I have to admit clowns make me nervous, but this is just awesome. The Clandestine Insurgent Rebel Clown Army, or CIRCA, is a group of actual, trained clowns that, according to its website

... aims to make clowning dangerous again, to bring it back to the street, restore its disobedience and give it back the social function it once had: its ability to disrupt, critique and heal society. Since the beginning of time tricksters (the mythological origin or all clowns) have embraced life's paradoxes, creating coherence through confusion - adding disorder to the world in order to expose its lies and speak the truth.

The rebel clowns that make up CIRCA embody life's contradictions, they are both fearsome and innocent, wise and stupid, entertainers and dissenters, healers and laughing stocks, scapegoats and subversives.

Rebel Clowns are trained by CIRCA recruiting officers, using a variety of different exercises, training includes finding your inner clown, civil disobedience tactics, learning to be spontaneous and playful, practicing clown gaggle manoevers and last but not least marching and drilling.

They got a chance to put the training to excellent use at a VNN/Nazi rally held in Knoxville in May this year. I found the story thanks to Belledame222 over at Fetch Me My Axe who posted an excerpt from an Indymedia article describing how the clowns completely took the wind out of their white supremacist sails.

“White Power!” the Nazi’s shouted, “White Flour?” the clowns yelled back running in circles throwing flour in the air and raising separate letters which spelt “White Flour”.

“White Power!” the Nazi’s angrily shouted once more, “White flowers?” the clowns cheers and threw white flowers in the air and danced about merrily.

“White Power!” the Nazi’s tried once again in a doomed and somewhat funny attempt to clarify their message, “ohhhhhh!” the clowns yelled “Tight Shower!” and held a solar shower in the air and all tried to crowd under to get clean as per the Klan’s directions.

At this point several of the Nazi’s and Klan members began clutching their hearts as if they were about to have a heart attack. Their beady eyes bulged, and the veins in their tiny narrow foreheads beat in rage. One last time they screamed “White Power!”

The clown women thought they finally understood what the Klan was trying to say. “Ohhhhh…” the women clowns said. “Now we understand…”, “WIFE POWER!” they lifted the letters up in the air, grabbed the nearest male clowns and lifted them in their arms and ran about merrily chanting “WIFE POWER! WIFE POWER! WIFE POWER!”

There's a more sober account of it in the local newspaper that focuses more on why the rally was held and talks about the arrest of its organizer, who apparently couldn't control his rage at the clowns and attempted to attack them, then resisted arrest. Tsk tsk.

I think this is brilliant, not just because I love it when people get all subversive, but because CIRCA really does what clowns/fools/madmen through the ages (at least those we know of, starting with the Greeks) were meant to do: hold up a mirror to society and reveal all the really ugly bits we'd rather not deal with.