The next issue's cover announced: "STUDENTS - THE NEW REVOLUTIONARY VANGUARD", a sentiment that caused apoplexy among old-guard Marxists. The in-your-face front page of the first issue showed a photo of triumphant students in the Paris May events with the slogan: "WE SHALL FIGHT WE SHALL WIN PARIS LONDON ROME BERLIN". Edited by Tariq Ali, then a prominent member of the Vietnam Solidarity Campaign and a fiery orator, the broadsheet paper pulled no punches. It quickly established itself as the house journal of the anti-Vietnam war movement and the wider New Left politics that was developing around it. Named after a radical 19th-century publication, the Black Dwarf asserted continuity with its predecessor by numbering its first issue "Vol 13 Number 1". In June, I was invited to join the board of a revolutionary newspaper, the Black Dwarf. We also took part as individuals in guerrilla publicity strikes, including unfurling a banner in front of TV cameras at the boat race that read: "Oxbridge paddles while Vietnam burns." This featured a giant polystyrene hamburger with the effigy of a GI as the filling, plus music from Mick Farren & the Deviants. We also formed a street theatre group (later known as Red Ladder), set up a poster workshop, started a bookshop and - in the summer of 1968 - staged an arts festival in Trafalgar Square called Thang Loi, Vietnamese for "victory". ![]() ![]() Working from my home, we built up a list of people with skills such as graphic design that might be useful to the left, leading to the Daily Mail describing us as a "rentamob" agency. My personal contribution to this upsurge was to set up a cultural organisation called Agitprop with a group of friends. For a few days, as they fought nightly pitched battles with the police while the communist trade unions called a national strike, there really was the feeling that a revolution might happen there. "Be realistic - demand the impossible," said the Paris students during May's showdown. Everything about modern capitalist society was suddenly called into question. What had started as protests against the Vietnam war expanded to something far wider. And in Czechoslovakia, Russian tanks rolled into the country to silence the Prague Spring led by Alexander Dubcek. There were major riots in Germany, Paris, Mexico City, Brazil, Tokyo and Chicago. That anger fuelled a political radicalism that grew wider and deeper in its scope as the year went on, leading to a series of dramatic confrontations with the authorities around the world. The people in Grosvenor Square were very angry. This was the world's first televised war. ![]() Seeing those images again made me shudder with horror, just as I did when I first saw them 40 years ago. They show a naked Vietnamese girl, aged about six, running along a dirt road, the skin of her back burned off by napalm dropped on her village by American planes. Yet near the beginning of Leo Burley's South Bank Show documentary Revolution 68, commemorating the 40th anniversary of the riot and the extraordinary year that followed it, there are some iconic images that make the passion in Grosvenor Square understandable. The scale and the violence of that demonstration took the country by surprise. Back in the beginning of that year, on March 17, I took part in the demonstration against the Vietnam war in Grosvenor Square, London. Sorti peut après la séparation des officielle des Beatles, Power to the People révèle une intensité encore plus forte dans les paroles protestataires de John Lennon, pour qui tout devient possible si les gens s'unissent et passent à l'action.T owards the end of 1968 I discovered that John Lennon, who I had never met, really didn't like me very much. Chanson interprété par John Lennon dans son album "Plastic Ono Band"
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