quote:

Why don’t we just vote to strike tonight, and we’ll decide tomorrow what we’re striking for?”

Those were the words of a student protester thoughtfully deliberating at Yale University, as recounted by Roger Kimball in his book on the Left, The Long March. It was a question that captured much of the heedless spirit of the student demonstrations of the 1960s, for which “May 1968” is shorthand.

That spring 40 years ago saw a radical takeover of Columbia University — eventually duplicated at other elite campuses — and student protests around the world. In France, the government was rocked to its foundations; in the Eastern Bloc, a crevice was opened up in the Berlin Wall; and here at home, campus life became synonymous with a straitened leftism, and the post-World War II political consensus shattered.

Before we had our long national nightmare (Watergate), we had our long national temper tantrum. In the U.S., student protests were an indulgence of the privileged, a wail by baby boomer kids raised in unprecedented affluence against the authority of their parents. To accuse of “fascism” a generation that bled in the mud of Normandy fighting the Axis took a massive historical ignorance and overweening self-regard; the New Left had both.

quote:


Nineteen sixty-eight was one exciting moment in a much larger movement. It spawned a whole range of movements. There wouldn't have been an international global solidarity movement, for instance, without the events of 1968. It was enormous, in terms of human rights, ethnic rights, a concern for the environment, too.


The Pentagon Papers (the 7,000-page, top-secret US government report into the Vietnam War) are proof of this: right after the Tet Offensive, the business world turned against the war, because they thought it was too costly, even though there were proposals within the government - and we know this now - to send in more American troops. Then LBJ announced he wouldn't be sending any more troops to Vietnam.

The Pentagon Papers tell us that, because of the fear of growing unrest in the cities, the government had to end the war - it wasn't sure that it was going to have enough troops to send to Vietnam and enough troops on the domestic front to quell the riots.

One of the most interesting reactions to come out of 1968 was in the first publication of the Trilateral Commission, which believed there was a "crisis of democracy" from too much participation of the masses. In the late 1960s, the masses were supposed to be passive, not entering into the public arena and having their voices heard. When they did, it was called an "excess of democracy" and people feared it put too much pressure on the system. The only group that never expressed its opinions too much was the corporate group, because that was the group whose involvement in politics was acceptable.

quote:

ORIGINAL: Level
Why don’t we just vote to strike tonight, and we’ll decide tomorrow what we’re striking for?”