
Beim Besuch der unten aufgeführten Webseiten kann die IP-Adresse gespeichert werden. Tip: Anonymes Surfen
Prelude: Våldsromantik
Riot – the unbeatable high! Adrenaline shoots your nerves to the sky. (The Dead Kennedys)
There’s a great word in Swedish, one of those compound nouns of which the English
language sadly is not capable: Våldsromantiker.1 Someone who is captured by the
romanticism of violent struggle, by the exhiliration, fear, adrenaline, and existential
positioning of physical confrontation. Predictably, most våldsromantiker tend to be
men. So now, here it is: I, too, occasionally suffer from våldsromantik. Ever since
getting involved in ‘radical’ activism I have relished most these moments when the
boundaries of legality are crossed, where there is rapid movement, and where there is at
least a potential for physical escalation. What a confession. Unsurprising –
våldsromantik seems to be common among alienated middle class young men like
myself – and politically unpleasantly incorrect. Mind you, not that I was ever much of a
street fighter. I generally just hover around the edges of confrontations, tickled by fear
and adrenaline, a spectator in a spectacle of violence, ‘dissent’, and oppression. But I
did not write this text to confess my personal/political weaknesses. Rather, I write it to
offer a (qualified) defense of them, not by extolling the virtues of ‘rioting’, or ‘violent
protest’ in general, but by attempting to point out what I take to be the positive impacts
(from a left-libertarian perspective) that one particular riotous event had, namely the
riots that occurred during the protests against the European Union (EU) summit in
Gothenburg, Sweden, in the summer of 2001, one month before the fateful events of
Genoa.
Download full text at www.ephemeraweb.org
Source: www.ephemeraweb.org