European and American image-consumers love such feisty expressions of democratic discontent; burning cars, throwing bricks, beating the crap out of riot police unlucky enough to come off their two-stroke motorbikes.
Because dissent is laudable overseas: At home it’s undemocratic.
You see, self-righteousness and anger as engines of change are exported, projected, displaced. In Iran we can admire the passion of Tehran’s glamorous youth (Playboy magazine is currently running a feature on Iran’s “Lipstick Revolution”); abhor the conservative clerics and watch the cars burning with a frisson of detached admiration.
God forbid such a thing happen on the streets of London.
Not so very long ago, there was a protest in England’s capital, as far as I recall. It wasn’t very violent: one window of one bank was smashed; no cars were burnt, no policeman beaten and the only things thrown were juggling balls. And not in anger.
The protestors largely rather politely demanded that the bankers who had run our financial institutions into the ground return their multimillion pound bonuses. Please. And that the leaders of the G20 push for jobs, fair distribution of wealth, and a low-carbon future.
For their pains, they had the crap beaten out of them by London’s Metropolitan police, who covered up their badge numbers, backhanded women across the face, punched protestors, dragged teenage girls backwards across the street by their hair and killed an onlooker after slamming his head into the pavement.
Britain’s political establishment praised the demonstrators for their civic mindedness and engagement in the democratic right to protest, and called roundly on the police to be accountable for their murder of an innocent bystander.
“Oh? Hold on a minute?” (Checks earpiece…) “They didn’t?”
No, sorry, they did nothing of the sort. They roundly praised the police for doing a “difficult job in tough circumstances” and smeared the protestors with all sorts of unsubstantiated allegations. Not a single senior figure stood up to condemn what amounted to manslaughter of an entirely innocent man. Not one.
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