Between January and December of that year, in East Asia, Eastern and Western Europe, and North America, the crack of the tectonic plates of history shifting sharply seemed almost audible. It was—or at least at the time seemed to be—“the year that rocked the world,” as the subtitle of a recent book put it.1 Now the golden anniversary of 1968 has arrived. Seen from this perspective, the year appears less a global turning point than an example of one of history’s signal features—irony, which is present when the outcome of individual acts and national policies turns out to be quite different from what it initially seemed to be, and from what the people involved in them intended.Example: Vietnam. "It would be difficult to find a purer case of historical irony than the long-term results of the Vietnam War."
Example: France. Quick history lesson first, the French government of the time was not at all interested in participating in the North Atlantic Alliance or the Common Market. "As for the students who had taken to the streets in the spring of 1968, in the many speeches they made and the manifestoes they issued neither of these two subsequently dominant issues played any significant part."
Example: Soviet Communism. "Attempting to preserve communism in 1968, the Soviet leaders doomed it." Yes, an American President and a Pope gave the tottery edifice a final shove, but perhaps these actions heightened the contradictions.
Example: the most visible sector of the early Baby Boom generation. "The institution that incubated the defining events of 1968 in the United States, which the activist wing of the Baby Boom generation did eventually come to dominate, is the university; and the fate of the university presents another, final, ironic coda to that year."
Suffice it to say that the squares of a half century ago could read this essay and observe, "See, I told you so."
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