Saturday, August 13, 2011

How youth-led revolts shook elites around the world

"The repression is brutal . and the teargas stronger than ever," says Camila Vallejo, president of the Chilean University student union which has brought 100,000 students on to the streets and taken control of 300 schools in an attempt to rebuild the country's education system from scratch - holding mass kissathons and Michael Jackson dance routines in the process. "We have been protesting not about reform, but about wholesale restructuring . if we don't have real change now, it's not going to happen."

It's easy to overstate the linkages; those joining the anti-government uprising in the Syrian town of Hama and los indignados Barcelona and Madrid are trying to make very different opponents and face wildly dissimilar levels of suppression as a result. But connections are obvious, not least in the protesters 'rejection of the old terms of debate and a commitment to something else in response to build on the roads - a commitment, most visibly in Cairo' s Tahrir Square, where demonstrators gathered not only to face down the regime, but also to prove that an alternative was possible, the singing ahum ahum ahum, al masryeen ahum ('Here, here, here, here are the Egyptians) was a snub to Hosni Mubarak, but also a reminder that the contours of the society would accrue from the ground up novel.

Elites still have that hunger for change for a meaningful basis, and the desire Agency to have a future that seems depressing set to capture reclaim, either rehabilitated under capitalism, nepotism and the brutality of the police from the Middle East despots or more plate of unemployment and austerity measures was narrated by the governments in the West. Those who failed on the other side of the trench to keep pace with the rapid change in thinking, in his analysis assumes Ferguson the kind of paternalistic tone that was easy to Mubarak octogenarian gently chided Egypt 's youth dared question authority of his, or the unelected rating agency chiefs, all the nations, to condemn the poverty, with a sad shake of the head and a well-intentioned finger-wag against wasteful spending.



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