It’s hard to know what to say, because what I’m thinking is unprintable. Yeah, what a surprise that the riots occurred. What a surprise. And cracking down will make it worse, not better. This isn’t even close to over, and it will never be over while men or women like that interviewer are in any position of influence or power. (h/t Feminist Philosophers.)
Update: a friend points out the social reasons behind the insistence that any explanation is an excuse and that anyone who “excuses” the rioters must be immediately asked if they condone the riots as if explaining is the same thing as condoning.
The insistence on not allowing an explanation reminds me of Obama refusing to “play the blame game” with reference to the Bush administration and the shutting down of discourse around the 9/11 attacks. Any attempt to actually understand why something happened threaten the official narrative, and might cast blame blame on those in power. That can’t be allowed, so no explanation is allowed, only condemnation. (Ian note: Remember all the nonsense about how the 9/11 hijackers were cowards? They were many bad things, they weren’t cowards.)
tBoy
A truly visceral reaction over here. I’m shaking.
Notorious P.A.T.
Yes, lots of elderly people smash down a storefront to steal athletic shoes. Good question, Ms. Anchorwoman.
And kicking a kid out of their house because their brother or sister rioted? Even the Mafia doesn’t go after your family.
“Remember all the nonsense about how the 9/11 hijackers were cowards? They were many bad things, they weren’t cowards.”
They thought their actions would be rewarded with a heavenly harem of women. That’s not courage.
BDBlue
Treatment like that is horrible of anyone, but it’s even worse when you know who Darcus Howe is (see this thread for background – http://www.correntewire.com/the_beeb_goes_fox).
Petro
That was a news anchor, lecturing on appropriate responses? I thought FOX news was bad.
To share an anecdote:
I was on a business trip to Mumbai (then Bombay) in the late ’80’s and one day I overheard English being spoken in the hotel bar. It was a table of British pilots, one female, and being somewhat drawn thin with culture shock, I insinuated myself amongst them to share conversation.
I was shocked to hear them address our waiter as “coolie,” right to his face and more than once. I expressed my dismay, and they all turned on me, with the riposte that Americans were the real racists, that we were just PC in our language. Given our history and our own race problems, there was not much I could say about that…
I suppose they had a point, but it was very disturbing.
I had other cringe-worthy moments on another trip to London – but kept to myself.
BDBlue
Treatment like that is horrible of anyone, but it’s even worse when you know who Darcus Howe is (see this thread for background – http://www.correntewire.com/the_beeb_goes_fox). By worse, I mean apparently who you are, what you believe, what you’ve accomplished and stand for are all meaningless to the reporter. Again, terrible to treat anyone this way, but the ignorance on display becomes even more stunning when you become aware of who Howe is.
BDBlue
Ack, the right link is – http://www.correntewire.com/the_beeb_goes_fox
groo
Ofcourse I watched it.
(not because You hinted it)
This decent man put the finger into the wound of british society.
And he is a black intellectual, fighting with the tools available to him against the distortions british media impose, to dominate the narrative.
————-
There is some positive tendency in the aftermath of that:
“I’m starting to think that the Left might actually be right” by Charles Moore.
http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/politics/8655106/Im-starting-to-think-that-the-Left-might-actually-be-right.html
and Frank Schirrmacher in the conservative German Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung.
(F.S. is an Icon of the conservative German intellectual right, if there is such an animal)
„Ich beginne zu glauben, dass die Linke recht hat“
(I am starting to think that the left is right.)
http://www.faz.net/artikel/C30351/buergerliche-werte-ich-beginne-zu-glauben-dass-die-linke-recht-hat-30484461.html
Which is a stunning new development in the conservative mind-frame.
Actually I do not believe in that sort of ‘change’.
But anyhow.
Maybe let’s listen, whether this reflects a real change in thinking about affairs.
StewartM
You know what that exactly sounds like? Corporate leadership.
Seriously, when corporate leaders do something idiotic, and get booted, and their replacements come in and reverse the previous policies, the replacements don’t blame their predecessors. In fact, they will hem and haw and say something like “what they [their predecessors] did was a good idea at the time, but not now, we are reversing 180 degrees because that’s now the good idea”. In no way, shape, or form will they say what their predecessors did was stupid.
Does that mean that we essentially have corporate leadership in this country?
-StewartM
groo
StewartM,
sounds interesting.
could You repeat that in plain words, please?
(I plead guilty of having the same-ahem-disease)
Daniel De Groot
I’m glad someone else has noticed the “explaining = excusing” fallacy. I like the explanation too, as it makes more sense than thinking people like that announcer are dumb enough to be intellectually unable to understand the difference between explaining the causes of X, and condoning or approving of X.
As a tactic for short fusing debate and preventing people from reaching the right conclusions, I’d say it’s pretty effective, as the bleating authoritarian sheep of the right particularly like it.
Ché Pasa
I saw a shorter segment of this clip a few days ago, and it was outrageous enough, but the fretting over the football cancellation that followed just made the BBC — which I had been watching during the rioting/insurrection — laughable. I know they are pandering to their market and to a bunch of political opportunists but really, this was just a level of stupidity and utter insensitivity that even FOX and the other Murdoch outfits would have trouble matching.
If you saw the expression on the news reader’s face after the conclusion of the interview, it’s clear even she knew what an asshole she’d been.
BBC has had a lot of trouble dealing with the rioting/insurrection, even when it comes to straight reporting of what’s happening. There was one incident that was shown repeatedly of insurrectionists not confronting the police in (I believe it was) Birmingham. The reporter on the scene was reporting it as if it were a rugby match or something like that, describing how the rioters would be running down the street shortly and would be confronting the police who were moving toward the intersection. “Yes, yes, here they come, the rioters are headed right toward the police; the police are moving into formation now, and here come the rioters, running toward the police, and OH, would you look at that! The rioters are turning down a side street now, well away from the police line, so there won’t be a confrontation as we were expecting. Yes, there they go, all the rioters just ran down that side street!”
He was obviously very disappointed.
The BBC and all the rest of the British media has had trouble “making sense” of the riots — as if “sense” needed to be made. It was a spontaneous conflagration. It’s not hard to figure out what the source was: for one thing, it costs a fortune to live in London and it isn’t cheap anywhere else in Britain, regardless of your class or status. Young, black and brown males are suspects on sight in Britain just as they are here. Mark Duggan was killed by police, something that is very rare there (compared to the statistics in the United States) and the police severely disrespected Mark Duggan’s family and the community. Protest led to violence — whether initiated by the police or not, doesn’t matter. Once the violence was triggered, the fire burned out of control. Howe explained it perfectly.
And no, to explain is not to condone.
Here’s Darcus Howe on Democracy Now!
http://www.democracynow.org/2011/8/10/over_1_000_arrested_in_uk
Ian Welsh
No one who deliberately dies for their beliefs can be called a coward. Most of humanity for hundreds of years believed they would go to heaven, they didn’t do what those men takes. Like it or not, that’s courage.
This is one of the problems with Americans, they always want to pretend their enemies are the lowest of the low and will never allow them their virtues. A friend has been reading about the Sepoy rebellion, reading the actual letters of the brits. They admired their enemy’s courage.
Celsius 233
Amy Goodman interviewed Darcus Howe; he’s articulate, but he’s black!
You know, I’ve got to say, as a working class American it’s ludicrous to say we’re a nation who has over-come racism; bullshit! We’ve just beaten it underground. I know! I worked with it for 40 years in every factory and office in which I worked.
England is in deep shit and I fear they’ll come/have come to the wrong conclusion; Orwell’s legacy realized is on the horizon and coming at us fast…
Everythings Jake
“The insistence on not allowing an explanation reminds me of Obama refusing to “play the blame game” with reference to the Bush administration and the shutting down of discourse around the 9/11 attacks.”
This is the role of the enabler, to deny the abuse (in this case perpetrated by Wall Street and corporate CEOs).
This isn’t any different from the way they treated Jeremiah Wright (a deeply thoughtful and serious minister) – watch the dripping contempt with which the “interviewer” at the National Press Club conducted that particular charade.
Got to denigrate, disparage and marginalize the truth tellers. The only time Charlie Rose ever found it in himself to practice aggressive, no less hostile, interviewing, was when Chomsky was a guest.
Is guillotine an unprintable thought?
Gaius Sempronius Gracchus
Condoning is a problem?
What happens if you regard the riots as a justified rebellion, and actually say so?
As a form of fighting back by the most abused, most powerless, and most relentlessly damaged victims of the class war in Britain that the government is continuing against them, quite remorselessly and with even greater violence?
Slave revolts aren’t pretty either, you know.
Even today, in America, they are a touchy issue and flat out endorsement of them is not quite as common or welcome as praise for apple pie or motherhood.
Thoreau was pretty much alone in his vigorous defense of John Brown, back in the day.
But he was right.
If I steal your insulin and you die as a result I am guilty at least of negligent homicide, even if my intention was not to kill you (I was and remain unconcerned with whether you live or die) but to profit by selling the stolen goods.
If I don’t contribute what I may rightfully keep to a charity that supplies insulin to the poor and many of the poor continue to die for lack of it I am guilty of nothing.
And if I rebel against coerced contributions or repel an effort at theft . . .
But then who was right, Jean Valjean or Javert?
Even the popes agree it was Valjean, though today’s conservatives will tell you to your face it was Javert.
But then if the rich who control society owe the medicine to the needy as a matter of justice and cut it off it is not a case of mere withdrawal of charity.
Much less is it discontinuance of coerced charity or even theft by the poor from the rich of what rightfuly belongs to the latter, though that, of course, is exactly the Tory view.
But it is untrue, is it not?
Their Thatcherism, their neoliberalism, their market fundamentalism, that is the real reason for their “austerity policy”?
Cuts to social services and health care are not withdrawal of charity.
They are not discontinuance of theft from the rich, despite Maggie’s infamous lie about socialism.
They are theft, themselves, with deadly consequences stemming from a criminal indifference to human life, just as much as the thief’s taking the insulin.
And one may resist such deadly theft with force, may one not?
StewartM
Groo
Just that corporate leaders, no matter how idiotic their predecessors in their jobs were (and this is at all levels of corporate leadership) do not pubically condemn them. I don’t know how to make this plainer, save to start to point to Dilbert cartoons. 🙂
StewartM
StewartM
Ian Welsh
OTH, while I agree with your overall observations, I’ve always believed that the correct conclusion to draw is that the martial virtues are vastly overrated. Lots of people have demonstrated a willingness to kill and be killed for very evil belief systems. That kind of courage is not the virtue it’s made out to be.
StewartM
hidflect
An enjoyable stream of well articulated comments here. Beating the trend, (especially YouTube) by not veering into into all-caps expletives by around comment #4…
Nary one reference touching Godwin’s Nazi’s at all, either.. awww damn, sorry
Notorious P.A.T.
“they always want to pretend their enemies are the lowest of the low and will never allow them their virtues”
I will admit when an enemy has virtues, but I don’t see any in bombing a building full of innocent people including children. (yes, the US government does that too.) That’s just reprehensible.
Notorious P.A.T.
And I find it questionable how many people who go to war share the absolute certainty of a hereafter reward that a suicide bomber has. Not to mention that fighting in a war involves pain, suffering, depredation, and fear, while the 9/11 hijackers only had to put in a day’s work of surprising half-asleep civilians to get their eternal salvation.
Fighters in Afghanistan, who go toe-to-toe with the US military in open combat, have courage. Especially since they know they might end up captured and locked in a “black site” where water is poured down their throat after being pistol-whipped and attacked by dogs. The Viet Cong also possessed great courage–living and fighting in a tunnel system that would give a gopher pause takes a lot of guts.
StewartM
Criminy: the interviewer accused *HIM* of being a rioter, because he was explaining it!
StewartM
Rob Grigjanis
StewartM
Courage is no more a virtue than speed or strength are. Its usage is a casualty of our society’s values. We are taught that courage is a virtue. Therefore, our enemies, who are by definition wicked, cannot have courage.
Ian Welsh
Courage is a morally neutral virtue. Without it a man or women’s other virtues or vices are ineffective. Those men were brave enough to accept a 100% death chance. They were brave. They were also bad men. There are lots of brave bad men. Being brave doesn’t change the fact they’re bad, it does mean they’re men.
You’re going way too far to pretend the people you hate are worms. Way too far.
Rob Grigjanis
That for me? I certainly don’t think our enemies (whoever they may be) are automatically wicked. However, that’s what society drills into us, and most people seem to accept (The Hun, The Yellow Peril, The Red Menace, etc). My last two sentences were a description of what we are taught, not what I believe.
groo
StewartM
my problem is, that at times I do not quite understand all the intricacies of injokes and so on.
(I am up to the level of George Carlin, whom I miss dearly.)
Because, what Ian adresses, has a global scope, I tend to think that we would have more of an impact if we make us all unterstandable on a global scale ( global pidgin English, so to say.)
I must confess that I bring in my 0wn cultural background, which sometimes probably is hard to grasp for others.
But I try to accomodate.
Ian does a good job in choosing a semantic set, which is widely understood.
StewartM
Ian Welsh
Agreed if you go beyond physical courage, to encompass moral courage, to encompass Clarence Darrow’s dictum that “a thousand men will march to the mouth of the cannon where one man will dare espouse an unpopular cause”.
But in regards to physical courage: I think that physical fear, even cowardice, is normal and healthy, and I worry about those eager to throw their lives (and others) away. I remember the military historian James Dunnigan’s description of how you tell rookie soldiers from veterans at the onset of any potential conflict–the rookies will talk to the reporters and tell them what they will do if need be, whereas the veterans sit glumly at the back of the truck and hope the politicians find a last-minute solution. “No one [normal, that is] who’s ever been shot at enjoys the experience”, Dunnigan says.
StewartM
StewartM
Groo
Being the typical functional mono-lingual American, I didn’t mean to be obtuse. Sorry if I was difficult to understand.
StewartM
groo
I think this is quite an important proposition.
Which has to be evaluated.
How about that:
Testosterone is a morally neutral hormone.
It serves bankers als well as the the -ahem- mob on the street.
I happened to read a very favorite comment on Thomas Paine today, along with Thomas Spence.
Those were courageous men.
True.
Were Alexander the Great (alongside with his mentor Aristotle) courageous men?
Or Napoleon?
I doubt that.
At least we have to work on the definition, on what ‘courageous’ means.
Is it ‘courageous’ to act according the prejudices of your fellow men?
Is it ‘courageous’ to act against them?
And who are those fellow men?
Your peers?
Or the whole of a functioning society?
Who are ‘they’ anyhow, who applaud?
I think Paine and Spence, actually figures of the pre-enlightenment did quite a good job, from whom we can learn a lot.
All those wonderful people.
Hume, Smith, Paine, Spence, Robespierre, Darwin, …
On the other hand.
Edmund Burke, Napoleon and the rest of the lot in the restauration camp.
Yes.
Courage they have both.
The end of the means, so to say, is quite always the same.
a) the community oriented flat society of equals, with care for the left-behinds.
b) the hawk-dove model, where the hawks have a -ahem- divine right, and even evolution is on their side- to exploit the doves to their advantage.
We have to face this dichotomy, an choose sides on moral and logical grounds.
My moral and logical stand on that is, that (b) is simply selfdefeating for any thinkable humane society.
Therefore I -well- fight it.
groo
some corrections:
i) I do not fight Aristotle. He just was too near to power. He could have done better to tame Alexander.
hindsight after 2500 years. What an embarrassment for us all, where our ‘farsightedness’ is measured in months or years.
ii) Darwin was post-enlightenment, of course, and one can debate the timeline, which is much more complicated than sketched here.
Considering the utter deafness of power nowadays to the rhymes and rhythms of historical processes, these are -hopefully- not deadly sins, where my compatriots kill me, because of a misplaced comma or so.
Bill H.
That is a lovely old man. “I have never been involved in a single riot. I have engaged in demonstrations which ended in violence.” That is a very intelligent and hugely powerful statement, and puts the onus where it belongs – on the authorities.