Rotten Stinking Carcass of 60s Again (and again, and again...)

[Michael Hoover <HooverM@xxxxxxxxxx>]

from London Observer

http://www.observer.co.uk

Year the music died
In 1968 we thought we could change the world. But we didn't change that
much

David Aaronovitch, columnist of the year

Sunday April 25 2004


Some brands never die; but the people who buy them always change. On
the first floor of the Oxford Street branch of Virgin Megastore, you can
buy a black-and-white postcard of Martin Luther King Jr from a display
he shares with Jimmy
Dean, Marilyn Monroe and Bart Simpson dolls. Walk 10 yards, as I did on
Friday, and you may hear his voice intoning 'I have a dream' mixed into
a track and played by a shop selling jeans.

In March, 1968, a month before King was killed, I came down this same
street. I was 13 and wasn't using the pavement. At Oxford Circus a thin
police line had been formed to stop 15,000 or so demonstrators from
reaching the American
Embassy in Grosvenor Square, but somehow the line had been breached,
and - at the run - the protesters reached the square, and proceeded to
attempt to assault the embassy. There was a big fight which produced one
very famous
photograph, a demonstrator apparently aiming a desertboot-shod kick at
the face of a London bobby.

I didn't see the kick, but I thought the whole thing was fabulous -
scary but exhilarating. People talked as though anything was possible.
The older activists were so certain and so romantic - and so right. The
rulers of the country were tolerating the napalming of civilians in
Vietnam ('Hey! Hey! LBJ! How many kids have you killed today?'), just as
they refused to take action over apartheid South Africa, just as they
tried, culturally, to hold the nation in the grip of old and bad ideas.
We believed in love, peace and storming the
barricades, but not necessarily in that order.

When you are the most junior possible extra in an epic involving
millions, you can't be expected to understand the whole thing. This
week, reading Mark Kurlansky's new book 1968: The Year That Rocked The
World, I got a sense of
how it had all fitted together, of how the events of that extraordinary
year, the year I turned 14, helped make us what we are. And how we have
misread it ever since.

These days, 1968 is principally remembered as a year of street
demonstrations and hipness. It was the year of the Guevara icon, the
year that the Yippies turned up to the Democratic convention in Chicago
planning party games such as
'Pin the Rubber on the Pope'. It is fascinating now to see how, in so
many places, the cause was different but the cast was similar. In France
the May student revolts (which killed practically nobody) seem in
retrospect, says Kurlansky, to have been as much about the boredom of
life in a wealthy,
provincial democracy, run by an elderly, arrogant war hero. The
'revolution' was sexy, creative and largely without demands. It was as
much about the end  of deference as anything else. Over in China
students were also having fun at the expense of their professors, tying
hats to them, covering them in paint and forcing them to denounce
themselves as part of the great Cultural Revolution.

Forty-nine per cent of the French, one year after the Six-Day War,
thought that Israel should annex all the land it had conquered. Only 19
per cent thought that it should give everything back. In Poland
protesters waved Israeli flags,
because their government was pro-Arab - in Berlin they burned them
because their government was pro-Israeli. In London we protested against
an American war, in Cairo students demonstrated in favour of an Arab
one. Only in
Czechoslovakia that spring was anybody demonstrating in favour of their
government.

Just as in 1956, there was a cold war symmetry. The Russians suppressed
the quiet Czech revolt, and put an end to the illusion that there was
any radical potential remaining in states ruled by 'existing socialism'.
And the Americans
began 1968 to the sound of the Tet Offensive, which showed that there
would never be a settlement on their terms of the conflict in Vietnam;
14,000 Americans were killed that year.

Reading Kurlansky one sees both the parallels and non-parallels with
Iraq. There's the danger of believing what you want to believe, that all
opposition is communist or Baathist, that if you just hold out a while
then things will come good. However, there is no North Iraq, no coherent
Iraq Liberation Front, and no great desire on the part of Iraqi people
that there should be one. The lesson could be that Iraq isn't Vietnam,
but if the coalition does all the wrong things, it could become Vietnam,
complete with its own My Lai massacres.
In its consequences at least, Falluja has come close.

The year of 1968 was the year of the Black Power salutes at the Mexico
Olympics (Kurlansky devotes a chapter to the killing of Mexican school
protesters by government forces in the run-up to the Games), a year of
charismatic radicals
and great posters. Then, as now, Tariq Ali saluted American reverses.
Speaking about the Tet Offensive the young Ali said: 'A wave of joy and
energy rebounds around the world and millions more are suddenly,
exhilaratingly, ceasing to
believe in the strength of their oppressor.' In France student leader
Danny Cohn-Bendit (now a German Green MEP) enjoyed his media celebrity,
and especially a large advance being paid to him for a book on
revolution: 'In the
market system, capitalists are ready to prepare for their own deaths.'
They would pay revolutionaries money even though they knew it would be
'spent on Molotov cocktails'. And why? Because 'they believe that
revolution is impossible. Here's to their readers to fool them!'

The readers didn't. Thirty years later capitalism still stood and
Cohn-Bendit, like several other leading soixante-huitards, found himself
under criticism for having supported the decision to   invade
Afghanistan. Or, as the German
socialist politician Willy Brandt said, when he was criticised by his
own son back in 1968, 'anyone who has not been a communist at the age of
20 will never make a good social democrat'.

Nineteen sixty eight brought protest, liberation and a sense of
empowerment to many. It heightened discussions about the treatment of
women, about the more fundamental notions of rights for minorities and
the limits of superpowers.

All that is true, but the balance sheet doesn't quite look like that.
The year ended, not with an anti-war Democrat, but with Richard Nixon in
the White House, and with Cambodia yet to come. It ended with the French
Right winning a landslide in the post- événement elections,
with Labour entering a period of crisis which culminated, 18 months
later, in a Conservative government. Twenty-one more years had to pass
before a new Prague spring, and Mikhail Gorbachev blamed 1968 for
putting the cause of reform in the Soviet
Union back by more than a decade. It saw the death of liberal
republicanism in the States, and the beginning of the process whereby
the civil rights movement in Northern Ireland was to be supplanted by 30
years of killings and murder. It was the year of Enoch Powell and a
30-year fear of even the word  'immigration'. It was the year that the
great hopes of non-violent change, Robert Kennedy and Martin Luther King
Jr, were murdered. This violence found its way into the
language. As Kurlansky puts it: '"Motherfucker" was everybody's word
that year'.

There are some more poignant parallels with our own time. Like the
image of a troubled Dubcek - shortly to be ousted as leader of
Czechoslovakia - out walking alone and encountering some Slovakian
miners, who he briefs on the latest state of discussions with the
Russians. Now, not even a Swedish
Minister can be sure of strolling through a supermarket unharmed.

And then there's an even more contemporary footnote. All through 1968
civil war raged in Nigeria. Hundreds of thousands died directly or as a
result of famine. But, says Kurlansky, 'much of the world, preoccupied
with the year's busy agenda, regarded this war with a fair amount of
indifference'. This week it became clear that something similar has been
happening in the Sudan, with well-documented allegations of massacres
and systematic rape by government and auxiliary forces. In war there are
fashions too.