Forty Years On

I've been trying to ignore it, but quite correctly many bloggers are remembering 1968 like Jakartass. It was a momentous year for those who were there. I was 16 and although I didn't get to the Grosvenor Square anti-war demonstration in March I did get to almost all the others that year. The UK wasn't as exiting as what was going on in France, Germany, the US and Czechoslovakia but a generation's political ideas were formed one way or another.

It was when the communist party started to lose the leadership of the left in France and also in the UK. New leaders were popping up. Danny the Red (Daniel Cohn-Bendit) in France, Rudi Dutschke in Germany, the Black Panther leaders in the US and people like Tariq Ali in the UK. Not all travelled the same path. Some like Andreas Baader moved towards terrorism.

The world was in trouble. The Tet offensive was on in Vietnam, a civil war in Nigeria, Russian tanks in Czechoslovakia, the ongoing cultural revolution in China and the beginning of the most recent period of troubles in Northern Ireland. Although a lot has changed I think we all thought it would be far more changed than it is.