“I dabbled in politics in the late 1960s and 1970s, more out of guilt than anything. Guilt for being rich and guilt thinking that perhaps love and peace isn’t enough and you have to go and get shot or something, or get punched in the face to prove I’m one of the people.  I was doing it against my instincts.”

John Lennon, quoted just before his death.

At a brief lull during the Who’s performance of Tommy, [Abbie] Hoffman, who had ingested LSD after working the past few hours at the medical tent, abruptly walked onto the stage and began addressing the crowd from Pete Townshend’s microphone.  He shouted, “I think this is a pile of shit! ... While John Sinclair rots in prison ...”  Alerted to the disturbance, Townshend (who apparently had been too distracted to notice Hoffman ambling onto the platform), snarled at Hoffman, “Back off!  Back off my fucking stage!”  He then struck Hoffman with his guitar, sending the interloper tumbling.  As the crowd let out an approving roar, Townshend returned to his microphone to add a sarcastic “I can dig it!”  Following the conclusion of the next song, the short “Do You Think It’s Alright?”, Townshend issued a stern warning to those in attendance: “The next fucking person that walks across this stage is gonna get fucking killed, alright? You can laugh, [but] I mean it!”

From the Wikipedia entry on the Woodstock Festival

During last month, the fortieth anniversary of the Paris student protests, the press was well-populated with articles about the generation of 1968.  I am nearly but not quite one of them and, personally, I’ve found a lot of what was written to suffer from generalisation.  The spirited, no-nonsense attitude of Townshend and the coerced and manufactured gaucheness of Lennon were nowhere mentioned.  But they are both much closer to the world that I encountered as a (very) young man.

One does well to remember that, at heart, the 60s generation as a whole was probably no more interested in left-wing political activism than any other.  Rather, it was caught up in an historical moment in the West so coloured by cultural, religious and political exhaustion, and - something entirely new - so drenched with the images of an inexcusable, far-away war, that millenarianism and rebelliousness were a simple, mechanical response.

Many aspects of it were ineffably silly and lightweight.  But a few managed to turn escapism from the grey reality of our parent’s world into an adventure of self-discovery.  These were a pure intoxication of the spirit, the like of which I have not seen since.

For the politicals among us, though, it was all much more intentional and hard-edged.  As an historically recurrent class, politicals might not encounter a single genuinely revolutionary moment in their entire lives.  But in 68 a generation went to Chicago and Grosvenor Square and the left-bank barricades in the conviction that this was indeed such a time.  And it would be theirs.  They would conjure up the destruction of all that they saw as corrupt and unjust in society.

But all that was compromised from the outset.  They threw themselves into it in a gesture-ridden and makeshift way.  Passion was more important that long-term planning.  No one could both determine theoretically for violence and organise it.

In reality, they had not cast off the naive belief in spontaneity that they had, in fact, been only too pleased to critique in the hippie phase of the previous year.  Revolutions just do not “happen” because someone has the raw energy to build a barricade or stick a penknife into a police horse.

Paris was the closest to the real thing.  At one point, a claimed million people were on the streets, demanding an end to the rule of their fathers.  Slogans appeared everywhere calling on the populace to rise up and “Defend The Collective Imagination”, or opining that “Commodities Are The Opium Of The People, Revolution Is The Ecstasy Of History”.

The only tangible success was the forced resignation of the de Gaulle administration.  But even then, it returned to power immediately afterwards stronger than ever.

For all that, we now know that the real, political 68ers did not waste themselves in their rebellion in the way that the hippies did in the Summer of Love.  Something, some whiff of “ecstacy”, was retained in the “imagination” down the years that followed, and never entirely mixed with the acquisition of position and wealth.

One has to acknowledge this resilience.  It is the most impressive thing about the politicals of 68.

Three decades after the flowering of their cult of youth, all the doors to institutional power - in government, in academia, in the foundation, NGO and voluntary sectors, and in the media - had opened for the most patient and serious of them.  William Jefferson Clinton, born in 1946, was a Rhodes Scholar at Oxford in 1968.  No that he inhailed at all.  He stayed true to the progressive ideals of 68, if not to the woman he married (who was born in 1947).  Gerhard Schroeder, born in 1944, but studying law at the University of Göttingen in 68, went on to co-sponsor the The Third Way with Clinton and Tony Blair.  Joschka Fischer, born in 1948, was active in German student and left-wing movements in 68, and was a close friend of Daniel Cohn-Bendit (who, as Dany le Rouge, led the Paris protests).  Blair, only born in 1953, hit Oxford five years too late.  But such is his shallowness, that proved no bar to his spiritual membership of the class of 68.

The gifts we have received from this generation are certainly revolutionary.  They include a substantial push for elitist internationalism, another for the police state, a third in the direction of the decline of Western civilisation, the attempted breaking of the bond between European Man and European soil, and the acceleration of the process of his race-replacement.  It’s some record.

But in time, weakness and exhaustion attend all things in this life, and politics are hardly an exception.  It may take a parliament or a presidential term or it may take a great deal longer, but there will always be this curious symmetry: the victories that sweep politicians to power and political theories to prominence will prove to be pyrrhic, and the moment of their ascension will be entirely unmindful of their own like fate.

This fact was attested in April when a scouting party from the doomed global left descended on Watford, of all places, to seek out a path to the progressive future.  Here’s the Torygraph view at the time:-

There are cycles in politics, and we are approaching the end of a period, both here and overseas, during which, under the guise of the word “progressive”, the big state held sway. Coming soon is a new political cycle, during which we will inevitably see demands for the excesses of the government-knows-best era to be undone.

... Politicians like to be on the right side of these historic shifts, because, if they are, they win political power. The two most successful leaders of recent years, Margaret Thatcher and Tony Blair, brilliantly presented themselves as fresh starts after years of immobility.

What is being publicly proposed here is the final enfeeblement of the politicals of 68.  One might, of course, argue that a McCain victory in November would contest the validity of a time-expired thesis.  McCain was already 33 and in a VC prison camp when the Chicago 8/7 were standing trial.  There might, then, be time yet for another 68er to climb to the summit.  But that would miss the point.  The zeitgeist is a-changing, as Robert Zimmerman never quite sang, and what went before will never come again.

So I think this is as fair a time as any for MR to mark the passing of this beautiful, reactionary, mistaken and quite deadly generation.  To assist in that I am posting above this small essay another, better one written by my friend Tom Sunic to mark the thirtieth anniversary of the 68ers, and first published in Chronicles Magazine.