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There are people in this world who will take a young girl, addict her to drugs, break her in with repeated rape sessions then send her into the streets to fuck for money.  Other people will kill to sell crack.  Some people will rob their own family to buy it.

These are repulsive things.  Criminals are seen as being directly opposed to the morals of a society yet, in reality, there is no such opposition.  There is simply a question of degree.  Rather than being opposed to a society, criminals exaggerate it.

Unhinged from conscience, the criminal is an artist; their lives a pure expression of our darker qualities.  It is certainly evil to take someone’s daughter, get her on junk and turn her out, using her sex to generate profits.  But it’s not alien.

Not to us.

Every young woman is born into a war and her mind is persistently assaulted until the day she dies.  Waged with advertisements, dolls and television/movie stars, children are told how to behave, how to look and how to get ahead.  None of this is meant to make her into a better citizen.  It’s meant to make her feel sick so that the cure can be sold.

You’re too fat.  Tits too small, hips too big.   Your breath is bad, hair is wrong and your body makes strange unpleasant odours.  But don’t worry dear, we can cure all that.  And you can get yourself a real man.

We’re not interested in making decent citizens, happy people or productive workers.  We’re interested in hijacking the human fundamentals like sex and love, your fear and your hunger.  We’ll use those to make perfect little, self-doubting consumers. We’ll make your eyes distort your own flesh, make you look like a mutant to yourself until you mutilate yourself to look like an impossible illusion.  Beat yourself up when you fail.

We’ll sell you the plastic, the scalpel and the paint.

When you scream out in pain, we’ll sell you the pills.

If you start to see through the game, to realize that it’s the game that makes you sick, we’ll sell you the cure to that too: Dove Soap.  Wash away all that post-feminist angst while you moisturise.

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It’s perverse.  No human should look into the mirror and see anything except for a truly remarkable ape; a creature possesed of the incredible wit, wisdom and ingenuity to build a mirror and the brains to recognize itself within one.  Instead we see pimples.  Little flaws as measured against a con. It’s perverse and it is this perversion that the criminal, unhinged from conscience, expresses.

The successful revolutionary is often a criminal.  They too express something about their society.  A brutal revolution that makes the human condition worse is an expression of its vice.  Stalin was a bank robber.  Hitler a beer hall conspiracy theorist.  Both were violent thugs and both were successful.  But a revolution that improves the human condition is a rare thing.  The men who create these are an expression of a society’s virtue.  Like the criminals, they are also an exaggeration.

The people who have always inspired me are not the resistance fighters who took up arms against brutal regimes.  Rather, it is the individual who refused to be dehumanized by their times.  I admire Friedrich Reck-Malleczenwen who had the misfortune of living in Nazi Germany and wrote “Diary of a Man in Despair.”   The fellow ended up in Dachau.  But he never put anyone there.

Men like Gandhi and Martin Luther King Jr are often misunderstood.  They did use passive resistance but that was a mere tactic.  Their actual strategy was much more powerful than that.

As opposed to the criminal who expresses the vice of a society without understanding it, these people understood and expressed its virtues.  Though we like to cast history into a comic book story of good versus evil, the truth is far more subtle and far more interesting.

It is quite fashionable to portray the The British Empire as an unquenchable force for evil on the planet.   And there is some truth to that.  It had become a perverse and hypocritical parody of civilization and an agent of violent repression.

But that’s not how it saw itself.

It saw itself as engaged upon a noble endeavour.  It was a civilizing force.  It valued duty, principles and an unemotional adherence to both.  Young gentlemen were taught to emulate Cicero, to do what’s right even if others do not believe it to be so.  This was a sort of lie it told itself, a myth about its actions and motivations.  But one that it believed.

Gandhi understood this myth.  His genius lay not in passive resistance but in using this illusion against the English.  If his enemies had ever been able to portray him as a beast, as a man unable to govern his passions, they would have used as much violence as they were able against him.  But he never gave them that option.

Pushed to every extreme, he simply epitomized English virtue.  He was absolutely civilized, starving yet unflinching.  The English looked savage in comparison. They could not murder him without murdering their own values.

I once met an old English solider in a pub.  Though in his eighties, he had that strict and upright bearing one immediately associates with the best of the British officer class.  Curiously, he also had a twenty year old blonde on his arm.  This fellow had met Gandhi while serving in India.  As he recounted the occasion, this stoic man started to cry.  “I have never seen someone so small, a mere wire of a man wearing rags, with such great power.”

And Martin Luther King Jr. was no different.  He understood what white people thought about black people and, more importantly, what white people thought about themselves.

He refused to give them the comfort of either role.  Pushed to the extreme, water-hoses and police dogs, the civil rights marchers did not react with violence.  This was not because of some inherent value in pacifism.  It was because he could not afford to prove the white people right.  They must not look like viscous, dim-witted animals.  In the face of every provocation, they must maintain their dignity.

But who could have blamed either man for using violence?  No one.  Self defence is certainly a natural right.  Anyone judging their case fairly would understand that.  But, if anyone was judging their case fairly, they would not have had a case.

It was not enough for their virtue to be ordinary.  Their virtue had to be extraordinary.

Just as the criminal expresses and exaggerates our vice, the true revolutionary must express and exaggerate our virtue.  They must understand the illusions that govern the society they seek to overthrow and they must be examples of its best values.  The enemy must be put into a position where they cannot kill you without killing the best in themselves.

Did anything at the G20 accomplish that?  Or were the protesters only too happy to be a bunch of dancing hippies in the street or mohawked punks smashing nothing before a curiously staged looking bunch of cameras?

They were only too happy to become their own agent provocateurs.

What a bunch of fucking clowns.  Each dreadlocked hippie and mohawked punk playing the roles that have been assigned to them. Until these protesters stop confusing their counter-cultural cache with genuine revolt, their revolution will fail.  As it currently stands, it does not even deserve victory.  We already have a bunch of hedonistic, bank smashing vandals in charge.

The change I seek has nothing to do with what they seek.  The anarchy I’m after has nothing to do with the rock n’ roll festival they want to throw.   It’s not an end to human dignity.  It’s not the feral animal begging its master for more food.  It’s not bigger cages and longer leashes, not the proof that we need to be policed to be good.  It’s a quiet and dignified thing.

I’m under no illusions.  I understand my limitations and flaws and I know that even though I strive for the best in myself I’m having a good day if I only get half there.  I  also know that it’s not the ends but the means that are important.  That I care more about process than result, that I cannot control other people and can barely control myself.  But it’s the effort that counts.

All of my heroes were murdered with their goals only half-accomplished at best.  Like extreme vice, extreme virtue is a crime.  But, if you’re going to be hanged, what would you prefer to be hanged for?