"As Gandhi revealed, non-violent protest is effective above all because it reveals how power really operates: it lays bare the violence it is willing to unleash on even the most peaceful citizens when they dare to challenge its moral legitimacy. And by doing so, it reveals the true moral bankruptcy of those who claim authority to rule us. Occupy Wall Street has demonstrated this time and time again. What the current spate of assaults shows is just how low, to what levels of utter moral degradation, such men are really willing to sink."
[WS:] I disagree. Protest actions in bourgeois democracies legitimize the status quo, even if they are brutally suppressed by the police. The very existence of a protest demonstrates the existence of "civil society" which the bourgeois propaganda claims, while the police violence tends to be "privatized" i.e. ascribed to rogue individuals within the ranks of the police. I wrote about it here http://wsokol.blogspot.com/2012/01/from-amritsar-to-derry-bloody-sundays.html
-- Wojtek
"Modern conservatism is just a neoliberal gloss on medieval domination."