From 1968: the Year That Rocked the World by Mark Kurlansky

Kurlansky discusses a total of sixteen popular uprisings – in addition to those in the US, France, and Czechoslovakia – that occurred in 1968. I  list four more that have clearly altered the course of world events. As I recall, the way the mainstream media reported them minimized the threat they posed to established authority. Perhaps this is why many progressives tend to underestimate their significance.

Mexico

• Tlaleloco Massacre in lead-up to 1968 Olympics (September)

According to Kurlansky, the Tlaleloco Massacre, like the Soviet invasion of Czechoslovakia, was the beginning of the end for Mexico’s corrupt and totalitarian PRI party, which ruled continuously between 1929 and 2000. Mexico’s 1968 student movement was extremely fractured until it unified in response to systematic and brutal police and army repression. Mexican President Gustavo Diaz Ordaz, who was intensely paranoid about the increasing politicization of the Olympics (by black athletics protesting efforts to reinstate South Africa’s apartheid team), especially in light of the massive street protests that occurred a month earlier at the Chicago Democratic Convention.

The London Guardian reported 325 “official” dead in the massacre, though thousands more were imprisoned or simply “disappeared.” This triggered more than a decade of well-organized protests by family members demanding to know the whereabouts of their loved ones.

Spain

• Public emergence of the underground Basque separatist movement (ETA), with the adoption of a strategy of violent resistance to violent repression by Spanish police.

Palestine

• Adoption of strategy of violence by Fatah and the Palestinian Liberation Army (under Yassir Arafat)

In response to Israel’s territorial gains in the 1967 war (the Golan Heights from Syria, the West Bank from Jordan, Gaza Strip from Egypt and East Jerusalem from Jordan), Fatah and the Palestinian Liberation Organization, under Yassir Arafat, became the dominant force in Palestinian politics. Previously Palestinian/Israeli policy was controlled by pro-Baathist Arab nationalists in the Arab countries bordering Israel. Fatah and the PLO openly advocated a strategy of violence and the training thousands of Palestinian refugees in Syria, Lebanon, and Jordan as guerrillas.

Nigeria

• Brutal siege by Nigerian army (with British assistance) of Biafra independence movement in oil-rich Niger delta.

Biafra was spun by the US media as yet another African famine, with all the images they showed is of starving Biafran children with their swollen Kwashiorkor bellies. The real story was that Nigerian forces (with British assistance) were brutally suppressing the Biafran separatist movement in the oil-rich Niger Delta. Besides shooting more than fifty thousand of them, the Nigerian army was deliberately starving them to death.

The US response was to turn it over to private relief agencies to airlift supplies. Lyndon Johnson and the UN turned a deaf ear to an urgent plea for military support for aid aircraft that were being shot down by the Nigerian army. He said we couldn’t interfere in the internal affairs of an African country (only an Asian country like Vietnam).

For me the section on Prague spring and the student/intellectual uprising in Czechoslovakia is one of the most valuable sections of Mark Kurlansky’s 1968: the Year that Rocked the World. With the distressing level of FBI and police repression occurring in the US, I find it heartening to learn that organized resistance occurred even in the brutal totalitarian regimes of cold war Eastern Europe. Moreover I feel it’s important to understand the circumstances in which resistance developed – a well as it’s significance in the ultimate collapse of the Soviet bloc.

It’s quite common for the US power elite to attribute the collapse of the Soviet Union to the Soviet invasion and occupation of Afghanistan, which ultimately bankrupted their economy. In, fact some of them take credit it:  Zbigniew Brzezinski brags that the US ingeniously “lured” them into Afghanistan. Hopefully American intellectuals are too sophisticated to be taken in by this simplistic and jingoistic view of world history.

Prague Spring and the Collapse of the Soviet Empire

1968 author Mark Kurlansky believes the Soviet’s 1968 invasion of Czechoslovakia marks the beginning of the end of the Soviet empire. The student/intellectual protest movement that brought Alexander Dubcek to power in January 1968 became less public but didn’t disappear in the government repression that followed the Soviet invasion in August. It also served to strengthen reform movements in other Soviet Bloc countries – especially Romania and Poland – where government leaders were under pressure to condemn the invasion. In Kurlansky’s view the appearance of Soviet tanks on Czech streets killed the dream of eastern block reformers that socialism could be made more democratic. Without that dream, they had no choice but to turn to capitalism when they ultimately took power in the late eighties (which many deeply regret at this point).

I was especially fascinated by Kurlansky’s description of the background and personality of Alexander Dubceck, the father of “Prague Spring.” Dubcek was clearly no wild-eyed radical seeking to overthrow communism. In every respect Dubcek was the ultimate communist bureaucrat:  blindly loyal, dutiful, honest, and somewhat bumbling. Dubcek, who had always believed in democratic reform, never spoke openly about it because he was also very pro-Soviet. In fact, he never imagined the Soviets would invade. Dubcek and his subordinates considered the Soviets their friends and protectors. In this respect, Czechoslovakia was unique among eastern bloc countries in voting in a communist government at the end of World War II (rather than having it forced on them).

Alexander Dubcek

Parallels Between Dubcek and Nixon

Dubcek was clearly more moderate than the students and intellectuals in the street. As Kurlansky describes it, he was actually somewhat dismayed at being suddenly thrust into power in January 1968 – owing to his predecessor’s inability to contain the student protest movement and the Slovak nationalist movement that exploded simultaneously in late 1967. At the same time Dubcek was deeply principled, unlike many Communist Party officials, and viewed violent suppression of the protests as unthinkable. Aside from his refusal to invoke military force against the students, his situation parallels that of Richard Nixon’s in some ways. Nixon was also forced to enact a number of progressive initiatives (The Clean Air Act, the Environmental Protection Agency, the Occupational Health and Safety Administration, the National Endowment for the Humanities, Social Security Supplemental Income) in response to a large and vocal protest movement. There are some interesting essays in the Nixon Library regarding the political pressures that led Nixon to embrace to these reforms:  http://www.nixonera.com/library/domestic.asp

In fact Dubcek had no real platform until April 1968, when he issued an Action Program with three planks: 1) commitment to Czechoslovakia’s socialist political/economic system, 2) ending secret police repression of personal and political beliefs, and 3) ending the monopoly of power by the Communist Party.

The immediate result was liberalization of foreign travel, increased access to foreign periodicals in Czechoslovakia, as well as an increase in media exposes about Czech and Soviet corruption and Stalin’s notorious purges. Freedom of artistic expression also increased, and everywhere Czech students wore blue jeans and long hair, listened to rock and jazz, displayed psychedelic posters and even held an international film festival.

Soviets Forced to Keep Dubcek in Power

Brezhnev, the Soviet prime minister, had been one of Stalin’s henchmen in several purges. For obvious reasons, he put extreme pressure on Dubcek to crack down on these “excesses.”  Dubcek, however, was also profoundly antiwar. Even as Russian tanks rolled into Czechoslovakia, he explicitly ordered a robust, well-trained and armed Czech military not to fire on them. As in Tienanmen Square in China, the main opposition to the tanks was tens of thousands of unarmed civilians, making it clear the Soviet invasion was extremely unpopular and placing them in an extremely awkward position.

Czech civilians surround Soviet tanks

Kurlansky writes at length about an unsung hero of this period named General Ludvik Svoboda, who the Soviets attempted to install in a puppet government after imprisoning Dubcek and three members of his cabinet. Though forced to agree to Soviet demands to gradually reinstate censorship and foreign travel restrictions, Dubcek was released and remained in power until April 1969, when he was forced to resign following the Czech Hockey Riots. In 1970 he was expelled from the Communist Party, which cost him his seat in the Slovak Parliament and Federal Assembly.

General Ludvig Svoboda

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Lyrics:

Won’t you Please Come to Chicago by Graham Nash

Though your brother’s bound and gagged
And they’ve chained him to a chair
Won’t you please come to Chicago
Just to sing

In a land that’s known as freedom
How can such a thing be fair
Won’t you please come to Chicago
For the help that we can bring

We can change the world
Re-arrange the world
It’s dying … to get better

Politicians sit yourselves down
There’s nothing for you here
Won’t you please come to Chicago
For a ride

Don’t ask Jack to help you
‘Cause he’ll turn the other ear
Won’t you please come to Chicago
Or else join the other side

We can change the world
Re-arrange the world
It’s dying … if you believe in justice
It’s dying … and if you believe in freedom
It’s dying … let a man live his own life
It’s dying … rules and regulations, who needs them
Throw them out the door

Somehow people must be free
I hope the day comes soon
Won’t you please come to Chicago
Show your face

From the bottom of the ocean
To the mountains on the moon
Won’t you please come to Chicago
No one else can take your place

Yes, we can change the world
Re-arrange the world
It’s dying … if you believe in justice
It’s dying … and if you believe in freedom
It’s dying … let a man live his own life
It’s dying … rules and regulations, who needs them
Throw them out the door

***

The most eye-opening section of Kurlansky’s 1968 (see previous blog) is chapter 3, in which he discusses the importance of violence and the rhetoric of violence in attracting media attention. As a veteran of the 1999 Battle of Seattle (the Seattle anti-WTO protest), I can’t help but agree. If it hadn’t been for a group of Black Bloc anarchists who smashed store front windows at MacDonald’s and Nike, our 75,000 strong protest would never have made the major dailies, much less the six o’clock news. Of course, to give the Seattle police their due, the police riot also attracted significant media attention.

Violence? Or Property damage?

Police violence in Seattle

Violence=Publicity

According to Kurlansky, no one understand the importance of the media in movement building better than Mohandas K. Gandhi, who inspired the current non-violent movement. Gandhi went to great lengths to obtain Indian, British, and American coverage of every protest he organized. In fact it was Gandhi himself who first spoke of the value of British violence in enticing the media to cover the Quit India movement.

Kurlansky goes on to describe a police chief who thwarted Martin Luther King’s organizing efforts in Albany, Georgia by studying his non-violent tactics and countering them with non-violent law enforcement tactics. As a result, King’s Albany campaign was a total failure. Because there was no police violence, it received no national media attention. And without media attention, King was unable to pressure Attorney General Bobby Kennedy to enforce federal civil rights laws there.

After Albany, King and other civil rights leaders deliberately targeted towns with hothead police chiefs and angry volatile mayors. Korlansky relates an incident in 1965 in which a King protester named Annie Lee Cooper punched the sheriff and then dared him to hit her. The photo of Sheriff Clark clubbing a defenseless woman made the front page of newspapers throughout the country.

Later in the book, Kurlansky describes the most highly publicized student antiwar protests of 1968. Here again, he stresses that they only took on national importance because of the repressive (sometimes violent) measures government and university administrators (particularly at Columbia University and University of California-Berkeley) took to stop them. Had the authorities merely ignored the student protests and sit-ins, they never would have received the national media attention that made them historic events.

The 1968 Democratic Convention

At Chicago Democratic Convention in August 1968, yet again it was police violence by Mayor Daley’s goons that drew national media attention to what was essentially a harmless prank by Abbie Hoffman, Jerry Rubin, Phil Ochs and other Yippies (Youth International Party). Featured events at the Yippies’ Festival of Light in Lincoln Park (where the police riot occurred), included snaking dancing, poetry, mantras, the Yippie Olympics, a Miss Yippie Contest and Pin the Rubber on the Pope.

In addition to attacking non-violent protesters engaged in civil disobedience (remaining in the park after the 11 p.m. closing time), police also viciously attacked reporters, cameramen, as well as going on a clubbing rampage in the neighborhood (Playboy publisher Hugh Hefner was one of the local residents who was attacked).

All this magically transformed the Yippies non-violent prank into front page news. Though ironically they had to share the limelight with the Soviet invasion of Czechoslovakia. Violent Soviet repression of Dubcek’s freedom movement also made this event international front page news.

Police riot at 1968 Democratic convention

To be continued, with a discussion of the Czechoslovakian student/intellectual movement that resulted in Prague Spring and its implications for a repressive American regime in 2010.

I have just read a fascinating book by British author Mark Kurlansky regarding the global liberation struggles that occurred in 1968. For progressives of my generation, this was a year of great hope and inspiration – one that saw millions of students and workers protesting in the streets. I bought 1968: the Year That Rocked the World partly out of nostalgia and partly in the hope of learning something from historic struggles that might help us reclaim the so-called western democracies that are really corporate-run fascist states (“Fascism should more properly be called corporatism because it is the merger of state and corporate power.” – Benito Mussolini)

How the Mainstream Media Shapes Memory

Up until now, I have viewed the political significance of the sixties with the tunnel vision of someone whose recollection and understanding of those years has been shaped by the popular media. Obviously Kurlansky’s book has greatly broadened my perspective. Previously I only associated two mass movements – the US anti-war movement and the French general strike – with the year 1968. Somehow I forgot there were riots in forty US inner cities that year. Although I clearly recall Alexander Dubcek and Prague Spring, I also forget that this also occurred in 1968. This was the inspirational movement that led Czechoslovakia to relax harsh censorship laws and allowed the flourishing of freedom of the speech, press, and artistic expression. I somehow forget that this, too, occurred in 1968.

As Kurlansky points out, there were comparable protest movements in at least a dozen countries – on both sides of the Iron Curtain – that year. Moreover students and workers in different countries learned from, copied, and supported movements in other countries.

In all, Kurlansky describes mass movements in 19 countries in 1968:

• US
• France
• Czechoslovakia
• Poland
• Yugoslavia
• Romania
• Italy
• West Germany
• East Germany
• Spain
• UK
• Russia
• Nigeria
• Palestine
• Mexico
• Brazil
• Ecuador
• Chile
• Uruguay

In addition to his emphasis on the global nature of the 1968 political movement, Kurlansky stresses two other important themes in 1968: 1) the secret to a successful social movement is getting media attention and 2) the secret to getting media attention is violence.

To be continued, with a discussion of how Martin Luther King strategically incorporated violence in his non-violent protests to increase media attention.