“…They Meant For The Best…
…but things, later on, didn't turn out that way." A rant from Rod Liddle in The Daily Mail about 1968 and what it meant - and, unfortunately - still means 40 years on.
Britain experienced some pretty bleak years in the last century, years you'd want to forget. 1940, for example, when - on the brink of defeat - we stood alone against Hitler.
Or 1926, the year of the General Strike. But it's difficult to imagine a year more ludicrous, or more damaging to the country, in the long term, than 1968.
A year chock full of deluded teenagers, of fatuous slogans, of bombs and sit-ins and bad music and worse films.
A year when everything the country believed in was turned on its head by extremely ill-kempt people who perhaps went a long time between baths. And even longer between shaves. People we should, by rights, have entirely ignored, or just smiled at indulgently.
A year of drugs, violence, "free sex" and the lionising of congenital idiots like the Scottish psychiatrist R.D. Laing, the German social theorist Jurgen Habermas and a multitude of self- styled freedom fighters wearing frankly embarrassing headgear.
If you are looking for a year when things first started to go bad, when the lunatics at last got their grubby paws on the controls of the asylum, 1968 is it.
The remarkable thing is that the half-baked and narcissistic ideologies of that dismal 12 months are still with us, in our schools, in our law courts, in our social services; they have permeated every facet of our lives.
A disrespect for authority, contempt for the family unit, multiculturalism, "yoof culcha" and an emphasis upon rights rather than responsibilities.
A permissiveness and indulgence shown towards every anti-social phenomenon from the use of illegal narcotics to single mothers and suicide bombers ("We really need to understand them better") - all that stuff was forged in the rather tepid British spring and summer of 1968.
It was not just Britain, of course. It was America and pretty much all of the West. We are still feeling those tendrils of Marxism, progressivism and half-baked liberationalism wrapped around us today. Go read the entire venting of Liddle's spleen to get the full flavor of the venom he feels toward that year that too many yearn for.
History, World news | Gaius Monday, 11 February , 2008
By Sam, Tuesday, 12 February , 2008 @ 2:46 pm
I watched all of that on the television and read about it in Life magazine as a 14 year old living in Casper, Wyoming - about as far from the center of the action as it is possible to get. At the time, I sort of fancied myself as one of the hippies, even though my parents never let that go too far. The only part of it I hold onto now is the music of the era, Jimi, the Doors, Cream, Led Zeppelin, etc. The rest of it has not aged that well, and looks increasingly ridiculous with the passage of time.