I haven't been downtown today but Murph has; I just talked to him on the phone. He says that both Corte Ingléses and the McDonald's are a wreck and Plaza Cataluña looks like there was a riot there, which is precisely what there was. I suggested that the government should perhaps turn the cops loose and have them beat the crap out of and then arrest the rioting punks. Murph said that we'd better watch out or this could be another '09 or '23 or '30 or '34 or '36. I said nope, in those days the rioters were real anarchists and SocioCommunists and Trotskyists who did Paris Commune shit like building barricades in the streets and torching the churches and murdering their enemies. These are just a bunch of middle-class kids smashing things up for fun. The most important thing is they don't have any guns. The militias in the old days, both right and left (though there's never been a real right-wing militia in Barcelona except for the Estat Català-Esquerra Republicana fascists, the Falange was very strong in some parts of Spain) had guns and used them, sometimes indiscriminately. These punks don't have any guns, nor do they have the balls necessary to do anything really revolutionary.