'At last I perceive that in revolutions the supreme power rests with the most abandoned.'

These images and videos are impossible to watch. They exists only in order to emphasize the solidarity each person must feel with another person who has placed something else totally outside of themselves. It is the purpose of a state to preserve itself, through ideology and finally through violence. But it is the bodies of the men and women who are beaten by those ideologies and bats that persist.

But that's a lie, too. It is too easy to abstract from this, to write about it as a singularity or an event, or maybe it is better put that it is too hard to speak about it as itself. It is the purpose of these videos that these bodies might persist. That their murderers, the worst kind of murderers, those who kill for ideologies that have become untenable and unreal, who think that by stabbing students or beating protesters they can return to the old world. They are wrong on two counts. The past can't be resurrected. Only a new tyranny can be installed, and it must have a greater capacity for violence and suppression. And these bodies can't be carted away. They existed, not just for the ten people who held a man while he died, or beat a defenseless man into the ground, but for everyone who encounters them in the future. It's what used to be meant by witness. They are more than just bodies at this point. They are also reminders that last week, the old order could stand on its own, people could be oppressed and still walk the streets oppressed, and this week, the regime must kill them to make them obey.

What solidarity means from this far away I don't know. It can have everything to do with a certain narcissism and a desire to become the revolutionary being while sitting still. But it can also be the limit of empathy and an absolute position against the hurt and crime being put to a people who persist, despite the men in the black masks.