- Kurlansky, Mark.
1968 : The Year That Rocked the World.
New York: Random House, 2004. ISBN 0-345-45582-7.
-
In the hands of an author who can make an entire book about
Salt
(February 2005) fascinating, the epochal year of 1968
abounds with people, events, and cultural phenomena which
make for a compelling narrative.
Many watershed events in history: war, inventions,
plague, geographical discoveries, natural disasters, economic
booms and busts, etc. have causes which are reasonably easy to
determine. But 1968, like the wave of revolutions which swept
Europe in 1848 (January 2002), seems to
have been driven by a zeitgeist—a
spirit in the air which independently inspired people to act
in a common way.
The nearly simultaneous “youthquake” which shook societies
as widespread and diverse as France, Poland, Mexico, Czechoslovakia,
Spain, and the United States, and manifested itself in radical social
movements: antiwar, feminism, black power, anti-authoritarianism,
psychedelic instant enlightenment, revolutionary and subversive music,
and the emergence of “the whole world is watching” wired
planetary culture of live satellite television, all of which continue
to reverberate today, seemed so co-ordinated that politicians from
Charles de Gaulle, Mexican el
presidente Díaz Ordaz, and Leonid Brezhnev were convinced it must
be the result of deliberate subversion by their enemies, and were
motivated to repressive actions which, in the short term, only fed the
fire. In fact, most of the leaders of the various youth movements (to
the extent they can be called “leaders”—in those
individualistic and anarchistic days, most disdained the title) had
never met, and knew about the actions of one another only from what
they saw on television. Radicals in the U.S. were largely unaware of
the student movement in Mexico before it exploded into televised
violence in October.
However the leaders of 1968 may have viewed themselves, in retrospect
they were for the most part fascinating, intelligent, well-educated,
motivated by a desire to make the world a better place, and optimistic
that they could—nothing like the dour, hateful, contemptuous,
intolerant, and historically and culturally ignorant people one so
often finds today in collectivist movements which believe themselves
descended from those of 1968. Consider Mark Rudd's famous
letter to Grayson Kirk, president of Columbia University, which ended
with the memorable sentence, “I'll use the words of LeRoi Jones,
whom I'm sure you don't like a whole lot: ‘Up against the wall,
mother****er, this is a stick-up.’” (p. 197), which
shocked his contemporaries with the (quoted) profanity, but strikes
readers today mostly for the grammatically correct use of
“whom”. Who among present-day radicals has the eloquence
of Mario Savio's “There's a time when the operation of the
machine becomes so odious, makes you so sick at heart, that you can't
take part, you can't even tacitly take part, and you've got to put
your bodies upon the gears and upon the wheels, upon the levers, upon
all the apparatus, and you've got to make it stop” (p. 92),
yet had the politeness to remove his shoes to avoid damaging the paint
before jumping on a police car to address a crowd. In the days of the
Free Speech Movement, who would have imagined some of those student
radicals, tenured professors four decades later, enacting campus
speech codes and enforcing an intellectual monoculture on their own
students?
It is remarkable to read on p. 149 how the French
soixante-huitards were
“dazzled” by their German contemporaries:
“We went there and they had their banners and signs and their
security forces and everything with militaristic tactics. It was
new to me and the other French.” One suspects they weren't
paying attention when their parents spoke of the spring of
1940! Some things haven't changed: when New Left leaders from
ten countries finally had the opportunity to meet one another at
a conference sponsored by the London School of Economics
and the BBC (p. 353), the Americans dismissed the Europeans as
all talk and no action, while the Europeans mocked
the U.S. radicals' propensity for charging into battle without
thinking through why, what the goal was supposed to be, or
how it was to be achieved.
In the introduction, the author declares his sympathy for the radical
movements of 1968 and says “fairness is possible but true
objectivity is not”. And, indeed, the book is written from the
phrasebook of the leftist legacy media: good guys are
“progressives” and “activists”, while bad guys
are “right wingers”, “bigots”, or
“reactionaries”. (What's “progressive” ought
to depend on your idea of progress. Was SNCC's expulsion of all its
white members [p. 96] on racial grounds progress?) I do not
recall a single observation which would be considered outside the box
on the editorial page of the New York Times. While the
book provides a thorough recounting of the events and acquaintance
with the principal personalities involved, for me it failed to evoke
the “anything goes”, “everything is possible”
spirit of those days—maybe you just had to have been there. The
summation is useful for correcting false memories of 1968, which ended
with both Dubček and de Gaulle still in power; the only major
world leader defeated in 1968 was Lyndon Johnson, and he was succeeded
by Nixon. A “whatever became of” or “where are they
now” section would be a useful addition; such information, when
it's given, is scattered all over the text.
One wonders whether, in our increasingly interconnected world,
something like 1968 could happen again. Certainly, that's the dream
of greying radicals nostalgic for their days of glory and young
firebrands regretful for having been born too late. Perhaps better channels
of communication and the collapse of monolithic political structures
have resulted in change becoming an incremental process which adapts to
the evolving public consensus before a mass movement has time to develop.
It could simply be that the major battles of “liberation” have
all been won, and the next major conflict will be incited by those who
wish to rein them in. Or maybe it's just that we're still trying to
digest the consequences of 1968 and far from ready for another round.
April 2006 