Sorry, I just can't resist quoting Marx to the effect that "History repeats itself, first as tragedy, second as farce." He, of course was commenting on the fact that Louis Napoleon was not the real Napoleon, but the statement could equally apply to our own times. The young people who have taken to the streets of Paris for the past two weeks in ever-escalating demonstrations, are not the enrages of 1968, but a pale and farcical imitation of those miserable miscreants.
Then the protestors represented an assault on capitalism, imperialism, and militarism -- what the naifs in the streets saw as the sins of their elders. Today's protesters are railing against the collapse of the miserable and mean-spirited socialism that their parents erected on the trash heap of Western civilization. Then the protesters sought to change the world. Today they are clinging desperately to a failed dysfunctional system that promised them jobs for life. Their rallying cry has been "Liberté, Égalité and Job Sécurité!"
A. M. Mora y Leon comments:
It’s a gloomy antirevolution, its only thing worth fighting for is a welfare check or the right not to have to work hard. Is this worth dying for? I do not think so. But there are youthful antirevolutionaries who say it is. And thus, the gloomy scenes we see in the Paris setting, the sad need to be one of the elect, one of the employed, and do it with no effort whatever, to do it as a matter of entitlement.
Read it here.
On second thought -- Marx was wrong. It is not today's protesters who are farcical. They are merely pathetic. The farce and the tragedy was the Eutopian world the "Generation of 68" sought, and failed, to create.
For pics go here.
Der Spiegel notes the spread of rioting to other French cities here.
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