1968 And All That

Rod Liddle writes:

Britain experienced some pretty bleak years in the last century, years you'd want to forget. 1940, for example, when - on the brink of defeat - we stood alone against Hitler.

Or 1926, the year of the General Strike. But it's difficult to imagine a year more ludicrous, or more damaging to the country, in the long term, than 1968.

A year chock full of deluded teenagers, of fatuous slogans, of bombs and sit-ins and bad music and worse films.

A year when everything the country believed in was turned on its head by extremely ill-kempt people who perhaps went a long time between baths. And even longer between shaves. People we should, by rights, have been entirely ignored, or just smiled at indulgently.

A year of drugs, violence, "free sex" and the lionising of congenital idiots like the Scottish psychiatrist R.D. Laing, the German social theorist Jurgen Habermas and a multitude of self- styled freedom fighters wearing frankly embarrassing headgear.

If you are looking for a year when things first started to go bad, when the lunatics at last got their grubby paws on the controls of the asylum, 1968 is it.

The remarkable thing is that the half-baked and narcissistic ideologies of that dismal 12 months are still with us, in our schools, in our law courts, in our social services; they have permeated every facet of our lives.

A disrespect for authority, contempt for the family unit, multiculturalism, "yoof culcha" and an emphasis upon rights rather than responsibilities.

A permissiveness and indulgence shown towards every anti-social phenomenon from the use of illegal narcotics to single mothers and suicide bombers ("We really need to understand them better") - all that stuff was forged in the rather tepid British spring and summer of 1968.

And now, as we celebrate that year's 40th anniversary, you can expect to see a parade of its noisome luminaries on your television screens - because 1968 is still a year dear to the hearts of many in the media and especially, I would reckon, the BBC.

For documentary film-makers, this will be a year of copious pining: where has all that fervour gone! They look back with nostalgia towards all that attitudinalising, all that faux anger - and the philosophising.

Student protest leader Daniel ("Danny the Red") Cohn-Bendit is certain to get wheeled out; his March 22nd Movement, based in Paris, instigated the later sit-in at Nanterre. He was a cultural icon of his time, afforded the sort of coverage we now give to our most gilded footballers. Bendit like Beckham, then. Ha, sorry. Cohn-Bendit is still with us, still treated with indulgence.

He now runs the Greens in the European Parliament, one of the few to have survived that tumultuous year with even a vestige of the old ideology intact (although he ditched hardline Marxism pretty quickly). Him and the pro-Green former German foreign minister Joschka Fischer.

They are both faux-apologetic about 1968; offering up a Blair sort of apology if you ask them about it - gee, y'know, I did what I thought was right. Maybe we were a bit naive and excessive from time to time.

You would hear much the same from their immediate ideological descendants, the bombers and terrorists and agitators - such as Red Army Faction militant Ulrike Meinhof and the Black Panther Party member Eldridge Cleaver etc, those people who made the 1970s such an entertaining place to be, with their explosives and ludicrous liberationist ideologies.

The media is our unelected collective memory, but paradoxically its own memory is both partisan and selective.

If they were truly even-handed they would use 1967, the summer of love, as the year to epitomise the good stuff about all that 1960s business, and 1968 - the summer of hate - to epitomise the bad.

It was the year that all those pleasantly pacifistic sentiments spilled over into radically stupid politics and, God help us, direct action - and threatened at least one Western government (France) in so doing.

In retrospect, it proved to be the first time anyone in power anywhere took the slightest notice of what teenagers had to say about anything - and back then it seemed that teenagers were about to inherit the world.

These were the first generation of teenagers, born at just about the time the term was invented, and we had not met their like before: now, though, we know all too well.

Quite soon teenagers, as a concept, may be disinvented. Perfectly nice as people, teenagers - but one really shouldn't take them too seriously any more.

Still, all this meant nothing to me at the time, as I suspect it meant nothing to most people. I vaguely remember my father being angry at the black power salute given by those piqued athletes, Tommie Smith and John Carlos, at the Mexico Olympics.

And everyone getting very worked up about the Tet Offensive as the U.S. war against Vietnam entered a new and, as it happened, decisive stage. But, like most of the Sixties, cultural change passed my family by.

It was the year I moved from Bexleyheath in Kent, where in cultural terms the year was 1959, to Middlesbrough, where it was about 1937. I did as I was told and if I failed to do so I was hit.

Looking back, it's easy to assume that nothing of the year really impinged upon our lives.

But looking out of my bedroom window in the autumn of the year I could see a new school being built, a state school which I would later attend and which had thrillingly abolished the concept of lessons, classrooms, learning, discipline.

"You will decide if you want to learn Maths or not," the headmaster told us, proudly, when the new school was opened. Well, I decided. What a time I had, doing nothing but playing football and the piano for an entire year. I'm still hopeless at Maths, as a result.

We are fighting to rid ourselves even now of most of the cultural nonsense imposed upon us by 1968 and those years immediately prior to it.

The bizarre excesses of multiculturalism, founded in a belief that the white establishment orthodoxy was an imperialistic construct, corrupt and useless, is only now being kicked into touch.

Children are still taught too little in our schools, and instead encouraged to interpret, a legacy of Lady Plowden's controversial report into education and, of course, Shirley Williams, the architect of the comprehensive school system.

When the children are naughty they must never be struck; indeed they must hardly be gainsaid, still less chastised. Radical feminism - which in 1968 reached its apogee with the radical writer Valerie Solanas's shooting of the pop artist Andy Warhol - has won every battle it set out to fight.

That wonderful new sexual liberation has left us with a country full of single mothers on benefit, the Child Support Agency, millions of divorcees and some very rich lawyers.

The overthrowing of the art establishment has given us a Turner Prize winner in a bear suit and a soiled mattress or a stuffed shark sold for tens of thousands of pounds.

Rock music, in its most hideous and bovine incarnation, has become the perpetual backdrop to our daily lives, a fugue of blandness and stupidity assaulting us from every car window, shop doorway, public bar, hotel, television programme.

Anti-Americanism remained the defining ideology of the European Left for 40 years - while Vietnam is still an inefficient, incompetent police state, lagging miles behind those south-east Asian countries which, unfashionably, chose to embrace free market capitalism.

Lagging behind in terms of human rights as well as prosperity, mind.

The one real hero of 1968, Czechoslovakia's Alexander Dubcek - a hero after the Prague Spring uprising against the Soviet invasion, remember, who was given little succour from the West - is now dead, having spent the greater part of the rest of his life working for the Forestry Commission, but he would have revelled in the irony of it all.

Eventually, the USSR collapsed under the weight of its own economic contradictions, and his country was at last free.

And yet in the West, the last tendrils of Marxism have a grip around the neck of every facet of our lives except, perhaps, for the economic sphere. So much, then, for Karl's idea of the base determining the superstructure.

In the West, the superstructure is still in the hands of the radical Left. Even the judiciary. How the hell did that happen?

I have a horrible feeling that we will be sent back, by the BBC and others, not just to 1968, but to an earlier time of Leftist ferment and revolution.

This year is also, of course, the 160th anniversary of 1848. A time when, as de Tocqueville put it, those who had nothing united in common envy and those who had something united in common terror.

The year in which the Communist Manifesto was published. Luckily, all those revolutionaries are dead, so they won't be on Parky or Jonathan Ross explaining how they meant for the best but things, later on, didn't turn out that way.

He's only wrong about the economic systems in South-East Asia. And the only thing to add is that 1968 made 1979 (and thus 1997) possible, indeed inevitable.