Still, England has not yet collapsed into a nightmare of destruction and despair.
By Christopher Hitchens
"I realized that the collapse of British society into a Hobbesian nightmare of mutual predation and despair was still some distance off when I caught two little straws in the wind. The first was a well-framed photograph of a badly scorched bit of London, taken on the morning after a night of riots and vandalism."
Read More (Slate)
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11 comments:
Fantastic article, and very welcome:):)
A good article, which puts good perspective on the riots in Britain; however, Peter Hitchins' article, despite his often copious superstitious arguments, is better. The particular details, lacking in Chistopher's, do help to explain the inadequateness in policing, sentencing, and preventing the kind of crime we saw.
In my local town the pious were blaming the riots on homosexuals lowering the moral standards of the community. Oh and also on giving gays and single mothers access to IVF. It seems the religious can never tire of applying old prejudices in new ways!
Great article. I have a brilliant solution for all the problems in Great Britain. First instead of the broom pictures PR stunt we take pictures of impoverished, malnourished, unemployed, police abused minority (muslim, black, carribean, etc) youths. We write articles about how cruel Great Britain is to its minorities. We impose world wide sanctions. When everyone is nice and starving, we arm the youths and form Liberation Armies across all of Great Britain. We let them have them have a go at each other, a bit of the ultra violence. Then to calm the situation we have NATO air strikes, of course with depleted uranium. Then we dissect Great Britain into small independent states, put international troops all over the land and hail it all as victory for democracy, peace, and stability. It seemed to work in the Balkans. Who is with me?
Dem a loot, dem a shoot, dem a wail. A Shanty Town Dem a loot, dem a shoot, dem a wail
I think London needed a bit of Charles Bronson action:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LvSwpljtxlg&feature=player_detailpage
Peter's article is better?? Christopher Hitchens' article puts the recent UK riots in the context of a history of violent group behavior that Britain has been seeing off and on for centuries, while also noting many people's constructive responses to the mayhem. His brother, in his Daily Mail blog, puts the same unpleasantness in the context of perceived social/moral breakdown in his own society (blamed, of course, on a "lavish welfare state"), as if riots were happening all the time in the UK these days, where they had *never* occurred before. Plus, Peter's prescribed remedy kicks off with smacking and caning schoolchildren (a paraphrase), supposedly to teach them not to mistreat others. Lord have mercy...
--Karen Olsen
"We ARE using MASSIVE third world
immigration to destroy British culture beyond repair, once and for all,---FOREVER."
-TONY BLAIR/JACK STRAW
(Daily Mail interview)
The 'continuity of agenda' in a nutshell.
---ALLLL we need to know.
Oh Hitch, would you please hurry up and get well! You are, with the possible exception of wor Boris, the only person who has reacted to this brouhaha with calm and reason. Cameron, on the other hand, showed just what a ridiculous little pipsqueak he is by yelping about moral decay and the end of society as we know it.
So get well, Hitch, and do carry on! We need you!
Ah great, a made up Tony Blair quote.
Having once lived in Bradford for a decade, I fail to see how Married homosexuals or Bangladeshis could have made it worse than it was. borrowing from the jungle book, it has 'reached the bottom and had to stop'. Busting that joint up would cause as much damage as beating the sand on the beach with a hammer. I suspect the areas of rioting were much the same and I am sure the Cheltenham wallahs were neither shaken nor stirred.
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