The Ghosts of 1968

As I recently watched American cities erupt in protests and police over-react, thoughts from my earlier life came rushing back. In 1968 I was a twenty year-old undergraduate at the University of Sydney. Every month offered up new crises in the comfortable Western world that I had grown up in, apart from the ever-present threat of nuclear annihilation that we found ways of ignoring.  As an early baby-boomer I lived with my family on the southern edge of the metropolitan region, in what even then was referred to as ‘the Shire’.

The Vietnam War had reached its turning point. In January that year the North Vietnamese troops and the Vietcong had entered Saigon, as we called the capital of South Vietnam. Although eventually beaten back, it was clear that the American gamble had failed. They were, in Trump’s terms, ‘losers’. Many of the riots back stateside were focused on stopping the war. There seemed to be an unstoppable political wave that would force whoever won that year’s US presidential election later that year to begin disengaging. As we know, it didn’t happen. The war escalated and dragged on for another seven years. But at the time, I and my peers were certain that we had – in Churchill’s words – at least reached the end of the beginning. As someone who turned twenty that year, the immediate future of the war was of no small matter. The Australian conservative government had imposed a policy of press-ganging young men into the army. Conscription or euphemistically, national service had been introduced again in 1951 during the Korean War but phased out by the end of the decade. It was reimposed in 1964 and focused solely on 20 year-old men. This time conscripts could and were shipped overseas to fight. This had not happened since the desperate days of World War II, when all Aussie men between 18 and 35 were subject to call-up (up to 45 for single men).

Unsurprisingly, the anti-war protests in the US were mirrored in Australian cities. As in America, the university campuses, including my own were in the vanguard. My memories are of large student meetings on the expansive lawn in front of the Great Hall, where speaker after speaker exhorted us to voice our rage. These calls to arms, led not to armed uprisings but mass street rallies and marches, culminating in the moratorium movements in cities like Melbourne and Sydney. An ill-timed visit by President Lyndon Johnson had led to a massive protest in Sydney city and the famously cack-handed comment by the NSW Premier – to ‘run the bastards over’, by which he meant us. It also drew from Prime Minister Holt the cringe-worthy promise – ‘all the way with LBJ’, uttered shortly before he went for his last, terminal swim at Cheviot Beach. We haven’t come very far; it now appears to be ‘all the way with Donald J’.

But 1968 was also chock-full of other momentous events. The anti-war protests in America were tied in with a resurgence of racial conflict, the recurring dark theme in the bedrock of modern democracy. The twin assassinations of Martin Luther King and presidential hopeful Robert Kennedy seemed to also kill off hopes of a peaceful end to the protests and riots. Richard Nixon’s victory later that year sealed the deal. Back in May students and workers took to the streets of Paris and briefly rekindled memories of the Paris Commune of 1870. But like the fate of the Commune, De Gaulle’s control of the army eventually quelled the protests. The Chicago Democratic presidential convention erupted as Mayor Daley unleashed the police and dogs on anti-war protestors. Later that year Russian tanks rolled into Prague to extinguish the Czech Spring and Mexico’s President unleashed a killing spree before the opening of the Mexico Olympics. It was at these Games that Melbourne sprinter Peter Norman stood on the podium with Tommy Smith and John Carlos as they gave the black power salute.

I never thought I’d see another year like 1968 or another US presidential election so critical in determining the fate of our world. But here we are in 2020. American cities are burning. Again. Cops are killing African Americans. Again. Right wing militia are on the streets brandishing high-powered weapons. Again. Banquo has joined us at the table. As if things couldn’t get worse, two hundred thousand Americans have died from a pandemic that the federal government is failing to control, suggesting that many more Americans will die in coming months. And fanning the flames, a sitting president has made the enduring civil unrest the centrepiece of his campaign for re-election. It is the prevalence and virulence of Covid – and the prospect of another four years of Trump – that marks 2020 out as an even greater disaster-in-the-making than 1968. To the ghosts of the latter are added the spirit of 1918-19 when the flu killed upward of one hundred million people. As I write, almost one million people have died worldwide during the current pandemic. The UK is poised on the edge of a second (or is it third) wave. India has just overtaken Brazil with the second highest national death rate and a population of 1.3 billion people is eyeing the US as the world’s worst.

In Australia, partisanship is also raising its head again, after a lull in politics-as-usual, political parties and sectional interests are reverting to type. The initial response of the Australian federation to Covid-19 was, by international comparison, successful. Even now, total deaths from the virus have not yet reached one thousand, a death rate roughly half the global average. However, crucial mistakes early on in quarantine management and the complete unpreparedness of the residential aged care sector to deal with virus outbreaks has seen a second wave explode in the state of Victoria and threaten to jump state borders. The pandemic has stoked an uncivil war between state governments, between the states and the Feds, between business interests and government and in a chaotic fashion, between confused, angry and fearful citizens turning on each other. The escalating costs of Covid are impacting negatively across the economy and are heaped heavily on marginalised groups who have been excised by deliberate federal government decisions from the various income and business support programs hastily trotted out. Australia is now effectively three nations: Victoria under stage three and four lockdown; NSW and Queensland on the edge of following; and the rest of the states and territories that have suppressed if not eliminated the virus. But the uncertainty is beginning to get people down.

We’ve seen what happened in America when a deranged leader irresponsibly ignores the advice of public health experts and pushes for unrestrained ‘reopening of the economy’ in a desperate throw at re-election. To date our leaders have managed to avoid this form of national suicide. But there are ominous signs that conservative and business elements are determined to push politicians to the cliff edge. The conservative federal government is leading the charge, in part to divert attention from its abject failure to protect older Australians in Australia’s horribly under-resourced and poorly regulated aged care sector. However, this partisan attack on the state governments over lockdowns and closed borders is also driven by the underlying ideology of ‘austerity’ and associated pressure from the business sector to ‘get the economy going again’. A less than enthusiastic commitment to propping up effective demand in the economy also promises to undo the gains made and sacrifices borne to date. The sensible advice remains to drive infections down to somewhere near extinction, while hanging out for a viable vaccine, to avoid the yo-yo effect of opening and closing the stable door.

A major difficulty is that we as a nation were unprepared. Even though public health experts had been warning of the near inevitability of another pandemic, following earlier experience with Ebola and SARS, national governments around the world stuck heir heads in the ground, hoping that it wouldn’t happen. Well, it did. So stripped of capacity to monitor and respond effectively, so reliant on stretched supply chains of vital medical supplies, and so clueless as to what to do, we now find ourselves scrambling to cope. In our confusion we strike out at whoever we think is to blame.

The conservative approach of public health experts (who face daily trolling and threatened harm for doing their jobs) will enrage many ‘sovereign citizens’ and sectional interests who hide behind the formers’ clumsy and crude rhetoric. Thankfully, an earlier conservative Australian government culled private gun ownership. Although these controls are slowly being eroded and illegal gun ownership is creeping up, thus far we have been spared the sight of gun-toting militia roaming our streets. Long may this be the case. We have seen the damage a single Aussie sov-cit can do, in the case of the Christchurch outrage.

If we are reliving 1968, I fear we have more pain to endure before somehow, our poor, inadequate, pitiful species muddles through to pick up the real challenges of a new cold war, rampant social inequality, climate change and the next pandemic.

Welcome to the 21st Century.

Postscript: A few years ago, I published a memoir – The Year – that chronicles what I remember of that year, 1968, traversed month by month. It can be purchased online at:

https://www.lulu.com/shop/mike-berry/the-year/paperback/product-22208653.html (£13.13GBP)

https://www.lulu.com/en/au/shop/mike-berry/the-year/paperback/product-17qg65kp.html (A$28)

OR from Amazon Books or the Book Depository