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Shaking my head, I looked at the pictures of the storming of the Capitol: Dilettantes!
It couldn't be anything.
These late-night hippies and would-be truckers were walking through the building, mostly busy filming themselves trespassing on their smartphones: "Look, Mom, I'm in the Capitol!" As if they didn't believe their own conspiracy theories, according to George Soros and Co. grab their likeness from the Internet, identify them and have them liquidated in the back room of a Washington pizzeria.
The Maoist KPD showed how to do it correctly on April 10, 1974, when the South Vietnamese President Nguyen Van Thieu paid a visit to the then seat of government in Bonn.
As a result of a demonstration against the Vietnam War, the Bonn City Hall was occupied by a troop that had been preparing for it for days.
The flags of communist North Vietnam and its South Vietnamese guerrilla group FNL were hung from the balcony, the walls were smeared with anti-American slogans, “solidarity addresses” were sent to Hanoi and Beijing with the town hall telegraph, the press supplied with explanations - and then left in an orderly manner and without losses.
I have to admit to my shame that I was there when I was 24.
Although only in a subordinate role: I had to organize the defense of the rear front of the town hall.
We blocked the narrow access road with the town hall garbage cans and defended the barricade against the approaching police.
But that was it: everyone knew what to do.
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On the other hand, the storm on the Capitol seemed to be guideless and aimless.
Luckily.
The events in Bonn show what a tiny but disciplined minority can achieve, acting out of cover for a large protest movement.
Donald Trump's supporters who actually believe the establishment has robbed them of their voice and land are legion.
You are cheered on by the president himself. You have sympathizers in Congress and in the media.
They are far more powerful than we were post-68ers, who opposed an overwhelming majority of Germans.
But the Trumpists are not organized.
At the moment of their symbolic triumph, they didn't know what to do with it.
It won't stop there.
The US has a long history of secret militant organizations, from anti-British revolutionaries to the Ku Klux Klan, from the Black Panthers to the Weathermen.
In these hours, people are sure to sit together who can learn from the ultimately unsuccessful Capitol Tower.
And unlike us back then, they have weapons and know how to use them.
Avanti Dilettanti was yesterday.
The future makes one shudder.