The Anatomy of Rage

 

Listen, friend. I’ve got a story to tell you about what happens when ordinary people finally snap. It’s not pretty, but then again, the best stories never are.

It was late August when the dam finally burst in Indonesia. You know how it is—pressure builds and builds like steam in a radiator until one day, BANG, the whole thing blows to hell and gone. The mob came for the politicians’ houses like something out of an old Hammer horror flick, only this wasn’t Count Dracula they were after. This was Ahmad Sahroni, Eko Patrio, Nafa Urbach—names that meant power and privilege while regular folks couldn’t put rice on the table.

Picture it: luxury cars getting their windows smashed in, like ice cracking on Sebago Lake in the spring thaw. Personal belongings scattered across manicured lawns like the aftermath of a tornado. And here’s the kicker—some of these people actually jumped in the politicians’ private swimming pools, hooting and hollering like kids at summer camp. Except these weren’t kids, and this sure as hell wasn’t camp.

The thing that gets me, the thing that really crawls under my skin like a splinter, is that most of those houses were empty. The fat cats had already flown the coop, probably sipping champagne in some five-star hotel while their former constituents went swimming in their pools. The security forces? Hell, they were about as useful as a chocolate teapot against that kind of rage.

See, looting isn’t new. It’s older than dirt, older than the first caveman who looked at his neighbor’s fire and thought, “I want that.” The Romans, now they knew how to loot proper. When they conquered a city, they didn’t just take the gold and silver. They took the stories too—the statues, the scrolls, anything that said “We were here, and we mattered.”

Take Jerusalem in 70 AD. General Titus marched back to Rome with the Menorah from the Temple, parading it around like some kind of holy trophy. You can still see it carved in stone on his arch, frozen in marble victory. Makes you wonder what those long-dead soldiers would think about that, doesn’t it? Their sacred symbol turned into a tourist attraction.

But here’s where it gets really nasty. The colonial boys—the British, French, Germans—they turned looting into a goddamn art form. They didn’t just steal your gold; they stole your soul. Egyptian mummies gathering dust in London museums, Indian statues sitting pretty in Paris parlors. It wasn’t enough to own your body; they had to own your story too.

In America, looting’s got a different flavor entirely. It tastes like rage and injustice with a bitter aftertaste of broken promises. Watts in ‘65, Newark and Detroit in ‘67—each riot left scars on the national psyche deeper than any knife could cut. But the real showstopper was LA in ‘92. Four cops beating the hell out of Rodney King, caught on tape for the whole world to see. When they walked free, the city exploded like a powder keg in hell.

I remember watching those flames on TV, thinking about how thin the line is between civilization and chaos. One minute you’re buying groceries at the corner store; the next, that same store is a smoking ruin and the owner’s hiding in his basement, praying the mob passes him by.

London had its turn in 2011. Mark Duggan got himself shot by police, and suddenly half the city was on fire. Same story, different accent. The rage is universal, friend. It speaks every language known to man.

Now, Egypt in 2011—that was something else entirely. When the Arab Spring came knocking, it brought looting with two faces, like some kind of mythological beast. Hosni Mubarak had been running the show for thirty years, and people were sick to death of it.

The Egyptian Museum got hit hard. Glass cases shattered, artifacts scattered like leaves in a hurricane. Some poor mummies got their heads torn clean off—can you imagine? Thousands of years in the ground, only to get desecrated by angry kids with nothing left to lose. But here’s the thing that gives me hope—even in all that chaos, some protesters formed a human chain to protect what they could. Amazing what people will do when they remember they’re more than just animals.

Out in the countryside, it got stranger still. Villagers started digging holes everywhere, looking for pharaoh’s gold like some kind of demented treasure hunt. From space, those archaeological sites looked like Swiss cheese, all pockmarked with illegal excavations.

When Mubarak finally fell, the protesters did something beautiful and terrible. They stormed the State Security offices—not for money, but for truth. They wanted those files, those records of torture and surveillance. That’s when they found out about the Mubarak family fortune—seventy billion dollars stashed away while people starved in the streets.

Sri Lanka’s story reads different. This wasn’t about rage so much as reclamation. The Rajapaksa family had run that island nation into the ground with corruption and stupidity that would make a Kennedy blush. They banned chemical fertilizers overnight, trying to go organic, and ended up starving their own people instead.

The Janatha Aragalaya—that’s “People’s Struggle” for those keeping score—wasn’t your typical revolution. No single leader, no grand manifesto. Just ordinary folks who’d had enough of living like refugees in their own country.

July 9th, 2022. Hundreds of thousands of people marched into Colombo like something out of the Old Testament. They didn’t just protest—they occupied. Presidential Palace, Prime Minister’s residence, the whole damn government apparatus. But here’s what made it beautiful: they didn’t steal. They made themselves at home.

Picture this: families having picnics in the President’s dining room, kids splashing in his private pool, people working out in his personal gym. It was like they were saying, “This belongs to us too, you bastards.” Social media lit up with selfies of regular folks lounging on beds that cost more than most people make in a lifetime.

“All that is corrupt will end,” one protester told reporters while feeding his children lunch in the palace. “So I brought my children to have lunch here.”

President Gotabaya Rajapaksa took one look at those crowds and ran like a scalded dog. Fled the country and resigned by email. First Sri Lankan president to quit mid-term. Sometimes the pen really is mightier than the sword—or in this case, the resignation email is mightier than the riot.

But Bangladesh… Christ, Bangladesh was something else entirely. When Sheikh Hasina fell in August 2024, the looting that followed was pure vengeance, darker than a Maine winter night.

It started with students protesting job quotas. Seemed innocent enough. But Hasina’s response was brutal—the UN says 1,400 people died in 46 days. They called it the “July Massacre,” and the name fits like a bloody glove.

When Hasina finally fell, hell came to collect its due. Ministers’ houses went up in flames. Some of those poor bastards got trapped inside and burned alive. Law Minister Anisul Haque, Home Minister Asaduzzaman Khan—their names might as well have been written on tombstones.

The cops got it worst of all. Forty-four officers killed, their bodies strung up like gruesome Christmas ornaments. February 2025, when Hasina gave a speech from exile, the mob went after the Bangabandhu Memorial Museum—her father’s old house, the independence leader Sheikh Mujibur Rahman. They burned it to the ground, calling it a symbol of fascism.

That’s the thing about rage, friend. Sometimes it’s surgical, sometimes it’s indiscriminate. Sometimes it cuts out the cancer, and sometimes it kills the patient too.

Indonesia’s May 1998 riots show us the darkest face of all. When Suharto’s regime was crumbling, the looting got directed at ethnic Chinese instead of government buildings. Their shops burned, their homes ransacked, their women… well, some things are too dark even for an old horror writer like me to dwell on.

The thing is, this wasn’t spontaneous. Witnesses saw organized provocateurs, muscular men arriving in trucks to stir up trouble. The security forces stood by and watched, like directors filming their own snuff movie. The Joint Fact-Finding Team later confirmed what everyone suspected—this was orchestrated from above.

It’s the oldest trick in the book: when people get angry at the system, redirect that anger at someone else. Someone weaker. Someone different. The Chinese minority made perfect scapegoats—visible, successful, and historically vulnerable.

Sexual violence turned social unrest into something much darker, something that leaves scars on the soul of a nation. Suharto stepped down eventually, but those wounds? They’re still festering, thirty years later.

You see, friend, looting isn’t really about the stuff that gets taken. It’s about power—who has it, who loses it, and who gets to point the finger when the music stops. It’s about control slipping away like water through desperate fingers.

Every society has its breaking point, that moment when the social contract tears like old fabric. Some countries burn their palaces; others burn their scapegoats. Some seek truth; others seek blood. The anatomy of looting is really the anatomy of the society that creates it.

And here’s what keeps me up at night, typing away in my study while the Louisiana wind howls outside: it can happen anywhere. Your town, your neighborhood, your street. Because underneath all our civilization, all our laws and customs and polite society, we’re still the same angry, desperate animals we’ve always been.

The only question is: when your breaking point comes, what kind of animal will you choose to be?

The End

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Sometimes the monsters are real, and sometimes they’re us. The scariest stories are the ones that could be true.