Sixty-eighters

Looking back on 1968, Christopher Hitchens sees things differently from Geoffrey Wheatcroft. No surprises there:

Looking back on that year of color and rage and excitement and (yes) hope, I can now see well enough to separate the different kinds of revolutionary with whom I became acquainted. Some of one kind went on to become victorious rulers, either of nascent dictatorships in Vietnam and Angola or of nascent democracies in Spain, Portugal, Greece, and South Africa. Some of a second kind would invert the hieroglyph "68" on the odometer and become the triumphant figures of the anti-Communist revolution of '89. (For this particular irony, see Tom Stoppard's brilliant play Rock and Roll.) And some of another kind wound up either dead or in prison, having tried to launch movements of "armed struggle" from Northern Ireland to West Germany. The first two evolved a sort of social-democratic modus vivendi that has some battle honors to its credit; the third lot mutated into the fans of Saddam Hussein and the apologists for al-Qaida and the Muslim Brotherhood - in other words, into the most reactionary force on the planet. There are also soixante-huitards whose adventures are less well known and far from over. I have met them among the tiny minority, from Bosnia to Zimbabwe to Iraq, who have struggled to evolve a consistent antitotalitarian politics and to marry it to a thoroughgoing internationalism. One day, perhaps, their less glamorous story will also be told.

(Via.)