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The solipsistic conceit of the age—that the young would change the world by ‘doing their own thing’, ‘letting it all hang out’ and ‘making love, not war’—was always an illusion, and it has not worn well. But it was not the only illusion of the time, and by no means the most foolish.
In its newly fashionable usage, ‘Theory’ meant something quite different. It was largely taken up with ‘interrogating’ (a contemporary term of art) the method and objectives of academic disciplines: above all the social sciences—history, sociology, anthropology—but also the humanities and even, in later years, the laboratory sciences themselves. In an age of vastly expanded universities, with periodicals, journals and lecturers urgently seeking ‘copy’, there emerged a market for ‘theories’ of every kind—fuelled not by improved intellectual supply but rather by insatiable consumer demand.
But it was self-consciously interpretive, typically from a non-dogmatic but unmistakably left-leaning position. Here was history informed by social theory, and by an insistence upon the importance of class, particularly the lower classes.
As an interpretation of human experience, any theory dependent on an arrangement of structures from which human choice had been eliminated was thus hobbled by its own assumptions. Intellectually subversive, structuralism was politically passive.
that Marxism was the dominant idea of the age: the secular religion of its epoch.
The prosperous, liberal West’s apparently infinite flexibility, its sponge-like capacity to absorb passions and differences, infuriated its critics.
Repression, they insisted, was endemic in bourgeois society. It could not just evaporate. The repression that was missing on the streets must perforce have gone somewhere: it had moved into people’s very souls—and, above all, their bodies.
The emphasis upon sexual fulfillment as a radical goal was quite offensive to an older generation of Left-wingers. Free love in a free society was not a new idea—some early nineteenth-century Socialist sects had espoused it, and the first years of the Soviet Union had been distinctly morally relaxed—but the mainstream tradition of European radicalism was one of moral and domestic rectitude.
But however discomfiting, the conflation of sex and politics presented no real threat—indeed,
As their critics had insisted from the outset, the boys and girls of the Sixties just weren’t serious.
It says something about the peculiar circumstances of the Sixties, and the social background of the most prominent public activists, that so many of the disputes and demands of the time were constructed around a political agenda and not an economic one. Like 1848, the Sixties was a Revolution of the Intellectuals.
There was also considerable nocturnal movement to and fro between the male and female dormitories, in spite of strict official prohibitions.
In this sense, as the disdainful French Communist Party leadership rightly insisted, this was a party, not a revolution. It had all the symbolism of a traditional French revolt—armed demonstrators, street barricades, the occupation of strategic buildings and intersections, political demands and counter-demands—but none of the substance. The young men and women in the student crowds were overwhelmingly middle-class—indeed, many of them were from the Parisian bourgeoisie itself: ‘fils à papa’ (‘daddy’s boys’), as the PCF leader Georges Marchais derisively called them.
They bespeak irritation and frustration, but remarkably little anger. This was to be a victimless revolution, which in the end meant that it was no sort of revolution at all.
But while this might account for the disaffection of the extra-parliamentary Left, it cannot fully explain their turn to violence. ‘Maoism’—or at any rate, an uncritical fascination with the Chinese Cultural Revolution then in full swing—was more extensive in Italy than anywhere else in Europe.
the class roles were now reversed: the privileged children of the bourgeoisie were screaming revolutionary slogans and beating up the underpaid sons of southern sharecroppers charged with preserving civic order.
Their parents, the cohort of Germans born between 1910 and 1930, did not just refuse to discuss the past. Skeptical of political promises and grand ideas, their attention was relentlessly and a trifle uneasily focused on material well-being, stability and respectability.
The cultural revolution of the era was remarkably parochial: if Western youth looked beyond their borders at all, it was to exotic lands whose image floated free of the irritating constraints of familiarity or information. Of alien cultures closer to home, the Western Sixties knew little. When Rudi Dutschke paid a fraternal visit to Prague, at the height of the Czech reform movement in the spring of 1968, local students were taken aback at his insistence that pluralist democracy was the real enemy. For them, it was the goal.
It was a peculiarity of Poland in the Gomułka years that Marxist philosophers and Catholic theologians could find some common ground in their defense of free speech and civil liberties—an
The failings of Communist economies were hardly a secret. They were only just able to furnish their citizens with sufficient food (in the Soviet Union they often failed to manage even this).
Bucharest intellectuals in the Sixties, cut off from their own society, played no part in domestic debates (there were none) and had to be satisfied with reading the latest nouveaux romans from Paris and participating vicariously in a cosmopolitan French culture for which educated Romanians had always claimed a special affinity.
مثل من :/
But far from condemning the Romanian dictators, Western governments gave them every encouragement,
كالعادة
The Polish October was a missed opportunity, he explained. Ten years later Poland was a land of privilege, inefficiency and censorship.
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But they offered an irresistible target for anyone seeking a route to power within the Party and demagogic popularity in the country at large.
نفس ما يحدث للمسلمين حاليا
All that was lacking was the opportunity, and the Six Day War between Israel and its Arab neighbors duly afforded this in June 1967. Soviet support for the Arab cause legitimized vocal criticism of Israel, Zionism—and Jews. Thus in a speech on June 19th 1967, condemning those who had backed Israel in the recent conflict, Gomułka brazenly conflated his Jewish critics and the Zionist state: ‘I wish to announce that we shall not prevent Polish citizens of Jewish nationality from returning [sic] to Israel if they wish to do so. Our position is that every Polish citizen should have one country: the
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الكاتب يتكلم عن العدوان بنبرة محايده بل متعاطف مع اليهود !!
was the privileged sons and daughters of Poland’s Communist nomenklatura who took the most prominent roles in the protests and demonstrations, and their concerns were focused on issues of free speech and political rights above all. As their neo-Stalinist enemies were quick to point out, Warsaw’s dissident intelligentsia paid little attention to the bread and butter concerns of the working population.
It was because they knew this that the aging Stalinists in Prague Castle had tried for so long to hold the line. If they did not clamp down firmly on the intellectual opposition emerging in 1967 it was not for want of trying. But they were held back by two constraints: the need to pursue the recently implemented economic reforms, which implied a degree of openness and tolerance of dissenting opinion along Hungarian lines; and the emerging difficulties in Slovakia.
Brezhnev propounded the Doctrine that would henceforth be associated with his name: ‘Each Communist party is free to apply the principles of Marxism-Leninism and socialism in its own country, but it is not free to deviate from these principles if it is to remain a Communist party . . . The weakening of any of the links in the world system of socialism directly affects all the socialist countries, and they cannot look indifferently upon this.’
Just five weeks earlier, Washington and Moscow had co-signed a Treaty of Nuclear Non-proliferation; the US was not about to jeopardize such gains for the sake of a few million misguided Czechs.
Palach lived for three days before dying of his burns on January 19th 1969. His funeral, on January 25th,
شاب حرق نفسه و ٢٥ يناير !!
The threat of violence was of course always implicit, but the fact that it was rarely invoked merely added to the collective humiliation. Once again, as in 1938 and again in 1948, Czechoslovakia was being made complicit in its own defeat.
In Prague, the evisceration of the reform movement left an especially bitter taste. Many of the most enthusiastic purgers had been among the loudest enthusiasts for Dubček just a few months before—‘it
The illusion that Communism was reformable, that Stalinism had been a wrong turning, a mistake that could still be corrected, that the core ideals of democratic pluralism might somehow still be compatible with the structures of Marxist collectivism: that illusion was crushed under the tanks on August 21st 1968 and it never recovered.
the optimistic emphasis on post-industrial alienation and the soulless quality of modern life would soon be displaced by a renewed attention to jobs and wages.
Taken all in all, such changes constitute an underlying cultural transformation of European society; but they were hardly the ‘revolution’ envisaged in the slogans and actions of the generation of 1968.18 Indeed, that revolution had from the start been self-defeating. The same movements that purported to despise and abhor ‘consumer culture’ were from the outset an object of cultural consumption, reflecting a widespread disjunction between rhetoric and practice. Those in Paris or Berlin who aggressively declared their intention to ‘change the world’ were often the people most devoted to
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In 1945 the radical Right had discredited itself as a legitimate vehicle for political expression. By 1970, the radical Left was set fair to emulate it. A 180-year cycle of ideological politics in Europe was drawing to a close.
Egyptians demanding the withdrawal of Anglo-French forces,
The OAS (Secret Army Organization) waged a bloody war of vengeful terror against those it held responsible for the loss of Algeria.
the rebels of 1968 were not notably doctrinaire. Most of them weren’t especially serious, either. As one of them recalled, we just ‘loved the Revolution’ (Dany Cohn-Bendit).
In Italy as in France, mass strikes and workers’ protests posed a greater threat to the authorities than the transient radicalism of the universities.
Most of the radicals of the Sixties, like their followers, abandoned ‘the Revolution’ and worried instead about their job prospects.
Currencies fell. And as they fell, so the cost of imports rose: between 1971 and 1973, the world price of non-fuel commodities increased by 70 percent, of food by 100 percent. And it was in this already unstable situation that the international economy was hit by the first of the two oil shocks of the 1970s. On October 6th 1973, Yom Kippur
Egypt and Syria attacked Israel.
يابن الوسخة، دا بيشكك في مصداقية كل معلومه في الكتاب للأسف
Italy, like Britain, was forced in April 1977 to turn to the IMF for help.
In the past, the social cost of economic change on this scale, and at this pace, would have been traumatic, with unpredictable political consequences. Thanks to the institutions of the welfare state—and perhaps the diminished political enthusiasms of the time—protest was contained.
1.5 million
رقم غلط اكيد
in Italy a flat-rate indexing system linking wages to prices, the Scala Mobile, was inaugurated in 1975.
for the sake of the jobs it offered in depressed regions, by substantial direct job subsidies (paying employers to keep on workers they didn’t need) and protective measures against third-world imports.
In the past, if a government opted for a ‘hard money’ strategy by adhering to the gold standard or declining to lower interest rates, it had to answer to its local electorate. But in the circumstances of the later 1970s, a government in London—or Stockholm, or Rome—facing intractable unemployment, or failing industries, or inflationary wage demands, could point helplessly at the terms of an IMF loan, or the rigours of pre-negotiated intra-European exchange rates, and disclaim liability.
some senior British political figures in these years thought it prudent to meet with police and military leaders to reassure themselves of their support in the event of public disorder.
