Note
to all of my younger readers—as if I
had any. Today is International Student’s Day but even if it didn’t fall on Sunday
this year, you would not notice it at any American
school, college, university. Why?
Because the day honors students not just for academics, but for their traditional
role as being a kind of collective public conscience, the bearers of high
ideals, and a thorn in the side of arbitrary authority everywhere. In other words pretty much exactly what our
oligarchs and authorities do not want.
They would prefer you train quietly and diligently to seamlessly become
cogs in the machinery of their prosperity.
Or if you must blow off steam, do it at football games, keggers,
or meaningless hook-up sex. Anything but protest.
The
day owes its origins to the dark days following the Nazi occupation of Czechoslovakia
in 1939. The country was perhaps the
most sophisticated in eastern Europe
with a large and prosperous middle class
which placed value on what was called high
culture. Education was particularly
valued and it had one of the highest percentage of its young people enrolled in
colleges and universities in the world.
In Prague many of those
students had watched glumly as German troops
poured into the city in March.
Some
students fled the country with their families, it they were able. Jewish
students were expelled and Jewish professors
fired. Some students, particularly young
Communists and left Social Democrats went underground and
began to form what would become a resistance
movement. Most stayed fearfully at
their studies, but many were determined to protest the subjugation of their
country.
On
October 29, the anniversary of the declaration of the Czechoslovak Republic in 1919, students of the Medical Faculty of Charles University
held a street rally which was violently suppressed by the Nazis. Among the wounded was Jan Opleta who was shot and died of his wounds on November 11.
Students
from all over Prague and the now splintered Czechoslovakia turned out by the
tens of thousands to turn Opleta’s funeral procession into a mass protest on
November 15. Students expected
reprisals. What they got was beyond any
of their imaginations.
On
November 17 the Nazis stormed the University of Prague and other campuses. All universities around the former nation
were immediately closed and their students ejected. 1,200 were rounded up and deported
immediately to concentration camps. Others would be picked up and arrested over
the next year. Few of those sent to the
camps survived the War.
Nine
professors and students were shot without trial the same day. Their names have become a litany of heroes to
Czechs—Josef Matoušek, Jaroslav Klíma, Jan Weinert, Josef Adamec,
Jan Černý, Marek Frauwirt,
Bedřich Koukala, Václav Šafránek, and František Skorkovský.
In
1941 the International Student Council (ISC) which included many refugee, proclaimed November 17 International
Students day with the approval and encouragement of Allied governments which used the proclamation in their propaganda broadcasts to the Continent.
The
celebration was kept alive in the post war years by the successor organization
to the ISC the International Union of
Students. Along with the National Unions of Students in Europe and
others there has been an on-going attempt to get the United Nations to officially recognize the day along with celebrations
for Women, Children, Indigenous Peoples, and such.
The effort has been met with what might be called benign neglect. It turns out a lot of governments are worried
about politicized students. And support
has been forthcoming and withdrawn depending on whose ox is being gored by
students in the street.
Take
the case of the old Soviet Union and
its Eastern Bloc allies. They originally embraced the celebration as
an extension of anti-fascism. But that changed after another incident
in Prague’
In
1989 independent student leaders and the official organized mass demonstration
for the 50th anniversary of the attack on Czech schools and students. The 15,000 students who took to the street in
a peaceful parade used the opportunity to criticize the Communist Party and government on an array of issues. Police responded with a predictable baton
attack leaving many wounded and one dead.
The dead man turned out to be a secret police agent who had infiltrated
the students but had gotten too close to his own government’s clubs.
Students
did not realize the dead man was an agent, however, and rumors of the death of
a comrade swept the capital. A student
strike was proclaimed and supported by actors
and others. The subsequent uproar
led directly to the Velvet Revolution and
the ouster of the Communist Government breaking the hold of the Soviet Union on Eastern Europe.
After the fall of the Berlin Wall and the collapse of the Soviet Union, European student groups fractured on ideological
lines. In the chaos, international
coordination of Student Day observances fell by the way side, although many
countries and national Student Union carried on independent celebrations.
Since
then students have been at the forefront of protest and rebellion throughout
the former Soviet empire, in China’s Tiananmen
Square, in the Arab Spring, in anti-austerity protests across Europe, in
Istanbul, and dozens of other places
around the world. They protest against
tyrants of the Left and of the right, against oligarchic wealth, and religious
zealotry. No wonder governments are so skittish about
encouraging them with United Nations recognition.
At
the World Social Forum held in Mumbai, India in 2004 various student groups and national unions began to discuss
re-launch an official, coordinated movement.
The movement has picked up steam, particularly in Europe.
In
2009 there was a massive commemoration of the 70th Anniversary and a major
conference held at the University of Brussels. Among the actions taken was a resolution
pressing for the adoption of a European
Student Rights Charter.
But
still nothing going on in the USA. Hey, here’s an idea, young readers. What say you start something next year….
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