![]() ![]() Maybe Martin Luther King and his media-savvy brothers had got the message first, but see how the demonstrations in the South of 1963 had become common events on American campuses by 1968. Only enough to fill the frame of a TV camera. Increasingly, around the world, public demonstrations were being staged. 1968, Kurlansky reports, was the year that Walter Cronkite realised how 'television was playing an important part not only in the reporting of events, but in the shaping of them. Yet there is the core of a thesis here, and it does resonate. Huge upheavals, such as China's cultural revolution, are dismissed in a page, as top-down not bottom-up. So how do you make all that a time-framed whole? You can't. France had Danny Cohn-Bendit and amazing événements, Britain had Tariq Ali and little else. ![]() While Germany seethed, Canada smiled and walked on by. The Yippies who wrecked Chicago knew little of the students who tried to free Warsaw. 'What was unique about 1968 was that people were rebelling over disparate issues and had in common only that desire to rebel, ideas about how to do it, a sense of alienation from the established order and a profound distaste for authoritarianism.' But it was not planned, Kurlansky adds, and it was not organised. ![]()
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