The World Festival of Youth and Students has a long history going back to the first festival in 1947 in Prague under the slogan "Youth Unite, Forward for Lasting Peace!". This festival's slogan "Let's Defeat Imperialism, for a World of Peace, Solidarity and Social Transformation!" was well in the anti-imperialist spirit of that first festival. 126 nations participated in the festival and a reported 15,500 students attended.
The U.S. delegation sent three representatives from the YCL including two comrades from California and myself. While attending the event we were lucky enough to meet bilaterally with other Young Communist organizations from as close as Mexico and Cuba and as far as Vietnam and Iraq. The delegations exchanged gifts including pins, t-shirts, hats, and even some Chavez temporary tattoos from Venezuela (one of my personally favorite souvineers).
More importantly we also exchanged ideas and experiences with different tactics. We exchanged concerns about imperialist actions and frustrations with our own elected officials as in our meeting with Cuba and our anger over the situation of the Cuban 5, but luckily we also exchanged possible solutions and different perspectives on percieved failures that might be a sign of hope.
We also got to see how YCL's in other nations are organized and whether they are growing or shrinking and what they are doing to make their own results more positive and effective.
We also stressed the importance of all of our organizations to be better organized amongst ourselves and how we shouldn't all have to wait until the next festival to get a report on our individual progress.
We were especially surprised at what a warm welcome the American comrades recieved despite our own nation's involvement in imperialism throughout history. The delegates from all over made it very clear that while they might have serious problems with the actions of our government they love the American people. And boy do they love the American people! All we kept hearing was about famous American movie actors and musicians and one name kept popping up over and over... Rage Against the Machine. Everyone kept saying how much they loved Rage and how it was the best American band ever.
Besides all the great ideas and different views and serious discussion, the best part of the festival by far was the atmosphere. The knowledge that if you were there every single person around you was your comrade and would bend over backward to help you. The standard greeting of "hello" in whatever language was replaced with "Comrade!" and even the announcements over the loud speaker rang out "Comrades! a Comrade has lost his wallet, it is brown and has a nike symbol on it" and immediately you would see the good comrades going to work looking beneath their bench seats and on the ground around them.
Needless to say it was an alien environment for us as Americans. We are simply not used to people being so optimistic and comradely. It's also needless to say that we didn't want it to come to and end. While we have so many notes from so many meetings we simply can't put many details in this update but rest assured we will continue to elaborate in upcoming articles.
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