If you’ve ever participated in a riot, especially one for peace, please speak up and correct me, because I’m about to go out on a limb here and call this weekend’s riots in Strasbourg, France, at the NATO summit, something worse than a contradiction: they’re pitiful.

From the outset, I’m no hawk. Nor am I a pacifist. I’m also open to persuasion about war in general, and about NATO in particular. But I can imagine why people wanted to protest. They might believe, for instance,

• That  NATO wages war unnecessarily;
• That NATO makes Europe less safe;

Or more cosmically,

• That NATO is a machine to secure global capitalism.

Or maybe they just wanted to burn a hotel to the ground.

Again, correct me if this is a misrepresentation. As someone who came of age in a non-NATO country in Western Europe during the cold war, I personally tend to credit NATO with keeping the Soviets out of the region. So while I may sympathize with peacemaking efforts, I’m not sure the NATO summit is the best symbolic event for the cause.

But was it about peace at all? Looking through flickr pages on the subject, I see two causes falsely conflated by the demonstrators:

• The revolutionary struggle for Socialism, and
• The struggle to abolish war.

The violence—the destruction, vandalism, and arson tends to suggest that the latter was primary in the minds of the rioters: the way to abolish war is to install a revolutionary socialist society.

But is there a deeper logic? Slavoj Žižek has recently dusted off an old psychological term, passage à l’acte, or acting out, to shed some light on violence of this sort: as with the tantrums of a two-year-old, some violence is less an expression of power than an expression of powerlessness.

That is, people smash things, not in order to bring about the revolution (though that may be what they’d claim to be doing), but in order to express their frustration at their own impotence at bringing about the revolution.

Is that too condescending? Perhaps. But Anti-war riots are full of condescension, and contradictions. I’d love some help here. Got insight?