On this day in 1968

a reply to: Sillyolme
For boys, it was about being rebellious by growing long hair.

a reply to: burgerbuddy

I believe we were a generation without a childhood.
Instead we had the cold war, nuclear bombs, Vietnam, Watergate...
Geez no wonder you can get therapists on speed dial now.

a reply to: DISRAELI

Thank you for sending the Beatles and The Rolling Stones.
Bright spots in a dark decade.

a reply to: DISRAELI

I don't remember the song but I remember my mother telling me to finish my dinner because there were children starving in Biafra.

a reply to: DISRAELI

We must have been passing through some dark cosmic cloud or something. Didn't anything good happen that year?
In July I went to visit the Berlin wall.

a reply to: Sillyolme
One of your millionaires bought London Bridge.

a reply to: DISRAELI

Umm. I still like my guys a little shaggy.

a reply to: DISRAELI

My husband was too. We still experience the occasional generation gap. He'll say remember that and I'll say umm I was seven. I remember Barbie.

a reply to: Sillyolme

Many of us are now old enough to have been their parents...

I have one cousin, albeit a distant one, sleeping aboard the Arizona.

a reply to: Sillyolme

I can relate, when I was stationed on a Navy frigate during the seventy's I was scared to death that a war would break out.

Much of that fear was the result of having to look at and handle torpedoes and missiles on a daily basis.

What I didn't know at the time is that the true purpose behind war is ALWAYS concealed by lies.

To me the saddest part of this whole thing is the fact that wars have no other purpose other than to increase the wealth and power of the "elite", reduce the population, and help to create a global police state.

Few seem to realize that wars are carefully planned, scripted, staged, and orchestrated into existence just like any other Hollywood production.

“All war in history has been hatched by governments, independent of the people’s interests, to whom war is always pernicious even when successful” ~ Leo Tolstoy

"War is the major way for the EVIL, sinister, insane Illuminati to control humanity." ~ Michael Shore

"Wars are all based on lies" ~ Charles Young.

"All war is based on deception." ~ Sun Tzu, The Art of War

“Most wars are engineered by the Illuminati to weaken civilization and create a global police state" ~ Henry Makow Ph.D.

‘The first casualty when war comes is truth.’ ~ Senator Hiram Johnson

My diary noted a list of themes which were being discussed on the current news;
Criticism of United States on refusal to go to Warsaw for talks with North Vietnam
More student rioting in West Germany
Riots by Basques in Spain
Accusations by East Germans of piracy when a West German ship rammed a liner
More shooting over the Jordan
Tanzania recognises Biafra [the secessionist state in Nigeria]

A nice quiet weekend, then.

The puzzling one now is the piracy story.
Google brought me this;

-A West German submarine chaser rammed an East German cruise ship, the Volkerfreundschaft, in darkness early today while rescuing a defector in the Baltic near Fehmarn Island.

www.nytimes.com...

But also this;

In 1968 the East German passenger ship Volkerfreundschaft forced a collision with the West German anti-submarine patrol craft Najade, which was saving the fugitive who had jumped overboard from the Volkerfreundschaft

And also this;

MV Astoria is a former ocean liner now operated as a cruise ship by Cruise & Maritime Voyages. She was ordered in 1944, and launched 9 September 1946, as Stockholm by Götaverken in Gothenburg for the Swedish America Line (SAL). During her almost seven decades of service she has passed through several owners and sailed under the names Völkerfreundschaft, Volker, Fridtjof Nansen, Italia I, Italia Prima, Valtur Prima, Caribe, Athena, and Azores before beginning service as Astoria in March 2016.
As Stockholm, she was best known for colliding with the Andrea Doria in 1956, resulting in the sinking of the latter ship.
With the retirement of Doulos Phos in 2010, Astoria is (as of January 2016) the world's second oldest active oceangoing passenger ship after Sea Cloud.

en.wikipedia.org...
(But the Wiki page does not mention the 1968 collision at all)

The British politician Enoch Powell made a notorious speech warning of the dangers of excessive immigration.

He quoted a translated line from Virgil about "I seemed to see the river Tiber foaming with much blood", for which reason the event is known (inaccurately) as "the rivers of blood speech".
I've seen the suggestion that Powell's classical education was a political drawback, if only because his training in Greek philosophy led him towards the strictly logical answer to problems, rather than the politically possible answer.

On this occasion, reactions were very mixed.
On the one hand, students marched towards his home chanting
"E-noch!
We WANT you!
DEAD!"
On the other hand there were strikes and marches in his support from many working-class groups, such as dock workers.

On the 23rd of April, the Race Relations Bill was introduced into the House of Commons. Enoch Powell's notorious "rivers of blood" speech (see previous post) had been delivered in anticipation of the event. From his seat on the government benches, the Labour politician Richard Crossman observed the impact of the speech on the unity of his Conservative opponents;

Then up rose Quintin Hogg and made one of the most statesmanlike speeches I’ve ever heard, transforming the whole party situation. If he hadn’t made this speech and we’d just been left with the attitude adopted towards Enoch Powell by Heath [Conservative leader] and Maudling, bipartisanship might well have broken down and the Tory party lurched nearer to Enoch. There sat Powell in the third row back, glowering, with everybody eyeing him and only Gerald Nabarro up in the front giving him overt support. I suppose there are a number of active supporters of Enoch Powell among the back benchers, but the vast majority obviously feel he’s behaved very badly and that they must support their front bench in order to avoid a split.

Richard Crossman, Diaries of a Cabinet minister, Vol2

(At the time, Sir Gerald Nabarro was best known for the Victorian exuberance of his moustaches)

P.S. I tried to post this on the relevant day, but the hotel Wi-Fi shut me out.
The Bill may be seen as the British equivalent of the Civil Rights Act, though the issue in Britain was driven by a different dynamic- not freed slaves, but voluntary immigrants importing their own culture.

The 1831 version of London Bridge was being dismantled, to be replaced by a shiny new bridge. The old bridge was bought by Robert P McCulloch to be re-erected in Arizona;


This transaction gave rise to a persistent British legend to the effect that the brash American millionnaire thought he had acquired Tower Bridge;


He always denied the suggestion, of course. But as Mandy Rice-Davies said in a completely diferent 60's context, "Well, he would, wouldn't he?"
Let's put it this way. If we search Youtube for videos of "London Bridge is falling down", there is plenty of evidence that Americans in general confuse the two bridges;


So even if the purchaser himself understood what he was getting, some of his fellow-citizens may have picked up the wrong end of the stick.

The search was still going on, for a place to conduct the Vietnam negotiations.
Indonesia was now offering one of her warships, to be stationed in the Gulf of Tonkin, and thus accessible to both parties. The United States accepted the proposal, but the North Vietnamese did not.

Student protests in France led the administrators of the Paris University at Nanterre to temporarily shut down the educational institution. Instead of quelling the demonstrations, the act led to more protests and the calling of riot police by the university.

en.wikipedia.org...

A group of 500 students at the Sorbonne in Paris, France, protested against the closure of Paris University at Nanterre and the proposed expulsion of some students. Police arrived to disperse the protesters, and "the first riot of mai 68 ensued" and led to riots and university closures across the country.

The United States and North Vietnam agreed that their representatives would meet in Paris on May 10 to begin the first discussions on the format for peace talks to end the Vietnam War.

en.wikipedia.org...


The Davis Cup match in Stockholm between Sweden and Rhodesia could not be played because of demonstrations against the white-dominated regime in Rhodesia.

The Davis Cup match between Sweden and Rhodesia, which had been interrupted by protests in Sweden, was now continued in Paris. French students were also protesting, but not about Ian Smith.

In Paris, the Union Nationale des Étudiants de France (UNEF), France's largest student union, along with the union of university teachers, staged a march to protest against police actions at the Sorbonne. More than 20,000 protesters marched towards the Sorbonne, and the police charged the crowd with batons. When some protesters created barricades and threw paving stones, the police respond with tear gas. Hundreds were arrested.

The first of thousands of May 7 Cadre Schools, intended to "re-educate" party members, government bureaucrats, college students and professors, and other professionals with forced labor alongside peasant workers, was opened in Liuhe, a village in the Qing'an County section of China's Heilongjiang Province.

This was part of the "Cultural Revolution" being promoted by Mao-Tse-Tung, who was ruling in Peking.

In Paris, students, teachers and young workers gathered at the Arc de Triomphe to demand that criminal charges against arrested students be dropped and that the authorities reopen Nanterre and Sorbonne universities.

Following the agreement to hold the Vietnam peace negotiations in Paris, the Hotel Majestic was chosen as the location. Wiki does not mention this decision until the 10th, but it was announced on the news this evening.