The Dance of the Monkeys

Funny that. All they needed was a piece of ass. Instead we ended up with decades of hideous social policy and scores of miserable “liberated” human failures, and the inappropriate parade of self-absorption celebrating the personal becoming the political. Is that crowd waiting outside in the cold for the Methadone Clinic to open up something to really be that proud of?

Götz Aly:

If the ratio of men to women had been more balanced, things would have gone differently. It was like the dance of the monkeys. There were few women at the universities, and at the same time there was the Pill and the sexual revolution. Reimut Reiche has noted that Freud said protesting men have a very special sexual attraction – they are XXL men. With this in mind, there was a very clear purpose to sexual liberation. It was fun, but it had little to do with emancipation.

Q: Didn't you perceive 1968 as a liberation?

Of course. In 1967 German students still addressed one another formally, as Fräulein Schmidt or Herr Aly. They wore pleated skirts or ties and jackets, and had nervous breakdowns every time they had a meeting with a professor. But all the writing about emancipation from that era is unbearable junk. Not only the theoretical stuff, even publications about private kindergartens. They don't contain one reasonable sentence, nothing that one could profitably read today.

Oddly enough there was no sit-com called Joschka’s Heroes, but there really should have been – featuring fist-pumping Socialists who were rather willing to kill people, the Bader-Meinhoff Gang, the KGB funded Red Brigade, their instinct to passively accept totalitarianism, and every crappy idea they’ve latched onto since.

With the hard-drug addiction, suicide, and divorce rate being as high as it is, the attendant loneliness of huge numbers of people who then had to invent absurd analogs to the intimacy of family life... with all of that, can we actually call it a failure and move on, or do we have to keep pretending that these incredibly fragile, touchy people really did create that miracle of social revision they keep claiming the rest of us should thank them for?