Connecting the dots from 1968 to 2006

Student protests in France lack the spirit of '68 - Europe - International Herald Tribune:
"... Paris in May 1968. That was a time of student dreams and of student revolt aimed at tranforming an authoritarian, elitist system.
"'Sixty-eight was a mass revolutionary movement to create a socialist society,' said Henri Weber, now a member of the European Parliament, who was a Communist leader of the 1968 revolt. 'We had an idealistic vision.'
"The current problem stems from a flawed educational system that churns out young people who lack the necessary skills to get jobs, combined with rigid labor laws that discourage job formation because they require hugely expensive benefits and job-security packages that make it difficult for employers to fire anyone."

The article goes on to point out that the students have been joined by many faculty and retirees - presumably including not a few veterans of the '68 struggle.

Yet nowhere here is there a hint of the irony of this situation. To the extent that the protests of four decades ago succeeded, they caused the situation which confronts today's students.

They are protesting a proposed law that would make the first two years of employment a probationary period in which employees could be terminated at will. This is intended, in a very small way, to improve employment prospects for young French men and women entering the workforce.

French students of my, and MEP Weber's, generation fought against what their Marxist mentors said was a rigid, authoritarian and elitist system. They made it more so. And now, that success threatens to destroy the French economy. So, what do today's students demand? More of the same.