"History always repeats itself, said Hegel. But he forgot to add, commented Karl Marx, the first time as tragedy, the second as farce. What Marx meant in his essay The Eighteenth Brumaire of Louis Bonaparte is that history does not repeat itself at all. It only appears to, because human imaginations cannot keep up with the speed of change, so they dress it in costumes borrowed from the past. It is not the 2011 rioters who are dressing in history's robes – they appear to have modelled themselves more on recent zombie movies – but commentators, who are reaching for analogies of 1980s socialists to attribute these troubles to familiar causes.
It is worth looking at images of London's violent weekend and asking how they make you feel. Far from fitting into any historical model, they seem to me to come from an imagined London, a horror scenario of the city as a blazing wilderness. Sci-fi nightmares of urban catastrophe resonate with these pictures because this is a city made strange. Whatever is going on here, it is not familiar, and will not be easy to put right."----Jonathan Jones from below
Commentsary from Ola:
Racism + Social Injustice on a large scale= London Burning
Any society in the world in which the majority is unperturbed by the striking pervasive racism and social
injustice suffered daily by the visible and audible minorities, and the poor deserves to burn from time to time.
The burning is a wakeup call for the sleeping and complacent stiff upper-lipped majority Britons
of all races including the few privileged immigrants from all over the world.
Bye,
Ola
Jonathan Jones on art
Jonathan Jones on art
London burning: history just went sci-fi
Images of the city's looted, burnt-out streets conjure not so much the 1980s Brixton riots as a new, dystopian reality
Wellsian wasteland ... water is pumped on a smouldering building in post-riot Tottenham. Photograph: Max Nash/PA
In HG Wells's novel The War of the Worlds, an attack by overwhelmingly superior Martians drives Londoners to flee their city. Mad columns of panicking people fight for space on roads out of the capital. When the narrator enters the abandoned metropolis he finds an eerie wasteland, where only a few derelicts and drunks remain on the deadly streets.
There was something a bit Wellsian about photographs of riots and looting across London this weekend. Pictures of burning shops and broken windows, and young men confronting uniformed police, included crowdsourced images snatched by witnesses in the rapid, unexpected diffusion of trouble. The most dramatic, of Tottenham on fire and the blackened aftermath, are positively apocalyptic. To me, it all seems uncanny and reminiscent of late Victorian science fiction. Even the place names have that quality of ordinariness that Wells exploits in his fantasy of a London apocalypse: Tottenham in flames, insurrection in Enfield, anarchy in Leyton and Islington ...
This sounds melodramatic – it was not the end of the world – but it is important to recognise the surreal and eerie sci-fi image of London in these pictures of the rioting and looting. It might even be a corrective to the mis-application of history.
For many observers, especially in Tottenham and Brixton, the weekend conjured echoes of the 1980s, when accusations of racist policing combined with the Thatcher government's economic harshness to bring communal protest and violence to British streets. At a time when a Tory-led government once again stands accused of treating young people as economic cannon fodder, the echoes are there in the underlying context. But do the events themselves summon up such history? The mostly teenage protagonists in pictures and eyewitness accounts suggest that, for these rioters, the 1980s are an extremely remote historical period. You may as well compare this weekend with the Gordon riots in the 18th century.
History always repeats itself, said Hegel. But he forgot to add, commented Karl Marx, the first time as tragedy, the second as farce. What Marx meant in his essay The Eighteenth Brumaire of Louis Bonaparte is that history does not repeat itself at all. It only appears to, because human imaginations cannot keep up with the speed of change, so they dress it in costumes borrowed from the past. It is not the 2011 rioters who are dressing in history's robes – they appear to have modelled themselves more on recent zombie movies – but commentators, who are reaching for analogies of 1980s socialists to attribute these troubles to familiar causes.
It is worth looking at images of London's violent weekend and asking how they make you feel. Far from fitting into any historical model, they seem to me to come from an imagined London, a horror scenario of the city as a blazing wilderness. Sci-fi nightmares of urban catastrophe resonate with these pictures because this is a city made strange. Whatever is going on here, it is not familiar, and will not be easy to put right.
• Walking out in my neighbourhood after writing this, I found that Gay's the Word bookshop on Marchmont Street, one of central London's best-known gay landmarks, had its window smashed last night. A substance seems to have been thrown at the window before it was broken. This was the only business attacked on the street. So much for any attempt to see radicalism (at least of a cuddly leftwing variety) in these events.
---- Original Message ----
From: ericayoola@aol.co.uk
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Sent: Tue, Aug 9, 2011 4:02 pm
Subject: ||NaijaObserver|| Re: [NaijaElections] 16,000 police men hit street in London ::UK PM recalls Parliament for London riot crisis..Re: Riot hits north London after police shooting death
From: ericayoola@aol.co.uk
To: NaijaElections@yahoogroups.com; Naijaobserver@yahoogroups.com; NAIJAEXCEL@YAHOOGROUPS.COM; igboevents@yahoogroups.com; IgboWorldForum@yahoogroups.com; Anambra-world@yahoogroups.com; icf icbicf <anambraForum@yahoogroups.com>; umuanambra@yahoogroups.com; ""naijainsider Naijaobserver""@yahoogroups.com; abujaNig@yahoogroups.com; dandalin-siyasa@yahoogroups.com
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Sent: Tue, Aug 9, 2011 4:02 pm
Subject: ||NaijaObserver|| Re: [NaijaElections] 16,000 police men hit street in London ::UK PM recalls Parliament for London riot crisis..Re: Riot hits north London after police shooting death
The reaction of the political leadership has been weak and incompetent. Boris Johnson as mayor and the Cameron - Clegg combo have failed Londoners and the English people by their ineffectual handling of the situation. Sad sad days
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[Photo Left: His Excellency, Gov. Orji Uzor Kalu ] 
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