Emboldened by the mostly non-violent regime change of the Arab Spring, anti-Gaddafi rebels took up arms, supported by NATO air strikes. America and its allies had briefly flirted with normalizing relations with Libya—fatalistically, because for decades no one had managed to dislodge Gaddafi, and by the way, Libya has tons of oil—but when they saw a chance to help get rid of him once and for all, they sided with the rebels. Some of Gaddafi’s family received asylum elsewhere, but he and his sons were determined to fight to the death. It all ended very, very badly for Gaddafi this week, when he was pulled from the drainage ditch in his hometown of Surt, beaten and abused for an enthusiastic mob, and finally executed with a shot to the head. His dead body, and that of his son Muatassim, were put on public display in a meat locker for days until they were buried in secret.

The fact that Gaddafi was captured alive but then shot has caused some hand-wringing. The New York Times wrote:

Responding to international pressure, the interim government has said it would investigate his death, since the killing of captives is considered a war crime. But there is virtually no appetite in Libya for prosecuting the killers of Colonel Qaddafi, whose violent death ended one of the most brutal dictatorships in the Arab world.

How the rebel-backed government will function, or if they even can, is unknown. But the way Western officials are concern-trolling about how something went wrong is ridiculous…and hypocritical. The international community provided those rebels significant aid in the form of arms and air strikes. They obviously weren’t opposed to violence—they just wanted it to be the right kind of violence (Not mob violence! So icky!). Unfortunately, once you set violence in motion, it’s extremely difficult to control, particularly when the people you’re enabling are desperate and enraged.

The truth is, violence is inevitable, and not always a bad thing for an oppressed people. Non-violent resistance doesn’t always work, and it certainly wasn’t going to topple Gaddafi. Non-violent movements succeed only if the powerful are willing to step down or compromise, which was never going to happen in Libya—or Romania or the Dominican Republic or any number of other nations whose strongmen truly left the citizens no option other than assassination. Some people may be squeamish about that reality, but I’m not one of them.

Those of us in peaceful Western nations like to hold up our ideal of an orderly, impartial trial followed by humane imprisonment as a model for the rest of the world—but those things are simply not possible in many places. Some states are so violent and insecure that it’s impossible to maintain the kind of order required for a clean arrest, trial, and punishment, even if they had the judicial infrastructure to carry out such a trial. Many simply don’t have the cultural or legal tradtion of impartially judged trials that Westerners take for granted. In places where strongmen do wind up on trial, it’s either because they surrendered, like Hosni Mubarak, who simply couldn’t bring himself to order the massacre of his own countrymen as Gaddafi did, or because, as with Saddam Hussein, an outside force like the US military imposed enough order that he could be safely arrested and imprisoned.

I suppose that theoretically the United Nations could be empowered to capture and try despotic heads of state. I’ve heard pundits and politicians propose that as a solution, but that just smells like good old-fashioned imperialism. To be honest, Western nations—especially the US—don’t have the best record of judging which despots should stay and which go (we were all too happy to prop up Saddam Hussein, for example, and we unapologetically put Mobutu in power). The ethics of such enforcement would also be undermined by the fact that Western nations frequently betray their stated humanitarian values by using extra-legal means—like renditions and torture—in order to get hold of war criminals so they can be brought to trial. In some cases, as in the former Yugoslavia, the people and leaders of a nation might ask the UN to oversee the trial of someone they capture themselves, and that seems reasonable. But that was not going to happen with Gaddafi. Some in the West might not have liked that the rebels gave him a bullet to the head instead of a fair trial, but there haven’t been fair and impartial trials in Libya for most of its history, and let’s face it, Gaddafi’s wasn’t going to be the first.

There have been some lamentations after Gaddafi’s death—the usual arguments that violence shouldn’t beget more violence and an eye for an eye leaves the whole world blind. I don’t buy it. That brand of pacifism is usually spouted by privileged Westerners who’ve never lived under the boot of violent oppression. Those who have know that non-violence gets you exactly nowhere when pitted against the truly violent or fanatic or deranged. Libyans could have spent the next twenty years marching in the spirit of pacifism and understanding and it wouldn’t have done a damn thing except get them killed. Gaddafi had poisoned Libya with violence, fear, and injustice over decades, and then refused to get out while he still could. His end was inevitable, and entirely of his own making.

Pacifism, non-violent protest, and bloodless courtroom justice are worthy ideals, but they are not always possible. Nor are they the only way to achieve positive social change and bring down oppressors. Violence will do that too, and sometimes only violence will do it. That’s been the reality for all of human history and pretending that we’re evolved past it is simply naive.

I don’t normally write about politics or current events because, honestly, I sometimes don’t keep up with my news feeds for days at a time and there are many other people on the Internetz who cover that role far better than I ever could. Why duplicate what you can’t either replicate or improve on?

But the first thing I checked this morning was the Guardian’s live news feed of riot coverage and I was checking last night’s live feed until a few minutes before I went to bed last night and what the fuck, people.

The parallel that comes to mind for me, inevitably, is Ireland and Northern Ireland in particular (because I spent about 10 years studying the IRA and three years writing a master’s thesis about nationalism and Bobby Sands). All I could think every time I read a news story coming out of England on Sunday afternoon or Monday morning was, “Now London knows what it feels like to be Belfast.” And that’s just awful.

Did we not see this happen in Belfast in the ’70s often enough that we needed to rerun it for kicks in London in the ’10s? David Cameron’s statement from this morning is, like so much of what comes out of his mouth, Margaret Thatcher redux: We will put more police on the streets. We will arrest lots of people. We will speed up the criminal courts. We will protect the law-abiding. We will restore order.

Would you like to know how bad it can get while order is being restored? It can get pretty fucking bad. It can turn into a major fucking nightmare. If you’d like to know how bad it can get, google “Diplock courts” (non-jury courts with a single judge) and try reading some Tim Pat Coogan or Padraig O’Malley or Kevin J. Kelley on Ireland of the ’60s and ’70s (Coogan is probably the most readable but also the most biased of the three). If you’d prefer first person narratives, try Richard O’Rawe’s Blanketmen. Young men and women were arrested, detained at Her Majesty’s pleasure, and binned up sometimes for years at a time for nothing more meaningful than being on the wrong street at the wrong time. Or being in a group. Or being out at a pub. Or — and this is my favorite — having the wrong last name. That’s a good one, isn’t it?

Do we really need to do this all again to prove that it was a bad idea the first time? Let me say it the short way: Demonising People Is A Bad Idea. (It doesn’t make a catchy acronym but you can’t have everything.) All it does is make them demonise you right back. There are at least 225+ years of Irish history to make this point and lots and lots and lots of dead people along the way.

Violence meets violence and gets more violent. At the minute, it’s smash and burn looting and, yes, that’s awful; yes, it should stop; yes, anyone hurting someone else should be punished. But if you drop 16,000 police officers on the streets instead of 10,000, how will that help? More uniforms to resent, to be scared of, to hate, to be angry at because the young people in these communities — and plenty of the older people, I imagine — don’t see them as protectors. They’re the bad guys, the ones who come and break up your party, or take away your friends, or stop you on the street because you’re the wrong color or wearing the wrong jacket or the wrong shoes or in the wrong place.

A whole generation of Irish young men — no longer young now — could explain precisely how this dance goes. It doesn’t end with a pleasantly stolen midnight kiss. It ends with dead people and resentment being built into the next generation of historical narratives that define “us” against “them” and set the stage for the next go-round whenever the provocation occurs.

The terminology of battle is already being used in the reporting and the Tweeting and liveblogging coming out of the injured areas; the phrase “war zone” is being tossed around. Businesses are boarding up, shutting down, closing “for the day.” Some terrible language is being tossed around about the rioters.

I don’t think that this one set of events will turn London into a divided city or a city armed against itself (it already is that), but it could lead to some very, very nasty things. Using precedent as a guide, we could look at the “peace wall” in Belfast or the tradition of having a bowl of water and a towel in your front hall for anyone — literally, anyone — who had been tear-gassed by the armed forces (police or Army) and might need first aid.

The Met is to be commended for not having asked for more serious gear in the wake of must be three nightmarish nights; their admission that plastic bullets may be used tonight is not a confidence-inducing one. Plastic bullets kill people and more uniforms on the streets won’t fix the problem; yes, it might sit on its head and squash it out of existence for the time being, long enough for Cameron to take the credit for having “restored order” and get out of office — but it will only pop up again and again and again.

This is Thatcherism coming home to roost. This is 20+ years of willful blindness on the part of successive administrations to the real, live, angry problems out there.

There’s a great short piece from Tariq Ali on the London Review blog this morning that makes all the points I want to make except better and in more measured English:

Why is it that the same areas always erupt first, whatever the cause? Pure accident? Might it have something to do with race and class and institutionalised poverty and the sheer grimness of everyday life? The coalition politicians (including new New Labour, who might well sign up to a national government if the recession continues apace) with their petrified ideologies can’t say that because all three parties are equally responsible for the crisis. They made the mess.

They privilege the wealthy. They let it be known that judges and magistrates should set an example by giving punitive sentences to protesters found with peashooters. They never seriously question why no policeman is ever prosecuted for the 1000-plus deaths in custody since 1990.

One of my friends referred to this blog post as being about my “disappointment.” Surprisingly, I am disappointed. I am distressed and unhappy and I wish there was something more concrete I could do than sit here and write a blog post making elaborate historical parallels. So I’m going to take a lesson from Stephen Fry here; in response to the awfulness in England yesterday, he tweeted 10 charities in need of donations; here’s the link to the #riotcleanup tag in Twitter and the Facebook group and a Wiki.