by liberal japonicus
{note: this is not a post speculating about Biden stepping down, despite how the title might lead one to think that. I promise I was working on this before pre-debate discussion even started.]
I've been trying to write this post for a while now, but maybe sending it out now is the right time. It is easy to attribute something to a specific cause that is there and ignore all the other stuff that is there but isn't on the forefront. Likewise, it's hard to prove that something is absent. I don't think there has been a work that has tied together the protests of the 60's as a world-wide phenomenon. This might be because it wasn't, but I'd make an argument that it was. (I feel like I've written about this before, so apologies if I'm like the senile uncle who tells the same story every Thanksgiving)
I think there are a number of reasons why there is this absence. One reason is that there is a notion that the protests in 1968 allows the year of 1968 to be taken as a synecdoche. For example, there is a wikipedia page that lists the protests of 1968, which already has one thinking of the specific events of 68 such as Mai 68, Prague Spring, or others, which then has you looking at a reduced set. That page cites two books, one by Croker, entitled The Boomer Century: How America's Most Influential Generation Changed Everything and Mark Kurlansky's 1968: The Year That Rocked the World. The former shows why you don't often get a global analysis, because, to mangle an old line, 'all protest is local'. Kurlansky's book is a bit better, touching on not only the US, France but Mexico and Poland:
“There has never been a year like 1968, and it is unlikely that there will ever be one again. At a time when nations and cultures were still separate and very different—and in 1968 Poland, France, the United States, and Mexico were far more different from one another than they are today—there occurred a spontaneous combustion of rebellious spirits around the world.”
But while he says 'spontaneous combustion', his narrative has it catalyzed by the US in Vietnam. The closest he gets to thinking it is not just about Vietnam is in Chapter 15 when he says:
“EVERYTHING SEEMED to get worse in the summer of 1968. The academic year had ended disastrously, with hundreds walking out on Columbia graduation—even though President Kirk did not attend in order to avoid provoking demonstrations. Universities in French, Italian, German, and Spanish cities were barely functioning. In June violent confrontations between students and police erupted in Rio de Janeiro, Buenos Aires, and Montevideo and in Ecuador and Chile. On August 6 a student demonstration in Rio was canceled when 1,500 infantrymen and police with thirteen light tanks, forty armored vehicles, and eight jeeps mounted with machine guns appeared. Often the demonstrations began over very basic issues. In Uruguay and Ecuador the original issue had been bus fares to school.”
But then he goes back to Vietnam and the Tet Offensive. It is as if everything is a planet rotating around what the US was doing in Vietnam.
The wikipedia page gives us a longer list, but again, because the book and the wikipedia page focus on a single year, they miss other events. The page mentioned the student riots of 68-69 in Japan (which are often referred to as Tokyo University riots, (which, again, by confining it to a single location, obscures the nationwide character of the protests) As that page notes "In the meantime, protests spread across many universities in Japan. Students at different universities protested different things." I don't mean to dismiss the individual causes, but if those causes are not linked, what links these protests is something deeper. Here are other events that I could list
-1961 Korea student protests against President Syngman Rhee started things off, with martial law declared in 1963. This continues up until the 1980 Gwangjung uprising
-1962 Burma the trigger was a ban on campus food sales and East Pakistan trigger was making English and Urdu required languages
-1963 protests by African students. primarily Ghanian, in Moscow, triggered by the murder of a Ghanian student, Birmingham protests, Chicago school boycotts, and even at the Ivies
-1964 race riots in Singapore, majority Malay students were celebrating the birthday of Muhammad, actual trigger unclear, Free speech Movement at UC Berkeley and The May 2nd protests in New York, and Anti US and Japan protests in Korea
-1965 Morocco student uprisings, trigger access to the second cycle of lycée
-1966 as well as marking the beginning of Chinese cultural revolution, Yugoslavian students protesting against the Vietnamese war (it sounds like a given, but is actually not what you think) and the 12-3 anti-colonial riots in Macau, triggered by the slow issuance of land permits for a private school
-1967 saw riots in Hong Kong against colonial rule, trigger was a labor dispute
-1969 in the US, too many to mention, but notable for the addition/increase of minority activism (here and here)
-1973 saw 'The Day of Great Sorrow' in Thailand, trigger was increased bus fares in Bangkok
-and in Greece, trigger was a student election postponed by the government, along with the Wounded Knee occupation,
-1976 Mao dies, marking the end of the Cultural Revolution
I was trying to fill the years after 1968 a bit more, but just got too tired and depressed.
My own feeling is that this decade plus of strife tells us two things: most notably "It's not always about you [or what you think it is]" and that what drove this is less any particular issues, and something much more diffuse. The French ambience gets into English and is watered down to talk about a room or a small event, the German Zeitgeist is weakly translated to 'spirit of the times', but we tend to brush off the idea that there is some invisible daemon out there pulling everyone's strings.
So why bring this up now? Well, obviously that debate, but also this.
Since February, more than 12,000 trainee doctors have remained on strike amid a deepening standoff with government officials, who want to grow the country’s number of doctors by up to 10,000 by 2035. Many reject the plan, saying schools won’t be able to handle the increased flow and that the quality of the country’s medical services would suffer.
Now, the numbers are small and a lot of people feel that the striking doctors are being indulgent, seeking to limit the number of doctors in order to keep their status intact. A similar thing happened when Uber tried to enter the Korea market, in 2014, and when the domestic company of Kakao tried, this happened
Tens of thousands of taxi drivers gathered in Seoul’s Gwanghwamun Square on October 18 for a one-day strike organized to protest a possible new carpool app from Korean tech giant Kakao. According to the Korean Taxi Workers’ Union, 60 percent of Seoul’s 100,000 taxi drivers joined the strike, alongside high participation in smaller protests organized in cities around the country.
There was more stuff (three drivers immolated themselves for example). But (and I may be mistaken), doctors protesting seems to carry a different meaning than taxi drivers.
This is Erica Chenoweth's page at the WaPo that contains the perhaps aptly named Monkey Cage Analyses that started in 2017, which has some thoughts about how we look at protests. A dive into Wikipedia has a list of protests year by year (here is the page for 2021) and it is dizzying to see. And this article looks at the trend from 2011 to 2018. Certainly, COVID enforced a break, so it short circuited things like the gilets jaunes movement, and I have to wonder what would have happened if the world hadn't been forced to stay home for that period.
When I was in grad school, an explanation for some difficult to explain phenomena that was trotted out was 'areal features'. The idea was that there were features that didn't come up from the proto-language, but came up because languages in the same area had them. I always thought that the idea was a cop-out, something you went to when you couldn't figure out what was going on. Now, I'm not so sure...
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