Remembering the real 1968 revolutionaries
On 21 August 1968, the Warsaw Pact invaded Czechoslovakia and ended the "Prague Spring" with its tanks. Four days later, seven human rights campaigners stood in Red Square and unfurled banners with the slogan "For your freedom and ours". For asserting their right to protest against the totalitarian regime in the Kremlin, they were immediately arrested, sentenced to prison and sent to Siberia. Their act of bravery was as much ignored by the Western left-wing media as the rioting of students in Paris was hailed.
In the long run, the most noble of the "1968's" where not the French, German, British or American students and intellectuals; the real heroes of that time were Sakharov, Bonner, Landsbergis, Milosz, Kuron, Karpinski and Havel. They helped create a human rights movement that would spread throughout the Soviet bloc and discredit the tyranny. The 1989 revolution would not have been possible without them.
The Marxist, Marcusian and Sartrian dialectics that inspired the students in France, Germany, Britain and the USA in 1968 have been completely discredited as amoral, selfish posturing. The truly revolutionary idea of that year was the notion of human rights that inspired the captive peoples of the Soviet bloc to protest in public and risk imprisonment, exile or death.
At a time when the spoiled brats of 1968 are being romanced for their excesses, we should all make a vow that when the 50th anniversary of that seminal year comes around it is not the opponents of freedom who will be honoured, but its defenders. They faced down the tanks; they went to Siberia. They started a revolution that spread from Prague to Red Square and beyond. They were the real revolutionaries.
