Amitava Kumar points to a youtube that has been doing the rounds since yesterday on Facebook, a video they say "the BBC will never replay":
Quickly, the question is asked "Do you condone the violence?"
Again, from Amitav Kumar on Twitter: And here he is as a younger man
Anti-Immigration campaign 1970s Britain
And then there was the Indian connection, via Sangat TV channel, whose camera man helped the cops to chase the looters down the stree -- leading to the arrest of 4 men:
Jonathan Freedland, in the Guardian, on 2011, the year the news refused to stop: Arab Spring, the financial crisis, phone hacking and now riots -- when "we realised our democratically elected leaders can no longer protect us: Where once we may have felt rage, now we can feel only impotence:
The most unsettling reports have been of policemen standing back, apparently powerless to stop people as they smash and burn and steal. It's deeply unnerving to see those we expect to protect us incapable and in retreat. Read the comment threads and Twitter feeds, with their demands that "this must stop", or even for looters to be "shot on sight", and you see the signs of impotent rage, the desperate desire for somebody to do something.
Nina Power in the Guardian on the context to the riots in London that cannot be ignored:
The policies of the past year may have clarified the division between the entitled and the dispossessed in extreme terms, but the context for social unrest cuts much deeper. The fatal shooting of Mark Duggan last Thursday, where it appears, contrary to initial accounts, that only police bullets were fired, is another tragic event in a longer history of the Metropolitan police's treatment of ordinary Londoners, especially those from black and minority ethnic backgrounds, and the singling out of specific areas and individuals for monitoring, stop and search and daily harassment.
And a reaction from the right, another blog-post that did the rounds on Twitter, Katharine Birbalsingh in the Telegraph:
Ken Livingstone blames everything from Thatcher to the Conservatives to lack of youth clubs. Darcus Howe is comparing our riots to Syria’s! I look on in horror at our BBC reporters, as well as ordinary people being interviewed on TV, as they all chant the usual mantra without even thinking: cuts, cuts, cuts. A man whose shop had been looted met Nick Clegg on the street, clearly distressed, and rather than blame the looters, he attacked the Deputy Prime Minister over the cuts. What is wrong with everyone? Have we been brainwashed by aliens?
Even the sensible people (and there have been a few) refuse to denounce ALL of the violence. Brixton, Croydon, Birmingham are bad, but Tottenham somehow was ‘understandable’. Come again? You mean sometimes looting and violence are acceptable? Apparently, the Tottenham riots are understandable because the police shot Mark Duggan (father of four, according to the Guardian). Do we really think that the police went out and killed a random innocent man?...
These criminals are responsible for their behaviour but so are their parents who sit at home, knowing their children are out there, looking forward to the goodies their children will bring home. I am so angry, so ashamed, so utterly dismayed. The vast majority of these criminals are black. No one will say it. I hang my head in shame, both as a black person and as a teacher
And on Twitter, at first it may seem like trivialising a serious issue, but beneath it all there was anger, frustration, helplessness: