Students started to defended their right to participate in politics and protested against the Vietnam war in 1964 because of the administration’s decision to ban all funds and propaganda for any political party or social ideals they did not agree with. This led to a small group of students to take action by writing their point of view in the Free-Speech MovementNews Letters.
I am curious as to what their definition of propaganda was myself, but I want to know if you guys think banning the fundraising and propaganda was a smart decision or not?
The university has, in fact, become a sausage-machine which turns out people without any real culture, and incapable of thinking for themselves, but trained to fit into the economic system of a highly industrialized society (Cohn Bendit 27).
A modern university has two contradictory roles. To begin with, a university must churn out the trained personnel that is so essential for bureaucratic capitalism. (Cohn Bendit 41).
Throughout Cohn Bendit’s book, there is the sentiment that the university fails to prepare the working class students for a life of meaning, not chasing dollar. Obviously Cohn Bendit is toying with marxist thought, but what do you think about the justifications for university protest within the context of curriculum adaptations? I challenge you to think of both positions and try to argue the one you agree with least.
https://youtu.be/_rwWyIqpyYY
Also, here is a tik tok I found a few month ago, I really enjoyed it and I think we need the laugh.
While reading Fraser in the chapter of The French May, 1968. There tends to be this pattern that when students prepare to protest, not many leaders of the protest are present. This leaves the students in a disadvantage because some are still in their teens and they still do not know what to do. For example, In the night of the barricades there also was not a leader present to help them. Instead the students themselves had to make a plan to make the barricades and try to fend off the police, which is really amazing considering all the times the students and the police met, there were always casualties and people badly hurt. My question to the class would be: why is it that the leaders, when the protest are happening, are not present. Also, why do you think the government does not want France to hear that the protest are going on. In the instance when the soccer commentator got turned off. On page 212-214 “Radio reports were spot on, transmitting live news of the events all over France… A well known soccer commentator was reporting the events from one station… his voice went dead- they had cut him off”
As I was reading the second reading for today’s class, I was once again taken aback by the way that European protests aren’t exempt from also being a facet of empire. On page 239, the text describes how these student movements looked to the developing world for inspiration amid postcolonial struggles and revolution.” The texts proceeds to explain the ways in which Europeans centralized themselves in the protests. To me, this is in a way harmful because of the way it tokenized the struggles of the developing world, and proceeded to emphasize European empire by simply using problems caused by them as “inspiration.” I guess what I’m wondering is if these student protestors were so aware of the issues with Europe, why wouldn’t they let those in developing countries lead the way in revolution rather than take control as always,
“Fuck hierarchy, authority, this society with its cold, rational elitist logic! […] Fuck this immutable society that refuses to consider the misery, poverty, inequality, and injustices that it creates, that divides people according to their origins and skills” (Fraser 218).
I found the above quote interesting in regards to The Grand Tour of Daniel Cohn- Bendit and the Europeanism of 1968 due to the strong connection between traveling and the youth’s resistance of authority Jobs makes. At first, I found myself hesitant to accept the notion that travel could make a student/young adult automatically question authority, but then I remember what I did the first time I left home on my own, learned some things, and then came back: I was a menace with a mission. I thought the section of this small article centered on the fact that Cohn-Bendit being barred from France because he elected German citizenship to be quite interesting because it really shows the issues with nationalism (and regionalism): you are not “allowed” to challenge to system without having the proper paper work (…). In so many ways, Cohn-Bendit was French: he was born and raised there, but his paperwork did not reflect that. My question to the class is this: how are we supposed to respect authority when major issues are cast aside and/or suppressed because authority finds a technicality to skate away on?
In Rethinking France’s Last Revolution we read a section that talked a lot about transnational cooperation between students. On 238 we are told when a popular German revolutionary figure named Daniel Cohn-Bendit was called an “undesirable alien” and banned from France. As a result students in the streets cried out “We are all undesirables! We are all foreigners! We are aliens!” My question is, what are the benefits of having a protest movement with strong transnational ties like the ones between Germany and France seen here?
