Student protest

Like a student.

Yeah, a student protest.

Woo! Vijay.

Oh

And Taylor did not choose.

I chose student protests.

Yes.

But Taylor's

That'll be a time in our country.

Mm-hmm.

So wanted to just go over a little history of student protests, maybe some tips for those considering, maybe thinking about why student protests are their own form of protest.

And why we should be paying attention to them because they've basically been on the right side of history like every fucking time.

But remove all of that, and what's left is deeply familiar.

I could draw any number of historical parallels, but the one that I can't get out of my mind is the student protests that rocked Poland for a few months in 1968.

What? That wasn't your first guess? Weird.

But the writers and editors behind Habibi City, behind the anti-Zionist graffiti all over New York City, behind the casual, thoughtless Substack and X and TikTok posts decrying Zionism as a unique historical evil, they are all reading from an ancient playbook, whether they know it or not.

In the US, it was all bell-bottoms and free love, anti-Vietnam War protests and civil unrest, and political assassinations: MLK in April of 1968 and RFK two months later.

In Israel, we're talking post-Six-Day War euphoria, mixed with low-level skirmishes with Egypt and the PLO.

And in Poland, student protests were gathering steam.

In November of 1967, the Polish National Theatre revived a classic 19th century play, whose Polish name I will not attempt to mangle, about Czarist Russia's oppression of Poland.