Acts of Violence in Grosvenor Square

Letters

Vol. 20 No. 12 · 18 June 1998

From Jenny Hinton

I well remember Christopher Hitchens strutting into the Blackfriars blood-donating session (LRB, 4 June), and trumpeting to the overworked technicians and prone blood donors that he wasn’t British but internationalist and revolutionary, and that he refused to join the Oxford Vietnam Peace Movement because our political line was ‘US quit Vietnam’, not ‘Victory to the Vietcong’.

I also remember the vast crowds at the Grosvenor Square demonstration: the police beating up demonstrators and the demonstrators retaliating by drawing razor blades. The police couldn’t defend themselves because their arms were linked. The revolutionary situation died because Tariq Ali hadn’t decided what to do with us next. Perhaps it was meant to be anarchy. At any rate another opportunity was lost to celebrate the heroic people of Vietnam, who, in spite of our ineptitude, won their war against US aggression.

Jenny Hinton
Oxford

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Vol. 20 No. 13 · 2 July 1998

From Adrian Mitchell

Jenny Hinton (Letters, 18 June) fashionably decries the uselessness of British demonstrations against the Vietnam War. We didn’t end the war, of course, that was done by the Vietnamese people. But at least we made it impossible for successive British Governments to send British troops to kill and die in Vietnam. (Quite a few politicians and some public figures like Bernard Levin and Kingsley Amis were in favour of this.) I wish we had as strong a movement today in order to prevent Blair and Co from poodling along behind the US whenever they decide to order up Gulf War Two or whatever’s next on the menu.

Footnote: I never saw demonstrators pulling razor blades on the police in Grosvenor Square. How many did this and how many police were slashed? I only saw a few bits of turf flung before I was chased by a mounted cop with a baton and hid behind a pacifist tree.

Adrian Mitchell
London NW5

From Peter Gillman

What is Jenny Hinton on about? I was at Grosvenor Square, and saw no demonstrators ‘drawing razor blades’. Where were they carrying them? In portable razors? In secret blade-holders? Did they injure any police? If so, why didn’t the police make an issue out of it? And why haven’t we heard about it before?

Peter Gillman
London SE25

From William Logan

Robert Lowell may have said that ‘he was glad not to have been a revolutionary when young, because it prevented him from becoming a reactionary bore in his old age’: but that doesn’t sound like Lowell the World War Two conscientious objector who later protested against the Vietnam War. Perhaps Christopher Hitchens (LRB, 4 June) was thinking of another Robert, who wrote:

I never dared be radical when young
For fear it would make me conservative when old.

Robert Frost, in 1936.

William Logan
Cambridge

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Vol. 20 No. 14 · 16 July 1998

From Michael Kellett

Not being old enough to remember the events of 1968 I had to strain my imagination to reconcile Jenny Hinton’s assertion (Letters, 18 June) that the police beat up demonstrators, who just happened to turn up armed with razor blades, with the statement in her very next sentence that self-defence on the part of the police was impossible because their arms were linked.

Michael Kellett
Preston

From David Rice

The 1968 ‘revolutionary situation’ in Britain did not die ‘because Tariq Ali hadn’t decided what to do … next’, as Jenny Hinton claims, for the simple reason that there was no revolutionary situation in Britain in 1968. There most certainly was in Vietnam, France, Czechoslovakia, the USA and elsewhere, but over here radicals were basking in reflected glory from abroad. Why else are ex-radicals (and just about everyone else) in this country so nostalgic about the Sixties? Real revolutionary situations are grim and brutal and do not lend themselves readily to nostalgia. Americans have little affection for the decade – for them it means Vietnam and serious civil strife at home – they get their warm glow from harking back to the Fifties.

Our days of struggle came in the Seventies, when student radicalism (which did not die out in 1974, as many seem to think), along with punk anarchy and large-scale working-class militancy, had some tougher battles on its hands. In the Sixties students occupied university buildings: in the Seventies trade-union action brought down governments. In the Sixties, the establishment was ‘rattled’, as Christopher Hitchens says (LRB, 4 June): in the Seventies it was in the throes of paranoia – Special Branch infiltration and MI5 ‘burgling and bugging’, while plots involving private armies and political coups were hatched and organised fascism stomped the streets. In Northern Ireland there was civil war and counter-insurgent military action on a scale not seen in the British Isles for decades. The revolutionary situation ‘died’ when the Winter of Discontent of 1978-79 failed to convert working-class militant action into any kind of political programme (much as in 1926). It wasn’t all flared trousers and tank-tops in the Seventies, any more than the Sixties was all Carry On films and Engelbert Humperdinck.

David Rice
Liverpool

From Jack Pudding

Christopher Hitchens rants beautifully in his review of memoirs of the Sixties, but his opening claim that the My Lai massacre was an act of policy is not substantiated. On the one hand, to assert that American top brass were in the air above the scene does not prove that they gave their assent to the horror; on the other hand, to make such wild emotional claims captures the street spirit of the Sixties. Mr Hitchens is in tune with those times.

Jack Pudding
Hammond, Indiana

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Vol. 20 No. 16 · 20 August 1998

From John Kay

It’s ludicrous to suggest as Christopher Hitchens does (LRB, 4 June) that British Communists in 1968 ‘yearned for a quiet life’. The Communist Party of Great Britain opposed the invasion of Czechoslovakia and supported the Prague Spring unequivocally (this is a matter of record). And there never was an ‘ingratiating’ attempt ‘to keep in with the Labour Left and the trade-union apparat’. What was launched, long before 1968, was an open public campaign to develop a ‘Broad Left’ movement based on, but not confined to, the Labour movement. Myself and hundreds of others, Communists and non-Communists, distributed tens of thousands of leaflets inside and outside factories and elsewhere. The movement paid dividends over the years: against incomes policy and wage restraint; in developing TUC campaigning; in the 1972-74 miners’ struggles; in the Upper Clyde Shipbuilders’ successful fight; against British involvement in Vietnam. Hardly a quiet life. Our experience was that Tariq Ali and the Vietnam Solidarity Campaign were a factor for disunity and not helpful in our attempt to build a broad movement: storming the US Embassy and punch-ups were a distraction.

Hitchens writes that the Communist Party ‘took the day off’ when London dockers marched to Westminster in support of Enoch Powell, but the Communists in Britain have a record second to none in the fight against racism. The CPGB must, however, accept justified criticism of its failure to speak out against Stalinism. It has to be admitted that the Trotskyists were correct in many of their characteris ations of the Soviet Union. Ideological differences should not preclude open political discussion in which innuendo and sneers have no place.

John Kay
Glasgow