Bourgeoisie Revolutionaries

Posted on May 6, 2008
Filed Under Books, Capitalism, Communism, Daniel Cohn-Bendit, Danny the Red, Europe, European Union, France, Freedom, History, Human Rights, International, Left, Liberalism, Literature, News, Oswald Spengler, Socialism, Terrorism, bourgeoisie, children, culture, defeatism, democracy, economics, education, violence | 1 Comment

It’s now 40 years since Danny The Red – Daniel Marc Cohn-Bendit – commanded the May ‘68 student revolution, in Paris, which lasted a full month. Who were these young Marxist revolutionaries? What did they accomplish?

The Revolution’s leaders were the pampered children of upper middle class families, none of them knew poverty nor hunger, none of them knew war nor understood it. All had, since early childhood, studied at exclusive schools for the offspring of the well heeled. Their ideas of revolution were based upon some romanticized notions, upon the doing away with the past and starting from scratch… even if it meant eventually making the same horrible, deadly, mistakes.

The Brussels Journal translated excerpts from a superb essay by Cyril de Pins, a 32 year old Adjunct Professor of Philosophy, on the legacy of that May of ‘68:

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.

What the Professor says about French education is no less true here in America’s shores. Never in history have so much money and resources been poured into so many schools to produce a greater apathy, a greater ignorance. “Thinkers” who rewrite history to fit their own agendas, to feed their own vanity, history that never happened… all that has replaced the universal truths of the past. All that falseness and affectation has become the new truth, the new ideals of “fashionable” thought.

Thought, gentle reader, was never meant to be fashionable. In fact history’s greatest revolutionaries, its greatest thinkers were often reviled and tortured. Were it not for them we might still live and die perfectly complacent… somewhere in a cave. Civilization, and the rights we now enjoy came as a result of hard fought for campaigns. The freedoms we take for granted in the West today are the result of much bloodshed, the result of deeply held beliefs by people who refused to blindly follow what was “fashionable” in their day.

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.

And that is precisely what Oswald Spengler foresaw in the early 1920s in his The Decline of the West. As Europe’s past is ignored, as the contributions of Western thought, literature and philosophy are discounted, as history is rewritten or simply never taught, the West becomes a ship without a rudder. It no longer has a direction, it no longer has a goal, it no longer has any spirituality or values worth defending; it becomes ripe for the takeover by IslamoFascism with the willing help of those “fashionable” haters of everything the West has so lavishly given them.

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.

Professor de Pins is still young, by birth, by cultural heritage he should have been quite comfortable and at home among the thought fashionistas, instead he exercised his own thought and realized the fallacy of their ways. I too once sympathized with the Revolution, I too once believed we could change the world by whatever means it took… but… as I wrote here on February 1, 2007:

[...]As a college student in the mid 60s, I was a sympathizer of Mark Rudd’s SDS (Students for a Democratic Society). Those who attended Columbia University at the time may have either fond or infamous memories of the struggle. We marched and fought for numerous causes and we felt we were making a difference in changing society. And you know what? We did! But… most of us also knew that only here in America could we make that difference, only here in America could we pursue our goals, our dreams, our causes, without much fear of retribution. If I could turn the clock back to those years, I would do everything again exactly as I did then. But, gentle reader, the Left changed. My goals, my ideals, my dreams of a better world, remained rock steady. But those that I once proudly marched with in locked step, suddenly changed. The new faces had other allegiances, they stopped analyzing the facts objectively. They started accepting and repeating mantras which, while they sounded great, in reality amounted to nothing more than the pronouncements of bought and paid for false prophets of some of the very causes we had so fervently opposed.

Everything we would not tolerate about America, suddenly became perfectly acceptable and worthy of praise when the country that was perpetrating such evil was anti-American. Anti-Americanism suddenly legitimized the worst criminals and washed away all their sins. I felt betrayed! If something could not be tolerated in America, then neither should it nor could it be given a free pass, or a knowing nod, anywhere else in the world. [...]

Herman Hesse’s Steppenwolf – Harry Haller – a master at blending reality and fantasy, comes to mind. Today’s revolutionaries, like those of May ‘68, mesh the reality of their comfortable bourgeoisie existence and upbringing with the fantasy of a world that never was nor could ever be as they persist in ignoring the past while enjoying the very comforts they pretend to deny.

Chaim

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