1 Jun
The Late 60s Remembered
Les evenements de Mai 1968? As the month draws to a close and this now slightly rheumy-eyed soixante-huitard draws towards his own kind of close, hoping it is still a fair way off, the memories come into focus.
The glistening waters of the Bristol Channel behind me, I entered College House, one of Swansea University’s largest buildings and went to the bookshop. Julian, the manager, an anarchist, asked me if I was following the events in France. “Events in France?” I asked, somewhat askance.
He explained, and so I went to a TV and saw that the streets of Paris, Lyon, Marseilles and so on were in uproar. Then I got hold of the papers and learned that a student and worker rebellion was on and that at the heart of it was a German Jew called Daniel Cohn-Bendit. (No, not ’bend it’ – like Beckham – but bon-di) and various Trotskyist 'groupuscules'.
They weren’t just protesting the capitalist order and the state; they were facing off against the Stalinist French Communist Party.
I learned that some at least were taking their inspiration from a German philosopher called Herbert Marcuse and his book ‘One-Dimensional Man’. So, back to the bookshop to buy this tome and read it. I did, cover to cover, but, believe me, it must have found its way straight through my cranium. Who, I wondered, would be fired up by such an abstruse text as this?
Ah, those were the days, ’68, ’69, ’70, ’71…
Chant, chant, chant, the kids are marching!
The chants… I hear them now.
The hated French riot police were compared, somewhat wildly to the Nazi terror squads.
The streets of London’s West End rang with the name of the bearded little man who had once washed dishes in the city’s swank Savoy (or was it the Dorchester?) Hotel. The tramp of marching feet as we did the Ho Chi Minh Trot to the astonishment of London’s bourgeoisie, tongues aloll, on the sides on the street.
“Smash the bourgeoisie!” chanted 200,000 mainly middle-class kids of all ages. And then we went off for a pint in a West End pub. Contradictions, you tell me.
Victory to the Viet Cong!”
Would I chant that now? No, knowing some of what I now know but I have no regrets at all about supporting the Vietnamese nationalist cause by donating blood to Medical Aid For Vietnam and opposing American imperialism. What many of us did not appreciate at the time was the way in which Britain’s intervention in Vietnam in 1945 had prepared the way for the ghastly French and American adventures.
We saw the napalm and the carpet bombing and were angry, genuinely so if not altogether coherently. We saw the zipper squads setting fire to villages just as we had seen ‘Bull’ Connors turn the dogs and the electric cattle prods on the Civil Rights marchers in Selma, Alabama, and we were angry. We saw the Freedom Riders go into that vipers’ nest of the US Deep South and face the segregationist white mobs and their masks of hate and we were inspired.
James Chaney, your body exploded in pain.
And the beating they gave you is pounding my brain,
And they laughed as they spat their tobacco.
The sounds of the voices are worried and low
Desperately wondering and desperate to know
About Goodman, Schwerner and Cheney.
Yes, as the rheum in my eyes increases and my joints ache that tad more, I can re-call that it was the soixante-huitards who protested the 1968 Soviet bloc invasion of Czechoslovakia, not the conservatives. And, believe me, I do not regret that. Nor do I regret a couple of years later protesting the Springbok rugby tour of Britain in the winter of ’69-70 and getting arrested at the game in Swansea – charges dropped!
Well, the rocking chair beckons …
David Jardine
Nice article as always from David but I was struck by this passage;
“No, knowing some of what I now know but I have no regrets at all about supporting the Vietnamese nationalist cause”
What on earth do we know now about the Vietnamese “nationalists” that wasn’t perfectly well known back then? That they were Soviet backed Stalinists bent on creating a Marxist dictatorship was perfectly well known, that’s why the Yanks were fighting ‘em.
Weren’t the south Vietnamese who bravely resisted Northern aggression also nationalists? And were the countless millions who were starved, murdered, exiled, enslaved, tortured and imprisoned in the gulags and grisly “re-education camps” in Vietnam and Cambodia the victims of “nationalism” or another ‘-ism’ beginning with “C”?
Anyhoo, I’m rather disappointed that David missed out the only successful ‘revolution’ that actually took place in western Europe in 1968, particularly as it happened on his own doorstep.
In my own home town, in the street where I was eventually to live on October 5th a small band of Civil Rights activists (including my parents, I know everyone now claims to have been there but my folks actually were) exposed a shocking nasty little quasi-police state within the very United Kingdom. Within weeks all their demands were met by a clearly shaken government.
However due to the fact that these events took place in grim little Tyrone villages and in the unglamorous back streets of the Bogside it is unlikely they will get the misty eyed nostalgic treatment that is reserved for the non-events of Paris that year.
As you already know, I was in Bogside a few days after the British troops moved in.
Another 40th anniversary is of the walkout by a group of women machinists at Ford which led to the Equal Pay Act.
However, the prevalence of short-term contracts and an antiquated tribunal system means that the “UK is one of the worst in Europe in terms of the gender divide, with women in full-time work being paid, on average, 17 per cent less than their male counterparts. When it comes to part-time work, the figures are much worse. The gap is enormous – a 36 per cent gap between the sexes.”
What else can we celebrate, eh?
Miko,
My first comment is that the 1954 Geneva Convention had agreed that in principle Vietnam was one country. The Americans and their stooges(what was that fascist Marshal Ky but a stooge?) subverted the Convention in order to make the artificial but temporary division permanent.
As to your point about N.Ireland, yes, I should have mentioned it and sung the praises of those such as Bernadette Devlin an, I guess, yourself who faced off bravely against the B-Specials and the Orange mobs. People’s Democracy and, a little later John Hume and Austin Currie in the SDLP were an inspiration.
Well my part in the struggle was limited to burping and belching in my pram as I was only eighteen months old at the time. I’d agree with you about Hume and Currie, Bernadette and the PD on the other hand didn’t play such a noble role.
By November ’68 following the Duke Street march the Unionists were on the ropes and pretty much conceded all the demands of the Civil Rights movement, however that wasn’t enough for Bernie and her Trotskyite friend Michael Farrell who organised the disastrous New Year march from Belfast to Derry which was little more than a coat trailing exercise through staunchly loyalist areas with the entirely expected and (as Bernadette always admitted) desired result.
Violence broke out at Burntollet Bridge, the loyalist die-hards staged their fight back, the RUC demoralised as it was behaved disgracefully in the Bogside and the old troglodytes of the IRA licked their lips and started greasing up the guns again. The moderates on both sides were marginalised and any hope of giving the reforms a peaceful chance went down the toilet for a generation, the rest as they say is history.
As for Vietnam, well no one has ever had a good word to say for the South Vietnamese regime but I am always amazed how the equally thuggish dictatorship of North (and subsequently unified) Vietnam got to be so lionised and idolised among well off middle class people in the west who wouldn’t have lasted five minutes under such a regime.