I often follow the developments of riots/protests around the world fairly closely. This weekend seems to be packed with them as protests have broken out in France, Spain, Taiwan, the United States, and as well as a general protest on the anniversary of the Second Iraq War. Regarding the student protests in France this weekend, Elaine Sciolino notes that they "lack the spirit of '68." What does this have to do with South Dakota? In the heated political atmosphere of 1968, the American Indian Movement was formed in Minneapolis which would later go on to occupy Wounded Knee in 1973. I often compare the protests of the past and the present to AIM, and that's the reason I follow these events closely. Anyways, here's an excerpt from Sciolino's article:
Once again, students are on the barricades in France, evoking comparisons to the uprising of May 1968. But this is not a revolt. It is not 1968 revisited.
Certainly, students are taking to the streets and shutting down universities, and tear gas is wafting through the heart of Paris. Hundreds of thousands of protesters, most of them students, filled the streets and marched in cities Thursday throughout France. With teachers, workers, labor union leaders, the jobless, even retirees beginning to join in, an even larger nationwide protest is planned for Saturday.
Forty-six police and riot officers were injured in the demonstrations, according to LCI television. A total of 187 people were detained in Paris, the city police chief, Pierre Mutz, said on RTL radio Friday, while more than 100 demonstrators elsewhere in the country were arrested.
The images a week ago of cheering students occupying the 17th-century Sorbonne, the birthplace of the 1968 revolt, called forth memories of that exhilarating, romantic leftist youth movement.
But the students' goal this time is far more modest. They want the abolition of a new law, the First Employment Contract, which aims to increase hiring by allowing employers to fire new workers without cause in their first two years.
"We're not back there in '68," said Nadjet Boubakeur, a 26-year-old history major at a public university here and a leader of the student movement UNEF. "Our revolt is not to get more. It's to keep what we have."
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