I remember 1968, and I was there

[Kiwi]

I remember 1968, and I was there
Gerard Henderson
January 8, 2008
Source:SMH

As someone once said, old soldiers never die. Quite a few, having abandoned the sword, keep battling with the pen or keyboard. So it is with the Pakistani-born British radical Tariq Ali. Once one of the most prominent student radicals in the West during the late 1960s and early 1970s, he is looking back with fondness on the occasion of the 40th anniversary of the student revolutions that are said to have shaken the world in 1968.

Last Saturday the Herald carried Ali's recollections on 1968 under the heading "The year that changed the world". On the same day The Weekend Australian Magazine's cover story focused on seven Australians who recalled "the year the world changed". Both Ali and those of his Australian counterparts who remain on the left exhibited a lack of comprehension about what really happened or, rather, did not happen in 1968.

According to Ali: "What was remarkable about 1968 was the geographical breath of the global revolt. It was as if a single spark had set the entire field on fire." He was referring to attacks on US forces in Vietnam, demonstrations in such Western democracies as the US, France, Italy, Britain and West Germany, along with opposition to the communist totalitarian regime in Czechoslovakia. But the fact is that the US was not militarily defeated in Vietnam in 1968 nor were the Western democracies overturned that year. Indeed, Richard Nixon was elected US president in November 1968.

Some of the Australian activists of four decades ago exhibited a similar sense of self-delusion. The painter George Gittoes recalled that "everyone was mad in 1968". The newly retired Labor politician Meredith Burgmann declared that "anyone from that time will tell you - we really thought the revolution was about to happen". According to the filmmaker Albie Thoms, in 1968 or thereabouts "everyone started self-medicating". Even today, the likes of Gittoes, Burgmann and Thoms seem unaware that about 1968 they mixed with a few members of the left intelligentsia. At the time the overwhelming majority of Australians were a quite sane lot who did not believe in the likelihood of imminent revolution and were not into the drug culture.

There is little evidence to support the view that 1968 was the year that changed the world. During the 20th century many years were more significant, including 1914 (the outbreak of World War I), 1917 (the Bolshevik Revolution), 1933 (the coming to power of Hitler's Nazis in Germany), 1939 (the outbreak of World War II) and 1989 (the effective collapse of European communism).

Certainly 1968 was a big year for news. In addition to violent student demonstrations in the Western democracies, 1968 witnessed the assassinations of Martin Luther King and Robert Kennedy in the US.

Yet, despite such traumas, Western democracy prevailed as an institution. Within a little more than a decade the Conservative Margaret Thatcher was in 10 Downing Street in London and the Republican Ronald Reagan resided at the White House in Washington. Meanwhile, the Liberal Party's Malcolm Fraser prevailed over Gough Whitlam in late 1975. At the time Fraser was the enemy of the left intelligentsia Down Under.

It is true that 1968 was significant in that it marked the beginning of the decline in European communism. The Soviet Union's invasion of Czechoslovakia in 1968 discredited European communism, even though its demise was to take a further two decades. Those who resisted communist totalitarianism in Czechoslovakia, Poland, East Germany, the Soviet Union and elsewhere were the real heroes of 1968.

The fact is that most of the student demonstrators and their fellow travellers supported communist dictatorships elsewhere. Most notably in China, where Mao's Cultural Revolution turned an entire nation into a prison ruthlessly administered by the communist elite. Later the 1968 set was to support the communist revolutions in Vietnam and Cambodia, which led to mass murders, incarcerations and refugees. And, of course, the Cuban dictator Fidel Castro remains a leftist hero to this day.

As the one-time leftist David Horowitz wrote in his autobiography Radical Son, the New Left in the US "was not an innocent experiment in American utopianism, but a self-conscious effort to rescue the communist project from its Soviet fate". This succeeded for a while when, following the cancellation of military aid by the US Congress, the anti-communist government of South Vietnam collapsed in 1975 in the face of the Soviet-supplied North Vietnamese Army. But in time the likes of China and Vietnam abandoned the hardline communism for which they were admired by the student revolutionaries in the West.

Many of today's baby boomers, in Australia and elsewhere, have never expressed regret for having supported some of the most brutal dictatorships the world has known. Take, for example, the British commentator Beatrix Campbell, who has a regular slot on Phillip Adams's ABC radio program Late Night Live. Writing in the Sunday Times on October 28, Neil Lyndon commented that Campbell is "never called to account for the fact that as a young subeditor on the communist Morning Star newspaper she took state-subsidised holidays in the odious Eric Honecker's East Germany".

The events of 1968 had little impact in the West. As David Caute pointed out in The Year Of The Barricades, the New Left in the West at the time engaged "in a murderous battle with the state, supposedly to arouse the working class from its torpor, in reality to play out social frustrations and personal fantasies". It was much the same in Australia, albeit without the extreme violence. This is widely accepted today, except by those old soldiers who seem to remain fossilised in 1968.

- On December 27 this column quoted the Wollongong academic Peter Kell as saying that Australian society had "broken apart". These comments were published in the Illawarra Mercury in January 2006 not the Jakarta Post in January 2007.