It’s obvious, but needs to be restated. The power and effectiveness of violence and destruction. As a tool for change they’re both well proven, and both are able to make a government or even the entire world listen to you.  

The smallest act; like breaking a window, some well targeted grafitti, or burning a car, can turn a thirty person protest into a dangerous struggle for freedom. Need some more evidence? With violence, the IRA got a peace process, the French a revolution, and Hamas a government. It’s time the peaceniks went a bit Greek, and started scaring people into submission.   

2. Come into my web  

In Moldova recently, a story emerged that recent protests had been organised on Twitter and Facebook. Use these new technologies- it’s impossible for governments to monitor all Twitter and Facebook groups and posts, meaning - with the internet, the ability to organise a mass-movement, whilst still keeping some degree of anonymity is a lot easier.  Quick tip- to be less traceable only write in internet cafés with accounts and e-mails you don’t usually use and can’t be tracked back to you.  

3. Dress to impress 

It’s a major problem that socially-engaged-care-about-the-world-types should have such bad dress sense. Long matted dreadlocks, loose hemp pants, and dirty fingernails don’t attract interest; they attract calls for a wash.  

The solution? Wear a suit, because the suit truly does maketh the man, or woman. You might feel, uptight and controlled by wearing a suit, but imagine yourself as an insidious little worm; you’re wearing the garb of the overlords while destroying them from the inside. 
 

4. Boiling the kettle 

Some of the loudest screams of dissent from the recent G20 protests were in regards to protesters being kept around the Bank of England for hours ( for their own safety) and being forced to piss on the walls. With the phenomenon of ‘the kettle’, protest organisers must be trying to think of ways to avoid being held without their consent, food, water or access to toilets.  

That got me thinking, instead of complaining about the lack of facilities, why not embrace them and use your bodies as a weapon. Drink too much water, and then, when the police won’t let you use a toilet, piss everywhere. For the incredibly brave you could also eat too much, take a few laxatives, and really rain on the parade (so to speak). Give them a real mess to clean up.  
 

5. (Flash) Mob Mentality 

For those not in the know, a flash mob is an amazing democratising phenomenon where people power is at its most evident. People meet in a very specific location, at a very specific time (to the minute) and perform a single act in unison. A great example of this, and an event a friend watched, took place in Liverpool St Station London- there, thousands of people met, danced for fifteen minutes, bemused the police and onlookers, then disappeared as quickly as they came.  

The amazing thing about it was that the police couldn’t control it- leaving the bobbies at the mercy of the largely benevolent crowd. Another plus was how pissed off some of the onlookers became. Dave, writing a comment on fleshisgrass.wordpress.com, says- 

‘All the people who took part should be banned from entering any tube or rail station for one year, then they can have a taste of the inconvenience that their petty actions caused to other people’  

What if you could use that for good? What if you could reproduce that same scale, that same speed and that same spontaneity; but for something that mattered. 

6. Surprise! 

So we’ve agreed to be violent, to load up on bodily fluids in the event of capture, and the idea of the philosophical flash-mob. Now comes the spice of surprise.

Too often are protesters being encircled and out-numbered by police, or even just accompanied by them-it’s a strange sight when you see a group of peaceable people with placards walking next to a cop trotting along on a horse. Basically, if there are police on horses walking with you, you’ve failed. You’ve submitted to the authority you’re meant to be criticising. You need surprise. 

The power of surprise is well known. Not to sound like a wanker (but I will), Sun Tzu, writer of the ‘The Art of War’ was famed for saying: 

‘In conflict, direct confrontation will lead to engagement and surprise will lead to victory’.  

Surprise, is a must to dislocate and confuse. You should never register with the authorities, when or where or on what route you’re going to walk. It’s not a parade it’s a protest. 
 

7. Choosing a target.  

In my mind, when choosing where to protest, go with the roads. The roads are the arteries of transport and industry and should be the Holy Grail for the modern radical. Paralysing them, means paralysing a city.  And paralysing a city, even for ten minutes can seriously piss people off. 

As a protest organiser you could easily set-up a flash mob to paralyse the major roads in a city- I’ll explain why you’d want to- In Sydney’s CBD, there were recently some blackouts that paralysed the entire district, with mass power outages and even traffic lights failing. People were gridlocked, they fumed, complained and the inconvenience even warranted a wide-spread tabloid press coverage. Imagine purposefully replicating that.  

You could all come from different directions, wait till there’s a red light, and then sit in the middle of a t-intersection until you feel ready to move. When the police appear, scatter. You’d get publicity and could quickly repeat the incident everywhere and anywhere. You could get little splinter-cells and copy-cats that could act independently and at random with an incredibly small amount of people. 
 

…And a final word.