Chris Wallace Remembers Part of 1968

Stephen Colbert interviewed Chris Wallace the other day. Wallace was flogging a history book that he wrote. He was a bit snarky about the venue, but he bit the bullet because it was marketing, after all. The book is about 1945, and they agreed that 1945 was a bad year. Between then and now, they figured that 1968 took the cake. I agree.

Wallace, now a faux historian, reminisced about 1968, but everything on his list of annoyances happened in America, or to America. He mentioned the Vietnam War, the urban riots, the assassinations of MLK and RFK, the “Chicago riots” around the Democratic Convention, and then he was done. He specifically said that, “but this year (i.e. 2020) we have the pandemic.” His list for 1968 was startlingly incomplete for a “historian," and the pandemic, as it happens, is not unique to our current year. 

Within the last four to six weeks I have come across mention of the Hong Kong Flu pandemic of 1968 in my reading. Several times, so the information is available. I must admit that it is easy to overlook in the general horror of that year. It was a serious problem though, killing between one and four million people around the world, and 34,000 in the U.S. alone. It was a mutation of the H2N2 flu virus, influenza A-H3N2. That's for a start.

What both men overlooked entirely was the worldwide character of the student demonstrations in 1968. Even marginally well informed people should recall the huge demonstrations, and police riots, and, I admit, student riots, in France and Germany. They were all over the place, and all over the news.

Maybe the most serious student demonstrations and the most murderous police/ army response was in Mexico. The Summer Olympic Games were in Mexico City in 1968, and student demonstrations started in the springtime. The protests continued to grow into the autumn, and by October the authorities had had enough. On October 2^nd, fully armed soldiers with tanks charged and scattered the demonstrations, killing a still mysterious number of students. Eyewitnesses claim to have seen hundreds of bodies being loaded onto trucks. It is safe to say that thousands of students were beaten and jailed, and that many of them simply disappeared. Recently declassified documents indicate that the army riot was provoked when government snipers shot and killed a few soldiers. That was a bad one. (pbs.org)

Things were nuts in Brazil as well. 1968 saw Brazil in the grip of an unpopular military dictatorship. In June of 1968 there was a student demonstration called, “the March of the 100,000.” It was met with government force, and many students were beaten, jailed, tortured, killed, and disappeared.

The Wikipedia page for “Protests of 1968” lists protests in the United States, Pakistan, Poland, West Germany, Scandinavia, Mexico, Czechoslovakia, the Soviet Union, Spain, Italy, France, the United Kingdom (including Northern Ireland), Yugoslavia, Brazil, and “others.” It's safe to say the whole world lit up with protests against one thing or another, including authoritarianism, capitalism, the death of Che Guevara, imperialism, and sexism.

Those casual mentions include the Prague Spring in Czechoslovakia! That was 600,000 Warsaw Pact troops with full armor support crushing an effort to add some local color to the usual drab Soviet communism. 

The problem with present day would-be public intellectuals is the lack of scope not only in their reading, but also in their understanding of the world. Wallace only wrote this book because there was money in it. O'Reilly proved that with all of those silly “Killing . . .” books. It is to be hoped that Wallace's book will die on its own, exposed on a hillside with no takers. That might discourage others from trying their own hand at it.