Now is the time?

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...

Comments

[wonkie]

I remember 1968 as a time of hope. I was fifteen and I believed in a better future as an inevitable outcome of current struggles. My family had been active in the Civil Rights Movement since I was ten or so, and I had a sense of forward momentum, a feeling of being part of a movement that was going to make the world better.

It's funny that you brought 1968 up because I just finished writing a novel about being a white suburban teenager in that year. I get nostalgic as hell about it--about the feeling of life being full of possibilities, the assumption that self-actualization was the goal of life, the belief in a better future.

I have none of that now. I am so glad to be old and childless. I have pity for people younger than me. I weep for the whole fucking planet.

Paul Simon wrote a song about being born at the right time. Us boomer were born at the right time in the right place and are dying at the right time too. We have been so incredibly lucky compared to how the rest of mankind over history and in the future have and will experience life.

[JanieM]

Interesting, wonkie. I had some of the same hopefulness at the same age you're describing, which for me was a few years earlier. (I suspect that says something about developmental phases...?)

I was born in 1950. For most of my adult life I've considered the period of my earlier teens my "hopeful years," which I also associate with a certain era of folk music that helped me think some of what you described: that people could change the world for the better.

The March on Washington happened in 1963, when I was thirteen, but then late that year JFK was assassinated, the first dark shadow. The war became an ever bigger shadow, then Martin Luther King was assassinated in the spring of my senior year in high school -- i.e. the spring of 1968. Bobby Kennedy was shot late on the night of my high school graduation.

I didn't give up hoping the world could be made better, but I had certainly learned that it was going to be a bloody mess of a process.

*****

I do have children and grandchildren. I spend some of every night worrying about the world they're inheriting. Then, some days, I go and play with the wee ones, and they show me how to live in the moment.

[wj]

I have a somewhat different perspective (quelle surprise!). I was a college student (at UC Berkeley, actually) in 1968. I understood how upset my fellow students were over Vietnam. I thought it was a badly run war that we shouldn't be involved in in the first place. (My view on that has since gotten more negative.)

But I also remember thinking that the protesters had totally missed the boat. Sure, hold a single (in any given venue) sit-in or whatever. But then put your energy into the grunt work in the trenches that will get candidates elected. Candidates that think like you do.

But the protesters didn't do that. Perhaps the rush of being at a big protest was addictive. But, because they didn't, we got Nixon. Which result, objectively, owed a lot to the person they saw in the mirror each morning.

[wonkie]

WJ I agree with you about the futility of badly planned protests. I was frustrated and angered by the BLM actions and am frustrated and angered by the current actions that are supposed to be in support of Gaza. Public displays of moral outrage are self-indulgent and often counter-productive. I get incandescent with rage at assholes who block traffic. Protests have no value if not designed to be media events planned like advertisements to sell a message to the people not there--not just an opportunity to here one's own voice shouting.

[wj]

What is particularly infuriating is the argument that disrupting others is the whole point of a demonstration. Being inconvenienced has never, ever, convinced somebody to change their views. Or, to be accurate, to change their views in the disrupter's direction. Changing opinions against the disrupters, however, is very common. (See the political reaction to the 1968 disruptions in the US.)

People, correctly, see those disruptive protests, especially if repeated, as extortion. And they don't like it, any more than other targets of extortion do.

[JanieM]

wonkie and wj: I half agree with you and half don't. I think you're right that disruptive protests turn people off, and often away from whatever cause is being put forward.

But I think that’s a very narrow frame for what’s going on. IMHO there's a much less measurable, more diffuse effect over a wider social "area" and over time, especially if you think about the protest not as a way to change people's minds from blue to yellow (or whatever), but as a way to get attention to the issue.

wj (and wonkie I don't know if you read Balloon-Juice) -- the commenter Martin at BJ wrote a really interesting comment on this not too long ago, but I don't think I kept the link. If I can find it I'll post it.

Besides my usual random theorizing, I'm speaking also from the memory of one of my rare forays into public activism, during the mid-nineties when Maine had the first of its many gay-related statewide votes. "Maine Won't Discriminate" were the good guys (and gals) -- the other side was trying to get a law passed to explicitly limit rights for gay people. (Housing, employment, I don't remember all of it.)

I did a training in non-confrontational speaking -- it was very valuable and interesting, and I did do a couple of "speakout" engagements (it was always done with a partner). Helped me practice not losing my temper....

But while I was in that little non-confrontational bubble, I was very frustrated with all the very confrontational activists who were putting themselves forward with a great deal of nastiness about the homophobic agenda of the other side. (The "Christian Civic League of Maine" in the forefront.)

Over time, though, I realized that any "cause" is going to have this kind of range of activists, cranks, etc., and if you really want to effect change you have to accept that. And/or try to proselytize the hostile cranks before you try your non-confrontations with other people, etc.

It's complicated. And yet somehow change happens -- and then, apparently, gets undone by the bad guys. (And gals....)

[wonkie]

I think that if someone wants to raise an issue--just raise the issue, not change minds--then it is important to raise in such a way as to marginalize the cranks and present to the public something they might decide to agree with later when they have had a chance to think about it. Big public meetings, especially at night, are a magnet for cranks and parasites who feed on excitement.
I used to be involved in organizing marches in Seattle. The local communist (all ten of them) would show up with a hundred small red flags and the normal people didn't think of bring American flags--which should ALWAYS be part of a public event (and not to burn). So next time we planned a public event, I brought an American flag, and I stood in front of a TV news camera the whole time I was there. Yes, I got on the news, so to the viewers we looked patriotic. Meanwhile, we brought hundreds of small flags in Easter egg colors to hand out. The march looked like a party and the communists were lost in all the color.
It's just as important to think about how to raise an issue to the public as it is to think about how to change their minds,

[JanieM]

wonkie -- sure. That's related to my comment about proselytizing the hostile cranks -- you can also be wily and attempt to plan in such a way as to neutralize them.

But people don't know all this, and we learn the hard way, generation after generation, apparently. You go to war (and protests, and activism) with the fellow-humans you have, not with some species entirely composed of Gandhi or MLK or Tutu or Mandela clones.

I'm basically agreeing with you, but just not as ready to blame people for not knowing what they don't know. Math lover that I am, I nevertheless think "we" would be much better off taking some of the time currently used to teach math in schools, and dedicate it to teaching group process, conflict work, etc. instead. (And "math" is a stand-in for the curriculum in general.)

But then, the bootstrapping for that agenda would take a while, because there are so few people qualified to teach the skills needed for effective activism. Not to mention a huge machinery and unimaginable wealth dedicated to making sure it can never happen. Let's have some ersatz 10 commandments instead, and teach the Bible......

[JanieM]

Long but interesting comment from Martin at BJ on protests.

[Snarki, child of Loki]

"There has never been a year like 1968"

1848 sez "hi!"

[nous]

Solidarity is hard. Activism is hard. You can try to organize a protest in a way that doesn't offend or inconvenience potential allies, but doing so is almost always going to reduce participation, or reduce impact, or introduce organizational complications that are hard to overcome.

It's also impossible to control who is allowed to show up to a public event. The people who support your cause, but who think you are being too cautious are going to show up on their own, and try to supplement your efforts with their own. And the opposition is going to show up to disrupt, or to do false flag counter-actions.

So you can either plan small actions that make your point, but lack much impact, or you resign yourself to the mess and march in solidarity, knowing that the results will be imperfect, but hoping that it will be good enough to prompt some incremental good.

In practice, I find myself caught somewhere in the middle of this a lot of the time, but I've become more comfortable with the mess over time.

[sekaijin]

While I have followed ObWi over the years and at one point, around 13-15 years ago or so (and my apologies in advance if it was longer – that’s how memory goes) I regularly commented. But I stopped doing so because the breadth of commentary was far richer than what I felt justified in trying to keep up with. I usually had no time to search out data or hunt around for links, so I thought it best to let the commentariat who could do that do so – other than the odd comment here and there since. But LJ’s latest post has prompted me to comment here.
Some years ago, I had a blog in which I tried to recollect memories of my upbringing between Australia and the U.S., and I had a multipart piece about Woodstock and its legacy, seen years later in a way I couldn’t at the time (as I was only seven when the festival was held). But over the years, the Woodstock festival fascinated me for its political undercurrent and social import. I covered the latter but treated the former with a sober eye because so many from that generation who held that festival as a political watershed, or at least as something politically symbolic, believed (or wanted to believe) that it played a role in ending the war in Vietnam. But the war would drag on for another three-and-a-half years, and it was – in a turn of phrase I still flatter myself with – Milton Friedman, not Kinky Friedman (RIP), who got Nixon’s ear to end the draft.
I say all this as a setup for an observation about protests I’d like to toss in the air to see where they land: It seems to me that they come from a sense of desperation in the case of the un(der)privileged, and a sense of exasperation in the case of the more privileged. I say this because this seemed to be the twin poles of protest at least in the U.S., with the civil rights movement and its collective protests representing the one pole, and the campus protests representing the other. Where the poles arc together is when a similar degree of threat is being felt. So, pace LJ, what is being protested is of lesser importance than the threat in front. It is the mixture of desperation and exasperation that enables the willingness to face up to the threat, even with the risks involved, and this might be a key – not the key, but a key – to seeing where protests in such disparate places, over seemingly unrelated causes, come together in character.
I don’t want this to be the audible click that closes things out, because there are factors that complicate this observation, not the least of which is the nature of the threats. In some places, the threats were prison, torture, and death; in some other places, it was educational suspension and loss of economic status; in others, it was a combination in degrees of some of these things. In the case of the ‘68-’69 student riots in Japan, a fair number of the rioters were kicked out of the universities and forbidden to resume their studies, which was a huge deal at that time because in most cases it was near impossible to transfer to other universities. Given how Japan was still in full re-developmental flight deep into the ‘60s, this set back the economic improvement of the protestors in question and was tantamount, in some cases, to poverty or at least, economic diminishment, which amounted to a grave penalty given where the country was at the time.
There’s more to say, but I’ll leave it here.

[wonkie]

I appreciate the depth of your remarks, sedaijin. My reactions to protests comes from fear that bad tactics will lead to failure of the effort. I think the response to the summer of protests of police violence would have been better if there hadn't been riots. The riots actually affected House elections and state legislatures negatively (Republicans who might not have won, did.)

[wj]

My reactions to protests comes from fear that bad tactics will lead to failure of the effort. I think the response to the summer of protests of police violence would have been better if there hadn't been riots. The riots actually affected House elections and state legislatures negatively (Republicans who might not have won, did.)

That's the risk. There are lots of ways for things to go sideways. Many of which are outside the control of demonstration organizers. Threading the needle, to make the point without repelling a big part of the audience, is incredibly difficult. And requires a serious tranche of luck besides.

In an academic setting, I've seen "teach-ins" generally work out OK. But other types of protests do not have a great track record. Yes, there have been some spectacularly effective exceptions. But they are just that: exceptions.

[liberal japonicus]

what is being protested is of lesser importance than the threat in front

is a nice phrase that encapsulates what I'm thinking. I'd add that the problem is we can't agree on what the threats are.

[sekaijin]

And pace LJ again, what the nature of the threats are is indeed a factor. For the student rioters in the late-60s Japanese cases, the loss of status and the denial of the right to continue higher education was tantamount to prison (though granted, try selling that to the starkest victims of the Cultural Revolution across the South China Sea at around the same time).

But one other dilemma to add to what wj, wonkie, nous, and JanieM have already mentioned about protests: While one goal of protests is to get as many people as possible out onto the streets, the larger the number, the more the protests become events, and when seen as events, they become ends in themselves. As ends, a display factor takes shape where merely showing up is confused for commitment, while the purpose of the protest, and the issue(s) that were the basis of it, evaporate. This is also where the bad actors enter and the bad elements wonkie and wj point out set themselves to work. This was one of the things that plagued the '60s protests, which may have played a role in BLM and Extinction Rebellion: The event became of greater importance than the cause. In the display culture we're now in, where a protest can be ignited one way or another instantly through social media, the risks of it all going wrong are greater.