Is London burning? By Tatalo Alamu  •Sony warehouse burning during the recent London riot (The Decline of the West) All good parties end in hangover. There is nothing that has a beginning that does not have an ending. In the ebb and flow of history, civilizations and empires rise and fall with unfailing rigour, leaving only their monuments as benchmarks. Could it be that what Noam Chomsky, the MIT maverick, dissident intellectual and linguistic genius, famously dismissed as the “five hundred year empire” has truly reached the end of its tether?    Late evening on Monday, the 8th of August, Snooper received three frantic text messages from the Metropolitan war zone of London. “London is burning”, they all announced with apocalyptic deadpan. Snooper ignored the first and the second texts. It was probably the work of an idle prankster with plenty of time and free texts to spare, the columnist hastily concluded.   But when the third arrived with the same urgency and frantic panic, there was an unmistakably eerie dimension to its S.O.S. London was truly burning. An irate multi-ethnic underclass had set the great city ablaze. From the television came scenes out of the apocalypse and Dante’s inferno combined. Hordes of rampaging hoodlums were looting and torching everything in sight. The police appeared helpless and overwhelmed.    No, this was not downtown Kinshasa with its feral slums and human zoos. It was not the riot-happy equal opportunity mob of inner-city Islamabad. It was not Mogadishu and its aggravated denizens. This was happening right in the heart of the metropolitan imperium, in the very city where modern capitalism first took off. Before you could blink in utter disbelief, the mayhem had spread to other cities in England as if the wretched of Albion were waiting for their historic cue.   It was a bleary-eyed and obviously distressed Prime Minister who surveyed the chaotic landscape the following morning. Having been forced by events at home to cancel an overseas engagement, David Cameron was hopping mad and was spewing fire and brimstone, promising the full weight of the law on the offenders. This was the second time in three weeks Mr Cameron has been forced by emergency at home to cut short a trip abroad. It doesn’t get more frustrating than that. How can this be happening in the country of good manners and refined taste where the proverbial gentleman is expected to wear his famous hat and opinion lightly? Now if gold does rust, what happens to baser metals?   Three weeks earlier, Norway had its own baptism of fire.  The land of enigmatic trolls, with its alluring rolling hills and verdant lush valleys, perhaps the nearest thing to an Eden garden on earth, has had to confront the monster within. A crackpot ideologue from the lunatic Christian fundamentalist fringes of the Norwegian society had shot and bombed his way through Oslo leaving scores of the quick and the dead in his sorry wake.     But if you were expecting to find a ragged kat-crazed refugee from Somali behind the carnage, you are profoundly mistaken. Anders Behrin Breivik is every inch a Norwegian original.  Handsome and physically prepossessing like an Aryan god and those fabled Norsemen straight out of the Icelandic sagas, he is blond and blue-eyed to boot. Yet if ever there is an enemy of his people, here was one. Henrik Ibsen would be turning in his grave.   With their customary icy imperturbability and cultured sangfroid, the good people of Norway have taken it in the chin, hoping that this is just a nasty one-off. It is a remarkable tribute to their stolid commonsense and the level of civilization and refinement of these Nordic islanders that a hate-filled mob has not descended on the streets of Norway braying for the blood of immigrants and minority cultural refuseniks. The strong political cohesion, the deep bonds of humane liberalism and the core national values that have stood this exemplary human community in good stead have held.  Once again, the Scandinavian societies have shown by their example what it takes to confront the demon within.     Yet by a profound irony, what the Norwegian crackpot thought he was trying to prevent in Norway by his extreme ideology and misanthropic genuflections is precisely what has stolen upon good old England. Railing and raving against immigration and the multicultural society, the madman of Oslo believed that his society has gone to the dogs from sheer permissiveness. But in his lunatic raving, Breivik has mistaken the symptom for the disease. A genuine multicultural society cannot be founded on poverty and unequal opportunity. It is like taking away with the left hand what you have given with the right.   For a long time, astute social observers have noted that despite the advances of human freedom and liberal democracy, despite great strides in the provision of basic welfare particularly for the needy, Western countries, particularly England, are still marked by institutionalized racism, entrenched class discrimination and a medieval Caste-like snobbery. There is no point in pretending to welcome immigrants and their children when you have already placed a glass ceiling on how far they could rise. There is no point in proclaiming equal opportunity for all when you mean equalized inopportunity for the radically disempowered. There is no point in trumpeting open access for all when there is a Forbidden City within the forbidding city.      If their fathers and forefathers could take it, grateful to be spared the concrete horrors of the post-colonial hell they had left behind in Africa, Asia and the Caribbean, if the suborned natives could oblige dazzled by the Macmillan razzmatazz that they had never had it so good, their children are unlikely to so meekly cooperate. One day, the baklava must arrive at the supermarket, and the falcon will no longer hearken to the falconer.      But if history is such a nagging neighbour, we need to understand its shrill complaints. We must go back to history in order to understand its ironic poignancy and complexities. Almost four hundred years earlier, Toussaint l’Ouverture, the great Haitian revolutionary of Africa descent, had famously pleaded with his French tormentors not to substitute the aristocracy of class they had just overthrown in France with an aristocracy of race. His plaintive pleas fell on deaf ears. In a fit of colonizing messianism, it was all well and good to try and turn the colonized to Frenchmen. But obstacles and complications abound on the path of the colonizing messiah.   As later events were to prove, there are Frenchmen and there are Frenchmen.  The aristocracy of race and of class is truly alive and well in Europe despite revolutions and serial regicides. The more things change, the more they remain the same. This year, in a stunning and sorry capitulation to the rampaging forces of uni-culturalism, the French authorities banned the wearing of the female burka in public places. Earlier, the German Chancellor, Angela Merkel, had also pooh-poohed the very idea of a multi-cultural society, dismissing the whole venture as a dismal failure in Germany.     But as we have argued, it is not the multi-cultural society that has failed. It is multi-culturalism founded on poverty and discrimination.  To cut through the Orwellian foliage, that is not multiculturalism but mono-culturalism parading as one. Some animals are famously more equal than other animals, or to put it with the African pungency of a Congolese proverb, a tree trunk does not become a crocodile simply because it has spent some time in water.     This is where the Norwegian crackpot got his facts and mission so murderously mixed up. He was actually asking his country to renounce its multi-cultural spirit and revert to an overt racism and religious intolerance which is alien to the stellar culture of the Scandinavian society. The Scandinavians are actually historically fortunate. With no history of the colonization of “inferior” people, they have been spared the psychological trauma of the victorious colonizers. Colonization breeds racism and the endemic instability of racist societies. You cannot dehumanize others without dehumanizing yourself in the  process.       In the event, every Rome has its own barbarians, just as the virus of failure is embedded in the corpus of success. Modern capitalism took off on the cusp of the brutal despoliation of Africa, Latin America and Asia. To be sure, slavery and wholesale enslavement of other people, like poverty and want, have been part of the human condition since the beginning of history. But the globalization and industrialization of slavery led to an ideological need to justify it in an intellectual and systematic manner.    Thus was born the spin of the savage other, and thus racialism became internalized and interiorized. Now, half a millennium later, the older empires have struck back. What we are witnessing in the west may well be a process of reverse globalization whereby the road that leads to the conquered world also leads back to the conquering metropole. If the west were to suffer a terminal decline and eventual fall as a result of the final working out of the contradictions unfurled by that historic subjugation, it is a small price to pay for first empire to dominate the entire world.