Friday, May 16, 2008

May 68: An Empty Legacy

The 68's gave nothing of value, in fact they destroyed all the values around them in a haze of pot smoking and hallucigenic drugs and now they believe they have the right to opinionate against very other who does not share some utopist psychotic fantasies and abominations of multicultidiocy and political correct dogmas, today they have evovled into sloppy pea-brained halal hippies.

From: The Brussels Journal

Here are some excerpts from an excellent essay on May 68 by a writer named Cyril de Pins. Several French websites have mentioned the article:

We are the heirs of May 1968. It is indubitable. But we no longer see ourselves only in that light. Those, like myself, who were born after 1970, only inherited what was bequeathed to them by the preceding generation, the generation of those who were in their twenties during the springtime festivities regarded by so many as a revolution. And this heritage is indeed impoverished: it consists of a juvenile proclivity to publicly complain and denounce, of an unlimited and blind confidence in youth and in oneself, of a hatred of the principle of authority, and of a hateful rejection of the past.

The Communist Internationale said, "Let us make tabula rasa of the past." May 1968 and its lyrical little soldiers did just that, shouting: "Run, comrade, the old world is behind you."

The least one can say is that they pretty much succeeded: there is no longer a student who knows who Danton or Marat were, who can distinguish a Romanesque church from a wash house, or who can even say who Lenin and Mao were. Students today use history in the same way as their elders: history is good only insofar as it proposes imperfect rough drafts of our modernity.


He describes how spoiled and privileged the generation of May 68 was. How they had never known war, how they had been lavished with the excellent educational resources France then possessed, including knowledge of the regional dialects.

Like all spoiled children, they destroyed what they received, what history had preserved for so long, those languages, those traditions, the instruction inherited from the Jesuits and spread by the Republic. They replaced all of that with their whims, their fantasies and by the memory of their youth.

My generation is the first to have received nothing: no regional language [...], no training in the classics (Latin and Greek classes have closed almost everywhere despite efforts by our elders, such as Madame Jacqueline Worms de Romilly), and what is more serious, no national culture: our students know almost nothing about the history of France, of its classical literature, and their knowledge of French is confused and lax, a consequence of the only demand that is ever really made on them – self-expression (as opposed to just expression). [...]

We received only the narcissism of history's spoiled children and their "feel good" notions; we received no knowledge, no savoir-faire. Therefore, is it not up to our generation to judge the record of May 1968 and the actions of its participants, rather than the generation that has already done enough to deaden the minds of its descendants and deprive them of culture? But THEY are the only ones we hear! For forty years they are all we hear, as if France had begun with their shouts and their slogans; every day they strut, like veterans of a war, when in fact they are recent pensioners. The REAL resistance fighters, who owed their careers to their commitment, had both courage and modesty.

The crisis of French identity is not difficult to explain. Since May 1968, and in conformity with the credo of its participants, France is considered as the land of human rights, and nothing else. [...]

France is a country of rich and numerous traditions: scientific, linguistic, historical and academic. It is a land with an inexhaustible patrimony, but it is threatened by indifference (more and more churches and châteaux are being destroyed one after the other by deadly transformations, or simply from neglect).

The actors of May 68 hate the idea of heritage so much that they believe it can never be sufficiently blamed, or sufficiently shackled, for to them there is no greater iniquity than a heritage. [...] The actors of May 68 have forgotten one important thing: any inheritance is accompanied by debts. They were the first to enjoy the fruits of an inheritance without recognizing the debt, beginning with the one contracted on receiving the inheritance - the obligation to transmit it to the next generation. This debt is a debt left not only by those who preceded us, but also, and especially, it is a debt that ties us to those who will follow us and to whom we must entrust memory and knowledge, for they are the future.

What will those of my generation transmit to those of the next generation? A nation and a history are not built with a good conscience and a few comforting symbols. A nation is built from memories and from the language, not on the sidewalks shouting useless slogans - the same ones for thirty years (the only songs the young have in common with their elders are the very ugly songs of the demonstrations...)

Those who acquired their pensions by throwing bricks would like us to admire them for having enjoyed their privileges for so long without sharing them, and at the same time to shed a heart-felt tear over their exploits. It is not odious any more, it is obscene.

The Meaning of May 68: Population Replacement and Hatred of the West

Last week student demonstrations in Paris revived fears 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.

Must we be reminded of how the little powdered prophets of the salons of 1788 ended up, […] massacred by the very “tools” they claimed to be manipulating, and who completely escaped their control. Beware, Mr. Stora... You were forced to leave your native Algeria to save your skin. Your “protégés” might very well remind you one day that they had already chased you from “their territory.”

Stora’s thinking illustrates perfectly that massive immigration is a tool invented by the extreme Left to shatter European society, and to destroy it. There is no humanism here; his ideas reek of hatred. It is not freedom that Mr. Stora and his clique are calling for, but blood!

If Le Conservateur sounds a warning, its readers go further in denouncing Benjamin Stora, calling him an agent of the government in the service of Sarkozy’s multi-cultural project, and wondering how anyone can tolerate the Trotskyist and Maoist propaganda that spews forth every morning on France Culture radio.

More on May 68:

Remembering the Sixties, 13 February 2008

Rivers of Blood and the Mentality of 68, 14 April 2008

Dany at the Elysée: The Apotheosis of May 68, 17 April 2008




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