Anyone who has ever been on a protest march or felt the heady frission of student rebelliousness should check out Hugo Rifkind’s piece in the Times today. A really subtle piece of reporting, with no hint of the usual establishment sneer.
What’s fascinating about his observations the history of student revolt is how similar the present wave of sit-ins is to the protests of the past.
The latest generation of student revolutionaries use the Israeli action in Gaza as their starting point but their real gripe is with global capitalism. They know as little about the realities of life in Isreal’s occupied territories as their precursors in the 1968 “events” knew about Vietnam.
Their unwitting alliance with the Islamic extreme right is unfortunate. But the empathy and the sense of injustice is real.
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