Roger Cohen: 1968 ... The Year That Changed the World
There are many strands to the annus mirabilis of 1968 — the Prague Spring, the Paris barricades, Flower Power — but all involved an uprising against a stifling postwar order. In what the author Paul Berman has called “an incoherent fraternity,” idealism provided what coherence there was.
Roger Cohen
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“It’s forbidden to forbid,” proclaimed Daniel Cohn-Bendit, the French-born German Jew who led the May ’68 Paris uprising. His slogan, silly-looking now, was less important than his border-crossing identity, a rebuke to countless European silences, prejudices, taboos, lies and murders.
Now, once again, we find ourselves a generation on from the ending of a global war, the cold one of the Berlin Wall. Once again, idealism and youth involvement in politics are awakening in the United States, gathered around a thirst for change and the rejection of a status quo Bush successor. We’ll see what comes of these stirrings. I suspect they have the wind at their back.
I hope so. I’ve been feeling wistful. May is almost over and my head’s been full of 40-year-old images — overturned cars in the Latin Quarter, Soviet tanks rolling into the Czech capital, the pistol pointed at Robert Kennedy, Tommie Smith’s raised black-gloved fist at the Mexico Olympics, Jimi and Janis in their glory — images that engraved themselves even on a 13-year-old’s mind.
They blur, these black-and-white snapshots, and I realize I’ve been sorting through them ever since. It’s not true that everything changes so that everything can stay the same. Not much emerged unchanged from 1968, even if protest never became revolution....
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Roger Cohen
Go to Columnist Page »
Blog: Passages
“It’s forbidden to forbid,” proclaimed Daniel Cohn-Bendit, the French-born German Jew who led the May ’68 Paris uprising. His slogan, silly-looking now, was less important than his border-crossing identity, a rebuke to countless European silences, prejudices, taboos, lies and murders.
Now, once again, we find ourselves a generation on from the ending of a global war, the cold one of the Berlin Wall. Once again, idealism and youth involvement in politics are awakening in the United States, gathered around a thirst for change and the rejection of a status quo Bush successor. We’ll see what comes of these stirrings. I suspect they have the wind at their back.
I hope so. I’ve been feeling wistful. May is almost over and my head’s been full of 40-year-old images — overturned cars in the Latin Quarter, Soviet tanks rolling into the Czech capital, the pistol pointed at Robert Kennedy, Tommie Smith’s raised black-gloved fist at the Mexico Olympics, Jimi and Janis in their glory — images that engraved themselves even on a 13-year-old’s mind.
They blur, these black-and-white snapshots, and I realize I’ve been sorting through them ever since. It’s not true that everything changes so that everything can stay the same. Not much emerged unchanged from 1968, even if protest never became revolution....