The Spirit of '68

...Yet as Berman points out, even the libertarian contingent of the New Left, while critical of Stalinism, "kept falling for the Third World fantasies of the modern Marxists, kept wantingto celebrate Ho or some other tropical Communist as the hero of the libertariPower and the Idealists: Or, The Passion of Joschka Fischer and Its Aftermath by Paul Berman (SOFT SKULL PRESS, 310 PAGES, $23.95) Reviewed by Shawn Macomber an cause-an odd thing to do...

...Yet Fischer opposed the invasion of Iraq--"a country," Berman duly notes, "studded with Srebrenicas"-with a ferocity equaling 68 THE AMERICAN SPECTATOR JUNE 2006 BOOKS IN REVIEW his enthusiasm for the Kosovo war...

...They went to the movies...

...Unlike Clinton, who "worked at being liked," Berman writes, Bush's lack of deference to European ideals ("Dithering seemed to Bush a sign of moral laxity") and his supposed Texan/Born Again swagger ("The death penalty was scary, from a European point of view, but Christianity was terrifying") left those gentle Europeans souls willing to let Clinton bomb Serbians adamant about not letting Bush bomb Saddam...

...BOOKS IN REVIEW Were it not for its title, this book would sink like a stone, but precisely because of its title liberals in droves are reading it, probably through spread fingers like jurors looking at autopsy photos...

...It is not 1968 revisited...

...Berman-who supported the first Gulf War and the toppling of Saddam Hussein in 2003, even as he loathes Bush and bemoans his presidency_himself is eloquently plain in his opposition to totalitarianism of all stripes: "Realism is never genocide's enemy," he writes...

...That was 35 years ago...

...As Berman half-jokes with regard to Germany's participation in the Kosovo war, "German soldiers departed German soil for the purpose of saving someone else's life...

...This new generation, Berman posits, will need "its own way of speaking about the tragedies that descend all too fatefully upon the people who struggle against tragedies-upon those people especially, the risk-takers...

...They're elderly ladies in their seventies now...

...Such a sentiment might be premature...

...As for F ischer's journey from "a street-fighting militant, someone on the fringe of terrorist New Leftism, a rough and ready revolutionary, who then became a Green, and then a NATO supporter," the right wing was as likely to call it growing up as the left wing was to call it selling out...

...If the surviving members of the sisterhood all read The Sentence...

...Talk about radical...

...It's a more static opposition than the immediate aftermath of the September 11 attacks may have made it seem...

...For Fischer, this realization came when it turned out the mastermind of the Air France flight hijacked and diverted to Entebbe, where Jews were separated from the goyim and threatened with murder just as in lines at concentration camps, was a man he knew, Wilfried Bose...

...If only he had become, like so many ex-radicals from the nineteen-sixties, a right-wing newspaper columnist...

...Thus, a large segment of those who came to fall under the umbrella of the New Left were all the more susceptible to seeking common cause with any movement with left-wing revolutionary rhetoric backing it...

...Something new under the sun...

...laughable question, you might observe, given the Balkan massacres...

...All under the headline, "Student Protests in France Lack Spirit of'68...

...They were the generation of the second rate--the less-thanMalraux, less-than-Camus generation;' Bermanwrites...

...He was a man chosen to be Germany's forward face to the world...

...Those of Fischer's comrades who chose not to oppose the Iraq war or the destabilization of other Islamic totalitarian governments based on their interpretation of "the spirit of 1968," were now somewhat out of step with Fischer, even as he had been out of step a fewyears earlier with his own Greens over Kosovo...

...He worked in a bookstore...

...The Sentence: "In my experience it is difficult for a man who is attracted to a woman not to find her cute, rather than intimidating, when she gets angry...

...And so the beat of 1968 goes on and on...

...The leader of the 1968 French student riots Daniel "Danny the Red" Cohn-Bendit and Doctors Without Borders founder Bernard Kouchner, to name two...

...Ironically enough, in his brilliantly witty, brazenly honest (if occasionally overly sympathetic) warts-andall study of the 1968 generation, Power and the Idealists, New York University professor and confirmed man of the idiosyncratic left Paul Berman notes that one eras romantics were another eras failures...

...They dreamed, therefore...

...Fischer almost immediately rejected the latter by supporting NATO's campaign in the former Yugoslavia...

...Joschka Fischer may have left public life after the 2005 defeat of the German coalition government and his successor Dr...

...Berman's opinion on the controversy isn't difficult to discern as he approvingly summarizes poet Charles Simic's essayinFrankfurterAllegemineZeitung: "If only Fischer had become a stockbroker or a college professor, Simic observed, nobody at all would have complained about his left-wing background...

...Berman labels the movement's rough schisms as threefold: Retro-Marxists blissfully celebrating Leninist orthodoxy despite the Russian Revolution's quick turn to murderous totalitarianism...

...Four hundred police officers had to stand guard when he got up to address the convention...

...If you took the most ardent revolutionary," Bakunin once noted all-tooprophetically, "vested him in absolute power, within a year he would be worse than the Czar himself...

...Power and the Idealists tells a story of disillusionment and its aftermath: Disillusionment with dedicating one's life to setting down the path of a better world and ending up in a confusingly bad reality...

...Bernard Kouchner, for example, "was convinced that by agitating so energetically against the American invasion, French diplomacy was only sustaining Saddam in his fantasy that somebody, somewhere was going to rescue his regime...

...Fischer came to the foreign minister post in 1998 on the coattails of the Green Party, with its "twin principles of ecology and anti-militarism...

...And when he returned to the political world, he signed up with the Greens, whose movement was strictly post-New Left...

...Cast your mind back to the stars of the feminist movement in its heyday...

...Undermining the threat of American military might, in other words, made the use of it all the more likely...

...In late 2001 the Germans were willing to agree to the invocation of Article Five of the NATO charter-an attack on one member is treated as an attack on all members--primarily to bolster "the political strength of the more worldly and sophisticated people within the Bush Administration...

...Fischer wasn't a college professor or a stockbroker, though...

...The pacifists, Fischer soon found, were not pacified by his explanations...

...An anarchist salt and a Marxist pepper, sprinkled together...

...Nevertheless, whatever the incongruities, after this and other revolutionary barbarities (the 1977 kidnapping and murder of Hanns-Martin Schleyer in particular) Fischer dropped out of the scene and began to formulate a new vision of his life and ideals: "He drove a taxi" Berman writes...

...In Power and the Idealists Berman writes at length about the fascistic nature of current Middle Eastern regimes and the curious lack of solidarity with (and in some cases, hostility towards) liberal elements in those countries, by those who consider themselves strict anti-totalitarians...

...Nobody else was likely ever again to speak about 'our generation' and its mission," he writes...

...At the Green convention in 1999, someone threw a bag of red ink at Fischer and broke his eardrum," Berman recounts...

...S O IT WAS IN THIS HEADY, somewhat confused milieu (subsidized and made possible byAmerican military might, as Robert Kagan ably argued in Of Paradise andPower) that many of Europe's future leaders first cut their political teeth...

...policy on Iraq, the late Michael Kelly seized upon this statement, writing "You are the man for whom Munich wasn't enough, the man who needed Entebbe to convince him that Jew-murder was wrong...

...Left without an obvious fascist enemy to fight and Shawn Macomber is a Boston-based writer and frequent contributor to The American Spectator...

...Fischer's career survived the brouhaha, but onlybarely...

...The liberty such governments provided stoked fears, Berman says, of "an iron cage cleverly designed to resemble the open air of freedom...

...The New Left that emerged was by no means monolithic...

...and libertarian-anarchists who embraced, at least in theory, the verve and chutzpah of 19th-century anarchists Peter Kropotkin and Mikhail Bakunin, who famously feuded with Karl Marx himself over Bakunin's rejection of the concept of the dictatorship of the proletariat...

...The results were seldom pretty...

...There are many reasons to support or oppose intervention in those conflicts, but most positions seem watered down when split between the two...

...We've already lost two of them--Betty Friedan and Andrea Dworkin--in the lastyear alone...

...I hope they don't blot anything out because the book contains a sentence that is even better than the title, a sentence that could change America overnight, or for that matter, in a few seconds...

...I learned not only 'No more war' but, 'No more Auschwitz,'" Fischer, who attended a 1969 PLO conference in Algiers calling for all out war on Israel, later said...

...I T'S A GORDIAN KNOT the European '68ers will likely not undo at this late date, bogged down as they are attempting to establish a congruity between current mainstream acceptance and political power and the cynical utopianism (arrogance even) of the past...

...In service of uncovering that complexity Berman, following up his equally fascinating left-wing call to arms against Islamic fascism/totalitarianism Terror and Liberalism, delivers a well-paced, beautifully written narrative tracking the evolutionary phases of Fischer, as well as some of his notable old comrades...

...Shocked disbelief and towering rage are bad for elderly ladies...

...Fischer and not a few other former New Leftists were willing to forsake that "repetition" in order to end ethnic cleansing in Serbia...

...Neo-Marxists of the Ho, Mao, Che, and Fidel variety, who believed the revolution was being perfected outside of its early environs...

...The students were rdsistan ts who had nothing to resist...

...Of watching pacifist comrades embrace random crime and murder, even as the supposed Third World vanguards of the revolution turned out to be vile, deadly enemies, not friends, of The People...

...But the Greens had been asking that question all their lives, and repetition made it anything but laughable...

...Berman believes the story of the generation of 1968 ended on August 19, 2003, when suicide bombers blew up the temporary UN headquarters at the Canal Hotel in Baghdad, killing Sergio de Mello, along with four other well-known '68ers...

...Unsurprisingly, it was and is more complicated than that...

...eager to prove themselves as true revolutionaries, the generation of 1968 in Europe gazed upon the world, straining their eyes until the ghosts of Nazism were summoned forth here, there, and everywhere...

...Frank-Walter Steinmeier may have a more subdued academic background than his fiery predecessor, but the buzz around Europe is if the European Union were to add a foreign minister post to its roster Fischer would be one of the first to receive a phone call...

...When Fischer began his vociferous opposition to the U.S...

...The anarchisants spoke of freedom and personal autonomy and, at the same time, nodded respectfully at Che's self-sacrifice, even though Che's unmentionable achievement was to have established Soviet-style labor camps in Cuba...

...The no-war policy was the enemy of the less-than-war policy...

...What's more interesting-and what Berman gets to in short order-is how in less than 30 years Fischer had gone from violent revolutionary to a texture of the modern liberal political structure, "a low-key consensus of the not-too-radical," as Berman aptly describes it...

...The resisters...

...This was a disaster...

...They pretended to resist, even so, and pretending merely aggravated their self-doubts...

...True to its subtitle, Power and the Idealists uses the political firestorm set JUNE 2006 THE AMERICAN SPECTATOR 67 BOOKS IN REVIEW off by the January 2001 publication in Germany's Stern magazine photographs of Joschka Fischer-at the time German foreign minister and one of the most popular politicians in Europe--viciously attacking a police officer at a riot in 1973 as alaunching point to discuss how the various members of the old New Left have reconciled their youthful radicalism with maturity, respectability, and the vast power many of them now wield...

...Western democracies were hardly exempt from this apparitional summoning...

...Demoralized" by "finger-wagging lectures" from those who had resisted the Nazis or Spanish fascism, the young people who took over the left-wing movement in the 1960s and 1970s suffered from an acute inferiority complex...

...Didn't American hegemony pose a terrible danger to Europe and to the world, perhaps the greatest danger of all...

...Perhaps only today's protesters, dismissed as unworthy heirs (as their parents once were), will break the code, inasmuch as it can be broken, and find that delicate balance of despising America enough to maintain their basic worldview and opposing actual fanatical totalitarianism...

...So why Kosovo and not Iraq...

...JUNE 2006 THE AMERICAN SPECTATOR 69...

...His own party, the eco-pacifist assemblage, was a howling mob...

...Berman writes...

...The Spirit of '68 E VEN AS FRENCH YOUTH took to the street last March to protest new labor laws allowing employers to fire them without massive compensation packages, Elaine Sciolino sniffed in the International Herald Tribune that while the protest "called forth memories of that exhilarating, romantic leftist youth movement" of 1968, "this is not a revolt...