Once upon a time,
when major news events were chronicled strictly by professionals and printed on
paper or transmitted through the air by the few for the masses, protesters were
prime makers of history. Back then, when citizen multitudes took to the streets
without weapons to declare themselves opposed, it was the very definition of
news — vivid, important, often consequential. In the 1960s in America they
marched for civil rights and against the Vietnam War; in the '70s, they rose up
in Iran and Portugal; in the '80s, they spoke out against nuclear weapons in
the U.S. and Europe, against Israeli occupation of the West Bank and Gaza,
against communist tyranny in Tiananmen Square and Eastern Europe. Protest was
the natural continuation of politics by other means.
And then came the
End of History, summed up by Francis Fukuyama's influential 1989 essay
declaring that mankind had arrived at the "end point of ... ideological
evolution" in globally triumphant "Western liberalism." The two
decades beginning in 1991 witnessed the greatest rise in living standards that
the world has ever known. Credit was easy, complacency and apathy were rife,
and street protests looked like pointless emotional sideshows — obsolete,
quaint, the equivalent of cavalry to mid-20th-century war. The rare large
demonstrations in the rich world seemed ineffectual and irrelevant.
There were a few
exceptions, like the protests that, along with sanctions, helped end apartheid
in South Africa in 1994. But for young people, radical critiques and protests
against the system were mostly confined to pop-culture fantasy: "Fight the
Power" was a song on a platinum-selling album, Rage Against the Machine
was a platinum-selling band, and the beloved brave rebels fighting the
all-encompassing global oppressors were just a bunch of characters in The
Matrix.
"Massive and
effective street protest" was a global oxymoron until — suddenly,
shockingly — starting exactly a year ago, it became the defining trope of our
times. And the protester once again became a maker of history.
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