I’m going to hop brightly on the bandwagon and suggest first that you look here, and then look at the various links in that post. And then come trundling back here.
I’ve been working for the last couple of weeks with groups of children in some theatre workshops; today, we had a big old chat at lunchtime about what’s happening at the moment in London, Birmingham, Manchester, and generally all over the place.
One kid wanted to know if the people taking part in these riots were “bad people”. And if you look at a lot of the coverage and a lot of the public responses to what has been happening, you’d forgive someone a lot older than that kid for agreeing; for dismissing this as mindless, pointless, causeless violence. There are causes. We can’t divide ourselves neatly into two camps of ‘good’, law-abiding, safe, polite non-rioters and ‘bad’, cruel, thuggish, mindless rioters. There is a reason that so much anger in this country is boiling over. Look at what Camila Batmanghelidjh has to say in the Independent.
I’m not condoning the sort of violence that has been happening; but if we reduce it down to ‘good’ and ‘bad’ then we’re just going to perpetrate the same blinkered thinking that has led to these feelings of alienation and disgust with society that are driving all this chaos and violence. These attitudes come from two people who yes, it could fairly be said, possibly haven’t put a lot of thought into what they’re doing, but there is, somewhere down there an understandable sense of lingering unfairness. I’d argue that maybe firstly they’ve got the wrong targets, and secondly (and more importantly) violence isn’t the way to go. One of the most sensible and awesome voices I’ve heard so far on all this is this woman, who I want for our PM.
But this is sort of leading me on to another aspect of the conversations I was having at lunchtime with the workshop kids. Some of them were born after 9/11, a fact I find peculiarly unnerving, considering how much of their lives it will have indirectly/directly shaped. Most of them didn’t really know who Osama Bin Laden was, they just knew of him as “that evil guy that the Americans killed”. I overheard one child likening him to Hitler, which confused another – who didn’t really have a clear idea of who Hitler was.
Fun lunchtime task for Clare – explain the Holocaust to a bunch of bewildered nine-year-olds. It would be so easy to take the same dichotomising response as has been struck with these riots and say that the perpetrators were just bad people. Maybe, at nine years old, that’s what you want to hear. But that’s not a fair depiction of what happened to anyone. I dislike referring to anyone – Bin Laden, or (sohelpmegod I am not a neo-Nazi, so do not misunderstand me) Hitler – as evil. Fucked up, cruel, and displaying a hideous absence of respect for human life, maybe. Definitely, in Hitler’s case. Evil, no.
Someone’s actions can be evil. They cannot. That is too reductive a view to apply to one person, far more so when applied to a group. So, even if it makes for a more complicated answer, I am not going to tell a group of nine-year-olds that the Jews, and homosexuals, and the Romany Gypsies, and Black People, and physically or mentally disabled people were put to death by a bunch of “bad guys” called Nazis. Or, worse, as I heard one child put it:
“well, the evil Germans killed a load of Jews.”
“Who are Jews?”
“I don’t really know. I just know that the Germans are bad.”
Not so much, no. As someone of German and German-Jewish heritage, that’s an explanation I find deeply troubling.
So, to wander round back in a circle and say something perhaps not deeply enlightening, moral absolutism, of the sort we’ve seen in the reactions to the riots, can (I feel) only really be a negative, damaging and reductive way of responding to a situation. Maybe those two girls in the video who seem to be only out for “free alcohol”, and getting their own back on the police and/or rich people seem fairly close to the mindless thugs we’re being warned about. But they are responding to deep and underlying feelings of unfairness and social exclusion that will continue to trouble our society until we start listening and responding to those voices with respect. Give people a voice and maybe they won’t need petrol bombs.
(And if you want me to spell it out, no, I’m not condoning the violence. It really, really worries me. But dismissing it as mindless thuggery is not going to help.)
It’s really interesting that we were discussing similar ideas today over dinner. I had to try and explain to my siblings that the people doing these things are fundamentally nice, normal people who would probably condemn such behaviour if you got them alone. I think that this idea is something we must not lose sight of; I think too that we must feel sorry for these misguided youths who may have defeated their own purpose by acting violently and who will be dealing with the consequences for the rest of their lives.
Yeah, exactly. And that there’s a lot more that goes into this sort of behaviour than just a general feeling of greed, which is what seems to be a common suggestion. To me, this sort of rioting and violence is largely driven by anger, and it’s hugely important, therefore, to look at why it is that people feel so angry, rather than just dismissing it as random, stupid, greedy and mindless.
But maybe that’s naive and idealistic of me? Maybe this is just about wanting a new TV…
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I’m not entirely sure I agree. Yes, there are underlying causes, of course there are. However I think there’s a pronounced difference between conscious anger and resentment as a result of social division and the subconscious influence of these things. Are some (I won’t say all, because it’s not true) people rioting because they’ve been disadvantaged in society? Of course.
But I’d posit that the majority of those people are motivated by an alienation and lack of direction that has pervaded the culture in which they were brought up, not by cuts to the legal aid budget. Does society have a role to play in this? Of course. Does that mean these people are revolutionaries, political dissidents? No.
The Peeler of Potato Pie is welcome to contradict me, but Rosie — it sounds to me like you don’t actually have a very different point of view from the blog.
My reaction: yes. And I don’t envy you the task of explaining nuanced history to nine-year-olds! Someone commenting on the first article you linked reported that her boss had just uttered the words “thank God for Maggie Thatcher” (I hate myself for even typing the words) — but it was really more that Thatcher laid a good deal of the groundwork for these riots. Along with a great many more people, and “us” — by which I mean the people who actually have/had a good chance of making changes to the country.
If we don’t want this happening again, we need to sort the country out as a priority, not simply the rioter
Seb, you’re right. Rosie – that was what I was (probably unsuccessfully) attempting to convey. Not that I think they’re all aiming for some major social revolution, but more that these riots are a reaction to an underlying discontent with society, that this is a response to a feeling of alienation and dissatisfaction, not that it has a stated, conscious purpose.
Also, nuanced history + nine-year-olds is a very tricky task. Especially when half of them are nearly the same height as me…