European Document/London's Riots

...They must be really frightened not only by the riots, which endanger their lives and property just like everyone else's and which give all blacks a thoroughly bad and largely undeserved name...

...do nothing calculated to increase whatever prejudice fair or unfair there may be against you...

...A lot of people seem to have got the cart before the horse...

...Otherwise the vicious circle of cause and effect will produce vaster conflagrations from which evil men will profit even more...

...Every decent person understands and to some extent shares the bitter resentment they must feel...

...And this sympathy is surely one of the factors which stops us from uttering even the most good-natured criticism and advice...

...Well of one thing they certainly are deprived: and that is of the sort of candid criticism and advice which all the rest of us get from time to time...

...Yet really something ought to be said, and that for the blacks' own good...

...Not when you think of it: For what is disorder but universal injustice, unjust not only to its victims but also to those who have created it, and who are tempted into evil courses they would not otherwise have dreamed of...

...don't smash the windows and loot the property of whatever few employers still remain...

...It may make us cross for a bit...

...These decent blacks must fear that all this special pleading will in time produce a nasty reaction-and it could...

...I don't doubt that the vast majority of blacks are decent, friendly, quiet, and law-abiding citizens...

...We don't want to get mixed up with the thugs who daub "Wogs Go Home" on lavatory walls...

...Narayan's implicit assumption that, if the police were not entirely to blame, then both police and rioters are alike troublemakers, rival ganga so to speak, Montagues and Capulets, and he, Mr...

...don't take any notice of black or other windbags whose livelihood and prominence depend on fomenting racial discord and who are thus, as Roy Kerridge has pointed out in the (London) Spectator, your worst enemies...

...Most of them showed it not by brutal violence and riot and looting, or by attacking the Gestapo with telegraph poles but by that awed, apprehensive, and shrinking quietness which is the usual mark of real fear...

...don't reduce your district to stinking ruins...

...I said there was nothing like it.'' The State offers to all, to black and white alike, an arguable appalling education...

...Alice demurred, and the king replied: "I didn't say there was nothing better...

...It is like hay for faintness...

...there are various obvious don'ts...

...Blacks who are genuinely frightened should beg Mr...

...This is that order must first be restored and thereafter firmly maintained...

...We have all of us behaved appallingly at times...

...I saw him on Monday night and asked for his co-operation in generally cooling things down...

...For whoever is black and unemployed and genuinely wants a job (of how many young blacks in Brixton is this true...

...No one expects the blacks to profit from this sort of thing...

...don't vote for any party which, by raising the rates sky-high, will drive most employers in despair out of your area...

...Disorder engenders beasts and monsters and-don't misunderstand me -white beasts as well as black, skinhead as well as Afro monsters...

...Very well: What is to be done about that...

...Rudy Narayan, a prominent "spokesman," has been "in touch" with the Deputy Assistant Commissioner at Brixton police station...

...Millions of us, moreover, black and white alike, are and have been unemployed without riots...

...They must also be frightened of the way in which all their soapy pseudo-friends, social workers, clergymen, and self-appointed, self-advancing "spokesmen" leap forth to claim the riots are justified by grievances (which they cannot be) and urge that these grievances be removed by all sorts of those special favors, privileges, and immunities, which wise people always refuse as they would refuse poisoned chocolate...

...I don't doubt that some blacks really are frightened, and these must include the most decent, sensible, and law-abiding of them...

...If I were a black I would find this patronizing tone appallingly embarrassing, not least because of Mr...

...Certainly most of the ones I bump into are often movingly so...

...Narayan if not to get lost, then at least to de-escalate and cool himself down...

...Thus only when all these ills are redressed will order be restored...

...Certainly the blacks are not deprived of coarse abuse and horrible insults, scrawled on walls or expressed in foul language or appearing even in print in racist rags...

...As a result there was a de-escalation of the trouble...

...There's nothing like eating hay when you're faint," said the White King...

...Could anything be more absurd...

...don't spout modish hatred for police, for society and the system...

...Is this in some way to our discredit, suggesting us to be spiritless and spineless...

...If forced to choose between disorder and injustice, Goethe preferred injustice...

...For a start, the blacks are said to live in "fear'' of the police...

...Of course not...

...The answer may lie in political action for better schools or in parents educating their own children or finding teachers for them, or in children encouraged by their parents educating themselves, in reading, in a respect for and determination to acquire knowledge, skills, and wisdom...

...Don't get yourself up to look ferocious, outlandish, and threatening...

...It is surely Colin Welch is Editor-in-Chief of Chief Executive and former deputy editor of the London Daily Telegraph from which this article is reprinted...

...A harsh saying...

...Jews living in German-occupied territory, now they really did live in fear...

...not normal to injure 149 policemen or to shove battering rams into their stomachs if you are absolutely terrified of them...

...Alas, it certainly doesn't lie in riots, exciting as these may be...

...This view, if not entirely wrong about the causes, surely obscures the cure, if there is one...

...Only where order prevails in schools, in families, and on the streets, only where violence and disorder are immediately checked and appropriately punished, only there will be found jobs and prosperity and happy well-kept homes...

...It really is quite absurd to protest by violence and disorder against a general belief that you are prone to violence and disorder, to protest against bad housing by smashing up houses, to protest against unemployment by means which ruin employers and make you unemployable, to protest against being unloved by rendering yourself unlovable...

...Isn't it time then that these decent ones in their own interest disciplined their unruly young and knocked into their heads the idea that, if the police and society have some duty to understand and sympathize with them, then they also have a complementary duty to understand and sympathize with the society they live in and with the police who have to protect it-yes, by rough and ready means if needed...

...indeed, do the exact opposite...

...don't shamelessly break the law...

...And most of us can say without humbug that we are sincerely grateful to those who without spite or ill-nature pointed it out to us...

...Narayan, the impartial godlike peacemaker, the dusky Prince of Verona...

...Again, blacks are said to riot because they are badly educated and unemployed...

...But on reflection we digest it and often greatly profit from it...

...Well, they or some of them certainly have an odd way of showing it...

...The root causes of violence in Brixton and like places are said to lie in bad education, bad housing, and unemployment...