In My Best Fiend, Herzog talks about the unbridgeable gap between him and Kinski.  He claims it was caused by their fundamentally different attitudes towards nature.  Kinski portrayed himself as “the natural man” and always spoke about the jungle yet only went into it once.  With a photographer.

“Poses and paraphernalia were what mattered to him. His alpine gear was more important than the mountains themselves. His camouflage combat fatigues tailored by Yves Saint Laurent were much more important than any jungle. In this regard, Kinski was endowed with a fair share of natural stupidity.”

After following the first day of the London G20 protests, I’d have to say that the so-called velvet revolution suffers from the same natural stupidity.  Everywhere one looks there was no action but many photographers.  No fires but lots of flashbulbs.  There were more cameras and less substance than at any fashion show I’ve ever attended.

Tim Weber reports a funny rumour: “Met police says G20 protests were relatively peaceful because everybody was busy twittering… no idle hands, no evil deeds.”  PolitkSkeptik quotes someone as saying:  “Rather than a riot we’ve got a bunch of geeks sitting around under placards, tapping away on their touchscreens.. It’s a doddle to police”

The pictures and videos I’ve seen would bear this out.

[youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Mfpr3XuDqQs&feature=related]

I won’t be a part of any revolution with that sort of dancing.

All these pictures and tweets are a pathetic excuse for a protest but they might not be a bad thing.

I love riot porn as much as the next man and would like to point out that, if the trouble starts, all those people with cameras will have to be viewed as snitches but I’m not going to sit here and play armchair commando.  Frankly, I’m not convinced that burning shit down and killing each other in the streets is called for.

Yet..

When it is, this is the sort of picture you’ll need.

Father always told me to “show some initiative” but I still believe that violence can only be in direct response to direct violence initiated by the state.  And it certainly should not be led by some professor whose goal is to become the new head of the labour party by hanging bankers. That sort of man is disgusting and menace to liberty.  Trust Adolph at your peril.

The revolution does not need heroes.  It does not even need protesters.  It needs workers.

My position on these protests is much the same as it always is.  There’s a place for getting out and burning things down but it’s also the glamorous, idiotic part of anarchism.  Breaking a bank window never built a house, cooked a meal or solved a math problem.  Does it look cool?  Sure.  Does it accomplish anything?  Not really.

Would I like to do it?  Of course.

Fuck their property.  They did, after all, steal it from us.

Any human has the natural right to defend themselves.  By any means necessary. But no human has the natural right to initiate violence.  No matter their cause, uniform or ideas.  No matter how cool it looks on YouTube.

When the cops take to the street and execute someone, like Oscar Grant or Alexandros Grigoropoulos, then, by all means, take back the street and burn down their stations.  That’s war. And that’s The Chicago Way.

In the meantime, it’s not that sort of war.  Not yet.  We’ll know when it is.

Right now, it’s a phony war fought with spectacle.  I hope it remains that way and I hope we win.  I fear neither will happen.

The state is a brutal greedy system run by brutal, greedy morons.  Should we be successful in building better ways to live, ways that counter their powers and profits, they will react first with laws and then with violence.  As Asimov once said:  “Violence is the last refuge of the incompetant.”  And make no mistake, these people are incompetant.

The goal right now is make ourselves better and them, by contrast, even more incompetent.

We’ve already won the spectacle.  The internet has slaughtered the mass media.  And I even see some growth in decentralized trade, farms and power.  But our violence is still exceeded by that of the state.

That’s a lovely thing.  Until they use theirs.