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PDF FormatFischer, for his part, has his dramatic moment telling Donald Rumsfeld that he is “not convinced” by the evidence of weapons of mass destruction. Cohn-Bendit proposes a slow international isolation and opposition to the Saddam regime, in the hopes of an internal overthrow. Neither of them spend much time musing over the nature of Saddam’s regime, or its attendant human cost. Their concern is with America and, specifically, the Bush administration. Berman grants them their points, and adds a few criticisms of his own. Indeed, Berman’s disdain for Bush is palpable, at times overwrought, almost as if the ferocity of his criticisms were a defense against the inevitable charges of neo-conservatism sure to be directed his way. Nonetheless, there is little doubt that tactical concern, a respect for international law, and moral considerations played no small part in the refusal of Fischer and Cohn-Bendit to endorse the invasion of Iraq. This does not, however, erase the fact that Fischer and Cohn-Bendit, for their part, when faced with the Manichean equation of their own making, decided, more or less, to remain neutral.
Kouchner is another case entirely. Replete with his own disdain for the Bush administration—matched in equal measure, however, by his contempt for the Chirac government and the anti-war movement—Kouchner nonetheless holds fast to his Hippocratic creed. He does not turn away from the daily atrocities that formed the nature of life under Saddam Hussein. He openly affirms the indisputables—that the majority of Iraq’s population wanted Saddam Hussein gone, that the presence of radical Islam in Iraq was growing to fearful proportions, and that Saddam himself was every bit the evil that George Bush, in his unpleasing Texas way, made him out to be. Kouchner’s opposition to the invasion is purely tactical, and it is a bitter critique indeed; but Kouchner does demand, at least from himself, that one take a stand.
He is joined in this by Glucksmann, whom Berman describes in an inadvertently hilarious moment as “poring through Bush’s speeches, looking for the passages that might be fairly reasonable,” and by Michnik as well, the dissident from the Soviet bloc, whom Berman describes as lacking in patience for arguments against overthrowing totalitarianisms. Nor, it is implied, does a survivor of the Soviet occupation have the degree of resentment of American power so common to the French and their intellectual class.
In the end, of course, the invasion happened. Iraq’s future remains uncertain, but the toll it has taken on the generation of ’68 is, according to Berman, enormous. It is doubtful that there will be a sequel to Power and the Idealists. In the book’s final pages, Berman lowers the curtain on his pageant of rebellion and disillusionment. As he places its genesis in 1968, Berman draws its conclusion in 2003, with the truck-bombing of the UN mission in Baghdad, where, as he describes it, the best of the ethos of ’68, the Hippocratic resistance to human suffering, went up in flames:
The story of the generation of 1968 ended there, surely. In Baghdad in August 2003. Nobody else was likely ever again to speak about “our generation” and its mission…. Cohn-Bendit’s imaginary ’68ers’ International… did come into existence, for a while, in the 1990s, and Kouchner and some of the people in his group in Pristina were the International’s action team. The team was gone, now…. And the younger generation was going to have to find its own way of thinking.
The trial of the generation of ’68 is not yet over; in many ways it has not even begun, and notwithstanding the occasional eruptions of resentment and approbation, the dominance of the ’68 generation, at least over the cultural sphere of the West, and in many ways over its political lexicon as well, remains firmly in place. The best and the worst of the legacy of 1968 is something all of us are forced to live with, and to reckon with, on a constant basis. Nearly every aspect of socio-political life in the West has felt the impact of 1968, and has been formed either as an embrace of it or a reaction to it. To take our ground upon the subject, therefore, is not merely necessary, but inevitable.
This is especially pertinent when judging Power and the Idealists. For Berman has written not merely a requiem, but also a writ for the defense. Joschka Fischer, he contends, should be forgiven his youthful indiscretions, Daniel Cohn-Bendit is the victim of vicious and baseless slanders, and Kouchner has long since rid himself of his romance with the likes of Fidel and Che. These men, he contends, have figured out where they went wrong, and as their mistakes are those of an entire generation, the indictments against them must be regarded as little more than insensate reaction.
Indeed, Berman, even as he itemizes his criticisms, gives little weight to any attempts at generalization. He concludes that the trial of 1968 and the cultural phenomena that surrounded it are little more than the longing of inferior minds for the oppressive sureties of the 1950s. Michel Houellebecq, symbolizing, as he does, the literary voice of the prosecutors, comes in for particular approbation. I do not intend to write a defense of Houellebecq here, although I must note that it is absurd to say that a writer as completely despairing of humanity as Houellebecq longs for anything. But there is a point worth making here. The phenomenon which Berman critiques, and to which Houellebecq gives exemplary expression, is not a movement towards reaction. It is, rather, in every way, the voice of the same Hippocratic impulse which Berman praises in his ’68ers. It is the voice of the casualties of a generation’s revolution: The children of divorce or illegitimacy, the exploited runaways, the women who have undergone multiple abortions and broken relationships, the offspring of drug-addled parents, the tapestry of victims carelessly left by the wayside by the ideological hedonism of a generation.
It is also the voice of other victims, victims of the political rather than the personal variety. Castro’s prisoners, Pol Pot’s massacred, the Vietnamese boat people whose plight, at least in some measure, must be laid at the feet of those who helped engineer the destruction of South Vietnam—in short, the millions of victims who did not feel the urge of revolution and were nonetheless forced to pay with their freedom, their property, and often their lives for the revolutionary passions of a few. This is a butcher’s bill which demands payment, or at least acknowledgment, but is not to be found in the pages of Berman’s book. Berman criticizes his ’68ers for failing to live up to their ideals, but he refuses to recognize the victims of those ideals themselves.
This indifference comes to fervent expression whenever the youthful indiscretions of the ’68 generation are involved. Fischer, we are assured, is now a friend of Israel, as though the victims of German-Palestinian terror who preceded the epiphany of Entebbe did not exist. Kouchner’s encounter with Fidel Castro, in which El Commandante waxes poetic on the virtues of the AK-47, passes by as an amusing anecdote, when it ought to be a chilling reminder of how many must have fallen under those marvelously revolutionary bullets. And the indictment of Cohn-Bendit is simply pushed aside as an absurd slander. Berman, to his credit, includes the passage from Cohn-Bendit’s memoir—regarding his tenure as a teacher in a progressive kindergarten—which aroused the accusations:
Cohn-Bendit had written: “It happened to me several times that certain kids opened my fly and began to tickle me. I reacted differently according to circumstances, but their desire posed a problem to me. I asked them: ‘Why don’t you play together? Why have you chosen me, and not the others?’ But if they insisted, I caressed them even so.”
Berman accepts, with proper indignation on behalf of the accused, Cohn-Bendit’s description of this as a “literary exaggeration.” To my untrained ears, it sounds fairly damning. We are assured that Cohn-Bendit has been a longtime opponent of pedophilia. But surely this misses the point. The question is not whether Cohn-Bendit is a pedophile, but whether the culture he helped found violated the sexual boundaries of young children. What makes Berman’s reaction so frustrating is the fact that the answer appears, to me at least, to be so wretchedly obvious. But, then again, I am not a child of ’68.
