The Semiotics of “Brown-on-Brown” Violence

Our Canadian correspondent Rembrandt Clancy sends the following report about recent violence in Mumbai, and compares it with an incident in Palma de Mallorca that was reported here last week.

It is tempting to write off YouTube’s determined censorship of the Mallorca video as yet another attempt to whitewash Islam, since the Africans causing the mayhem were presumably Muslims. Yet the rioters in Mumbai were also Muslims, and the YouTube videos of their violent destructiveness have so far been allowed to remain.

So some other factor must be at work. As our correspondent points out, the victims of the rioters in Palma de Mallorca — mainly business owners and tourists — were white, whereas both the rioters and the victims in Mumbai were “brown”. This grants each of the two incidents its own distinct semiotics.

The racial rules for reporting on mob violence might be summarized as follows:

White on White:	Normal news reportage. The incident is examined with objectivity, delving into the background of the violence and the response of the authorities, with no particular slant — unless, of course, left-wing or right-wing political views are an issue, in which case the usual media bias may be expected.
White on Brown:	The incident instantly becomes headline news, above the fold and at the top of the hour, and remains there for weeks or months. Every day the front-page analyses and crawl-ribbon snippets are crafted to demonstrate the racist motives of the perpetrators and the innocence of the victims.
Brown on White:	This news must be buried at all costs. Media outlets will hide it completely if they possibly can. If they must report on it, the race of the perpetrators will be occluded whenever practical. If the facts cannot be avoided, they will be spun to include circumstances that mitigate the racial element; e.g. it was somehow the fault of the white victims through their racist, inconsiderate, corrupt, or thoughtless behavior.
Brown on Brown:	This news is not really news, and will be largely forgotten after the first few days of video showing burning vehicles, police charges, and rubble in the street. It’s inside-pages stuff, not worth the attention of a white audience.

The above semiotics become more complicated when religion is involved. Christians are generally considered “liturgically white” for the purposes of the MSM, and may be treated as such, regardless of their color. Muslims of any race are, of course, “brown”.

When both races are non-white and Christianity and Judaism are not involved, the incident is hard to classify. Who is the Bad Guy? Who is the Innocent Victim? How can we tell, since nobody is white, Christian, or Jewish?

Such was the situation in Mumbai.

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Below is Rembrandt Clancy’s report:

This amateur video, which I originally saw on Politically Incorrect, depicts the Muslim rioting in Mumbai which took place on Saturday 11 August, 2012. You can see the rioters torching and overturning vehicles:


It is reminiscent of another amateur video posted on Gates of Vienna a few days ago under the title “The Sounds of Silence” in which African immigrants are filmed while rioting in Palma de Mallorca, Spain.

The rioters in both videos are immigrants (the Muslim rioters are called “settlers” in the Mumbai case), and both videos are entirely without commentary. Nevertheless YouTube deleted the video of the Spanish riot on the grounds it constituted “hate speech”, but will they delete the record of the Mumbai riot? Perhaps not. In the case of Mumbai, all participants are much the same colour and are rioting in a non-Western country; while in the Spanish incident, there is a black-white contrast.

Media accounts agree that the Mumbai riot was triggered by the deaths of two Muslims during an earlier violent incident (July 23, 2012) involving the indigenous Bodo people over “land rights” in Assam, a northeastern state of India. The Muslim “settlers” originate in East Pakistan before it became Bangladesh in 1971.

The following newspaper account translated from Freie Presse in Saxony is a typical report of the Mumbai riot, but the last paragraph, while lacking in detail, suggests that the earlier unrest in Assam must have been quite serious:

Friday, 11 August, 2012

In a clash between thousands of Muslim demonstrators and the police in the Indian city of Mumbai two men were killed and more than 50 injured. According to police reports the demonstrators were protesting the death of Muslims during unrest in July in the northeast of the country. The security forces employed truncheons and fired shots into the air, in order to disperse the crowd. The demonstrators hurled stones and damaged around a dozen police vehicles.

Two demonstrators succumbed to injuries which they had suffered during the clash, according to a police spokesman, but they bore no gunshot wounds from the incident. Among the 52 injured are 44 police officers. In addition, three television broadcast vans were set on fire, because in the view of the demonstrators, the press reporting about the unrest in the Indian state of Assam in July was biased against the Muslim victims.

The riots between Muslim settlers and members of the Bodo tribe are about land rights. At least 53 people were killed, around 400,000 people were forced to flee their homes and sought refuge in government emergency shelters.