The revolutionary past of Joschka Fischer, Germany's foreign minister may be about to catch up with him if it turns out it is true that he lied about some aspects of it during the recent trial of an old friend/ terrorist from that turbulent period of 1968 to the mid 1970s.
If it does it should not be just the end of an interesting period of German government but perhaps a time to ask what did all that turbulence do for the Western world? Is the only mark it left a black one? Has it bequeathed, as the great commentator on the era, Mel Lasky, asked many years ago in his journal de combat, Encounter, "powerful, moving, and possibly profound ideas"? It seems not.
The only memorable and lasting hand-me-down of that era was not the "revolution" itself, but what was its trigger, the American black civil rights movement. It was Martin Luther King's southern marches in the early 1960s that made protest respectable, and helped inspire the new post-war generation both in North America and in Europe with not just high ideals but the urge to get out on the street and confront the authorities. Yet the legacy turned bad, became often violent, as it did in the US with the white middle class Weathermen and the ghetto-bred, gun-toting Black Panthers, and with the stone throwers of Danny Cohn-Bendit in Paris and his long-time friend Joschka Fischer in Frankfurt. At the same time it was all wrapped up in the anti-Vietnam war movement.
While this was a universal phenomenon throughout the Western world, it obviously reached its apotheosis is the US where the fear of being drafted was an active recruiter for the street protesters. Indeed, it can be said with some surety, there would have been no mass movement of protest in the US if there had not been the fear of being killed in some far away place in Asia. The whole protest movement, with its pot smoking and sexual impermissivness was entirely of the body and the spirit, not of the mind.
The American intellectuals of that age -- Paul Goodman, Susan Sontag, Charles Reich, Noam Chomsky, Allen Ginsberg and C. Wright Mills, just rode the tiger.
The revolt would have happened if they had never written a word. In continental Europe it was different. There was no fear of the draft and the ideas that moved the young were all written down by others before they lifted a paving stone or marched a step. The brilliance of Sartre and Fanon, of Adorno and Habermas, of Marcuse and Gramsci more than rubbed off on the youthful middle class masses, it helped propel them forward. John-Paul Sartre, the then ageing philosopher, was nothing less than the pied piper of the children's crusade of '68. Sartre, who inspired Picasso's dove of peace, was the same man who had blessed the plastiqueurs who delivered bombs to the Algerian terrorists.
And the Left Bank activists of the mid 1970s were intellectual enough to change their mind once again under the onslaught of ideas, leaving their German counterparts in splendid -- but violent prone -- isolation. It was the publication of three volumes of Solzhenitsyn's Gulag, which coincided with the re-discovery by the new wave philosophers, Andre Glucksmann and Bernard-Henri Levy, of the power and worth of the Sorbonne intellectual, Raymond Aron. Aron pointed out to the students that they had merely indulged in "the theater of revolution." No revolutionary changes could be discerned: either in the university or in the economy; neither in class structure nor in private life. The age of permissiveness owed itself mainly to a pharmacological breakthrough, not to street protests. And the expansion of women's rights was partly a corollary of the pill and partly a sociological accompaniment of the expanding manpower needs of industrial society.
What is left when the left is quiet? Has there been, as some charge, "a long march through the institutions" that brought the likes of former protestors Bill Clinton, Joschka Fischer and others to the pinnacle of power? It is said by academics that have studied these aging rebels that by and large they have carried their ideas with them.
But the practice belies that. We see no indication that they are or have been seriously out of step with conventional wisdom.
The residue of '68 can hardly be measured. There were no great ideas and few great thoughts, other than of the most fleeting variety, especially on the core issues of alternatives to war and alternatives to capitalism. We can still take inspiration from Martin Luther King, pay our dues to Amnesty International and shop at organic food shops. But from '68 itself we take nothing and this is the reality that the admirers of Joschka Fischer have to face.
Jonathan Power is a freelance columnist based in London.
In an article published in Newsweek on Monday last week, President William Lai (賴清德) challenged China to retake territories it lost to Russia in the 19th century rather than invade Taiwan. “If it is really for the sake of territorial integrity, why doesn’t China take back Russia?” Lai asked, referring to territories lost in 1858 and 1860. The territories once made up the two flanks of northern Manchuria. Once ceded to Russia, they became part of the Russian far east. Claims since then have been made that China and Russia settled the disputes in the 1990s through the 2000s and that “China
China has successfully held its Forum on China-Africa Cooperation, with 53 of 55 countries from the African Union (AU) participating. The two countries that did not participate were Eswatini and the Sahrawi Arab Democratic Republic, which have no diplomatic relations with China. Twenty-four leaders were reported to have participated. Despite African countries complaining about summit fatigue, with recent summits held with Russia, Italy, South Korea, the US and Indonesia, as well as Japan next month, they still turned up in large numbers in Beijing. China’s ability to attract most of the African leaders to a summit demonstrates that it is still being
Trips to the Kenting Peninsula in Pingtung County have dredged up a lot of public debate and furor, with many complaints about how expensive and unreasonable lodging is. Some people even call it a tourist “butchering ground.” Many local business owners stake claims to beach areas by setting up parasols and driving away people who do not rent them. The managing authority for the area — Kenting National Park — has long ignored the issue. Ultimately, this has affected the willingness of domestic travelers to go there, causing tourist numbers to plummet. In 2008, Taiwan opened the door to Chinese tourists and in
Taiwan People’s Party (TPP) Chairman Ko Wen-je (柯文哲) on Thursday was handcuffed and escorted by police to the Taipei Detention Center, after the Taipei District Court ordered that he be detained and held incommunicado for suspected corruption during his tenure as Taipei mayor. The ruling reversed an earlier decision by the same court on Monday last week that ordered Ko’s release without bail. That decision was appealed by prosecutors on Wednesday, leading the High Court to conclude that Ko had been “actively involved” in the alleged corruption and it ordered the district court to hold a second detention hearing. Video clips
RSS