Pathfinders – There will be riots
The sun is out, the sky is blue, I’m rioting today, how about you? Politicians in the UK have good reason to look with trepidation on the period of their summer recess. It’s not only when the small boat crossings reach their peak. It’s also when riots are most likely to happen. There’s an underlying pressure of discontent that exists year-round and year-on-year, generally simmering through the cold winter months, but ready to explode periodically when reaching a critical mass, if weather permits, and if touched off by some suitable trigger event. This year the pretext was the dreadful stabbing to death of young children in Southport, which certain vicious individuals wasted no time in exploiting with invented claims that the alleged perpetrator was a Muslim illegal immigrant, when he was actually born in Cardiff and had a Christian father.
Comparisons were inevitably drawn in the UK media with the last lot of major riots in England in 2011. There too the trigger event – the fatal shooting of a North London alleged gangster – was obscured by confusion and misinformation, with the police and eyewitnesses providing contradictory accounts. In the ensuing orgy of arson and looting, the original trigger was largely forgotten, having served its purpose.
Echoes of similar misinformation events reverberate back through history. In a particularly notorious instance in 1255, ‘Little Saint’ Hugh of Lincoln, a 9-year-old boy, was alleged to have been ritually murdered in a ‘blood libel’ sacrifice by Jews. The chronicler and Benedictine monk Matthew Paris offered a fantastically ghoulish account in which the boy was tortured, whipped, run through with pikes, crucified and disembowelled before being thrown down a well. The atrocity seems to have been fabricated to incite popular hatred against Jews, and served its purpose admirably. In no time at all, a Jew was found and tortured into confessing, after which he was executed, followed by 18 more Jews who bravely refused to recognise the validity of the kangaroo ‘show trials’. The ritual murder accusation was not the first to be made against Jews, but it was the first to be officially endorsed by the ruling monarch, Henry III. What was not widely advertised at the time was that the king had previously sold his right to tax Jews to his brother Richard, Earl of Cornwall, thereafter decreeing that the property of any Jew committing a crime would be forfeit to the Crown. This gave the perpetually hard-up king a transparent motive for endorsing such stitch-ups. A further 71 Jews were subsequently condemned to death, but by then the fraud had become so farcically obvious that even the Church, and Richard of Cornwall, felt honour bound to intervene, and the victims were released. But the bogus story continued to have legs. It later popped up in works by Chaucer and Marlowe, and was still doing the rounds in 20th century America. In 1955 the Church of England shamefacedly mounted a plaque at Hugh’s former shrine in Lincoln Cathedral, relating how ‘trumped up stories of ritual murders of Christian boys by Jewish communities were common throughout Europe during the Middle Ages and even much later. These fictions cost many innocent Jews their lives… Such stories do not redound to the credit of Christendom, and so we pray: Lord, forgive what we have been…’ (tinyurl.com/4zuc47ae).
Probably the most die-hard English Defence League sympathiser would dismiss the obvious historical parallel. Just because blaming ‘foreigners’ is a tactic as old as history, doesn’t mean today’s far-right are wrong. But they should still pause and ask themselves the cui bono question- who gains from this claim? With hindsight it’s clear that the king and the landowners had a clear financial incentive to discredit and persecute people they owed money to, which led to executions, pogroms, expulsions, and the forced wearing of yellow badges, decreed by the Vatican 700 years before the Nazis. The Church too is thought to have had an incentive in creating little ‘saints’ whose shrines would be lucrative draws for pilgrims. Who gains today? Ambitious populists looking to ride to power on a wave of anti-immigrant votes. Capitalist elites who delight in watching workers fight each other. Desperate individuals eager to blame their failings on those weaker than themselves.
Back in the Middle Ages, most people were illiterate, with no education and no ability to fact-check. People today have no such excuse. If they still choose to believe fake tales, it’s not because they can’t help it, it’s because they don’t care about the truth. They have sunk into sociopathy, and are no help to socialists.
According to the Torah, the Jewish people used to ritually burden a goat with their sins and send it off to get lost in the wilderness. Jesus performed the same function for Christians by getting himself crucified. But the biggest scapegoaters of all are states and their ruling elites, particularly when it comes to violent crimes like the one in Southport. ‘The many causes of and potential solutions to knife crime are well documented in extensive research…. Social issues including poverty and deprivation, serious mental health issues and online radicalisation are all part of the prevalence of knife crime. The lack of a proper home, violence in the home, lack of resources and money, parental neglect, adverse childhood experiences, supply of drugs … are also sometimes part of the picture’ (tinyurl.com/5ey3aam2). What capitalist state could do anything about any of these, even if it wanted to? To abolish poverty, the wellspring of so many social ills, you would have to abolish private wealth ownership, which is the foundation of capitalism. That’s exactly what socialists propose. Capitalist officials will simply lock up the perpetrators as deviants, and look the other way.
Nobody can predict when or where the next riots will happen. But as long as capitalism lasts we can be sure that there will be riots, and usually it will be innocents who get the blame.
PJS