A storm swept the world in 1968. It started in Vietnam, then blew across Asia, crossing the sea and the mountains to Europe and beyond. A brutal war waged by the US against a poor south-east Asian country triggered a wave of global revolts not seen on such a scale before or since.
If the Vietnamese were defeating the world's most powerful state, surely we, too, could defeat our own rulers: that was the dominant mood among the more radical of the 1960s generation.
In February 1968, the Vietnamese communists launched their famous Tet offensive, attacking US troops in every major South Vietnamese city. The grand finale was the sight of Vietnamese guerrillas occupying the US embassy in Saigon (Ho Chi Minh City) and raising their flag from its roof. It was undoubtedly a suicide mission, but incredibly courageous. The impact was immediate.
The spark that lit the world
The single spark set the world alight. In March 1968, students at Nanterre University in France came out on to the streets and the 22 March Movement was born, challenging the French lion: Charles de Gaulle, who, in a puerile outburst, would later describe as chie-en-lit — “shit in the bed” — the events in France that came close to toppling him. The students began by demanding university reforms and moved on to revolution.
In May, a million people occupied the streets of Paris, plastering the walls with slogans: “Defend The Collective Imagination”, “Beneath The Cobblestones The Beach”, “Commodities Are The Opium Of The People, Revolution Is The Ecstasy Of History”. The revolution did not happen, but France was shaken by the events.
De Gaulle, with a sense of history, slapped down his interior minister for suggesting that Sartre be arrested: “You cannot imprison Voltaire,” he ruled.
The French example did spread. In Prague, communist reformers had that spring already proclaimed “socialism with a human face”. On August 21, the Russians sent in the tanks and crushed the reform movement. In Mexico, students took over their universities, demanding an end to oppression and one-party rule. And then in November 1968 Pakistan erupted, toppling Field Marshal Ayub Khan and leading to the first general election in the country’s history.
The Bengali nationalists in east Pakistan won a majority that the elite refused to accept. Civil war led to Indian military intervention. Bangladesh was the result of a bloody caesarean.
Concurrent narratives
The glorious decade (1965-75), of which the year 1968 was only the high point, consisted of three concurrent narratives. Politics dominated, but there were two others that left a deeper imprint — sexual liberation and a hedonistic entrepreneurship from below. We had cause to be grateful for the latter. We were constantly appealing for funds from readers when I edited The Black Dwarf in 1968-69.
One day a guy in overalls walked into our Soho office and counted out 25 grubby £5 notes, thanked us for producing the paper and left. He would do this every fortnight. Finally, I asked who he was and if there was a particular reason for his generosity. It turned out he had a stall on Portobello Road and, as to why he wanted to help, it was simple. “Capitalism is so non-groovy, man.” It’s only too groovy now and far more vicious.
And, yes, there was also the pleasure principle. That the 1960s were hedonistic but they were different from the corporatised version of today. Radical upheavals challenge all social restrictions. It was always thus.
Homosexuality in Britain was decriminalised only in 1967. The advances of the civil rights, women’s and gay movements, now taken for granted, had to be fought for on the streets against enemies who were fighting the “war on horror”.
History rarely repeats itself, but its echoes never go away. In the autumn of 2004 when I was in the US, I noticed at a large antiwar meeting in Madison a very direct echo in a utopian bumper sticker: “Iraq is Arabic for Vietnam.”
A decade before the French Revolution, Voltaire remarked that “History is the lies we agree on”. Afterwards there was little agreement on anything.
Were the dreams and hopes of 1968 all idle fantasies? Revolutionaries wanted the whole forest. Liberals and social democrats were fixated on individual trees.
The forest, they warned us, was a distraction, far too vast and impossible to define, whereas a tree was a piece of wood that could be identified, improved and crafted into a chair or a table. Now the tree, too, has gone.
Much of this seems utopian now and some, for whom 1968 wasn’t radical enough at the time, have embraced the present and, like members of ancient sects who moved easily from ritual debauchery to chastity, now regard any form of socialism as the serpent that tempted Eve in paradise.
This, too, is nothing new. Shelley’s rebuke to Wordsworth who, after welcoming the French Revolution, retreated to a pastoral conservatism, expressed it well:
In honoured poverty thy voice did weave Songs consecrate to truth and liberty,Deserting these, thou leavest me to grieve,Thus having been, that thou shouldst cease to be.
