The international crises of the past ten years may come to seem relatively mild compared with the rifts and dissensions which now threaten many countries internally. France is on the edge of a civil war. We have seen American cities burning, and Negroes expressing through their violence that desperation and anger which is the consequence of the United States' total failure to come to terms with their predicament. In West Germany students have been on the streets and confronted Herr Springer and the Bundestag with their rejection and contempt of a social system which is politically moribund and only precariously democratic. This too resulted in violence, as did the Vietnam demonstration in Grosvenor Square.
Everywhere 'respectable' citizens are bewildered, anxious, frightened or angry — or perhaps more commonly a combination of all four. The word respectable requires quotes in this context, since the character and identity of those who believe or acquiesce in the economie and power structure of modern capitalism, are under serious challenge. It is the decent solid citizens who call for harsh authoritarian measures against students; whose hate mythology is one of ' long-haired pinkoes'; who in England find sanction in Enoch Powell's inflammatory racism for their own bigotry and prejudice against coloured people.
The trouble is not confined to the capitalist world. In the Soviet Union and Central and Eastern Europe, comfortably placed men and women doing well enough out of the system are experieneing criticism, attack, and demands for change from the young. There (with the recent and hopeful exception of Czechoslovakia), dissent is put down in the name of Socialist discipline and party authority Here, dissent is acknowledged as a social-democratie right — but if it strays from impotent, ordered demonstration into an actual clash with the authorities as represented by the police, then there are howis of outrage from au sides.
We then have the curious paradox of communist and capitalist authorities alike making similar sorts of horrified noises, and exerting their respective forms of violence against rebellious elements so as to preserve their respective kinds of 'order'.
*ve it seems in a period when several major strands of history are drassmend 'her Tha Soviet -volution has failed genuinely to revoluponse human relas onships, and whereas it has created a materially socialised basis for living, the humane objectives which should justify its very existence seem as remote as ever. Post-war capitalism on the other hand has produced a society which must appear morally revolting to many people whether they understand its mechanisms or not — this at the expense of large underprivileged sections of each country, and more so at the expense of what is now known as the Third or Underdeveloped World.
The conclusions drawn by the young go far beyond the (as some would have it) tedious symptoms of the perenTAB WORKERS WILL TAKE FROM THE STUDENTS FRAGILE HANDS THE R Letter from a Respectable Man Dear Dwarf, the "Pre your • I doubt whether yer, Axe oww pae net. does hot preach any- nownere near as malicious as mangal an a suggest tnat before tou Big mouth the sad he bether the assasin of Rudi butschi see the house on fire as ever read a Springer ne ave been De idiotic can it might as well piegel, Der Stern, radio or televisio ime Springer for his casc nc 1s a crank, and t actons 1 there is no one in sight You mention Jack Dash. What better build. better houses than we have got. nial generation-confliet. Far from being ideological hooligans, the minority who have placed themselves at the point of physical struggle with the apparatus of power are dramatising contradictions which the authorities would prefer to remain concealed. When it has been pointed out that violence is immoral and intolerable, nothing has really been said, since each side can and must apply the proposition in terms of its own assumptions about what constitutes a just society. If students could in principle refrain from attacking policemen - policemen could also in principle refrain from attacking students. When they are face to face, the issue is academic since society cannot of course give way and neither can the students yield, when they have already seen that the traditional democratic processes' result only in the perpetuation of a system they reject politically, morally and socially. If a minority in these conditions must inevitably lose out, this does not mean that what they stand for and believe is wrong. The question is whether society will choose to understand it, and this is doubtful, for to do so would be to concede the signs of its own disintegration.
None the less it is time the 'respectable citizen' began to understand the real standards by which he lives, as opposed to the cherished delusions he believes to standards.
This far from mythical creature lives rooted in his smug individual interests. He lives relatively unmolested and in comfort whilst most of the world lives in oppression ind misery. He votes for his system because his systen gives him what he wants, yet it withholds from him the means of understanding that what he is getting is trivial even when it is not plainly squalid. When things go wrong, he reaches for the nearest seapegoat. - and there simply an underting to take the brun opinis rage and simply an underling to take the brunt frustration. He makes money out d. every hing and everyone, given the chance - not stopping short at the most barbarous means of destruction. He produces and consumes at random, and wastefully. He builds ugly eities and makes the air stink and throb from the pursuit of his and unknowingly in a disastrous prison of acquisition and greed. Abov delell, it is an economic (and therefore political fact th as rao go his ugly way and make his despicable little nher, he must exelude from this paradise the hungry despairing millions. At worst, should they rebel, they will be bombed into submission. At best, the creeping financial and industrial network whose blood money protects him from most of the facts of live, will exploit those whose needs he ignores.
That is Respeetable Man. Maybe he will have to go. And maybe there are increasing numbers of people who will not regret his passing, or shirk the means necessary to push him off the stage — into the wings of history.
DAVID MERCER • Be Liken into public our ant you see tha WacICyC press, up awarts to Blants Giant:
BLACK DWARF Communist eountries. You would b ent to prison or mental homes if you what you are doing in Russia if you fail to see that, I suggest you he Bind Deart name ind call yoursel are what you of their intellect started trying to make use K. H. KUKOWSKI 18 Walmer Gardens, Londos, W13 It does not seem very intelligent to 4 May
TEL BLACK DWARF
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oF him believe in Go and deny tan. Motto aer Many in social-democracy and freedom, and live unthinkingly