Wednesday, August 17, 2011

Daylight robbery, meet nighttime robbery: wealthy looters, meet poor looters...

I keep hearing comparisons between the London riots and riots in other European cities—window smashing in Athens or car bonfires in Paris. And there are parallels, to be sure: a spark set by police violence, a generation that feels forgotten.

But those events were marked by mass destruction; the looting was minor. There have, however, been other mass lootings in recent years, and perhaps we should talk about them too. There was Baghdad in the aftermath of the US invasion—a frenzy of arson and looting that emptied libraries and museums. The factories got hit too. In 2004 I visited one that used to make refrigerators. Its workers had stripped it of everything valuable, then torched it so thoroughly that the warehouse was a sculpture of buckled sheet metal.

Back then the people on cable news thought looting was highly political. They said this is what happens when a regime has no legitimacy in the eyes of the people. After watching for so long as Saddam and his sons helped themselves to whatever and whomever they wanted, many regular Iraqis felt they had earned the right to take a few things for themselves. But London isn’t Baghdad, and British Prime Minister David Cameron is hardly Saddam, so surely there is nothing to learn there. More...

Don't miss:
  1. The perfect storm: the riots in England...
  2. Poor looters are the street version of the wealthy ones...
  3. The sun never sets on the British welfare system...
  4. The tiny dot, or how the few rule the many...
  5. They got bailed out, we got sold out...
  6. Britain's ruling class is milking the country...
  7. Capitalism in crisis, a warning from history...

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