The August 2011 UK Riots

There is much talk about why these riots have occurred. It comes largely from either people that have never been part of a riot or from some of the media's pet social community commentators.

Subsequently all the usual excuses and condemnations are regurgitated by the usual suspects. The theme of these tends to be along the lines of: "this happened because the world is not the way I think it should be".

I have been in a number of riots. I lived for many years in inner London in a variety of dead end jobs. E.g. Retail store warehouseman and a cardboard box factory operative, so I understand clearly the feelings, thoughts and emotions of the rioters.

For a member of a gang, it will be something like this:
There will be some period of wild expectation and speculation prior to the event. Many talks about "we'll do this" or "we'll do that". We will all know this speculative nonsense for what it is but it's fun anyway.

The concept that the police and *any* business or manifestation of government is 'the enemy' is implicit and unquestioned (here lies the actual problem) so the 'how, where and when' of the attack is all that the discussions will consist of. The 'who' is obviously 'us'. There will be a multitude of suggestions and rumours, culminating at some point, in actually going out to see what is happening. This is an exciting time as we are going to take part in a big confrontation and we don't know what the outcome will be. We could all be arrested or get a kicking from the police so it's exciting.

Once we are on the streets and have encountered other groups like ours, we become part of a mob. Mobs have an implicit command hierarchy. There will be one or more people that are used to giving orders (called natural leaders in the army) and so when orders are given this results in instant obedience from the immediate group. All the others then follow. This is how mobs seem to respond so quickly. These 'Commanders' may have a loose plan, but their main purpose is to achieve their personal agenda which could be any one or more of these, or similar: 'steal valuable goods', 'get revenge on the police', 'take control of their manor, yard or hood to enhance their reputation', 'smash up some disrespectful shop owner', 'get on the TV' etc.

When it kicks off, (the initial acts of violence or vandalism) the mob crystallises into the initial small groups. We start looking out for our mates. We are surrounded by other well or less well known faces and many other strangers but everyone has a combined purpose. This may be something that we have never, and may never again, encounter (especially in our fractured society) and is the most powerful of human emotions. We become unstoppable.

Individuals take greater and greater risks, confronting well armed police lines individually, torching cars, gaining entry to premises or destroying something spectacularly and gaining respect accordingly. Imagine how some of these kids reputations will have been immortalised as they individually attack riot police with just their hands and get away with it. They can walk tall. They are now top men and have the media to prove it. It's their fifteen minutes of fame. Many, many young men will happily swap a year in jail for this as the youtube video will allow them to brag about it for years.

Throughout all of this, the feeling of being part of something huge, with a common purpose, clear opponents and clear membership of our group is all pervading. This bonds us all. We become something bigger than ourselves, our group, even our riot, we become part of a national movement to fight back against the oppression that we feel. We take risks for each other, we operate as a unit, we achieve our objectives, we gain a feeling of control, we prove our ownership of the streets (our streets), we prove our valour and we enhance our reputations so 'it is all good'. Irrespective of the consequences of the police operation, the arrests, the short sentences and community orders dished out this has been a great thing for us and we shall define ourselves for it for many years to come.

To see this in action we only need to look at the number of 'ex-gang-members' and participants in previous riots that are still trading on their criminal exploits as social or community workers to the extent where they can get a regular income from it.

The other side of the coin that is not visible to the public, is the immeasurably enhanced reputations from riot exploits for individual gang members that will help them to graduate to higher levels of criminality which is after all their life ambitions. Some people want to be a successful Banker or Politician, others want to be a successful Gangster.

BBC Country profile: Yemen

Where and what is Yemen Children?

Let's ask Auntie BBC?
The reputed home of the Queen of Sheba, Yemen has been at the crossroads of Africa, the Middle East and Asia for thousands of years thanks to its position on the ancient spice routes.
The Romans knew this fertile and wealthy country as Arabia Felix, in contrast to the relatively barren Arabia Deserta to the north. And today it maintains its distinct character.

Sounds romantic doesn't it? Having a distinct character...

Meanwhile back in the real world the same BBC fails to report this...

A Yemeni judge dissolved the marriage of an 8-year-old girl to a man nearly four times her age, and the girl's lawyer said Wednesday that the court also ordered the youngster removed from the control of the father who forced her into the wedding.

Yes you heard it right an 8 (EIGHT) year old Girl!

But that's allright, justice was served in the end when the Pedophile that married her was granted $250 compensation by the Judge.

I can feel another Fatwa coming on...

In an article a London based Iraqi Author, Aref Alwan has described how the Israelis have as much right to Israel as te Arabs do and how the denial of this and successive distortions of Islam has created the mess that the Arab world finds itself.
A kind of personal responsibility really rather than the continual assertions that all is the fault of the West.

Political Correctness

One of the best explanations of the origins of Political Correctness is in a speech by Bill Lind. The Origins of Political Correctness. He tends to harp on excessively about the tendency in Academia but it is an interesting historical insight into P.C.

In 1923 in Germany, a think-tank is established that takes on the role of translating Marxism from economic into cultural terms, that creates Political Correctness as we know it today, and essentially it has created the basis for it by the end of the 1930s. This comes about because the very wealthy young son of a millionaire German trader by the name of Felix Weil has become a Marxist and has lots of money to spend. He is disturbed by the divisions among the Marxists, so he sponsors something called the First Marxist Work Week, where he brings Lukacs and many of the key German thinkers together for a week, working on the differences of Marxism.

And he says, "What we need is a think-tank." Washington is full of think tanks and we think of them as very modern. In fact they go back quite a ways. He endows an institute, associated with Frankfurt University, established in 1923, that was originally supposed to be known as the Institute for Marxism. But the people behind it decided at the beginning that it was not to their advantage to be openly identified as Marxist. The last thing Political Correctness wants is for people to figure out it’s a form of Marxism. So instead they decide to name it the Institute for Social Research.

Weil is very clear about his goals. In 1971, he wrote to Martin Jay the author of a principal book on the Frankfurt School, as the Institute for Social Research soon becomes known informally, and he said, "I wanted the institute to become known, perhaps famous, due to its contributions to Marxism." Well, he was successful. The first director of the Institute, Carl Grunberg, an Austrian economist, concluded his opening address, according to Martin Jay, "by clearly stating his personal allegiance to Marxism as a scientific methodology." Marxism, he said, would be the ruling principle at the Institute, and that never changed.

The initial work at the Institute was rather conventional, but in 1930 it acquired a new director named Max Horkheimer, and Horkheimer’s views were very different. He was very much a Marxist renegade. The people who create and form the Frankfurt School are renegade Marxists. They’re still very much Marxist in their thinking, but they’re effectively run out of the party. Moscow looks at what they are doing and says, "Hey, this isn’t us, and we’re not going to bless this."

Horkheimer’s initial heresy is that he is very interested in Freud, and the key to making the translation of Marxism from economic into cultural terms is essentially that he combined it with Freudism. Again, Martin Jay writes, "If it can be said that in the early years of its history, the Institute concerned itself primarily with an analysis of bourgeois society’s socio-economic sub-structure," – and I point out that Jay is very sympathetic to the Frankfurt School, I’m not reading from a critic here – "in the years after 1930 its primary interests lay in its cultural superstructure. Indeed the traditional Marxist formula regarding the relationship between the two was brought into question by Critical Theory."

The stuff we’ve been hearing about this morning – the radical feminism, the women’s studies departments, the gay studies departments, the black studies departments – all these things are branches of Critical Theory. What the Frankfurt School essentially does is draw on both Marx and Freud in the 1930s to create this theory called Critical Theory. The term is ingenious because you’re tempted to ask, "What is the theory?" The theory is to criticize. The theory is that the way to bring down Western culture and the capitalist order is not to lay down an alternative. They explicitly refuse to do that. They say it can’t be done, that we can’t imagine what a free society would look like (their definition of a free society). As long as we’re living under repression – the repression of a capitalistic economic order which creates (in their theory) the Freudian condition, the conditions that Freud describes in individuals of repression – we can’t even imagine it. What Critical Theory is about is simply criticizing. It calls for the most destructive criticism possible, in every possible way, designed to bring the current order down. And, of course, when we hear from the feminists that the whole of society is just out to get women and so on, that kind of criticism is a derivative of Critical Theory. It is all coming from the 1930s, not the 1960s.

Other key members who join up around this time are Theodore Adorno, and, most importantly, Erich Fromm and Herbert Marcuse. Fromm and Marcuse introduce an element which is central to Political Correctness, and that’s the sexual element. And particularly Marcuse, who in his own writings calls for a society of "polymorphous perversity," that is his definition of the future of the world that they want to create. Marcuse in particular by the 1930s is writing some very extreme stuff on the need for sexual liberation, but this runs through the whole Institute. So do most of the themes we see in Political Correctness, again in the early 30s. In Fromm’s view, masculinity and femininity were not reflections of ‘essential’ sexual differences, as the Romantics had thought. They were derived instead from differences in life functions, which were in part socially determined." Sex is a construct; sexual differences are a construct.

Another example is the emphasis we now see on environmentalism. "Materialism as far back as Hobbes had led to a manipulative dominating attitude toward nature." That was Horkhemier writing in 1933 in Materialismus und Moral. "The theme of man’s domination of nature," according to Jay, " was to become a central concern of the Frankfurt School in subsequent years." "Horkheimer’s antagonism to the fetishization of labor, (here’s where they’re obviously departing from Marxist orthodoxy) expressed another dimension of his materialism, the demand for human, sensual happiness." In one of his most trenchant essays, Egoism and the Movement for Emancipation, written in 1936, Horkeimer "discussed the hostility to personal gratification inherent in bourgeois culture." And he specifically referred to the Marquis de Sade, favorably, for his "protest…against asceticism in the name of a higher morality."

How does all of this stuff flood in here? How does it flood into our universities, and indeed into our lives today? The members of the Frankfurt School are Marxist, they are also, to a man, Jewish. In 1933 the Nazis came to power in Germany, and not surprisingly they shut down the Institute for Social Research. And its members fled. They fled to New York City, and the Institute was reestablished there in 1933 with help from Columbia University. And the members of the Institute, gradually through the 1930s, though many of them remained writing in German, shift their focus from Critical Theory about German society, destructive criticism about every aspect of that society, to Critical Theory directed toward American society. There is another very important transition when the war comes. Some of them go to work for the government, including Herbert Marcuse, who became a key figure in the OSS (the predecessor to the CIA), and some, including Horkheimer and Adorno, move to Hollywood.

These origins of Political Correctness would probably not mean too much to us today except for two subsequent events. The first was the student rebellion in the mid-1960s, which was driven largely by resistance to the draft and the Vietnam War. But the student rebels needed theory of some sort. They couldn’t just get out there and say, "Hell no we won’t go," they had to have some theoretical explanation behind it. Very few of them were interested in wading through Das Kapital. Classical, economic Marxism is not light, and most of the radicals of the 60s were not deep. Fortunately for them, and unfortunately for our country today, and not just in the university, Herbert Marcuse remained in America when the Frankfurt School relocated back to Frankfurt after the war. And whereas Mr. Adorno in Germany is appalled by the student rebellion when it breaks out there – when the student rebels come into Adorno’s classroom, he calls the police and has them arrested – Herbert Marcuse, who remained here, saw the 60s student rebellion as the great chance. He saw the opportunity to take the work of the Frankfurt School and make it the theory of the New Left in the United States.

One of Marcuse’s books was the key book. It virtually became the bible of the SDS and the student rebels of the 60s. That book was Eros and Civilization. Marcuse argues that under a capitalistic order (he downplays the Marxism very strongly here, it is subtitled, A Philosophical Inquiry into Freud, but the framework is Marxist), repression is the essence of that order and that gives us the person Freud describes – the person with all the hang-ups, the neuroses, because his sexual instincts are repressed. We can envision a future, if we can only destroy this existing oppressive order, in which we liberate eros, we liberate libido, in which we have a world of "polymorphous perversity," in which you can "do you own thing." And by the way, in that world there will no longer be work, only play. What a wonderful message for the radicals of the mid-60s! They’re students, they’re baby-boomers, and they’ve grown up never having to worry about anything except eventually having to get a job. And here is a guy writing in a way they can easily follow. He doesn’t require them to read a lot of heavy Marxism and tells them everything they want to hear which is essentially, "Do your own thing," "If it feels good do it," and "You never have to go to work." By the way, Marcuse is also the man who creates the phrase, "Make love, not war." Coming back to the situation people face on campus, Marcuse defines "liberating tolerance" as intolerance for anything coming from the Right and tolerance for anything coming from the Left. Marcuse joined the Frankfurt School, in 1932 (if I remember right). So, all of this goes back to the 1930s.

In addition to the links to Hollywood and the CIA some members of the Institute for Social Research, among them Theodore Adorno went on to work for the Princeton Radio Project, a social research project funded by the Rockefeller Foundation. The work of the Radio Project included the development of methods of measuring the response of subjects to stimuli from radio programmes. The primary tool developed for this was the Stanton Lazarsfeld Program Analyzer named after Frank Stanton who went on to become the President of CBS.

It can be seen that these people were ideally placed to present the Critical Theory of the Frankfurt School and begin to influence society by the initial dissemination of Political Correctness in the media.

These people, both by their access to the media and their academic credentials were absolutely fundamental in the presentation and development of Critical Theory. In the Dialectic of Enlightenment by Max Horkheimer and Theodore Adorno they manage to shift the emphasis of Critical Theory from the initial Marxist critique of Capitalism to Western Society as a whole.

So under the new ideology of Political Correctness. Hey Presto! We are the villains and there's
absolutely nothing that anyone can say or do to deter the Politically Correct as their remit is simply to criticise. There is no need for reasoned argument or the application of facts or common sense as Critical Theory only needs to criticise. It has no need to construct.

We are outraged but surely we are not surprised?

The latest useful idiot to fall foul of the barbarity of the very "helpless victims of western imperialism" that she felt compelled to assist in person is British Schoolteacher Gillian Gibbons.

Having allowed a child in her class to name a teddy bear Muhammed she has been sentenced to 15 days in a Sudanese hellhole of a prison narrowly escaping the usually obligatory 40 lashes.

The streets around the courthouse were filled with chanting mobs armed with knives and mobilised by the local Imams who always seem manage to rise to the occasion whenever a mob of armed lunatics frothing at the mouth are required to defend Islam from crusading infidel 54 year old female Schoolteachers.

Apparently the the semi-official Assembly of the Ulemas, or Islamic clerics, said Wednesday that Gibbon's action was "another ring in the circles of plotting against Islam."

There's really nothing else to say is there?

One reason less to worry about Irans Nukes

It seems from Aviation Week that when Israel bombed the Dayr as-Zawr Syrian nuclear reactor they had already hacked the Syrian radar systems.

A good word for the Great Satan?

Anti-Americanism is hypocrisy at its finest. You can spend your evening catching the latest episode of "24" and then complain about Guantanamo the next morning. You can claim that the Americans have themselves to blame for terrorism, while at the same time calling for tougher restrictions on Muslim immigration to Germany. You can call the American president a mass murderer and book a flight to New York the next day. You can lament the average American's supposed lack of culture and savvy and meanwhile send off for the documents for the Green Card lottery.

Not a day passes in Germany when someone isn't making the wildest claims, hurling the vilest insults or spreading the most outlandish conspiracy theories about the United States. But there's no risk involved and it all serves mainly to boost the German feeling of self-righteousness.

Moral Relativism

David B. Wong in his book Moral Relativism (U.C.P. - 1986) asserted that there is no single true morality. There is a plurality of true moralities existing across different traditions and cultures.

The concept of Moral Relativism was subsequently discussed and expounded in the rarefied atmosphere of US academic philosophy by a number of academics over the rest of the 20th Century finding its way into liberal social thought as a convenient defence to the anti-social behaviour and criminality of minority cultures.

Acceptance of Moral Relativism means that *any* behaviour, no matter how grotesque, can be justified by the assertion that only our contrived Western social mores and our priveleged position make violence, intolerance and criminality immoral and that what we would refer to as immorality has a standing no less valuable and right.

Inherent in the assumption of us arrogant Westerners that our considerate sociable behaviour has an impeccable morality is an inbuilt sense of superiority that clearly implies racism. And when racism is implied then clearly the argument is won. Isn't it?

The A.P.U. is alive and well and living in Iraq

If you remember from some earlier posts I blogged about the concept of the Arab Parallel Universe.

This universe was created by Arabs to explain to themselves why they are in the rut they have been for so long, while also glorifying their personal victories against a world that is always conspiring against them. In the A.P.U. events that happen in our real universe also occur, except that the fashion of their occurrence and their outcome are very different then what we- in the real universe-know them to be.

This phenomenon has an amusing side in addition to the alarming aspects such as how Arabs are fully convinced that the WTC was an Israeli conspiracy and the US moon landings were a fake.

The amusing side can be found here;
The British release strange bear-like man-eating beasts into the wild in Basra.
The Americans transport a shark 200k upstream to eat Iraqi kids swimming in the local rivers.

Isn't life interesting?