What was the year 1968 like in the world?
The musical Hair was staged on Broadway for the first time, Hollywood was dominated by the film Bullit with Steve McQueen, there was a civil war in African’s Biafra in which one and a half million people died, the North Vietnamese shocked the Americans with their Tet offensive and shortly after that lieutenant Calley gave the order to slaughter women and children in the Vietnamese village of My Lai.
Hippies were giving away flowers all over the United States and thanks to them, sex became almost a public matter in which the discovery of contraceptive pills also played its part. Students, mostly in the bohemian Paris, but also in Warsaw, Madrid, Tokyo, Germany, the United States, Italy, Yugoslavia, Mexico and elsewhere were building barricades under such slogans as Do not trust anybody who is over thirty and in hatred towards everything built and created by the generation of their parents they were throwing incendiary bottles.
In addition to this the world saw for the first time topless swimwear, the puritan but at the same time more and more emancipated American women almost spoiled the Miss finals, because they considered the competition humiliating for women. A shot out of the hands of an assassin injured Andy Warhol, killed Robert Kennedy and Martin Luther King and Afro-American ghettos were soon in fire. Despite all this revolt and maybe against it, the conservative Richard Nixon became the new president of the USA while the Beatles were singing: ‘You say you want a revolution we all want to change the world…“,
A barrel with gunpowder exploded
Nothing happens by accident. Many things that had happened earlier lead to the new revolutionary year 1968. It is hard to believe that at the end of the year 1967 the French newspaper Le Monde published an article entitled “The World Is Boring”.
Thanks to the year 1968, boredom disappeared. It even might have contributed to the subsequent explosion. The barrel with gunpowder had been “heated“ for a long time. The world was moving forward and new inventions were coming one by one. Set rulers were slowing down this movement. The society and its whole system were infinitely old. It stagnated in the post-war period, when it seemed that a peaceful time had come after the terrible war frenzy and that nothing needed to be changed, on the contrary, changes would only do harm.
It was this very rigidity and hypocrisy that criticism targeted first. Not only in the behaviour of older generations but also in the establishment and in all those who governed the world at that time. People in suits, Vietnam War, bankers, conservative parents, dirty business, dictatorship of consumerism, feigned democracy, manipulative media, dated schools, empty, violated culture…briefly everything bothered the most radical of radicals, mainly young people from Tokyo to London.
Today, many commentators consider these revolutionists from all over the world naive. They might be right. They back their assertions by the fact that many of these revolutionary students became after a few years Wall Street financiers or politicians or at least conservative parents indulging in a consumer way of life.
It is difficult to judge, however it can be said that the year 1968 was for a great number of people a year when after a long time they did not let themselves be silenced and they optimistically believed in a more free, open, unprejudiced and just future. Those who witnessed that year look back to it stating: „At that time we really hoped that we could change some things.“
Us and the World
We lived behind the iron curtain then. That does not mean that we didn’t know what was happening on the other side. The distorted and filtered official news in that year fell together with censorship. Who knows how much the world events influenced the radicalism of Czech students and most of the public in that memorable year 68? The streets of Czech towns were full of eagerness for a real liberty. What was it supposed to be like? We were not and we couldn’t have been unified in that sense. But that is a different story.
Maybe time has shown that even we were naive. We believed that we could make the system more humane. It didn’t work out. It reminds me of one personal experience. After the Olympic Games in Mexico, in which the winning quartet of black sprinters appeared with black gloves on their right hands to demonstrate how the Black were discriminated against at home, the same was done by the sprinters representing in an athletic competition one of Czechoslovakian military schools. The only difference was that they had green gloves on their hands clenched in fists and they protested against the fact that the army did not stand against the forced occupation of Czechoslovakia of that time…
Nevertheless, the legendary year 1968 changed the world. It wasn’t the same as before. Some people say that it became the year zero in modern history. It certainly seems to be true!
František Sládek
