Did anyone expect any thing different? their on their side and we are on ours.still doesn't stop them being cunts though.Vale and health.From south east France.

I don't want this to sound like another ode to Genoa by regurgitating the kind of angst-ridden diatribe that's been repeated throughout these fora. But I'm going to say it anyway.

With the neo-fascists in power in Italy and Austria and the Greens and Social Democrats joining them in a neo-liberal ideological consensus, I'm steadily losing interest in non-violent tactics. While I dislike the kind of bombing campaigns carried out by the IRA and ETA nationalists which kill innocents, I don't know whether any change can be affected by simply demonstrating in large numbers and becoming bait for fascist police.

Following the Genoa repression, the German interior minister, Otto Schily, proposed a Europe-wide stasi-style police force. He is quoted as saying: 'We cannot allow violence from militant activists to dictate where and how democratically-elected state leaders hold their meetings'.

In other words, when people like me have given up on writing pointless letters to politicians and bureaucrats who rarely reply and never listen, we don't even have the option of exerting pressure by more direct action. As for 'democratic' leaders, what came out of the massive upsurge in popular environmentalism other than the ridiculous Kyoto declaration? Is this all democracy can produce, a feeble 1 per cent reduction in carbon emissions?

Even when we're trying to be on our good behaviour for the sake of moral rectitude, we're either ignored by the press or vilified - we are either unemployed spongers and therefore not entitled to opinions or middle-class idealists whose opinions are out of touch with the poor. When the police react violently to a bit of non-violent direct action intended to attract public attention, we're always portrayed as 'evil' and government ministers line up with their latest plan to kill, maim and torture us. Now its a travelling band of state-sponsored cold warrior thugs, proposed by the SPD-Green coalition.

When faced with state violence, perhaps the only option we have is armed resistance. How else can we open up a space for civil resistance to the designs of the state?