The Hindu : Front Page : 1960s a decade of hate, says Professor

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Wednesday, May 07, 2008
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1960s a decade of hate, says Professor

Severin Carrell

For a generation of adults, the 1960s are wistfully remembered as the decade defined by free love, anti-war radicalism, Woodstock and the student revolt in Paris. Not so, says a Professor of modern history.

In an appraisal to mark the 40th anniversary of the Paris revolt in May 1968, Professor Gerard DeGroot from St Andrew’s University, Scotland, argues that the “real spirit of the 60s” has been obscured by ill-informed nostalgia for the music, hippy ethos and defiant protests against the Vietnam war, nuclear weapons and conformity.

Ill-informed nostalgia

Professor DeGroot said the decade should best be remembered for its violence and unhappiness. “How many of us... think about the Chinese cultural revolution, which was undoubtedly one of the worst atrocities of the 20th century?”

Some liberal causes benefited from the 1960s, he writes in The Sixties Unplugged: A Kaleidoscopic History of a Disorderly Decade. Student protests in the early 1960s were true to the liberal, revolutionary ideals which became distorted by violence and posturing for TV cameras.

“[It] brought flowers, music, love and good times. It also brought hatred, greed, dangerous drugs, needless deaths, ethnic cleansing... bearing all that in mind, [it] should seem neither unfamiliar nor all that wonderful.” — © Guardian Newspapers Limited, 2008

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