EDITORIAL

Welcome to Issue Eight - the "Riots Issue"

While I was staying in London during the riots, I listened to the radio and watched the news on television rather more than was good for me. And one thing struck me. Discussions and arguments concerning the riots went round and round in ever diminishing circles and nothing ever seemed to be resolved. After a while, my head started spinning. The more I listened, the less I wanted to hear what people had to say, but still they continued saying it, each in their predictable ways. Call it exhaustion; call it attention-span deficit syndrome (or is it "disorder"?); call it what you will, but before very long I began to turn off.

There will be a lot of political capital made from these riots. It's already been called "a defining moment", whatever that means.  The political positioning has begun and the more partisan it becomes, of course, the less convincing it will be to "yer average punter" like me.   So yes, I am prepared to stand back for a while, forget all the political point-scoring and say give the poets a chance. Why? Perhaps because poets don't go around saying what they ought to say, depending on their party allegiances. Perhaps it also has something to do with seeing rather than looking, which is an intentional act that carries a certain baggage. When one looks one looks at what one wants to look at; there is volition involved. And in looking, one sees only what one wants to see and everything else you might see gets very conveniently overlooked or suppressed. But the act of seeing just by itself is not  volitional or intentional in this way. Something enters your field of vision and it's registered whether you like it or not. It is thereby much truer than what you might look at, because the original intention behind the looking is absent, so that what you see is not what you want to see or aim to see, but simply what impinges on your field of vision in a completely uninvited way. Later of course, when you come to present what you see, you might engage in a bit of suppressing just to make what you have seen conform to your own agenda. But that is another matter.

Seeing is what distinguishes the poet from the politician. Politicians shape what they see in accordance with what they are looking to see. Poets, on the other hand, do not. They present what they see as it swings into view without asking their permission. Of course, the visual analogy I'm using here is simply that - an analogy. What a poet hits upon while writing a poem is, in its best moments, almost a happy accident, not something intended.  One thing is certain, poets do not write in accordance with a preformed agenda.  And that distinguishes them from politicians, who cannot express a point of view without first knowing what their party colleagues and leaders have already agreed upon. This is why politicians are so good at not answering questions which they haven't already collectively decided on. Most politicians will say in response to a question which hasn't been scripted, "Yes, that's a very good question, but let me first make these 26 other points and then I will come back to your question." By which time of course, you have forgotten what you wanted to say, become so exasperated that you've just given up or David Dimbleby has called time on your question and moved on to another one. This is not the way poets work and because of that, what poets offer has the chance of being something much truer. 

That's why I announced that I wanted to do this issue and solicited for material related to it. I wanted to hear different voices for a change, voices less stale, less predictable  than those I'd been hearing either from professional politicians or the professional media - or indeed that mythical beast, "The Great British Public',* which seems incapable of thinking for itself. Of course, not all the material received was directly about these particular riots; after all, it is difficult to have an immediate response to such events and register it in poetry, but I hope readers will think it is still relevant to what we have recently witnessed and to the 'end-times' we're presently living through. That goes in particular for the poem about Rimbaud, who has come to be seen as the archetypal rebel in poetry. And what were these riots, if not some kind of rebellion, some kind of "fuck you!" to rules and authority.

Finally, I did not want to exercise too much editorial discretion regarding the poems submitted, because differing points of view and ways of presenting them may all be relevant to a fuller picture of the riots and their aftermath.  There is certainly not one simple picture that emerges, whether it be of 'feral rats', criminal gangs, an alienated underclass, the cuts, the behaviour of the police prior to the riots and so on and so forth. Let those with an axe to grind say what they have to according to the agenda they wish to promote. Poetry has its own way of seeing things and it is important to keep that distinction.  

  

* "Most people are other people...their thoughts are someone else's opinions; their lives a mimicry; their passions a quotation." Oscar Wilde.
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                        CONTENTS


Poems                                  -                                    Karen Margolis

Shard                                    -                                      John Bennett

Poem                                    -                                    George Szirtes

Poem                                    -                                     Edward Mycue

Quote                                    -                                    Antonin Artaud

Poem                                    -                                  David Waddilove

Poem                                    -                                   Gerald England

Photograph                           -                                   Gerald England

Poem                                    -                                   Ian MacFadyen

Essay                                    -                               Richard Livermore

Quote                                    -                                           Al Capone

Poems                                  -                               Richard Livermore










POEMS - Karen Margolis



Season of Empty Shops
 
 
A bubble of fragile truth
floating on a puddle of lies
refusing to be blown away
and trying not to burst
 
Credibility a flash game
while the present is downloaded
as a crisis scenario
on flickering displays
 
Elena, age 7, fires a question
through the baubles and tinsel
of adult illusion: “Why all the fuss
about a baby being born?”
 
A season of empty shops
dwindling faith and hollow sentiment
weighs ahead, sinking the year
we’ve already written off as loss


Alone & Afraid
 
 
The Great Fear in the Dark Ages
bred riots and mass migrations
freak storms & tidal waves
calves born with two heads
babies with cauls around their necks
plague and pestilence, wars
and inquisitions, visions
of the horsemen of the apocalypse
avenging angels and weeping madonnas
 
millions downed tools and left their villages
running from they knew not what
 
our age is still nameless
only a series of changing labels
fashion fads we can't avoid
affordable fakes for one & all
the Great Fear stalks us in shopping malls
perpetually ringing cellphones
menacing headlines
tales of invading hordes & terrorist threats
screens and cameras
in public and private spaces
 
the Great Fear fills the hole
where gods or love used to be
it's fuelled by insecurity
 
insects devoid of instinct
we scuttle into the web for safety
our virtual universe offers disembodied
signs & wonders to all & sundry
numbs the senses with the drug of choice
and leaves us lonely.








                         SHARD - John Bennett


                                       The Street


We're all seeking truth. We're all seeking answers. We're all looking for a way out, a way in, an anchor with links as thick as giant sausages to drop and weather the storm. And then reality strikes, the messy unpredictable here-and-now. There's nothing else, really. Roll with it.

People talking war. People talking carnage. People talking the abstraction of distant suffering. You don't know what six German riot police are until they kick in your door, and then they're not German, they're not even riot police, they're six men with license. From the moment the door splinters off its hinges and your wife starts screaming with her hands over her ears and the two English vagrants you've been harboring make a dash for the window, generalities and abstractions and speculations get vaporized and life explodes into a shower of micro-seconds.

                                                                 ***
The Pentagon March, 1967. Face-to-face with a row of bayoneted rifles and gas masks with 19-year-old boys behind them. A girl sticks a rose down a barrel, someone barks a command, and the boys move forward in the short-thrust position. Someone grabs a rifle, someone gives a shove, Norman Mailer has come and gone, Dick Gregory has been rushed to the hospital at the tail end of his protest fast, and then they fire the tear gas.

Things shatter into myriad particulars. You and Grant slide down a hillside and come face to mask with a soldier who is pointing his bayonet at you, and you're thinking not about the war or justice or equal rights but that this kid doesn't know Grant. You've been here with him before, in New Orleans, on the streets of Brussels, this has nothing to do with McNamara or Mailer, with the Nam, this is personal, and like a swift jungle cat Grant wrenches the rifle out the the boy's hands, flings it aside, and rips off the mask. 

The kid is scared and has no idea what he's doing. "I'm sorry," he says, choking on the gas, and--eyes stinging and throats burning--Grant and I laugh. Grant gives the kid a bear hug and we haul ass out of there.

                                                                 ***

I'm parked in my work van up on the hill at 6 a.m., the only vehicle up here, the window rolled down to let in the fresh morning air, drinking coffee and smoking and writing this, when a low rider pulls up. 

A low rider? In Ellensburg? On the hill at 6 a.m.? 

The tinted window goes down and a black chick says, "You got a cigarette?" 

There's an Arab-looking guy with a gold chain around his neck behind the wheel, and a blond in the back with plucked eyebrows. The four of us are taking readings like crazy.

"I roll my own," I say.

"Huh," says the black chick. 

The window goes up and the low rider backs slowly in behind me.

I keep writing. I write what just happened and then I study the low rider in the rear-view mirror. I get out of the van and walk back there. The passenger-side window comes down about halfway and I walk around and hold out a cigarette. This isn't in the script, and that gives me the upper hand.

"I don't smoke rollies," says the black chick, but when I continue to hold it out, she takes it, reluctantly. "Do you smoke rollies?" she says to the girl in the back.

"I'll smoke it," the girl says, and the black chick hands it back. The girl twists one end of the cigarette like it's a joint and I hand in a lighter. 

The Arab-looking guy has both hands on the wheel and is looking straight out the windshield. 

The girl in back lights up, leans forward, and hands the lighter back out. "Thanks," she says.

"No problem," I say, and walk back to the van. 

I've got all the information I need to rest easy.

                                                                  ***
Years ago, in San Francisco, me and my friend Glenn, whose whole life is an abstraction, were driving down a deserted street off Broadway around midnight after a night of drinking when a woman sprang out from behind a hedge and came running toward the car, waving her hands frantically.  

Glenn stopped, put the car in park, and with the motor still running, got out. I took one look at the woman, the way she was dressed, the way her eyes didn't match her arm waving, and my eyes began darting around. Sure enough, here's this guy coming around the other end of the hedge, one arm stiff at his side, a pistol in his hand.

"Get in!" I shout at Glenn. "Get the fuck out of here!"

"She needs help!" Glenn says. He still hasn't seen the man with the pistol.

"Fuck she does!" I say. "There's a guy with a gun!"

Glenn freezes in place, his eyes glazed--he was rolled in the Fillmore just a week earlier. I reach out, yank him back behind the wheel, put the car in gear, get my foot on the gas and floor it. We go careening down the street, Glenn steering reflexively.

I twist around and look out the rear window. The man and woman are standing side-by-side in the middle of the street, the woman with her hands on her hips, the man with his arm still stiff at his side, holding the pistol.

                                                                ***
If you've spent any time on the street, all this makes sense to you. 

The street is where things get processed at lightning speed. 

The street is a state of mind. 

People who don't know the street are fair game, and they get what they deserve.














POEM - George Szirtes


Aftermaths: Postcards from a riot


1
13 packets of fruit gums, 21 Yorkie bars:
this was the spree and all around the loot.
Below, the street, up there the sparkling stars
among the broken glass and burning cars,
the spree too small, a week’s supply the loot,
13 packets of fruit gums, 21 Yorkie bars.

2
The good samaritans arrived, they helped him up
and took most tender care,
once he was walking, to open up his bag
and share the spoils, or what there was to share.

3
Sheneka Leigh, aged twenty-two,
was simply trying on a shoe,
footwear her besetting sin:
this is the box they threw her in.

4
He was peripheral,
a dot at the rim of vision,
with a stolen bottle of wine
a twelve year old before the district judge.
He’d punched some 1 in the chest 2 times.
Now see him move back to the periphery.
You watch your fucking face, his mother cries.
You watch your fucking face.

5.
Brought up in circumstances more humble than they,
the righteous proclaim their humility.
The looters consider then pass on their way
this exercise in futility.

The fatter, the fitter, the fleeter, the flitter
all of them suitably humble,
delighted and crowing and ever more bitter
as buildings and businesses crumble.

6.
Payback time for not being taken on
by the job no-one wanted but you.
So payback is paid
with both parties through.

7.
CCTV is on the case. Watch the figures emerge
from the wallpaper then merge back in again.
Caught. Caught. And the commentary that chimes in:
Scum! Feral rats! 
It is as well to distinguish them from the domestic sort
who are not about to flee the ship.

8.
Zero Tolerance on Ground Zero:
the proper platform for a proper hero.
The toiling masses gather in the Forum
without ever constituting a quorum.

9.
A boy holds up a pair of jeans appraisingly.
It goes with the hood and the mask.
It is an aesthetic matter.

10.
Or the man hugging a few bottles of, is it,
Black Bush? Bushmills?
A man of taste, I'd say,
albeit in a haste
(he seems to be running away)
after a brief visit.

It is, as Empson said, not the slag hills,
but the waste,
the waste remains and kills.

POEM - Edward Mycue 


A CENTURY IS A SKULL FACTORY

I.
It’s another century, careless, rudderless
when what’s next is curtains
riding the night air
                              and victims living their injuries
                 sledding along like a shell in a swift stream
       the color of coral, of flamingos
                                  transparence twilled over and
intersecting recesses of hurt.
                                                     
 II.    
       Discrete bits of elsewhere become
yellow tulips in a sodden light
       that doesn’t equal dusk because it’s split
from a century like a skull floating like a factory
                              whose function is clotting
       where optimal longings gather under a mask,
                    
 III.
                     but first it curdles into a dance
of confusions called CLINICAL TRIALS, “mono-
                                            therapies
a mobius strip adder                    doubling on itself
    as I sit wanting to fly from my speech into
     silent brown eyes       flecked with gold      crossed legged waiting                                                       
drifting on the current
                                                                   like a flag.











QUOTE - Antonin Artaud

"God does not exist, he withdraws, gets the fuck out and leaves the cops to keep an eye on things."














POEM - David Waddilove


       Riot Haiku


       the objects of desire
       are in your face
       the windows are shattering











POEM - Gerald England

August Riots
 
Saturday as London riots
Manchester boasts it is riot-free
though some fear to celebrate
 
Sunday in Salford
and Manchester City Centre
a mad mob mobilizes
 
Wanton destruction
Miss Selfridge's torched
lots of looting
 
Monday morning
an army of citizens gather
armed with brooms
 
Outside Starbucks
free coffee for volunteers
cleaning the streets
 
Wednesday afternoon sun
fountains play in Piccadilly Gardens
families having fun
 
The trams trundle
down Market Street
thronged with shoppers
 
Only a few boarded up windows
remain to remind us
of a sad Sunday.

                                                                                          

THE MORNING AFTER THE NIGHT BEFORE IN MANCHESTER
Courtesy of Gerald England

POEM – Ian MacFadyen

 


Night In Abyssinia
                                                       For Eddie Woods



The viaduct drips with ice and soot

And in the crumbling brick he finds an arctic violet

Illuminated by a ray of light


There’s a furnace in the book shop 

Where he can warm his worn-out boot soles

Stealing real fire consigning the poems in his pockets to the flames 


Flaneur of filth his azure eyes feast on trash 

Shock of hair alive with lice to flick at priests

He’s the imp of the perverse lasciviously sucking a liquorice stick


Perfidious poet passing through rotten Albion

In a ten-shilling top hat his fingers shiny over the dirt

Metropolitan peasant of train tracks and chimney stacks


Cruel child relishing suffering and degradation

A pale sun wavering through the smog

And then the crepuscular blue bewitching hour


Smell of excrement on the tide

The gutter crowd swept from the burning Cross

To the debauch of the Childermass


He sees the sad face of an organ grinder’s monkey

And the whores with their tired old tits in the alleyways

A late hawker selling needles and thread door to door


And that insane old man disguised as the ghost of a flea

He’s the image maker the kaleidoscope shaker

Shuttling the pictures back and forth 


The magic lantern operator electric with rebellion

He projects the pandemonium shadow show of his own mind 

In a street séance of his own design 


Already he knows the absolute futility the monstrous stupidity of poetry

He’ll learn instead an extinct language and speak with the dead

And go where they go salt crystals burning the wounds in his lips  


It is necessary to travel it is not necessary to live

The world is immense there are many lives to live

He wants to walk out one morning and never come back


And do this again and again every day of his life

To disappear forever and never come back to be finally forgotten

A vagabond of the scorched earth


Insolent silence must be his game

To confound the teachers in the prison house of  language

He’ll wipe his slate clean of all that tedious reason and sentimental guff 


Waiting out the white unholy winter sozzled and vicious as always

Laughing at himself and at everything n’existe pas

Already he can taste the absolute loneliness of Ultima Thule


Call it Terra Incognita the no-place of mists and vapours

Where green lions preside with their peacock tails

Of mercury and amethyst


Call it Anima Mundi the zebra-striped ocean of time

Call it Imaginatio the cloud mythology blown by winds of chance

Call it whatever you like


Call it Mythopoeic Metempsychosis

Call it the Daimonic Via Regia of revelation through obliteration

Call it a game of skittles 18,000 years long


The world is immense

There are many lives to live

Have pity have courage


Be hard be gentle

Have compassion have pride

Throw yourself away utterly with no regrets


A master of maps on a voyage to nowhere 

He stares all day at a single cloud frozen in the shattering blue

Suspended forever above a street of rubble on an endless khat afternoon


And he praises the beauty of women and the uselessness of men

And that flayed goat skin crucified in the sun

And the inevitability and stupidity of everything


One night he sees a hyena raising itself paw by paw

Up the grain store steps its spotted skin matted with blood

It has a wounded leg and a hungry and sorrowful look


The wind is freezing the animal whimpers and snarls

But its misery consoles him  

This moment too will disappear in time Inch’Allah
















                                                       ESSAY


                       VIGILANTISM AND SELF-DEFENCE
                                     Richard Livermore


During the recent disturbance in London and other cities and towns in England, a subject arose in response to certain actions people had taken which seems to have been quietly swept under the carpet since then and conveniently forgotten, although for me it was one of the more intriguing aspects of the disturbances. That subject was 'vigilantism'. The very word "vigilantism" conjures up images of lynching in Alabama or townsfolk in westerns breaking someone out of prison, 'taking the law into their own hands' and dispensing summary 'justice'. What actually happened in London had very little to do with people taking the law into their own hands in this way. It was more a case of people standing together to defend their shops, temples or mosques from  looters and arsonists, especially in light of the fact that the police had been largely standing around and allowing the looting and arson to happen. Why the police were not more proactive to begin with is an interesting question in itself which I cannot decide upon, but the suspicion does arise that they wanted to demonstrate to the government why the government's cuts to police numbers would be counter-productive. After all, one thing Thatcher made sure of when she was embarking on similar austerity measures was that the police were properly funded. However, that's a political point which I don't want to pursue in this essay.

During the 'Arab Spring' in Egypt, the police, after emptying the prisons, also reneged on their responsibility to defend communities from looting and as a result neighbourhood defence-committees emerged as people began to defend their communities themselves. Something like this began to happen in parts of London and other riot-torn cities in England. Call this 'vigilantism' if you will, but you will find it in any similar situation, especially under conditions of insurrection and revolution. When the traditional barriers to 'anarchy' break down, along with the means of servicing life on an everyday level, people invariably step into the breach and begin to improvise for themselves. It certainly happened during the mother of all revolutions, the French Revolution, in the sections of Paris and elsewhere, and also during the Russian Revolution. Read Volin's anarchist account of it in The Unknown Revolution for a fuller picture of what happened. During the French Revolution, the police and the magistrates were under the direct control of the popular assemblies in the sections rather than the centralised state. It was one of the reasons why Robespierre needed to attack the sections through the use of The Terror in order to bring them into line with his centralising policies and popular leaders like Jacques Roux went to the guillotine. I think it is a safe bet to say that if the Metropolitan Police in London had been similarly accountable to the local communities, the killing of Mark Duggan would not have taken place and the riots that followed would not have been triggered

During the recent disturbances, senior members of the police began to warn people who were defending their neighbourhoods from looters and arson against 'taking the law into their own hands'. Commentators on the radio and television began to mutter darkly about 'vigilantes' usurping the role of the police and the 'proper authorities' and applying the term to people who were attempting to protect the buildings they lived,  worked or worshipped in from attack. Which is rich considering that the police had been largely standing around stroking their truncheons during the first nights of the looting. One could almost be forgiven for thinking that the police feared these defensive actions by ordinary people because it was starting to make them seem redundant. After all, if people were seen to be defending their neighbourhoods more effectively than the police, people might start to ask the very relevant question regarding what good the police actually are. So it is natural that the police would get somewhat alarmed at these examples of 'vigilantism'.  But there is one thing which distinguishes these neighbourhood self-defence groups from real vigilantes and that is that they are only defending themselves and their property and banding together to do so. A true vigilante is a kind of crusader imbued with an authoritarian Law 'n' Order mentality, whose desire is to remove the 'scum' from the streets. That, of course, means vigilantes taking the law in their own hands, and enforcing the law in situations where it is perceived to have broken down or isn't working to their satisfaction. Self-defence groups, on the other hand, have a much more limited remit; they are simply engaged in defending themselves, their communities and property. Enforcing the law is not part of that. Some of the Turkish people in London, for example, engaged in defending their own restaurants and streets against looters and arsonists said that this is what they would do in Turkey if their villages came under attack in this way. There is a huge difference between these two things. The self-defence 'mentality' is a minimal one, while the vigilante mentality is not. The vigilante, as I have said,  is a crusader on behalf of some idea of 'Law 'n' Order'. This distinction I don't think can be emphasised strongly enough.

Of course, many police-officers are not themselves far from having a vigilante mentality. In her novel, The God Of Small Things, Arundhati Roy describes a situation in which the policeman and vigilante become one and the same thing when dealing with a Dalit - a member of India's untouchable caste. "If they hurt Velutha more than they intended to, it was only because any kinship, any connection between themselves and him, any implication that, if nothing else, at least biologically, he was a fellow creature - had been severed long ago. They were not arresting a man; they were exorcising a fear." This dehumanising impulse to exorcise a fear lies behind the vigilante mentality. The outlaw or 'other', who is little more than 'scum' or 'vermin' which the vigilante wishes to  hunt down and, if possible, exterminate, needs to be exorcised. When you are defending your homes, businesses and neighbourhoods against looters, you are defending yourself against a very real threat and that distinguishes it from vigilantism, whose fear is a permanent feature of the psychology of its adherents rather than a contemporary state of mind which, once the threat has receded, will pass.

The vigilante may not only be defending law and order in the strictly literal or legal sense of the term. He or she may be defending such notions as the sanctity of the family, the purity of the race,  the virtue of white women,  Christian morality and notions of decency. Honour-killing too is a form of vigilantism, as is gay-bashing. Vigilantes may see themselves as policing society against all forms of decay or breakdown and not just the breakdown of law and order. The vigilante is a kind of moral crusader who, if he or she is imbued with respect for law and order, it is usually in the sense of the hang 'em and flog 'em brigade, who believe that the law as it is presently constituted and practiced is too liberal and soft. - or too hampered by red-tape or 'political correctness'. This may extend to those who are paid and sworn to uphold the law, such as the police. How else can one explain the fact that, according to John Pilger, more than 330 people have died in police custody in Britain since 1998 without one policeman being convicted.  (330 seems an awful lot of people who just so happen to have accidentally 'died' in police hands!)

There are two ways of keeping the peace in society; 1) the authoritarian punitive way and 2) the libertarian restorative way. (The liberal way attempts a compromise between these two poles.) The authoritarian punitive way is the way of the vigilante. The libertarian (and let's take this word back from the 'libertarian' - actually, propertarian - right, who have usurped it completely), restorative way is the way of most pre-state societies. The object of restorative justice is to restore the social harmony that has been broken as a result of certain kinds of behaviour. It will involve mechanisms of collective defence - based on the neighbourhood, not the state - mechanisms for paying compensation - which is not punitive except where it might inconvenience the offender - and reintegrating the offender into society.  Of course, such a system of justice could not possibly work in a social and economic system which is itself unjust. States have always existed to uphold the unjust order of society and its inequitable economic arrangements. Therefore, it follows that a system of restorative justice could never be guaranteed by the state, no matter how 'democratic'. It could only be guaranteed by the people themselves through their own institutions of direct popular democracy as begun to happen during the French Revolution.

Ordinary people have the right to defend themselves against looters and rioters without being labelled vigilantes by the cops or by 'concerned' leaders of the community' - such as politicians, bishops and others who are not on the front line. A riot is no picnic to endure, and riots invariably involve looting. Looting in fact is an almost ritual aspect of rioting. There are no 'good riots' as far as that goes. The riots in Brixton and Toxteth in 1981 involved looting no less than the recent riots. Anne Czerny in the Morning Star newspaper put her finger on one of the reasons why rioting so often involves looting,  "Historically, looting is an ancient act of war. To plunder the enemy's valued treasure is the reward of battle. To defile architecture and objects of a civilisation is the means by which a victor obliterates all traces of the enemy." This element, I suspect, is not entirely absent from what has been taking place in England recently. During the Spanish Civil War, after the peasants had driven the landlords out, they attempted to destroy everything which the landlords possessed - including works of art. In many cases, their leaders persuaded them that it was better to liberate works of art than destroy them. Dispossessed people who become rioters may likewise feel that they are liberating the goods that they're looting; not just stealing them, but putting their own stamp of possession on them, appropriating them in a way which makes those goods somehow more unambiguously theirs than would be the case if some kind of exchange was involved. Of course, it is inevitable that they would meet resistance from local communities, workers and shop-owners whose livelihoods are threatened. After all, no one likes to see their means of earning a living destroyed.

However, it is not always as simple as that. The September Massacres of 1792 during the French Revolution provide a very good example of a situation in which self-defence and vigilantism can go hand in hand, even though they are two different things.   Most of those massacred were counter-revolutionaries who even from prison were actively conspiring with invading Prussian forces - who were then advancing on Paris - to restore Louis XVl to the throne of France. However, many ordinary prisoners were massacred as well, as sections of the mob who wished to 'cleanse society' and get rid of the 'dregs' went on the rampage. The massacre of counter-revolutionaries may have been a necessary measure of self-defence for a people who were under attack from the  invading Prussian forces. (The massacres the other way would have been far greater if those forces had succeeded in putting Louis back on the throne.) However, the second group of people, some of whom were just children, were victims of pure vigilantism. They were no threat to the revolution. They simply ran up against the moral prejudices of a panic-stricken and hysterical mob whose fever was fuelled by the prevailing sense of immanent threat. Vigilantes are always inspired by moral prejudices like that. That's more or less what defines them.  The difference between vigilantes and people simply coming together to defend their neighbourhoods, homes, shops and places of work or worship should thus on the face of it be fairly obvious, but they can become mixed up and confused in reality, as the example of the September Massacres show. That doesn't mean that the distinction is  invalid, or that police-officers, politicians and bishops who mutter darkly about 'vigilantism' when ordinary people start to defend themselves should necessarily be taken as authorities on the subject. 










QUOTE  -  Al Capone


"Capitalism is the racket of the ruling class." 









POEMS - Richard Livermore


(The  first  of  these  poems was  written  about  the time of the Brixton  and  Toxteth  riots in 1981. It has  already  been published - or exhibited - in numerous places. The second was written in 1995 or thereabouts, while the last poem is of much more recent vintage. RL)



     Epitaph for the Late-Bourgeoisie
               (circa: the day after tomorrow)

               If only you'd known
                  life beyond carpets
                     and windows.
               or was it your fate
 
               to sentence yourselves
                  to the dot of an i
                     with a full
               stop ahead at the garden?

               and that of the overlooked
                  in the street?
                    the monster 
               that stalked the world
 
               you neglected, eager
                  to slake its thirst
                     with your blood, 
               to never desist

               from its beastly behaviour
                  until you'd acknowledged
                     your creature
               and saviour?




Meltdown

All fall down like a house of cards
gone blat at. All the President’s 
horses and men... When queue
went to barge, spirits were rising
as demons danced in the forest.

Then came the gaping silence,
when all you could hear was the sonic
boom of the bat in pursuit
of the bug and the tom-tom drum
of the ear of the bat in reply.

Spirits laughed to behold the collapse;
collaboration in ruins!
Still not a sound to be heard
- spirit laughter is silent.
Then a demon shrieked in delight.

Who hadn’t seen it? There was death
in the air from the start,
the smell of decomposition.
One of the gods owed one of the gods;
the time had come to collect.





Past Help?

Can all the world's pilots
in all the world's cockpits
right the world's tailspin?

Or is the world doomed
to go down with a whoop
and a yippy-yie-yo?