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The London riots were nothing new.

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posted on Aug, 22 2011 @ 11:30 AM
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Just came across a great article on the history of Britain's social unrest, comparing the articles written by todays journalists with those from previous decades in British history.


Daily Express of July 7th 1981, stating:

Over the past twenty years or so, there has been a revulsion from authority and discipline... There has been a permissive revolution... and now we all reap the whirlwind



You find editorials and columnists seeming to blame the decline on black immigration. Here is the Sunday Telegraph of November 29th 1981:

Brixton is the iceberg tip of a crisis of ethnic criminality which is not Britain's fault—except in the sense that her rulers quite unnecessarily imported it


But the moral outrage goes further back,

In a 1956 front page editorial, headlined "Rock 'n Roll Babies" the Daily Mail declared:

It is deplorable. It is tribal. And it is from America. It follows rag-time, blues, dixie, jazz, hot cha-cha and the boogie-woogie, which surely originated in the jungle. We sometimes wonder whether this is the negro's revenge.


Obviously before political correctness.

Before 1950, people were still demanding a return to the good old days


Back to 1932, and a guide to the work of boys' clubs lamented:

The passing of parental authority, defiance of pre-war conventions, the absence of restraint, the wildness of extremes, the confusion of unrelated liberties, the wholesale drift away from churches


Much of the information for the article was from a book called "Hooligan: A History of Respectable Fears" , published in 1982, and written by Geoffrey Pearson.

It's an excellent article and worth a read.


In London, 1815 sees the foundation of the Society for Investigating the Causes of the Alarming Increase in Juvenile Delinquency in the Metropolis. 1751 sees Henry Fielding's "Enquiry into the Causes of the Late Increase of Robbers" (Fielding fingered "too frequent and expensive diversions among the lower kind of people"). The seventeenth century saw moral panics about violent and rowdy apprentices, as well as about organised fighting among gangs (wearing coloured ribbons to identify their troops). Professor Pearson ends with the sixteenth century and puritan fears about, if not gangsta rap, popular songs that treated criminals as heroes.


www.economist.com.../fb/wl/bl/wehavebeenherebeforebritain


This is no way defending the actions of the rioters and looters, but providing a little historical context. This is nothing new.




edit on 22-8-2011 by woodwardjnr because: (no reason given)



 
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