The Spirit of 1968 Politicised Everyday Life - Essay Example

The Spirit of 1968 Introduction The year 1968 witnessed the unfurling of historical political events that somehow evoked long concealed angst in people all over the world and turned them into instant revolutionaries. The US was struggling with a war that it had trouble controlling and winning, the former USSR was busy keeping Czechoslovakia from shedding basic socialistic tenets and embracing the ways of democracies, and other countries all over the world were simply preoccupied trying to keep its citizenry calm down and off the streets. People were simply out there in the streets, in fury, raging and simply agitated. From the streets of First World cities like Memphis, London and Paris to Communist ones like Belgrade and Warsaw, protests, many of them violent, marked the year that was 1968. Civil right protesters, students and instructors, professionals, labour union groups, all trooped to the streets to denounce what they saw was imperialistic, oppressive, repressive and simply unjust status quo. In short, 1968 was simply a year of chaos and anarchy. The Guardian called it the ‘Year of the Revolt’ and that was not an exaggeration. The events of 1968 were in themselves overwhelming, but more so because media, principally television, brought the images of these events into the intimacy of homes. The spirit of 1968 succeeded in changing the world chiefly because it changed the everyday life of people. It empowered, it prodded and it inspired people to take stock of their political world and go out in the streets and have a say on how things are done, whether rightly or wrongly. It simply politicised everyday life. Students became a power to be reckoned with, rattling and changing government policies and perspectives. Students, professionals, and the working-class were all part of the rampaging social segments that made 1968 the year that changed the history of the world. 2 The Dramatic Events of 1968 To start with, 1968 was no ordinary year. The global scene was awash with arresting and dramatic political developments that would have naturally stirred attention and emotions. At the very first month of the year, the North Vietnamese Army and the Vietcong caught the Americans by surprise when they launched the Tet Offensive, so called because it was made on the 31st of January, which happened to be Tet Nguyen Dan or Vietnam’s first day of the year and its most important holiday. The Vietnam War that the US government was waging had previously already earned mounting protests at home and overseas because Americans felt it was not their war to fight and people abroad thought it was an act of imperialism. To the Americans at home, the Tet Offensive just illustrated how helpless American might and power could be when brought to the enemy’s home front, an enemy that has turned out to be not only elusive but also resilient. To the people abroad, the Tet Offensive was a triumph against the imperialistic power of a powerful nation that sought to impose its might on a helpless their world country. The hundreds of body bags of American soldiers that became casualties of the Tet Offensive that year fueled protesters rage even more against the US government’s engagement in that war (Herring 1998 31). Russia, the other global power that made up the Cold War before its collapse in the late 1980s, was also vehemently assailed across the globe for its own brand of imperialism against a supposed-to-be regional ally. In 1968, Russia was also engrossed in its fight to keep socialism remain the uniting force and intact within its region. In August of 1968, together with other countries in the Warsaw Pact, Russia invaded Czechoslovakia. The invasion was prodded by the Prague Spring, a movement for reforms that began in early January of 1968 in Czechoslovakia geared towards the political liberalisation of the entire domestic system and initiated by its newly elected leader Alexander Dubcěk. Dubcěk’s reforms of partial decentralisation of power and democratisation earned the ire of Russia and hence, the invasion. The invasion, which was conducted with other Warsaw Pact countries, drew protests all over the world, even from countries allied with the Soviet. Russia unseated Dubcěk and demoted him. At home, Czechoslovaks conducted protest actions, albeit peacefully, in various ways, declaring their support of the ousted Dubcěk (Kramer 111). Many of the significant and dramatic political events of 1968, however, happened within the US. Two of these events are the assassinations of two of the most well-known personalities of the time. In April, Martin Luther King, figurehead of the Civil Rights Movement, was brazenly assassinated right in his front yard and in June, Robert F. Kennedy met his ultimate fate in the hands of an enraged Palestinian assassin, allegedly for the former’s pro-Israel views, shortly after he delivered a speech in San Francisco. King’s death was mourned by thousands and sparked riots in ghettos and streets all over the country that left many injured, many more arrested and 46 people dead whilst Kennedy’s assassination frustrated, depressed and left hopeless many who adhered and believed in his libertarian advocacies (Boyer et al 2009 694-695). In 1968, student protests were the order of the day. The May 1968 student revolt in France, however, is considered the most famous student revolt not only of that year but of all time. Initially, the students were only protesting against the role of the US in the Vietnam War as well as the segregation of the sexes in dormitories but when the police breached university campuses and arrested and injured a considerable number of students in the process, the protests became a full scale conflict. Instructors and union groups joined the protests and allegedly more than half of the people in Paris were sympathetic to the plight of the students. The movement successfully snowballed that more than 800,000 people marched in the streets at one time and seized the city of Sorbonne (Katsiaficas 88-89). The revolutionary spirit of 1968 permeated even the world of sports because that same year African countries threatened to boycott the Summer Olympic Games held at Mexico City to show their protest of the inclusion of South America in the Games. South America was then reeling with international allegations of apartheid. The threat compelled the International Olympic Committee to withdraw its invitation to South Africa on the pretext that the team did not pre-qualify. Previous to that threat, students were already streaming into the streets to protest the Mexican government’s financial splurges just to host the Games that year. When Michael Morris, then president of the International Olympic Committee arrived in Mexico City just before the Games started, students trooped to the streets and engaged the police in an armed battle with more than 200 hundred students dead and scores of others injured in its aftermath. During the Games, some African-American athletes boycotted the Games and two track and field athletes who did not, wore black and raised their fists when the US National Anthem was played to show support to the US Black Power Movement at home (Findling & Pelle 2004 484). It was also in the year 1968 that Women’s Liberation Movement really flourished. In early January, some radical women’s group staged a symbolic burial of traditional womanhood during an anti-Vietnam war in Washington and several other meetings and events were held that year. In September, the group protested the Miss America pageant that earned the attention and therefore, massive coverage by the media and in November, the group held its first national conference in Chicago (Buechler 70-71). 3 How the Spirit of 1968 Politicised Every Day Life The events that took place in 1968, especially the surprise invasion of the Vietcong and the North Vietnamese soldiers against South Vietnam where the American soldiers were keeping watched and stationed, brought about an aura of unusual political triumph in the David-versus-Goliath manner that emboldened and made people believe that anything is possible under the sun, if only the Davids believe and act together and confront the Goliaths head-on. The subsequent assassinations of King and Kennedy, both perceived to be good men fighting for what is good, and the invasion of the USSR on Czechoslovakia and Dubcek, who only wanted to free his country and people from the structural restraints inherent in a communistic system further romanticised the need for the good to stand up together and slay the evil, if necessary. The 1968 atmosphere infused people, across the world, with militant radicalism that infected even the average person on the street. The dramatic turn of events seemed to spur people to think and hope that they too wield the power to change things. Sheila Rowbotham, a British historian and socialist feminist, recounts in her book Promise of a Dream: Remembering the Sixties how the spirit of 1968 changed her life. Initially preoccupied with the trivialities in her day-to-day existence in the early part of that year, Rowbotham was mostly brooding on how empty her life was becoming as she went from one failed relationship to another whilst her heart still deeply yearned for the man who seemed not keen on building a stable and solid life with her in the present and in the future. She was also in a dilemma with the future of her soon-to-be teenaged son who was fast alienating himself from her. The unfurling of events in 1968, however, changed all that. The images of the North Vietnamese successfully conducting its Tet Offensive and catching by surprise the most powerful nation of the world, had inspired Rowbotham to forget her own personal predicament and throw herself into the thick of political radicalism. Joining her hastily constituted comrade-in-arms, fellow academics and professionals, Rowbotham engaged in acts, almost classifiable as subversive, to protest against the Vietnam War and the American government. These involved pasting stickers, of anti-Vietnam War demonstrations, on faces of parking meters in Central London and found to her amazement that she was in the company of a down-and-out subversive who had flyers in his pockets advocating people to bring weapons to the demonstrations (Rowbotham 2001 164-172). Overnight, Rowbotham turned into an overzealous active member of anti-Vietnam war groups in London, joining protests, marches, organising left-wing festivals at the Trafalgar Square and other movements and mouthing the usual slogans against imperialism, constantly faced with the specter of being arrested by the police authorities and being jeered at, and sometimes physically harassed and threatened, by people who took the other side. She was also at the same time battling ideas against her own students in her classes at Tower Hamlets who initially frowned on her activities. The upheavals all around them however, and Rowbotham’s influence had turned their disdain for the movement into interest and pretty soon, even her mocking students were turned overnight activists. In addition, Rowbotham became heavily engaged into writing for the Black Dwarf, a radical newspaper identified with the left, which was raided at one time by the authorities, a raid that resulted in a sold out issue. In the end, Rowbotham felt that 1968 made her into something she would not have dared become had the course of things ran in its usual gamut and route. The events of 1968, Rowbotham felt, made her older than she actually was and more politically attuned and responsible overnight (Rowbotham 2001 172). The spirit of 1968 likewise spread like wildfire in other places like Trento, an autonomous city in the northern part of Italy, and in Italy itself. In 1968, the academic air in Trento was rife for student activism and protests which took root some years back with the proposed academic reforms by the Minister of Education. One of the much maligned proposals was to impose access restrictions on the basis of student performance gauged through the usual average grade point system, a measure proposed to implement the government’s program of aligning university education with the needs of labour and business communities. In 1967, however, the issue of the US-led Vietnam War became dangerously mixed with the earlier issues of academic structural reforms leading to a much more explosive blend of grievances. Thus, the first half of the year was marked by especially massive and violent student-led protests that spread, like wildfire, across Italy. These protests were characteristically violent marked by building occupations and face-to-face confrontations between police authorities and student activists. The November 1967 was particularly significant not because it involved university building occupation but because it occurred in a private Catholic university in Milan sponsored by the Vatican, i.e. The Catholic University of the Sacred Heart. And for the first time since its founding, police authorities set foot on the university’s campus at the behest of the school’s Vice Chancellor. The usually staid Catholic students turned into ardent activists overnight and since 1968 never looked back, producing the most influential and popular radicals of all time in Italy (Horn 2007 81). Perhaps the 1968 spirit also meant competition between student activists as to which group can show the most relentless radicalism and get away with the most subversive act vis-à-vis the government and police authorities because in January 31, 1968, after the Catholic students fought with the police, the Trento students sought recourse to their ultimate weapon of building occupation which lasted this time for 67 days. Similarly, students in Pisa and Turin joined in the fray and launched their own brand of massive protests (Horn 2007 83). Pretty soon, student protests and demonstrations were the order of the day in other Italian cities, big or small, like Florence, Genoa, Rome, Naples, Sassari, Luca, and a host of other big and small cities (Horn 2007 84). The student protests in Italy in 1968 reached its peak with the confrontation of an enraged group of University of Rome students who, during one of its demonstrations inside the campus met the police. A melee ensued, with student fighting with their bare hands, stones and sticks and even university furniture they can hold on to and hurled and used them against the police authorities on March 1, 1968. The enraged police was forced to meet force with force and heave the students out of the campus. That event consolidated student protests all over the country, with students acting as one and against one enemy – the government. Every day, students from all universities all over Italy marched in protests and occupied buildings and confronted the police, a protest movement that were growing more and more violent that it ended in successfully paralysing the country’s entire system of education for a long time (Horn 2007 85). Students were not only ones infected and affected by the spirit of 1968. Workers were on it too, en masse. As earlier stated, nowhere is student-led revolt at its worst than in France. The French student-led protest made history for its violence and sheer mass and the alarming notion that even students actually have the potential to bring a country down. The 1968 revolution was widely acknowledged as a student-led revolution and labour groups and other sectors grudgingly took a back seat. France, however, was an exception to that general notion because the working-class of France were as involved with protests and demonstrations as students back then, but then even before 1968 the French working-class was known to be anything but timid and complascent. Thus, although the intense radicalism that was brought about by the spirit of 1968 was almost always identified, first and foremost with students, this was not the case in the highly industrialised 1968 France. In Caen, located in the northwestern part of France, the 1968 militancy was initiated by a work stoppage of more than 4000 thousand workers of SAVIEM, a huge manufacturer of big trucks and buses, in January 1968. Two days later, a violent confrontation ensued between police and strikers, the former using tear gas and the latter, employing Molotov cocktails and makeshift weapons (Horn 2007 101). The late Herbert Marcuse, a German philosopher and theorist who had been living in America since the end of WWI, wrote An Essay on Liberation. The essay was written in 1967, a year before the fateful events in 1968, but Marcuse acknowledged that everything said on it was strikingly similar to the demands that were then made by the student-led revolt in France a year later. Indeed Marcuse’s words seemed prophetic of the nature of the extreme radicalism in school campuses, streets and work factories that marked 1968. Marcuse sees uprisings, such as those happening in 1968 as a paradigm of people’s innate desire to eschew the restrictions that established society had built to sustain itself and to free themselves from the constraints of that limiting environment. The revolutionary movement that swept the globe in 1968 tested the limits of the ‘power of containment’ of the status quo, Marcuse asserts, and that although the alternatives proposed by these overnight revolutionists were not the real alternatives, the movements were nevertheless significant because they have successfully established a trend that will have difficulty reversing itself. He believes that the trend initiated by the 1968 revolt will eventually culminate in a new form of “totalitarian suppression,” forcing things to come to a head-on collision until the people shall have totally liberated themselves and a new form of non-exploitative social order, a free society, that will break ties with the past and the present surfaces (Marcuse 1967 3-79). On the other hand, Guy Debord, another Marxist theorist, was one of the influential figures that shaped the French student-led revolt in 1968. He was an inspirational figure of the Situationist International or SI which lent its hand and underpinned the success of the French student-led revolt. The SI was a group of artists with Marxism-rooted ideology who utilised films, painting and other form of arts to spread their ideas and during the 1968 revolt, their works can be seen as graffiti all over walls in Paris. They were also instrumental in the formation of workers councils during the height of the protest and it was said that Debord’s Society of the Spectacle inspired the student protest (Jappe 1999 99-101). The Society of the Spectacle was a Marxism-based theory and critique of modern society as exemplified by the American and Soviet societies and how these advanced societies, which tolerate mass media making events and people spectacles, become medium for the degradation of human life (Debord 1967). 4 Conclusion The year 1968 was indeed a year of revolt with protests and mass demonstrations gripping countries across the globe. What is significant about theses “revolutions” was that albeit they were spurred by international political events such as the US-led Vietnam War and to a certain extent, the invasion of Czechoslovakia by the USSR, they eventually had a life of their own sustained and fueled by their hatred against the respective governments of the protesters and the status quo. It was as if the Vietnam War was simply an excuse for students and labourers to engage their governments in conflict and to vent steam perhaps from the pressure long built up by a generally constricting society, which impressed peace and order to sustain itself. This is not to say, however, that the protests were uncalled for. The collective anger at a superpower imposing itself on a small third world country, or of another superpower breaching the shores of another territory to curtail its flourishing liberalisation efforts, or at the nameless assassins who ended the lives of two men who only advocated peace and freedom were enough to push peace-loving people to go to the streets and make known their objections. The 1968 revolutions were, however, more than that. It started as a protest against all the unjust things happening around the world and ended up politicizing the man on the street and making him realise that, collectively with others, he wields power in his hands to change the course of things. References: 1968: The Year of Revolt Guardian.uk. http://www.guardian.co.uk/world/1968-the-year-of-revolt Boyer, P & Clark, C & Hawley, S & Kett, J (2009). The Enduring Vision: A History of the American People, Volume 2, 6th Edition, Boston: Cengage Learning. Buechler, S (1990). Womens Movements in the United States: Woman Suffrage, Equal Rights, and Beyond Rutgers University Press. Debord, G. & Knabb, K. (1983). Society of the Spectacle London: Rebel Press. Findling, J. & Pelle, K. (2004). Encyclopedia of the Modern Olympic Movement Greenwood Publishing Group. Fink, C. & Gassert, P. & Junker, D. (1998). 1968: The World Transformed 3rd Edition, Cambridge University Press. Herring, G. 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