(voices of resistance from occupied london)

Luther Dimissett, hybrid[at]occupiedlondon.org

Recent Urban Unrest?

The Old Good Urban Rest was Better!

WHAT is recent urban unrest? I mean, in Paris the suburbs would always explode in reaction to authorities and the police. Haven’t you seen ‘La Haine’? Or in 1968, when even the petite bourgeoisie revolted - looking for the beach under the pavement. That was Urban Unrest!

Moreover, London saw riots almost monthly since in the 1980s. Did you ever hear about the wild manifestations in Italy during the seventies? Athens sees hundreds of bomb explosions every year. Or did you forget of Amsterdam in the eighties? I will behave and I won’t even start about Berlin and Barcelona, where riots were almost customary.

IN THE PAST…The TV almost had a monopoly on public images: it referred to a bunch of anarchists adding that “fortunately” ‘everything was under control’ and that what we saw was urban rest. Well OK... 10,000 cops were in hospital and the city centres were occupied by 500,000 masked revolutionaries burning ministries and banks, but still ‘the situation was under control.’

TODAY…Well TV has not changed much: Most of the poor but honest reporters still claim that ‘the situation is under control’...

...But the image per se is much less controlled and less monopolised.

Today, everyone has a camera and records everything - not only behind the helmets of policemen, but also behind the heads of the rebels!

Police and reporters might tell you the police controls the situation...but when videos come showing nothing is under control, the authorities have two tricks:

(1) The old one is to belie what everyone can see and claim that what we see in TV is Urban Rest, not Urban Unrest...

…and (2) their new trick is to try to win the audiences’ sympathy by throwing X or Y number of poor, small, unprotected officers injured.

Today TV and other professionals lose their monopoly in the administration of images...

-Images here - images there... where is the image? It must be here somewhere...-
BUT this camera thing is an anti-revolutionary conspiracy!

Everything contributes to that condition... The world is full of cameras: They put them on the streets; they put them in the working places; in the houses... They even put them on mobile phones, to make sure that everyone will have one!

THE demonstrators focus their attention to the camera and to the image, not to reality!

THE Counteractive elements want to cause a metamorphosis: From rebels to camera-men... ...camera-men who record the image, they do not participate in the rebellion!

IN order to force the rebels to use cameras they also advertise their use: They give policemen a camera. These cameras are fake policemen do not know how to use machines, (apart from machine guns) they have them for promotion reasons, they advertise camera use to demonstrators. They also provoke them by claiming that there is ‘urban rest’ when this is not the case, getting demonstrators pissed off – then demonstrators get a camera and start video-taping.

AND when there is a camera not only the camera men do nothing, but they even influence the rest of the people around them who behave like they are on film.

THERE are two kinds of urban unrests: those one in front of a camera and those without cameras. The first type refers to what we are used to call ‘recent urban unrest’ Here, the situation is miserable, both police and rebels are caught doing everything merely for the spectacle.

UNDER these circumstances today we just see more and think that we learn more about the urban unrests, consequently we think that they are recent phenomenon...
...but social unrest in cities is as old as cities themselves. Greeks and Romans had riots and club holders to control the crowd unrest... Spartacus did it! What difference is there between the current wave of urban unrest and older ones?

Image!

...Quite simply: Social groups that are oppressed will always revolt against their exploiters. Then cameras and monitors came, together with the image.

THUS what I want to tell is that recent urban unrest is not recent, it is as old as the mud. We just SEE more about them nowadays.

‘Recent unrests’ will end as soon as cameras turn off!

There is life after (and before) the image!_