Why we're still talking about 1968

A few days ago Gerard Henderson, bought and paid-for propagandist of the status quo, had yet another bash at one of his obsessive themes, the left of the late 1960s and early 1970s. This time the excuse was the 40th anniversary of 1968.

Henderson's view is that nothing much happened in '68, and certainly not what the so-called left thinks happened.

If nothing much really happened, it's interesting that Henderson has spent much of the past 40 years talking about it. Has he spent the past 40 years writing about nothing much? Well, actually, he has, much of the time. Like his mercifully now-retired partner in crime Paddy McGuinness once did, he writes the same few columns over and over, presumably familiar with the tried and tested propaganda technique of repeating a few simple ideas often.

In the case of 1968, however, there really is something worth talking about 40 years later. Henderson's talking about it because that was the year ordinary people around the world shook his beloved status quo to its foundations.

Students and workers took over the streets of Paris and brought down the government, Vietnamese national independence fighters gave the most powerful army the world had ever seen a swift kick up the khyber, mass demonstrations against the war in Vietnam startled the rulers of Britain, Germany and the US, and the people of Czechoslovakia stood up to Moscow's tanks with nothing but their own bodies, supporting an alternative vision of socialism. Tariq Ali provides a more extensive description of the year in the article that prodded Hendo into his semi-automated response.

Some people, from a distance, equate 1968 with fashion and mind-altering substances, but those are not the reasons people are still talking about that year. Every time has fashion and drugs. Unfortunately, every time doesn't have very large numbers of people questioning the way their society is being run and deciding to get involved and change things.

That's what Henderson and his paymasters hate about 1968. It scared the daylights out of them, and that's why they're still talking about it.