The Year 1968--Posturing Rebels And Moral Equivalency

Playwright Tom Stoppard on the whining rebels and the year 1968 (via Instapundit):

I was as aware as most people were that not everything in the gardens of the West was lovely and of course we didn’t know – one never knows – the half of it. But when in August 1968 the armies of the Warsaw Pact invaded and occupied Czechoslovakia, an act which was simply the ongoing occupation of eastern Europe writ bold, my embarrassment at our agit-prop mummers’ “revolution” turned to revulsion.

What repelled me was the implied conflation of two categorically different cases. The “free West”, God knew, was all too often disfigured by corruption and injustice but the abuses represented, and were acknowledged to represent, a failure of the model. In the East, though, the abuses represented the model in full working order.

A small incident which must have confirmed some people’s worst suspicions about me occurred when I was asked to sign a protest against “censorship” after a newspaper declined to publish somebody’s manifesto. “But that isn’t censorship,” I said. “That’s editing. In Russia you go to prison for possessing a copy of Animal Farm. That’s censorship.”

Communism’s “normality” relied on the distortion of language and my new hero, George Orwell, had long since diagnosed the disease in his own society, so I took this kind of thing very much to heart.

Awash in a sea of freedom, the youth of 1968 rebelled.

Some in Denver and around the nation want to "recreate '68" this election year.

And like all faux-revolutionary poseurs, they don't know the half of it--the price of freedom, or the responsibility for one's actions.

Just lashing out at the targets of their anger, labeling everyone and everything in their path as the enemy, and continuing the "conflation" of categorically different ideas/themes/messages in order to make a political point and win concessions through intimidation and manipulation of the current PC culture.

Why recreate 1968? For the leftist moonbats, nothing has changed. Everyone else grew up and matured. They seem captivated by their lingering insecurities and the thrill of (impotent) action.

And they're bringing their roadshow circus to Denver's DNC this August.

More discussion (Via Bob's Blog)--Caplis & Silverman on Recreate '68.