If you wanna know what really happend during the violent demonstrations in London yesterday...

...you can start on my blog: I have made a collection of 4 posts linking to/quoting witness statements, an analysis, some video material, etc.

I have made these posts to provide a perspective on this story which is difficult to find in the mass media reports - eyewitness statements claims that the police provoked much of the violence themselves. I find that the video material I have seen from the scene very much tells the same story.

I want to add that I do not like or condone any kind of violence, if its not used as a last resort in a self-defence situation (even as a last resort, the use of violence can be discussed, but that is a whole other issue). I do think that some of the students who were at Parliament Square in London on the 10th of December 2010 really experienced that they did not have any other way out than to use violence. Still, most of them didn't use violence, not even after being beaten by the police. Many say that the majority of violent acts against humans came from the police, and that the violent acts from students was mainly aimed at trashing government property (some windows, a statue, the car of Prince Charles...).

All in all, I must say that I do understand that young people cannot control themselves after standing in the cold for up to 8 hours without food, water or access to toilettes - being told, they still cannot get out...

Judge for yourselves.

Here also a quote from a blog post by Joyce McMillian, which I re-posted on my blog today. A brilliant, simple analysis on the demonstrations in London, Wikileaks and current, western politics - here an excerpt:

"What the governments of the west apparently fail to grasp, though, is just how silly, authoritarian and out-of-touch they look, as they try to control the infinite variety of the internet by wielding the big stick of state and commercial power. In the 2010 general election in Britain, one of the key allegations made against our political class was they just “didn’t get it”; that they had become part of a privileged elite that no longer knew how the other nine-tenths lived or felt, and had no idea of the rage and contempt they had provoked, both by their lying – to themselves and the people – over major life-and-death policy decisions, and by their feather-bedding of their own position.

And now, as rebellion begins to stir on the internet and on the streets, it becomes increasingly clear that instead of responding with humour, energy and flexibility to these new challenges, our control-obsessed elites are inclined to clamp down first, and ask questions later; adopting, all the while, that blustering, self-pitying and outraged tone common to discredited regimes everywhere."

The video here below is from a seminar after earlier protests (there has been several during the last weeks). In it you can listen to an eloquent, angry 15-year-old who makes sure that we know that his generation definitely have woken up politically, and why. I particularly recommend the end of the speech: