Revoltas em Londres
Autor: hellsand | Publicado: 2011-08-09T01:46:00-03:00

Pra todos aqueles que não entendem o que está acontecendo em Londres, segue um ótimo texto de Penny Red ( http://pennyred.blogspot.com )

 Panic on the streets of London.        I’m  huddled in the front room with some shell-shocked friends, watching my  city burn. The BBC is interchanging footage of blazing cars and running  street battles in Hackney, of police horses lining up in Lewisham, of  roiling infernos that were once shops and houses in Croydon and in  Peckham. Last night, Enfield, Walthamstow, Brixton and Wood Green were  looted; there have been hundreds of arrests and dozens of serious  injuries, and it will be a miracle if nobody dies tonight. This is the  third consecutive night of rioting in London, and the disorder has now  spread to Leeds, Liverpool, Bristol and Birmingham. Politicians and  police officers who only hours ago were making stony-faced statements  about criminality are now simply begging the young people of Britain’s  inner cities to go home. Britain is a tinderbox, and on Friday, somebody  lit a match. How the hell did this happen? And what are we going to do  now?In  the scramble to comprehend the riots, every single commentator has  opened with a ritual condemnation of the violence, as if it were in any  doubt that arson, muggings and lootings are ugly occurrences. That much  should be obvious to anyone who is watching Croydon burn down on the BBC  right now. David Lammy, MP for Tottenham, called the disorder  'mindless, mindless'. Nick Clegg denounced it as 'needless,  opportunistic theft and violence'. Speaking from his Tuscan holiday  villa, Prime Minister David Cameron – who has finally decided to return  home to take charge - declared simply that the social unrest searing  through the poorest boroughs in the country was "utterly unacceptable."  The violence on the streets is being dismissed as ‘pure criminality,’ as  the work of a ‘violent minority’, as ‘opportunism.’ This is madly  insufficient. It is no way to talk about viral civil unrest. Angry young  people with nothing to do and little to lose are turning on their own  communities, and they cannot be stopped, and they know it. Tonight, in  one of the greatest cities in the world, society is ripping itself  apart.   

Violence is rarely mindless. The politics of a burning building, a smashed-in shop or a young man shot by  police  may be obscured even to those who lit the rags or fired the gun, but  the politics are there. Unquestionably there is far, far more to these  riots than the death of Mark Duggan, whose shooting sparked off the  unrest on Saturday, when two police cars were set alight after a  five-hour vigil at Tottenham police station. A peaceful protest over the  death of a man at police hands, in a community where locals have been  given every reason to mistrust the forces of law and order, is one sort  of political statement. Raiding shops for technology and trainers that  cost ten times as much as the benefits you’re no longer entitled to is  another. A co-ordinated, viral wave of civil unrest across the poorest  boroughs of Britain, with young people coming from across the capital  and the country to battle the police, is another. Months  of conjecture will follow these riots. Already, the internet is teeming  with racist vitriol and wild speculation. The truth is that very few  people know why this is happening.  They  don’t know, because they were not watching these communities. Nobody  has been watching Tottenham since the television cameras drifted away  after the Broadwater Farm riots of 1985. Most of the people who will be  writing, speaking and pontificating about the disorder this weekend have  absolutely no idea what it is like to grow up in a community where  there are no jobs, no space to live or move, and the police are on the  streets stopping-and-searching you as you come home from school. The  people who do will be waking up this week in the sure and certain  knowledge that after decades of being ignored and marginalised and  harassed by the police, after months of seeing any conceivable hope of a  better future confiscated, they are finally on the news. In one NBC  report, a young man in Tottenham was asked if rioting really achieved  anything:"Yes," said the young man. "You wouldn't be talking to me now if we didn't riot, would you?""Two  months ago we marched to Scotland Yard,  more than 2,000 of us, all  blacks, and it was peaceful and calm and you know what? Not a word in  the press. Last night a bit of rioting and looting and look around you."Eavesdropping  from among the onlookers, I looked around. A dozen TV crews and  newspaper reporters interviewing the young men everywhere ‘’’There  are communities all over the country that nobody paid attention to  unless there had recently been a riot or a murdered child. Well, they’re  paying attention now.Tonight  in London, social order and the rule of law have broken down entirely.  The city has been brought to a standstill; it is not safe to go out onto  the streets, and where I am in Holloway, the violence is coming closer.  As I write, the looting and arson attacks have spread to at least fifty  different areas across the UK, including dozens in London, and  communities are now turning on each other, with the Guardian reporting  on rival gangs forming battle lines. It has become clear to the  disenfranchised young people of Britain, who feel that they have no  stake in society and nothing to lose, that they can do what they like  tonight, and the police are utterly unable to stop them. That is what  riots are all about. Riots  are about power, and they are about catharsis. They are not about poor  parenting, or youth services being cut, or any of the other snap  explanations that media pundits have been trotting out: structural  inequalities, as a friend of mine remarked today, are not solved by a  few pool tables. People riot because it makes them feel powerful, even  if only for a night. People riot because they have spent their whole  lives being told that they are good for nothing, and they realise that  together they can do anything – literally, anything at all. People to  whom respect has never been shown riot because they feel they have  little reason to show respect themselves, and it spreads like fire on a  warm summer night. And now people have lost their homes, and the country  is tearing itself apart.Noone  expected this. The so-called leaders who have taken three solid days to  return from their foreign holidays to a country in flames did not  anticipate this. The people running Britain had absolutely no clue how  desperate things had become. They thought that after thirty years of  soaring inequality, in the middle of a recession, they could take away  the last little things that gave people hope, the benefits, the jobs,  the possibility of higher education, the support structures, and nothing  would happen. They were wrong. And now my city is burning, and it will  continue to burn until we stop the blanket condemnations and blind  conjecture and try to understand just what has brought viral civil  unrest to Britain.  Let me give you a hint: it ain’t Twitter.I’m  stuck in the house, now, with rioting going on just down the road in  Chalk Farm. Ealing and Clapham and Dalston are being trashed.  Journalists are being mugged and beaten in the streets, and the riot  cops are in retreat where they have appeared at all. Police stations are  being set alight all over the country. This morning, as the smoke  begins to clear, those of us who can sleep will wake up to a country in  chaos. We will wake up to fear, and to racism, and to condemnation on  left and right,  none of which  will stop this happening again, as the prospect of a second stock market  clash teeters terrifyingly at the bottom of the news reports. Now is  the time when we make our choices. Now is the time when we decide  whether to descend into hate, or to put prejudice aside and work  together. Now is the time when we decide what sort of country it is that  we want to live in. Follow the #riotcleanup hashtag on Twitter. And  take care of one another.      Posted by Penny Red    at 9.8.11