Protesters Storm Montreal University, Gang Up On Students In Class

[Satan's Evil Twin]

Ey now, I never said I wanted to shoot people, but if some else resorted to that that doesn't mean I would sit here crying. When people start attacking you and/or defacing your property they are perpetrating violence. To turn the other cheek would be foolish. Therefore, there should be no surprise if violence is answered with violence. That is all I was trying to say on that matter.

Also, not believing entirely in peace and a violence free way of life does not make me any less intelligent, but thanks for the jab. Do you think Malcom X was an idiot in comparison to MLK? Both have earned their place in history and have loyal followers. An eye for an eye makes the world blind is a nice concept to aspire to, but it's entirely unrealistic, comrade.

[Satan's Evil Twin]

Northern Light

Posted on Jun 3, 2012

By Chris Hedges

I gave a talk last week at Canada’s Wilfrid Laurier University to theCongress of the Humanities and Social Sciences. Many in the audience had pinned small red squares of felt to their clothing. Thecarre rouge, or red square, has become the Canadian symbol of revolt. It comes from the French phrase carrement dans le rouge, or “squarely in the red,” referring to those crushed by debt.

The streets of Montreal are clogged nightly with as many as 100,000 protesters banging pots and pans and demanding that the old systems of power be replaced. The mass student strike in Quebec, the longest and largest student protest in Canadian history, began over the announcement of tuition hikes and has metamorphosed into what must swiftly build in the United States—a broad popular uprising. The debt obligation of Canadian university students, even with Quebec’s proposed 82 percent tuition hike over several years, is dwarfed by the huge university fees and the $1 trillion of debt faced by U.S. college students. The Canadian students have gathered widespread support because they linked their tuition protests to Quebec’s call for higher fees for health care, the firing of public sector employees, the closure of factories, the corporate exploitation of natural resources, new restrictions on union organizing, and an announced increase in the retirement age. Crowds in Montreal, now counting 110 days of protests, chant “On ne lâche pas”—“We’re not backing down.”

The Quebec government, which like the United States’ security and surveillance state is deaf to the pleas for justice and fearful of widespread unrest, has reacted by trying to stamp out the rebellion. It has arrested hundreds of protesters. The government passed Law 78, which makes demonstrations inside or near a college or university campus illegal and outlaws spontaneous demonstrations in the province. It forces those who protest to seek permission from the police and imposes fines of up to $125,000 for organizations that defy the new regulations. This, as with the international Occupy movement, has become a test of wills between a disaffected citizenry and the corporate state. The fight in Quebec is our fight. Their enemy is our enemy. And their victory is our victory.

This sustained resistance is far more effective than a May Day strike. If Canadians can continue to boycott university classrooms, continue to get crowds into the streets and continue to keep the mainstream behind the movement, the government will become weak and isolated. It is worth attempting in the United States. College graduates in Canada, the U.S., Spain, Greece, Ireland and Egypt, among other countries, cannot find jobs commensurate with their education. They are crippled by debt. Solidarity means joining forces with all those who are fighting to destroy global, corporate capitalism. It is the same struggle. A blow outside our borders weakens the corporate foe at home. And a boycott of our own would empower the boycott across the border.

The din of citizens beating pots and pans reverberates nightly in cities in Quebec. The protesters are part of what has been nicknamed the army of the cacerolazo, or the casseroles. I heard the same clanging of pots and pans when I covered the protests against Manuel Noriega in Panama and the street protests against Augusto Pinochet in Chile. Quebec Premier Jean Charest, who despite Law 78 has been unable to thwart the street demonstrations, is the latest victim. I hope the next is Barack Obama or Mitt Romney; they, and Charest, are puppets manipulated by corporate power.

The importance of the Occupy movement, and the reason I suspect its encampments were so brutally dismantled by the Obama administration, is that the corporate state understood and feared its potential to spark a popular rebellion. I do not think the state has won. All the injustices and grievances that drove people into the Occupy encampments and onto the streets have been ignored by the state and are getting worse. And we will see eruptions of discontent in the weeks and months ahead.

If these mass protests fail, opposition will inevitably take a frightening turn. The longer we endure political paralysis, the longer the formal mechanisms of power fail to respond, the more the extremists on the left and the right—those who venerate violence and are intolerant of ideological deviations—will be empowered. Under the steady breakdown of globalization, the political environment has become a mound of tinder waiting for a light.

The Golden Dawn party in Greece uses the Nazi salute, has as its symbol a variation of the Nazi swastika and has proposed setting up internment camps for foreigners who refuse to leave the country. It took 21 seats, or 7 percent of the vote, in the May parliamentary elections. France’s far-right National Front, led by Marine Le Pen, pulled 18 percent of the vote in the first round of the presidential election. The right-wing Freedom Party in the Netherlands is the third largest in the parliament and brought down the minority government. The Freedom Party in Austria is now the second most popular in the country and holds 34 seats in the 183-seat lower house of the parliament. The Progress Party in Norway is the largest element of the opposition. The Danish People’s Party is Denmark’s third largest. And the Hungarian fascist party Jobbik, or the Movement for a Better Hungary, captured 17 percent of the vote in the last election. Jobbik is allied with uniformed thugs known as the Hungarian Guard, which has set up patrols in the impoverished countryside to “protect” Hungarians from Gypsies. And that intolerance is almost matched by Israel’s ruling Kadima party, which spews ethnic chauvinism and racism toward Arabs and has mounted a campaign against dissenters within the Jewish state.

The left in times of turmoil always coughs up its own version of the goons on the far right. Black Bloc anarchists within the Occupy movement in the United States, although they remain marginal, replicate the hyper-masculinity, lust for violence and quest for ideological purity of the right while using the language of the left. And they, or a similar configuration, will grow if the center disintegrates.

These radical groups, right and left, give to their followers a sense of comradeship and empowerment that alleviates the insecurity, helplessness and alienation that plague the disenfranchised. Adherents surrender the anxiety of moral choice for the euphoria of collective emotions. The individual’s conscience, a word that evolved from the Latincon (with) and scientia (knowledge), is nullified by personal sublimation into the collective of the crowd. Knowledge is banished for emotion. I saw this in Yugoslavia. And this is what happened in Germany during the Weimar Republic. The Nazis, who knew whom they could trust, forbade recruitment from the Social Democrats. They understood that the bourgeoisie liberals of that political stripe lacked the desired ideological rigidity. But the Nazis embraced recruits who defected from the Communist Party. Communists easily grasped the simplistic, binary view of the world that split human relations into us and them, the good and the evil, the friend and the enemy. They made good comrades.

“Comradeship always sets the cultural tone at the lowest possible level, accessible to everyone,” Sebastian Haffner wrote in his book “Defying Hitler,” which more and more looks like a primer on the disintegration of the early 21st century. “It cannot tolerate discussion; in the chemical solution of comradeship, discussion immediately takes on the color of whining and grumbling. It becomes a mortal sin. Comradeship admits no thoughts, just mass feelings of the most primitive sort—these, on the other hand, are inescapable; to try and evade them is to put oneself beyond the pale.”

William Butler Yeats, although he saw his salvation in fascism, understood the deadly process of disintegration:

Turning and turning in the widening gyre

The falcon cannot hear the falconer;

Things fall apart; the centre cannot hold;

Mere anarchy is loosed upon the world,

The blood-dimmed tide is loosed, and everywhere

The ceremony of innocence is drowned;

The best lack all conviction, while the worst

Are full of passionate intensity.

Those of us who care about a civil society, and who abhor violence, should begin to replicate what is happening in Quebec. There is not much time left. The volcano is about to erupt. I know what it looks and feels like. Yet there is a maddening futility in naming what is happening. The noise and cant of the crowd, the seduction of ideologies of hate and violence, the blindness of those who foolishly continue to place their faith in a dead political process, the sea of propaganda that confuses and entertains, the apathy of the good and the industry and dedication of the bad, conspire to drown out reason and civility. Instinct replaces thought. Toughness replaces empathy. “Authenticity” replaces rationality. And the dictates of individual conscience are surrendered to the herd.

There still is time to act. There still are mass movements to join. If the street protests in Quebec, the most important resistance movement in the industrialized world, spread to all of Canada and reach the United States, there remains the possibility of hope.

http://www.truthdig....light_20120603/

[Buggernut]

lol look @ the over weight youngsters, man they look like they are 40 not 20 something.. good grief, the sad state of affairs we call youth. They are so oppressed by the govrenment teet they suck on.

[Common sense]

Looks like the Spaniards and Greeks of Canada are taking their message west.

Quebec student leader takes protest on road as CFS looks to create ‘democratic strike movement’ in Ontario

Quebec student protest leader Gabriel Nadeau-Dubois, known for his telegenic looks and refusal to condemn violence, has been recruited to teach Ontario student leaders about Quebec’s paralyzing student strikes, as Ontario students appear to be setting the stage for their own season of discontent.

The Canadian Federation of Students has organized and funded Mr. Nadeau-Dubois and other Quebec organizers to tour 10 Ontario universities for its Quebec-Ontario Student Solidarity Tour.

“We are optimistic that a general student strike in Ontario can and will succeed, given the right ingredients,” an open letter from Quebec activists to the CFS said, adding the letter “represents a first step towards creating a radical, democratic strike movement in Ontario and beyond.”

The nine-day tour will kick off Thursday at the University of Ottawa, and Mr. Nadeau-Dubois said Tuesday his group, CLASSE, is considering a September tour to other provinces.

“They contacted us a few weeks ago to say that there were a lot of students organizations in Ontario who were interested in receiving us,” according to Mr. Nadeau-Dubois. “It’s really an opportunity to share what we have learned in the last months; to share our knowledge of mobilization, of social organization.”

Asked if the CFS wishes to see the same paralyzing strikes here in Ontario, spokesperson Sarah King said the CFS is a member driven organization and does not currently have a mandate to support a strike. All decisions regarding policy and campaigns are made at bi-annual general meetings. The meetings typically host 120 of Ontario’s nearly 400,000 students.

The University of Toronto will also host a separate Student Strike Training Program this month. The workshops include “creating and/or radicalizing student associations,” and methods of “enforcing strikes.”

“For me, the main point is just sort of, let’s help people not make the same mistakes we made and replicate the successes,” Quebec student and event organizer Jamie Burnett said.

The event has also received a shower of support from unions, including the Ontario Union of Postal Workers local 538 and the Public Service Alliance of Canada.

“Our union recognizes that the fight to keep tuition affordable is linked to the fight for decent wages and working conditions,” the Postal Workers wrote in a statement. The union has donated money for the CFS event, but a union spokesperson was unable to confirm the amount.

Rodney Diverlus, president of Ryerson University’s graduate association, said its own CLASSE event is being funded, in part, by the student association.

“You need to show solidarity with Quebec and the work they’re doing and student power across the country but it’s making sure we’re still having the conversation in our province with students on our own particular campuses to talk about our issues too,” Mr. Diverlus said.

The CFS is best known for its annual Education is a Right and Drop Fees campaigns, which lobby the provincial and federal governments to lower tution fees.

“Our tuition fees are the highest in Canada and have gone up since 2006 by 71%,” CFS spokesperson Sarah King said. “Ontario students definitely have a lot to work on and definitely should be inspired to do so.”

Not all students, however, are happy about the program. Alexandre Meterissian, a student journalist and outspoken opponent of the student strikes, said the student groups are “playing politics” with students’ money.

“I would not advocate to stop the workshops,” he said. “I just don’t want my money to pay for it in any way or if I was a university of Toronto I wouldn’t want my money in any of these workshops.”

Mr. Meterissian said students’ time would be better spent by getting involved in politics.

“There’s other ways to influence policy than going into the streets. Getting involved politically would have a much better return on their investment in terms of money than organizing these gigantic rallies that cost thousands of dollars to organize.”

Mr. Meterissian has been the voice of what he calls Quebec’s “silent majority.” Despite calls for solidarity, roughly two-thirds of Quebec students, primarily from McGill, remained in school and finished writing their final exams.

Quebec students took to the streets in February to protest a proposed increase in tuition fees of $1,625 over five years. The daily marches included violence from masked Black Bloc activists, and soon developed into a movement calling for free education across Canada. Quebec students currently pay about half of what other Canadian students pay.

In Ontario, the McGuinty government introduced a 30% tuition rebate for students last fall but, according to Mr. Burnett, the funds are not reaching enough students due to the program’s strict qualifications. In addition, Ontario students said the government hiked tuition rates shortly after the rebate took effect.

http://news.nationalpost.com/2012/07/11/quebec-student-leader-takes-protest-on-road-as-ontario-group-looks-to-create-radical-democratic-strike-movement/