy involved. Nothing to riot about against the anarchistic management. The UK is to a great extent a packed, overpopulated consumer society. How people can get by year after year based on generating cash to buy largely imported goods, without the former connection to the land they once held in common, is an amazing miracle. Of course it would break down, as we have just seen. On my visit to Hackney and London, where I was speaking at The Institute of Petroleum, I got the full flavor of the metropolis. I was not impressed by the old monuments and "sense of history," rather it was dreary and hopeless to me. The downtrodden people aren't just the poor black youth enraged in the streets; they are "The little man who gets the train / Got a mortgage hanging over his head / But he's too scared to complain / 'Cause he's conditioned that way... / And all the houses in the street they've got a name / 'Cause all the houses in the street they look the same" - Shangri-La, the Kinks For those not up on the news, there have been "blazing cars and running street battles in Hackney, of police horses lining up in Lewisham, of roiling infernos that were once shops and houses in Croydon and in Peckham. Last night, Enfield, Walthamstow, Brixton and Wood Green were looted; there have been hundreds of arrests and dozens of serious injuries, and it will be a miracle if nobody dies tonight. This is the third consecutive night of rioting in London, and the disorder has now spread to Leeds, Liverpool, Bristol and Birmingham [and Manchester, Gloucester and Leicester]." - Laurie Penny, 24-year-old London journalist While the austerity measures impacting the poor in the UK are fearsome and loathsome, to analyze the rioting by looking at government finances and employment is to look at the mere surface. British society grew out of not just hierarchy but theft of the commons (the Enclosure) and the costs of its pointless but profitable, fading empire. What's more, peak oil has hit, reducing not just the North Sea petroleum-extraction revenue but jacking up of energy costs -- and energy costs are shot through everything people buy. How can people riot against peak oil? They don't and they can't, but they sure as hell will riot against the effects. Just wait until the riots are out-and-out food riots. Carrying capacity of the gentle English ecosystem has been surpassed and trampled. The rich can buy what they want, only up to a point. The debate on whether it's an insurrection or a violent reaction that will just fade is moot when we look at it all as a "rats in a cage" syndrome. In no way do I view people as rats or deserving to be caged. But let us be objective and see what modern society has done. Are there too many people for the local land and what it can offer? Britain industrialized originally because it had lost it's handy forests for fuel, so it exploited coal -- technologies for extraction, transport and processing became "wonders" celebrated as progress. If modern life is viewed by the average person as simply progress and science, having said goodbye to tribal ways and roots, then being an oil-dependent consumer who does what he or she is told by the "democratic" and "representative" government (and police state) is all well and good. Unfortunately, there is little future in it, and the injustice and inequality of it is something to riot over. The social justice activists generally don't understand peak oil or ecology. Is the message in the Jethro Tull Song, Living in The Past, apropos? "Now there's revolution but they don't know what they're fighting"? Riots will come to the United Paved Precincts of America (USA) too, but whether they'll be termed food riots or class warfare is of secondary importance to the big picture of overpopulation, overcrowding, and peak oil (which arrived in the U.S. in 1971). Petrol (gasoline) protests and shortage rocked the UK in 2000, as high prices and strikes involved blockades and interruption of supply. The causes were never addressed or solved, despite The Institute of Petroleum's taking note of my proposed "Citizen Petroleum Councils" idea in Feb. 2003. To implement something like that, there would have to be true democracy and open communication for all, instead of institutionalized and corporate-controlled media devoted to the status quo. UK youth counselor on the cause of the riots Chris Dilworth in the UK supplied this analysis to Culture Change: Youngsters are running riot around the country. Some of us, who work in education and on the 'street', kind of predicted and warned of this possible eventuality. It has happened. Our kids have been trained to consume; have been thwarted by lack of progression and aspiration.The article on overpopulation by John Omaha from Culture Change Magazine, late Fall 2001, is Overpopulation & terrorism: rats in a cage. It said, When a pair of reproductively competent rats are placed in a closed space and provided with sufficient food, they will reproduce and reproduce until the space is filled with rats. At a critical density, wars break out. Some rats, alpha males, claim territory and defend it. Others attack. Sound familiar? Only difference between rats and humans is the language-making capability of the human left brain. We humans give names to our territories -- "World Trade Center" is one. The right brain, impelled by drives and emotions, is the fundamental force operating here. The left brain makes "reasons" for what the right brain is going to do anyway. Some of these "reasons" are: democracy, Islam, God, Allah, terrorist, Third World, globalization. Further reading: Overcrowding in Our Less and Less Natural Environment by Jan Lundberg, March 2009 How The U.S. Population Can Overcome Its World Class Confusion, by Jan Lundberg, August 1, 2011 British Riots: Elites "Shocked" The Poor Are Rising Up Against Brutal Austerity Measures and Panic on the streets of London by Laurie Penny, Aug 9, 2011: "Riots are about power, and they are about catharsis... very few people know why this is happening. They don’t know, because they were not watching these communities." Toward conservation, food security and peace: Citizen petroleum councils, Culture Change e-Letter #11, January 2003, by Jan Lundberg The petrol crisis of 2000: Impact of September 2000 Fuel Price Protests on UK Critical Infrastructure, January 25, 2005 On September 7, the first oil refinery, at Stanlow, Cheshire, was blockaded. Protests spread rapidly with more refineries blockaded on September 8 resulting in nation-wide panic buying of fuel on September 9. On Sunday, September 10, the protests had closed Britain's largest oil terminal at Kingsbury, West Midlands, and huge queues at gas stations were reported. By Tuesday, September 12, protesters had blocked six of the UK's eight refineries. Over half of Britain's gas stations were shut.
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