tzimmer_history

tzimmer_history, 3 days ago

Commentators look for the most extreme voices and insist they define the whole movement. They often do this while conceding that the vast majority of students are genuine in their concern for the lives of innocent civilians. Why not foreground this reality about the protests? 2/

tzimmer_history, 3 days ago

This is certainly not how mainstream opinion has approached rightwing protests: When it comes to the Tea Party, Trump rallies, or Trucker convoys, we are asked to look for the least incriminating, most empathetic interpretation, one that does not foreground extremism. 3/

tzimmer_history, 3 days ago

The accusations against the students are also disingenuously inconsistent: They are derided as both extremist ideologues (who never fight back when the armed agents of the state arrest them?) and cosplaying children (why send police in riot gear then?). 4/

tzimmer_history, 3 days ago

The approach that dominates the mainstream discourse has been invariably used to delegitimize every major (left-coded) protest movement in history, very much including the ones that polite society today likes to affirm and claim as examples of the good protest. 5/

tzimmer_history, 3 days ago

The 1960s loom large in the collective imaginary of mainstream America. 1968, in particular, is constantly invoked to lend more credence to the idea that we are currently looking at a destructive uprising, as young people are – yet again! – giving in to irrational impulses. 6/

tzimmer_history, 3 days ago

What has entered our collective memory as “1968” was the culmination of student-led protests that erupted in around 60 countries at the same time. This was a truly transnational phenomenon, and those who protested perceived of themselves as part of a global movement. 7/

tzimmer_history, 3 days ago

The campus was the epicenter of the “unrest” that was animated by a longing to overcome the status quo, as the students were convinced the elites in power were betraying the ideals and promises they constantly invoked to perpetuate and legitimize the existing system. 8/

tzimmer_history, 3 days ago

The 1960s protesters were not rejecting the ideals America had always proclaimed – they were demanding the country finally live up to them. It was the anger over the gap between grand democratic promises and discriminatory realities that animated them. 9/

tzimmer_history, 3 days ago

The vast majority of young people who were politicized by the protests of the 60s didn’t become terrorists or just retreated into hedonism. Many actually channeled their frustration into new political ventures - their energy fueled the social movements of the 70s. 10/

tzimmer_history, 3 days ago

Whatever social, racial, and political progress we have achieved since the final third of the twentieth century: The protests of the 60s have had a lot to do with that. To reduce their legacy to “Nixon won” is simplistic and disingenuously reductive. 11/

tzimmer_history, 3 days ago

Students were at the forefront of the protests against the Vietnam War in the 1960s, South African apartheid in the 1980s, the Iraq War in the early 2000s. All of these protest movements were, at the time, widely derided as manifestations of leftwing radicalism. 12/

tzimmer_history, 3 days ago

It does not follow from this pattern that all left-coded student protesters are inevitably correct in their diagnosis and always justified in all the actions they take – or that all their specific demands are necessarily helpful and constructive. 13/

tzimmer_history, 3 days ago

But we must grapple with the role left-coded student protest movements have consistently played in recent U.S. history: As a corrective, reminding the nation that it was failing to live up to its own promises and aspirations.

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tzimmer_history, 4 days ago

In Egypt, the frustration resulted from the gap between the Nasser regime’s promises of “development,” of modernizing the country – and the fact that the social and economic circumstances had remained dire for most Egyptians. 6/

tzimmer_history, 4 days ago

If we zoom in on the “West,” it was the frustration over the gap between the promise of liberal democracy and the reality of a society and political system that certainly was quite democratic for some groups and something else entirely for others. 7/

tzimmer_history, 4 days ago

The gap between promises and proclamations on the one hand and existing power relations on the other was particularly stark in the United States, where “All men are created equal” contrasted violently with the reality of a racial caste society. 8/

tzimmer_history, 4 days ago

A global superpower that was presenting itself on the world stage as the oldest democracy in existence and a beacon of freedom for people everywhere was, in reality, a society in which the individual’s status was significantly determined by race, gender, religion, or wealth. 9/

tzimmer_history, 4 days ago

The central demand that spoke to the generational frustrations of millions and convinced them to protest even if they had nothing much to do with the inner circle of protest organizers was to close that gap, to end the hypocrisy, to finally realize the promise of American democracy. 10/

tzimmer_history, 4 days ago

Protesters across the world saw the Vietnam War as irrefutable proof of the system’s hypocrisies. America was sending its children to die and to kill in support of an authoritarian regime, all in the name of a “freedom” it was denying so many of its own citizens. 11/

tzimmer_history, 4 days ago

The vast majority of young people who were politicized by the protests of the 60s didn’t become terrorists or just retreated into hedonism. Many actually channeled their frustration into new political ventures - their energy fueled the social movements of the 70s. 12/

tzimmer_history, 4 days ago

Whatever social, racial, and political progress we have achieved since the final third of the twentieth century: The protests of the 60s have had a lot to do with that. To reduce their legacy to “Nixon won” is simplistic and disingenuously reductive. 13/

tzimmer_history, 4 days ago

Students were at the forefront of the protests against the Vietnam War in the 1960s, South African apartheid in the 1980s, the Iraq War in the early 2000s. All of these protest movements were, at the time, widely derided as manifestations of leftwing radicalism. 14/

tzimmer_history, 4 days ago

It does not follow from this pattern that all left-coded student protesters are inevitably correct in their diagnosis and always justified in all the actions they take – or that all their specific demands are necessarily helpful and constructive. 15/

tzimmer_history, 4 days ago

But we must grapple with the role large student protest movements have consistently played in recent U.S. history: As a corrective, reminding the nation that it was failing to live up to its own promises and aspirations, at home and abroad.

More here - please consider subscribing:

https://thomaszimmer.substack.com/p/the-students-have-never-been-the