When students ruled the earth

D.A.N. Jones

• 1968: A Student Generation in Revolt by Ronald Fraser
  Chatto, 370 pp, £14.95, January 1988, ISBN 0 7011 2913 1
• Street Fighting Years: An Autobiography of the Sixties by Tariq Ali
  Collins, 280 pp, £12.95, November 1987, ISBN 0 00 217779 X
• Sixty-Eight: The Year of the Barricades by David Caute
  Hamish Hamilton, 464 pp, £14.95, January 1988, ISBN 0 241 12174 4
• Nineteen Sixty-Eight: A Personal Report by Hans Koning
  Unwin Hyman, 196 pp, £10.95, April 1988, ISBN 0 04 440185 X

Twenty years is a long time in politics. To me, the flavour of the year 1968 is still ‘anti-Fascism’. The meanings of ‘Fascism’ and ‘National Socialism’ are quite well discussed in Roger Scruton’s cold-hearted Dictionary of Political Thought (1982). For me (born in 1931) and for many of my generation, ‘Fascism’ means a system of government which angers us and reminds us of the regimes of Hitler and Mussolini. A fear of ‘Fascism’ was quite natural in 1968, that year of wild crowds and top people’s plots. I was interviewed by a Swiss television team: ‘Don’t you think England might go Fascist, Mr Jones? A quiet English sort of Fascism?’ ‘Abs’lument pas!’ I snapped (quoting from a favourite French film), ‘Abs’lument pas!’ – with a confidence I could not muster today. Then, a contemporary at a college reunion (a conservative chap, working for the Ministry of Defence) said to me sweetly: ‘I think you’re a Fascist.’ I billed: ‘Oh, you don’t!’ He cooed: ‘But I do!’