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TIME magazine has announced their annual Person of the Year, and this year’s winner is not a single person, but a group. A very big group. 2011 was the year of The Protester. It began in Tunisia, spread through the Arab Spring in Egypt, Libya, Syria, and elsewhere, and before December, protesting crowds were seen in Greece, England, Wisconsin, New York, and all over. It was the biggest year of citizen demonstrations since at least the fall of European Communism in 1989.
In short, 2011 was unlike any year since 1989 — but more extraordinary, more global, more democratic, since in ’89 the regime disintegrations were all the results of a single disintegration at headquarters, one big switch pulled in Moscow that cut off the power throughout the system. So 2011 was unlike any year since 1968 — but more consequential because more protesters have more skin in the game. Their protests weren’t part of a countercultural pageant, as in ’68, and rapidly morphed into full-fledged rebellions, bringing down regimes and immediately changing the course of history. It was, in other words, unlike anything in any of our lifetimes, probably unlike any year since 1848, when one street protest in Paris blossomed into a three-day revolution that turned a monarchy into a republican democracy and then — within weeks, thanks in part to new technologies (telegraphy, railroads, rotary printing presses) — inspired an unstoppable cascade of protest and insurrection in Munich, Berlin, Vienna, Milan, Venice and dozens of other places across Europe, as well as a huge peaceful demonstration of democratic solidarity in New York that marched down Broadway and occupied a public park a few blocks north of Wall Street. How perfect that the German word Zeitgeist was transplanted into English in that unprecedented, uncanny year of insurrection.
In an extensive article, TIME tells the story of the year in protests. Link
(Image credit: Peter Hapak for TIME)
This post is not about the Wall Street protesters, well, yes it is, but not about the Occupy Wall Street protest of 2011. A century ago, people were not any happier about what went on in New York City’s financial district.
On September 16, 1920, an explosion at the corner of Wall and Broad Streets in downtown Manhattan killed 39 people and wounded hundreds more. It would be the deadliest terror attack on American soil until the Oklahoma City bombing 75 years later. Despite its proximity to the attacks on New York on September 11, 2001, the Wall Street bombing of 1920 has more in common with the public sentiment at the Occupy Wall Street protests in lower Manhattan today—with one notable exception. Today’s protesters are committed to nonviolence. The anarchists of yesteryear were not. They largely failed in their attacks on capitalism and Wall Street—and their tactics turned public sentiment against their cause.
That bombing was the culmination of decades of violence on Wall Street, which involved suicide bombs, union-busting mercenaries, and gunfire. After the 1920 bombing, cooler heads prevailed, and everything was hunky-dory on Wall Street …for about nine years. Link
Recent anti-government protests in the Middle East vary immensely regarding how much news gets to international audiences, and we can find it hard to keep up with developments in so many different areas. The successful regime change in Egypt and the violence in Libya tend to crowd out news from other nations. The Guardian has published an interactive time line that will help you catch up with developments in not only Libya, but also Tunisia (where it all started back in December), Bahrain, Yemen, Jordan, and other countries experiencing civil unrest. Link -via Metafilter
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Photo: AFP
If you want the world to listen to your cause, shouting just won’t work. You have to get weird. That’s what Alice Newstead did last summer to raise awareness about shark endangerment. With oversized fish hooks, a Paris boutique, and silver spray paint, Alice hung around briefly, but it got people’s attention.
The painful stunt went on for 15 minutes, as shoppers came to have a gander at the weird protest in the window of cosmetics store Lush. According to the International Fund for Animal Welfare (IFAW) some 100 million sharks are caught in commercial and sports fishing every year, and several species have declined by more than 80 per cent in the past decade alone.
Oddee has nine other strange protests we have been subjected to… and took notice of.
