Experts in arson

A friend asked a question this evening which I hadn’t heard asked before: how did these rioters manage to burn down block-sized buildings so easily? How did they start such powerful fires in buses that the buses were left twisted, shredded hulks? No ordinary thug or looter would know how to start such fires. These people have expertise in arson. Where did they get it? Is there an organized leftist or anarchist group behind these riots?

- end of initial entry -

August 10

VFR’s expert on the left, Ken Hechtman, writes:

Burning a bus isn’t hard. My brother burned a fire truck in a hockey riot when he was fifteen.

Old cheaply-made apartment buildings are so easy to burn people do it by accident all the time. When I lived on the Lower East Side, you didn’t need to be a expert arsonist to burn one of those tenement houses to the ground. All you needed to do was fall asleep with a candle burning directly on the floor.

Your comments remind me of similar ones made during the American ghetto riots of the 1960s. There were people then who were were also convinced there had to be white outside agitators controlling the rioters. After all, blacks couldn’t possibly accomplish anything that effective on their own.

LA replies:

I wasn’t making any racial implication. I saw the photos of that huge building in Tottenham gutted by flames, and of a municipal bus looking as though it had been hit by a daisy cutter, and I wondered how ordinary street thugs could have done this.

Paul T. writes:

An anarchist group may well be behind this, but I imagine that there are a number of common criminals with skills of this kind, and they may well have lent a hand.

Posted by Lawrence Auster at August 09, 2011 10:45 PM | Send