Police in Spain is proceeding to beat up and shoot at peaceful protesters in Barcelona:

Spanish police fired rubber bullets and swung truncheons to disperse anti-crisis protesters in a Barcelona square Friday as cleaning crews cleared their tent camp. Catalan police in anti-riot gear moved in after about 50 protesters sat down on the street to block a convoy of cleaning trucks leaving the Plaza de Cataluna square with remnants of the encampment. Police, some with plastic shields, were shown on television dragging protesters along the street and swiping with truncheons at activists, who had been chanting: “They shall not pass.” An AFP reporter at the scene saw rubber bullets fired. The protest blockade was broken up within minutes but about 100 protesters regrouped in the square. They were surrounded by two police cordons blocking hundreds more people from entering from nearby roads.

Here is a clip:

Upgrade Democracy??

According to Wikipedia the main goals of the Spanish protests are to “Upgrade democracy, reduce influence of economic powers in politics”.

Since I’m not exactly sure what that means and since the exact goal of these protests doesn’t seem very clear or obvious it is hard for me to sympathize with these people.

If they are protesting the recent liberalization of the labor market and the recognition of an employer’s right to hire and fire employees as he deems necessary, and if all they are asking for is cosmetic changes in their current flavor of the taxation extortion racket (=democracy), if in fact they are maybe even asking for the government to fund health care and education even more extensively than it has already been doing with such blood money, then I have little to so sympathy for these protesters.

After all, abolitionists didn’t take to the streets to demand that “slavery be upgraded” either!

The goal to “reduce influence of economic powers in politics” means nothing so long as you allow for the existence of a state. A state by necessity always and everywhere lends itself to special interest meddling on the part of the rich and powerful a.k.a politics, it is a completely boring and predictable side effect of statism.

Nor do I have any sympathy with the police, however I would at least submit that those people have little to no choice than to obey their masters and to go where they are ordered to go and beat up whom they are ordered to beat up.

The protesters meanwhile could have made the demonstrations about spreading truth and knowledge about voluntaryism and against the concept of the state in general.

I may be missing something, but I see no such indications anywhere.

In which case … I don’t mind if they all together smash and kick each others’ heads in, at least it’ll turn off all those who really care to make true and meaningful change happen at some point from joining such movements.

(To be clear: I may very well be missing the true objectives of these protests, the above is only based upon the few pieces of information I was able to gather)

Civil Disobedience

On a related note, some thoughts on civil disobedience …

Related Posts: