Volunteers Keep Watch on Protests in Chile. In Blue Helmets that detourne the uniform of UN observers.
http://www.nytimes.com/2012/08/27/world/americas/helmeted-volunteers-monitor-student-protests-in-chile.html
vs
Black Bloc in Egypt defend street protesters — by force if necessary. To a soundtrack of heavy metal.
http://incunabula.org/2013/02/black-bloc-revolutionaries-baffle-egyptians/
vs
Musings on Political failure modes and the beige dictatorship in Western democracies.
http://www.antipope.org/charlie/blog-static/2013/02/political-failure-modes-and-th.html
That last one is Charles Stross bemoaning the failure mode that the "end of history" has left us with in the West. There's a hidden failure mode, we've landed in it, and we probably won't be able to vote ourselves out of it. and it involves:- global-scale quasi-police state, with drone strikes and extraordinary rendition and unquestioned but insane austerity policies being rammed down our throats, government services being outsourced, peaceful protesters being pepper-sprayed, tased, or even killed, police spying on political dissidents becoming normal, and so on. He has a point if we're talking about the N America-UK- Europe axis. But this makes me as the same question as Furudi. What about the other 7/8 of the world? Is there really no alternative political system that more or less works and is already being tried elsewhere?
Both responses to institutional repression of protest seem valid to me although as a confirmed pacifist I obviously prefer the first one. If the authorities are determined to use force to control protest then at the very least they should be filmed doing it and their methods exposed to the wider populace. If (as in Egypt) the force is out of control then perhaps it has to be met with force but to protect the protesters not to intentionally escalate the violence.
And of course that's easy for me to say from behind my desk in a sleepy UK market town.