You have just returned from Paris. What struck you most during the visit?
Paris, unlike Malta, is choc-a-bloc with celebrations of May '68. Actually, it had all begun in the US. Two radical champions of oppressed people, Martin Luther King and Robert Kennedy, had arisen; both were martyred. Students began to rebel against the Vietnam War.
In Ohio I witnessed the tragic stupidity of National Guardsmen shooting at them. The students were not at all motivated by any lack of patriotism. They had, however, realised that Mao Zedong had rendered obsolete the still standard theory of military strategy based on Clausewitz: Apparently chaotic guerilla risings could not be crushed even by numerically and technologically vastly superior but institutionalised, regimented armed forces.
In Paris, the students generalised this perception that seemingly still eludes Bush. The French students hijacked the university structures in the conviction that in science (and culture) no less than in war, 'chaotic' conditions could be more conducive to innovatory success than 'orderly' protocols. A call for a general strike that could ally the workers with the students came from the Dominican priest Jean Cardonnel, still as alive and fiery today at the age of 87 as when I first knew him during my stay with the Young Christian Workers in Paris just before the uprisings.
Throughout Western Europe in 1968, there were clashes between the extreme Left which tended towards anarchy and the extreme Right which upheld the old Order.
In Malta, the only event that sparked a reaction among our very small student population at the time, was when Jan Palach, a Prague student, burnt himself to death in imitation of the Buddhist monks in Vietnam when Soviet forces mercilessly put down the rising in Czechoslovakia. However, the gestures towards workers' self-management in the Drydocks and elsewhere made when Dom Mintoff regained power three years later, and even more the idea of the 'Dialogue Society' launched by Eddie Fenech Adami when the Mintoff regime turned repressive, owe much to the heritage of 1968.
A paradoxical reversal occurred in China. Mao had been acclaimed as the main prophet of '68 not only because of his strategic insight, but also because he had broken away from subservience to Soviet Russia and, in a famous speech, urged that 100 different flowers of Marxist thought be allowed to bloom. Now he began the Cultural Revolution that proved to be the worst antidote of the spirit of '68 as represented by its other two great names, Marcuse and McLuhan.
What did Marcuse and McLuhan stand for?
In his book Eros and Civilisation, Marcuse had enriched the Marxist account of society with Freudian psychology. Sexual emancipation became a great thrust of '68. Probably its most enduring effect proved to be on the family. In another book, One-Dimensional Man, Marcuse stressed that emotional freedom was just as important for human fulfilment as intellectual.
McLuhan, a Canadian convert to Catholicism, argued, in modification of Marx, that changes in technologies of communication accounted more for big shifts in social and economic history than changes in technologies of production; the invention of the printing press was a more decisive turning point in history than even that of the combustion engine. In catchy slogans, such as 'the medium is the message', and 'the global village', McLuhan described the new, information-moulded world in its birth-pangs.
The thought of both Marcuse and McLuhan was reflected in much of the art generated in '68. Perhaps the most characteristic were the Living Theatre with their production of Paradise Now and the Bread and Puppet show. Both projected a new style of loving, sexual and otherwise, and a new style of language to go with it. Both sought to liberate the coming generations from all kinds of inhibition.
You mentioned the role of a Dominican friar in Paris. Has the '68 revolution marked the Church in any way?
Christians, like everyone else, seemed to have become suddenly aware of their right to make their voices heard. The Vatican Council had just ended a few years before and the Church no less than society began to set up structures in which dialogue took place as the road to decision-making - from parish councils to diocesan synods.
This liberation of discourse was accompanied by the passionate rediscovery of the presence of the Holy Spirit among the people of God.
Unfortunately, in 1968 Pope Paul VI published the Encyclical Humanae Vitae of which only the continued prohibition of the pill stamped itself on the popular mind. Many priests and religious sisters left their orders. All across the world, '68 was followed by a backlash.
The opinions now expressed on the many exhibition billboards in the streets of Paris as well as in the special issues of most magazines dedicated to May 1968 are divided. The most notorious leader of the French '68, Daniel Cohm-Bendit, now a Green member of the European Parliament, has proclaimed May '68 to be door-nail dead.
Many sixty-year-olds think of it as a dream that faded with their twenties. Many others think that we would be living in an unhappier world had there not been '68 and even that the only hope for humanity to have a future is to re-capture the flare-up of the popular creative imagination that occurred in May 1968.
Fr Peter was talking to Nicole Bugeja