Year of hope

John Nebauer

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“`Order reigns in Warsaw!' `Order reigns in Paris!' `Order reigns in Berlin!' This is how the reports of the guardians of order read, every half-century, from one centre of the world historical struggle to another. And the exulting `victors' fail to notice that an `order' that must be maintained with periodic bloody slaughters is irreconcilably approaching its historical destiny, its downfall ... Tomorrow the revolution will rear its head again, and, to your horror, will proclaim with trumpets blazing: `I was, I am, I will be!'” -- Rosa Luxemburg, 1919

“Revolution is the ecstasy of history.” -- Paris street graffiti, May 1968

So might Rosa Luxemburg have greeted the year 1968. It was the year bosses and bureaucrats trembled in their boots, as the mass movements that exploded onto the world's streets threatened to make them lose everything.

It was the year of the Tet Offensive, in which the Vietnamese national liberation movement broke the political back of the US war machine and brought down a US president. It was the year of massive antiwar protests across the world, and French workers and students seemed close to bringing about a revolution in an advanced capitalist country.

The women's movement and the black power movement made great strides forward. There were massive protests on a worldwide scale, not only in the US, Europe and Australia, but in Japan, Brazil, Pakistan and Mexico, to name a few.

1968: Marching in the Streets is a chronicle of that extraordinary year. For those who have read Tariq Ali's Street Fighting Years: An Autobiography of the Sixties, there is a lot that will be familiar. However, there is much that is new here, and the familiar is given added vibrancy by the eyewitness accounts, the posters and images of the period.

The book proceeds month by month, with each chapter given an introduction, followed by the events of that month. This is written largely in the present tense, giving the book the freshness of on-the-spot journalism.

There are also pieces written at the time, mostly reprinted from the radical British weekly newspaper Black Dwarf, but including other sources as well.

Some of the events chronicled are not well known. For example, students in Sasebo, Japan, protested against the arrival of the aircraft carrier USS Enterprise between January 18 and 21. Forty-seven thousand demonstrators, led by the ultra-militant Zengakuren student faction, surged toward Sasebo harbour.

“Spurred on by the rhythmic whistles of their comrades, the Zengakuren fight to hold their ground but are beaten back. Those who are caught are clubbed senseless by the police. Altogether, there are 450 casualties. The police are ruthless in pursuit: wounded demonstrators trying to escape into the local hospital (from whose windows patients and hospital workers have been watching the confrontation) are chased and clubbed; tear gas is thrown into the hospital building and the place is flooded by water hoses. The patients' sympathy is overwhelmingly on the demonstrators' side. One student, wounded in the eye, is deluged with gifts of milk, fruit, toilet paper, even underwear, by the other patient in the ward.

“The Enterprise leaves Sasebo four days earlier than planned. Crowds of protesters along the shoreline shake their fists at her as she steams off southwards, towards Vietnam.”

The authors draw attention to major victories that the establishment press has spent the last 30 years obscuring.

For example, the most successful events in 1968 led to the toppling of the Ayub Khan dictatorship in Pakistan. In November, 70 students returning to Rawalpindi after a shopping trip to a “tribal area” were arrested and their goods confiscated.

Demonstrations in Rawalpindi denounced Ayub Khan and supported Zulfikar Bhutto, a former cabinet minister of the Ayub regime. He was due to speak to the students, but was prevented by the police. Police fired on the students, killing Abdul Hamid, a polytechnic student.

“The revolt spreads throughout the country. It is when people banish fear from their hearts and are prepared to die for their cause that even the most powerful dictatorships begin to totter and fall. `Mass support for our actions was so total that if there had been a well-disciplined revolutionary organization we would have taken the city and the radio and railway stations,' declared student leader Raja Anwar on November 8.”

By early December the dictator had no supporters within Pakistan. But he was supported by the British Foreign Office and the US State Department.

The Student Action Committee in East Pakistan, which united the different factions of the student movement, offered to lead the country with a radical 11-point program. But workers and students in West Pakistan (and the politicians who jumped onto the movement) failed to prevent the army from unleashing bloody repression in the east. This led to the bloody civil war that gave birth to Bangladesh in 1971.

In Latin America, where the spectre of the recently murdered Che Guevara still haunted the tin-pot dictatorships, the people were rising up. In Mexico students engaged in a series of occupations of the schools and universities in September.

The spark was a vicious attack by the granaderos -- the riot police -- on a peaceful demonstration to mark the anniversary of the Cuban revolution in July. Many were clubbed to the ground.

The following day, students protested against the behaviour of the granaderos. Some students retreated into their buildings and barricaded the doors as a protection against the police. The doors were blown apart with a bazooka. The granaderos charged, and several students were killed. The occupations spread as outrage against the police mounted.

The struggle continued into October, as the Olympic Games were due to start. The leaders of the ossified Institutional Revolutionary Party (PRI) were pleased with the prestige and cash promised by the games, but the tempers of the students continued to rise.

On October 2, President Diaz ordered troops to fire on a crowd of 10,000 listening to speeches in the Plaza de la Tres Culturas. More than 60 were killed, and hundreds wounded.

The black revolt in the US is brought vividly to life. The events leading to the arrest of Eldridge Cleaver of the Black Panther Party were reminiscent of the police beating of Rodney King 24 years later.

It was the Black Panthers who tried to stop black youths rioting after the assassination of Martin Luther King on April 4. So although there was no rioting in the Bay Area of San Francisco, the cops were ready for one. The description is laced with excerpts from Cleaver's classic Soul on Ice.

 Cleaver and Bobby Hutton, a 17-year-old still at school, were chased into a house. They were forced to evacuate the building by tear gas and fire. As they came out, they were kicked and beaten by the police.

They were then ordered to run towards one of the squad cars. Cleaver, his foot full of shotgun pellets was unable to do so. As Hutton ran towards the car, he was cut down by police gunfire. Cleaver's life was saved by the watching crowd, which intervened, shouting abuse at the cops for the cold-blooded murder.

 In any period of revolutionary upsurge, radical politics and culture will come together, and thus it was in 1968. The book reproduces the handwritten lyrics of Mick Jagger's Street Fighting Man, which had been printed in Black Dwarf.

Police clashed with demonstrators in Paris in February, a crowd including Jean-Luc Godard, Marlene Dietrich, Simone Signoret and Jeanne Moreau. The were angered by the Ministry of Culture's sacking of the founder and director of the Cinémathèque Française, Henri Langlois. It was a year of films such as Richard Attenborough's antiwar Oh! What a Lovely War! and Godard's Weekend.

Revolt even rolled onto the hallowed sporting grounds. Two black US athletes, Tommie Smith and John Carlos, gold and bronze medallists in the men's 200 metre events, raised their clenched fists in the black power salute on the victory podium at the Olympics.

“The next day the two athletes are expelled from the US team, accused of `mixing politics with sport'.” Despite warnings of similar penalties, the following day Lee Evans, Larry James and Ron Freeman gave a repeat performance as the US national anthem was being played.

World heavyweight boxing champion Muhammad Ali had refused in March 1967 to be drafted into the US army. “I ain't got no quarrel with the Vietcong”, he told the press. He was barred from the ring and stripped of his title for his stand. In January 1968, he lost a court appeal, but he eventually won his case legally.

It was the year of the flowering of the women's movement. In Atlantic City a group of women, who mostly began their political activity in the New Left, conducted guerilla theatre outside the Miss America pageant.

The book also reprints the famous “The Politics of Housework” by the Redstockings group in New York.

Even with all this, two landmarks overshadow the whole book. The first is the Vietnam War.

At the beginning of the year, the Tet Offensive broke the political back of US imperialism and led to the fall of Lyndon Johnson. We see the troops of the National Liberation Front going into battle. We experience the excitement as the NLF seizes the US embassy.

We see B-52s carpet-bombing the Vietnamese countryside. It was during the Tet Offensive that Ben-Tre, a town of 35,000 people, with an NLF garrison of 2500 is blasted the US Air Force, taking over 50 hours of air and ground attack. During this operation, a US officer made the immortal statement, “The only way to save Ben-Tre is to destroy it”.

There is also the excitement of the antiwar movements around the world: massive demonstrations in the US, in West Berlin, in France. Mozambique freedom fighters in the jungle listen to news of the offensive and gain new hope and confidence.

We also see demoralised US soldiers in the field, exhausted soldiers during the Tet Offensive. Soldiers smoked hookahs during R&R, reflecting the demoralisation of US field armies. US commander General Westmoreland was broken.

 The US government attempted to defuse the peace movement and gain time to put together a new strategy. Johnson in April announced “serious peace talks” with the North Vietnamese. As a gesture of good will, he announced that there would be only limited bombing in the north.

Yet, before the declaration in April, the US had carried out 2500 raids. In April the figure was more than 3500. There are accounts of the raids by Vietnamese villagers which give added depth to the crimes carried out by the US and its allies.

The other landmark was the events in France, which gave hope that socialism could come to the west. In early May students demonstrate against their conditions. Protests escalated, and on May 10, the famous “night of the barricades”, the students defend the Latin Quarter from the CRS, the state security police. As well as pictures of students defending their barricades, some of the wonderful poster art is also reproduced.

The establishment media defend the police:

“A well-known French football commentator is sent into the LQ to cover the night's events. He reports: `Now the CRS are charging, they're storming the barricade -- oh, my God! There's a battle raging. The students are counter-attacking, you can hear the noise -- the CRS are retreating ... Now they're regrouping, getting ready to charge again. The inhabitants are throwing things out the windows at the CRS -- oh! The police are retaliating, shooting grenades into the windows of the apartments ...'

“The producer interrupts: `This can't be true, the CRS don't do things like that!' `I'm telling you what I'm seeing ...' His voice goes dead. They have cut him off.”

Pictures of workers marching with students indicate how close France came to revolution. There is a telling picture of a CGT (the trade union dominated by the French Communist Party) official telling strikers from Citroen to return to work. Their poses tell us they don't like what they're hearing.

Also important are the images of the Prague Spring. The popularity that the Dubcek leadership enjoyed among the population could have led to a flowering of socialist democracy.

Instead, the decrepit Brezhnev bureaucrats ordered Soviet troops to invade, lest the Czechoslovak model spread to the remainder of Eastern Europe, or even to the Soviet Union. The book conveys the excitement of the crowds in Wenceslas Square. There are burning Soviet tanks, destroyed by molotov cocktails, and demoralised Soviet soldiers. Ali and Watkins bring this tragic event to life.

This is not to say that this book is perfect. The introduction is disparaging of the “far left groups” of the period, each claiming the inheritance of Lenin, Trotsky or Mao.

It's true that there were a lot of stupid stunts carried out by a number of “Marxist” groups during the period. Yet these groups were important in many of the events. Ali was a member of the International Marxist Group in Britain, which played a leading role in the Vietnam Solidarity Campaign. But it rates hardly a mention.

The omission of the LCR (Revolutionary Communist League) in France is more important. Though it was unable to bridge the political gap left by the Communist Party in May and June, it has continued its activity until today, and is making its presence felt again in French politics.

That aside, this is a superb work. The socialist movement needs books which educate and inspire. Happily, this book does both. Every activist should read it.

When you've finished, close the book and put it down. Put down the cappuccino. Grab your bag and a bundle of Green Left Weekly. With renewed vigour and passion, throw yourself into the struggle. Let's storm bastions again.

From www.greenleft.org.au

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