The Meaning of May 68
by Tiberge
Last week student demonstrations in Paris http://www.wvwnews.net/story.php?id=2505 of another May 68, although so far there is no indication that an event of any magnitude is about to happen. Gérard Pince, economist and founding member of the Blue Revolution attended one of the rallies and tells us why this is no May 68:
Having returned from the demonstration by high-school students, I can relate to you impressions that the media will be very careful not to show. [There were around 10,000 persons. The front section of the parade was entirely composed of blacks and North Africans waving flags imprinted with the Islamic crescent. They represented one to two thirds of the total number of persons in the groups that followed. Let us remember that this sampling of students reflects the face of tomorrow’s France.
I must say, in all objectivity, that this youth demonstrated no hostility towards the police. I even saw a group of young black girls dance at Place de la Nation singing “Cops! We love you!” The rally broke up without any major incidents, at least as far as I know. I want to reassure you, a repetition of May 68 is not in the offing. We are witnessing a different phenomenon: that of our replacement.Ivan Rioufol writes for Le Figaro. His column, though relatively cautious in tone, is still a voice of tradition and conservatism in the otherwise uninspiring French media. He also has been maintaining a personal blog within the context of Le Figaro’s website, and offers some thoughts on May 68:
Yesterday on France 2, a good documentary put May 68 in the turbulent perspective of the times that witnessed revolts in Eastern Europe (Prague), the United States and even Mexico City. And yet, should we enshrine May 68 to this point, and present it as the liberation everywhere of a narrow and stifling society? The baby boomers had not even waited for 1968 to begin its entry into society. The Neuwirth Law had authorized the pill in 1967. A natural movement towards change was in the air. France would have become modernized without May 68. We can grant it is role as an accelerator. But we can also defend the notion that this “revolution”, because of educational and political inevitabilities, caused us to lose time. May 68 also aided in the setbacks and weakening that France is experiencing today.
As indicated, Rioufol remains cautiously optimistic about the situation today. He is unwilling to go so far as to use the term “irreparable damage,” or to analyze the tremendously coercive forces that cowed people back then into complying with the demands of violent infantile rebels. The powers that be (and that were) were clearly terrified and/or easily bought. This fear transformed our societies into politically correct robots, political correctness being a form of exorcism to chase away the devils of racial differences, intellectual inequalities and criminal intent. By denying the existence of racial and intellectual differences, or the hatred within the heart of criminals, they thought these unpleasant truths would simply vanish. And so the taboo on free speech became a type of “magic” employed to chase away demons that people simply could not face.
Besides Daniel Cohn-Bendit another celebrated communist from May 68, Benjamin Stora, manages to stay in the news in France. Stora, born in Algeria, is an historian and a specialist of Algerian immigration to France. He teaches North African history and French colonization at the Paris VIII-St-Denis branch of the University of Paris. A militant Trotskyist in May 1968, he was, until 1986, a member of the International Communist Organization, a group formed in 1965 as a result of a split within the Communist Party that had taken place in 1952. In 2007 he campaigned for Ségolène Royal. French readers can view a video of his rant in praise of Royal, in which he also extols the return of the authentic socialism which he had hoped would follow her election.
Stora wants to revive May 68 with ethnic minorities as his new tools for overturning the government. These ethnic minorities must “decolonize” themselves, the way Algeria broke French colonial rule. The French weblog Le Conservateur posted this critique of comments he made last week on France Culture radio:
[Benjamin Stora proudly announced, with a tear in his eye, that 2007 was that last electoral victory of the Right, because soon new ethnic battalions “would upset the balance definitively.” Today Mr. Stora wanted to put us on our guard: staying within the spirit of May 68 is not a matter of commemoration but of mobilization. What is needed, according to him, is to instill in ethnic minorities and the underprivileged (including the notorious migrants created by the Left for its own political purposes) a taste for challenging the established orders, in particular the “ethnic order,” by drawing inspiration from the “decolonization” movements.
http://www.brusselsjournal.com/node/3191