More Moonbat 1968 Nostalgia--Tariq Ali Laments Loss Of Revolutionary Zeal, Film Chicago 10 Glorifies DNC Agitators

First, moonbat lefty Tariq Ali's frothy paean to the "revolutionary" spirit of that fateful year, and the lament that it was not sustained:

The glorious decade (1965-75), of which the year 1968 was only the high point, consisted of three concurrent narratives. Politics dominated, but there were two others that left a deeper imprint - sexual liberation and a hedonistic entrepreneurship from below. We had cause to be grateful for the latter. We were constantly appealing for funds from readers when I edited The Black Dwarf in 1968-69. One day a guy in overalls walked into our Soho office and counted out 25 grubby £5 notes, thanked us for producing the paper and left. He would do this every fortnight. Finally, I asked who he was and if there was a particular reason for his generosity. It turned out he had a stall on Portobello Road and, as to why he wanted to help, it was simple. "Capitalism is so non-groovy, man." It's only too groovy now and far more vicious.

In some ways, the 60s were a reaction to the 50s, and the intensity of the cold war. In the US, the McCarthyite witch-hunts had created havoc in the 50s, but now blacklisted writers could work again; in Russia, hundreds of political prisoners were released, the gulags were closed down and the crimes of Stalin were denounced by Khruschev as eastern Europe trembled with excitement and hopes of rapid reform. They hoped in vain.
. . .
Were the dreams and hopes of 1968 all idle fantasies? Or did cruel history abort something new that was about to be born? Revolutionaries - utopian anarchists, Fidelistas, Trotskyist allsorts, Maoists of every stripe - wanted the whole forest. Liberals and social democrats were fixated on individual trees. The forest, they warned us, was a distraction, far too vast and impossible to define, whereas a tree was a piece of wood that could be identified, improved and crafted into a chair or a table. Now the tree, too, has gone.

"You're like fish that only see the bait, never the line," we would mock in return. For we believed - and still do - that people should not be measured by material possessions but by their ability to transform the lives of others - the poor and underprivileged; that the economy needed to be reorganised in the interests of the many, not the few; and that socialism without democracy could never work. Above all, we believed in freedom of speech.

Freedom of speech--except for those that disagree with them. That is so "non-groovy, man."

But what would an entry about 1968 be without a reference to the Democratic National Convention of that year--with a movie detailing the Chicago agitators using archival footage and rotoscoping animation entitled Chicago 10 (via Drunkablog):