Zinn’s Army

The high-spirited rhetoric seemed to me fuelled more by hatred of parents and teachers than by plans for the future.

writes Robert Fulford in Canada’s National Post as he reflects on the buffoonery of the 68ers that still try to strangle the good sense out of the world to this day.

All protests were against institutions in the West, none against Mao or the Soviets. It seemed that an entire generation had turned political. No one guessed that they would lose their ideology as quickly as they had acquired it.

Which reflects on the lack of depth behind the confused kids who then, like today are willing to look for evidence of evil under every American Flag, Menorah, or timecard.

When 1968 ended and things calmed down, much of what had happened seemed silly, a mass exercise in self-congratulation. Last week Tom Stoppard, the Czech-born playwright, said he didn't like 1968 much at the time (he was 31) and finds it embarrassing and repulsive in retrospect. "I loved the music and the dressing up but I couldn't take to the dialogue: a reductive argot of comrade-jargon and bogus wisdom derived from misunderstood eastern religions," words close to those he gives a character in his play, Rock 'n' Roll, which begins in 1968. His recent article in The Sunday Times of London carried the headline, "The year of the posturing rebel."