UK immigration: Protests and riots failed, but violence works: the lesson from Belfast. By John Carter.
We’re not advocating, but the facts speak plainly.
Last week there was a minor uprising in Belfast. Hadi Alodid, a gentlemen of Sudanese extraction, enriched the face of Stephen Ogilvie, a local bloke with special needs, providing him with extensive tribal scarring in a generous act of cross-cultural exchange, and only claiming two of his eyes in payment. The entire incident was caught on video. …
Belfast exploded the next day. Yes, I was surprised too. Not a city noted for its hard lads, Belfast.
The uprising was variously described as a protest and as a riot, but it was neither of these.
Protests and riots don’t work:
A protest is when an angry crowd gathers to chant some slogans and wave around some signs, pretending that their numbers are a display of power, and deluding themselves that Power will redress their grievances because a noisy lump of quivering biomass is somehow intimidating to Power.
A riot is an explosive release of emotional energy that results in some property destruction and futile confrontations with armoured riot police, typically ending with the rioters being rounded up and jailed.
In some cases, it’s true, protests and riots appear to produce political change, but this is almost invariably because Power has orchestrated these little carnivals in order to sanctify the policies it’s already decided upon under the guise of ‘bowing’ to ‘pressure’ from the ‘public’. (The Canadian government, by the way, has long since mastered a non-violent variant of this dark art: practically every ‘public policy research group’ in the country is funded by the government to pressure the government to do what the government already wants to do.) …
Not a protest, not a riot, but something quite different:
There were no signs being waved around in Belfast, no chanting of slogans.
While there was a great deal of violence, it was not random and senseless, but methodical and carefully targeted. It unfolded with the tight discipline of a coordinated military operation.
The day before the uprising started, a communique was sent out to local businesses, instructing them to close before the fun started. At the appointed hour loose formations of young men, indistinguishable in black hoodies, fanned out across the city.
Barricades were set up all over Belfast; these were lightly manned, reportedly often with minors, and seem to have been intended mainly to slow down the police. In a few places men in balaclavas established checkpoints, pulling out migrants when they found them and roughing them up.
Meanwhile, highly mobile groups of young men targeted houses, cars, and businesses known to belong to migrants, breaking their windows and firebombing them.
When there were civilians inside, they evicted them first: as far as I’ve heard, no one was killed, or even hospitalized. By the time emergency services arrived on the scene they’d already moved on to the next targets.
There do not seem to have been many direct confrontations with riot squads. There were a few videos of small numbers of skirmishers lobbing bricks or petrol bombs at police vehicles while using wheelie bins to shield themselves from a water cannon. It looked like they were mainly trying to keep the police occupied, so that the real work could proceed unimpeded elsewhere.
These young men had no interest in providing fodder for the media cycle. They left their phones at home in order to avoid being tracked. They kept themselves masked, and were at pains to politely discourage bystanders from recording them. …
This combination of identical black clothing, identity concealment, mobility, and property destruction are classic black bloc tactics. In North America black bloc is generally associated with Antifa, and as far I know, the tactical doctrine was first developed by anti-globalization activists at WTO meetings (remember when anti-globalization was a leftist position?) …
Due to the Troubles, the citizens of Northern Island were already organized:
The violence was largely contained to Belfast’s Protestant neighbourhoods, strongholds of loyalist paramilitaries such as the Ulster Volunteer Force and the Ulster Defence Association. These were formed in response to the Irish Republican Army’s terrorism …
Some of the paramilitaries’ leadership were seen on the streets, although they did not participate directly, and seemed to be just observing. Officially the paramilitaries played no part in orchestrating the violence, which is a line that both the paramilitaries and the police are sticking to, but then of course they would: the leadership isn’t about to confess to criminal activity, and the authorities much prefer a narrative of a spontaneous eruption of disorganized racist thuggery because that doesn’t imply that they don’t actually have a monopoly on violence in Belfast. My working assumption is that this is nonsense, and that the uprising was in fact organized by the loyalist paramilitaries. …
The IRA does not seem to have played any part in this, and indeed the IRA’s communist boomer leadership actively discouraged Belfast’s Catholics from taking part. They could not, however, motivate their people to actively interfere with the loyalists: the Catholics seem to have mostly watched (there were reports that some of their young men joined in the fun, but who knows). …
The message:
The uprising in Belfast was not nihilistic violence for the sake of violence, though I’ve no doubt the lads were enjoying the opportunity for mayhem.
It was violence towards a specific political objective: driving the foreigners out.
- Migrants whose domiciles were destroyed were directly deprived of housing.
- Migrants who managed to avoid this were made to worry that they will be next.
- Landlords taking government money to house migrants, or even thinking about doing so, now need to worry about the immediate cost of repairs and the ongoing expense of higher insurance premiums, making the Home Office’s lucre a lot less attractive.
- Landlords also need to worry about escalation: reportedly, letters were circulated which heavily implied that bricks and petrol bombs were just the first step on the violence ladder, and that the paramilitaries would be quite happy to take more decisive measures against the landlords themselves should the message not be received.
All of this is very sad, and I don’t want to seem heartless. The immigrants whose houses were destroyed were probably innocent; there was one particularly touching video of a nurse from Ghana or somewhere. Unfortunately, that is the nature of these things. They were brought in by the government en masse as a form of biological warfare against the native population. The government wants them there, the people want them gone, and the government refuses to listen, so, this is what happens.
It worked:
Only 27 migrants were actually made homeless by the arson, but reportedly, quite a few are already clearing out on their own.
The British government quite naturally condemned the violence, organizing a rally against racism in the aftermath, but it also responded by instructing the media to emphasize that it would be cracking down on illegal immigration into Northern Ireland. Underneath the condemnation, there is a clear message to all of this: in this case, violence worked.
It worked last year, too:
That message has been sent before in Northern Ireland. Exactly one year to the day before the uprising in Belfast, there were riots in the small town of Ballymena after the courts let two gypsy boys off with delicate wrist taps for raping an Irish girl. The rioting went on for two weeks, and resulted in two thirds of the gypsy population clearing out. Again: violence worked.
English protestors failed epically:
Contrast Ballymena with the other major British protest movement last summer: the anti-migrant hotel protest in Epping, a London exurb populated largely by Londoners driven out of their city by diversity, which started when one of the migrants diversified a teenage girl. In contrast to the eruption in Ballymena, the protest in Epping was explicitly non-violent: the only violence came at the hands of the cops arresting people for flying Union Jacks.
The mothers of Epping spent months gathering outside the migrant hotel, holding signs and raising awareness. The council also fought the migrant hotel in the courts, and enjoyed early success when a judge found that the location was zoned as a hotel but not as a migrant dormitory, essentially telling the Home Office that they didn’t have a loicense for that. This legal victory was short-lived. The decision was overturned almost immediately by a higher court judge, who explicitly found that whatever the concerns of the people of Epping as to their children’s safety, these were outweighed by the human rights of the mystery meat that had washed up on Britain’s shores, and by the government’s interest in housing them.
The migrant hotel in Epping was eventually shut down, but this likely had more to do with the government’s switch to ‘Operation Scatter’ in which migrants were garrisoned in smaller houses all over the country, rather than concentrated in a few large centres, than it did with the government responding to the concerns of British subjects.
Plain facts:
In Ballymena and Belfast, violence worked; in Epping, peaceful protest did not. …
The British people have voted for lower immigration in essentially every election since the British establishment destroyed Enoch Powell, and every government they’ve voted into power, whether Labour or Tory, has increased immigration.
The British people have used social media to raise awareness of the problems caused by immigration, and the British establishment, whether Labour or Tory, responded by imprisoning more Britons for mean tweets in one year than the Soviet Politburo sent to gulags for political crimes throughout Brezhnev’s entire term.
They’ve used the courts to try and defend their rights, and the British establishment responded, lol, you don’t have rights, immigrants do.
The British people have patiently pursued every avenue for peaceful redress of their grievances, and have been shut down at every turn by an establishment that doesn’t want to hear it.
So:
As the Americans say, there are four boxes: soap box, jury box, ballot box, and ammo box. Whether the Brits as a whole can crack open the fourth box remains to be seen.
If the ruling class obstinately disobeys, infuriates, and endangers the electorate, they’ve torn up their mandate to rule. Perhaps democracy can rescue the situation; let’s hope so.
