The
Revolution of '68
- it Has Bequeathed Very Little
By JONATHAN
POWER
March 7, 2001
LONDON - The revolutionary past of Joschka Fischer,
Germany's foreign minister may be about to catch up with
him if it turns out it is true that he lied about some
aspects of it during the recent trial of an old friend/
terrorist from that turbulent period of 1968 to the mid
1970s. If it does it should not be just the end of an
interesting period of German government but perhaps a
time to ask what did all that turbulence do for the
Western world? Is the only mark it left a black
one?
Has it bequeathed, as the great commentator on the
era, Mel Lasky, asked many years ago in his journal de
combat, Encounter, "powerful, moving, and possibly
profound ideas"? It seems not. The only memorable and
lasting hand-me-down of that era was not the "revolution"
itself, but what was its trigger, the American black
civil rights movement.
It was Martin Luther King's southern marches in the
early 1960s that made protest respectable, and helped
inspire the new post-war generation both in North America
and in Europe with not just high ideals but the urge to
get out on the street and confront the authorities. Yet
the legacy turned bad, became often violent, as it did in
America with the white middle class Weathermen and the
ghetto-bred, gun-toting Black Panthers, and with the
stone throwers of Danny Cohn-Bendit in Paris and his
long-time friend Joschka Fischer in Frankfurt.
At the same time it was all wrapped up in the
anti-Vietnam war movement. While this was a universal
phenomenon throughout the Western world, it obviously
reached its apotheosis is the U.S. where the fear of
being drafted was an active recruiter for the street
protestors. Indeed, it can be said with some surety,
there would have been no mass movement of protest in
America if there had not been the fear of being killed in
some far away place in Asia. The whole protest movement,
with its pot smoking and sexual impermissivness was
entirely of the body and the spirit, not of the mind. The
American intellectuals of that age- Paul Goodman, Susan
Sontag, Charles Reich, Noam Chomsky, Allen Ginsberg and
C. Wright Mills, just rode the tiger. The revolt would
have happened if they had never written a word.
In continental Europe it was different. There was no
fear of the draft and the ideas that moved the young were
all written down by others before they lifted a paving
stone or marched a step. The brilliance of Sartre and
Fanon, of Adorno and Habermas, of Marcuse and Gramsci
more than rubbed off on the youthful middle class masses,
it helped propel them forward. John-Paul Sartre, the then
ageing philosopher, was nothing less than the pied piper
of the children's crusade of '68. Sartre, who inspired
Picasso's dove of peace, was the same man who had blessed
the plastiqueurs who delivered bombs to the Algerian
terrorists.
And the Left Bank activists of the mid 1970s were
intellectual enough to change their mind once again under
the onslaught of ideas, leaving their German counterparts
in splendid- but violent prone- isolation. It was the
publication of three volumes of Solzhenitsyn's Gulag,
which coincided with the re-discovery by the new wave
philosophers, Andre Glucksmann and Bernard-Henri Levy, of
the power and worth of the Sorbonne intellectual, Raymond
Aron. Aron pointed out to the students that they had
merely indulged in "the theatre of revolution". No
revolutionary changes could be discerned: either in the
university or in the economy; neither in class structure
nor in private life. The age of permissiveness owed
itself mainly to a pharmacological breakthrough, not to
street protests. And the expansion of women's rights was
partly a corollary of the pill and partly a sociological
accompaniment of the expanding manpower needs of
industrial society.What is left when the left is quiet?
Has there been, as some charge, "a long march through the
institutions" that brought the likes of former protestors
Bill Clinton, Joschka Fischer and others to the pinnacle
of power? It is said by academics that have studied these
aging rebels that by and large they have carried their
ideas with them. But the practice belies that. We see no
indication that they are or have been seriously out of
step with the conventional wisdom. They took to power
politics like ducks to water. With Clinton we had eight
years of that. Fischer cut his realpolitik teeth with
the bombing of Belgrade.
The residue of '68 can hardly be measured. There were
no great ideas and few great thoughts, other than of the
most fleeting variety, especially on the core issues of
alternatives to war and alternatives to capitalism. We
can still take inspiration from Martin Luther King, pay
our dues to Amnesty International and shop at organic
food shops. But all of this was before or after '68. From
'68 itself we take nothing and this is the reality that
the friends and admirers of Joschka Fischer now have to
face up to.
I can be reached by phone +44
7785 351172 and e-mail: JonatPower@aol.com
Copyright © 2001 By
JONATHAN POWER
Tell a friend about this article
Send to:
From:
Message and your name
 
|