How the 'Year of the Protester' played out in Europe

“The description of the generation, not by their parents, but by politicians, and to some extent the mass media, is irresponsible and uninformed. We have TV shows called the Bank of Mom and Dad; its offensive,” Mr. Howker told the Monitor in September.

“All these different glib generalizations of youth bear no relation to the vulnerable situation they feel themselves in. Pensions are unfunded, long term debt is being leveraged against taxed earnings, privatization schemes proliferate," he said. "Far from being feckless drunks, these youth are vulnerable, and ignored, and ultimately put upon, since they are the ones that will be expected to pay for all this spending. From their standpoint, the price to enter society is higher and higher. That isn’t something previous generations had to worry about.”

Rage against the machine?

Is it fair to draw parallels between the disparate protests? Are groups of jobless physicists in Barcelona to be equated with the rioters in London this August? Or those in Syria, where thousands have died in clashes with government troops and security forces?

Many worry about how this ends, particularly in the Middle East, as Egypt and Syria writhe. Why can’t revolutions stay within the clean machinery of reason, rather than becoming a “rage against the machine?”

Perhaps this was the London elites' complaint against the American colonists in the 1770s or what the prelates in Rome said about Martin Luther’s Reformation. (A piece in the Economist this month, citing the invention of the press, called Luther’s anti-clerical message in 1517, which emphasized scriptural vs. church authority in matters of faith the first revolution to truly go “viral.”)

In a more sobering example, some say Russia's Old Guard similarly castigated the Bolshevik uprising, leading to Stalin's gulags.  

The hopeful may see the varying degrees of chaos in 2011 as a necessary transition period. Milosz, the poet who fought in the Warsaw Uprising, saw the shaking of the Soviet Union by the Polish Solidarity movement this way. In his 1980 Nobel lecture, he argued that the need for “true values” and expression among ordinary people could not be forever suppressed. “… Transformation has been going on,” he said, “defying short term predictions, and it is probable that in spite of all horrors and perils, our time will be judged as a necessary phase of travail before mankind ascends to a new awareness.”

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