Portrait of a Douchebag as a Young Man

Or rather a description of Daniel Cohn-Bendit during the May 1968 “your money or your life” revolution, to be more accurate.

What was unique about the Sorbonne, to which Cohn-Bendit had referred, what made it the model of the entire revolt, was its refusal of all leadership. People normally fear revolutions, on any scale, not necessarily because they fear disorder (for, in fact, disorder is often exhilarating), but because they fear the severity of a new order which succeeds the abandon. On the reverse side of the wild card that is revolution lurks the constant threat of dictatorship. In the French movement, which was directed specifically against an authoritarian regime, the participants were not about to allow another system to install itself where the previous one had cruelly reigned.

Except for the fact that so many of them joined hard left, revolutionary parties that look to authoritarian notions and leaders such as Lenin, Mao, and a man many of them could not bring themselves to really criticize: Stalin.

The walls of the Sorbonne, for so long deaf and dumb to the problems of the emerging consumer society, now rebounded with Marx and Lenin, Freud and Che Guevara, offering some lessons of their own: IT IS FORBIDDEN TO FORBID. ALL POWER TO THE IMAGINATION. ANSWER EXAMS WITH QUESTIONS. WE WANT A WORLD, NEW AND ORIGINAL. WE REFUSE A WORLD WHERE THE ASSURANCE OF NOT DYING FROM HUNGER IS EXCHANGED FOR THE RISK OF DYING FROM BOREDOM.

A curious thing for advocates of a welfare state parasitically drawing from the entrails of its former prosperity in tacitly state-run industries. Try as they will to characterize anything these louts thought to ‘libertarian’ in nature is as big a lie as the one the Warsaw Pact leaders used to tell: that THEY were the real democracies, and that their citizens were the ones who were truly free.