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Belfast and Derry in Revolt. Simon Prince
Читать онлайн.Название Belfast and Derry in Revolt
Год выпуска 0
isbn 9781788550956
Автор произведения Simon Prince
Издательство Ingram
WHAT’S LEFT
Another McCafferty story: it is one that has been misremembered, yet in such a way as to lend a suitably cinematic quality to her introduction to the men and women who transformed her life and her city. ‘One gloomy autumn afternoon [in 1967]’, she begins, ‘Eamonn McCann came down the street, bursting with energy…I complained of boredom. Why didn’t I come up to the Londonderry Labour Party headquarters that night and help in the forthcoming general election campaign? he asked.’127 In fact, McCann was in London during 1967, the next election in Derry was a May 1968 by-election and McCafferty was away for almost the whole of that spring.128 While these details had faded, certain memories of McCafferty’s old comrades continued to blaze bright: Cathy Harkin was ‘separated from her violent husband’, ‘rearing a son’ and believed that ‘one day we would run Derry’; Dermie McClenaghan ‘loved Frank Sinatra’, ‘worried about his family’ and lived near a ‘corner bookies’ on which someone had graffitied ‘We want better odds’; Ivan Cooper, ‘the only Protestant’, ‘managed [a] factory’ and ‘thought life was a breeze’. But, they were all outshone by McCann, with his ‘Elvis sideboards’, ‘brilliant orator[y]’ and ‘breathtaking’ good looks.129
Other Derry radicals, such as McClenaghan and Melaugh, also remember how McCann ‘brought a lot of energy’ and ‘a lot of positive ideas’ back with him from London in the spring of 1968.130 McCann himself recalled coming home convinced that he ‘could sweep up the local, parochial politics…by introducing an international dimension’.131 ‘Youthful dissidence’ was ‘a world-wide phenomenon’, the Central Intelligence Agency told President Lyndon Johnson in September 1968: ‘Because of the revolution in communications, the ease of travel and the evolution of society everywhere’.132 The State Department agreed that the upheavals were ‘truly international’, that young people facing similar political problems were looking to their contemporaries in foreign countries for help solving them.133 McCann, thinking back forty years on, linked ‘direct action’ with this ‘wider perspective’: ‘direct action was … the hallmark of the radical movement …in London and across the world’, the ‘tactic of the civil rights movement [and] of the anti-Vietnam war movement’.134 (Although there is, of course, an element of recasted memories here, McCann has consistently taken this line over the decades.) The ‘global Sixties’ was an external shock to the local political system.
During the second half of the 1960s, the civil rights and anti-war movements radicalized non-violence and helped build up links between activists around the world. In 1966, Stokely Carmichael, the then chair of SNCC, began calling for ‘black power’ – which came to stand for armed self-defence, for political and cultural self-determination and for international solidarity. This did not, though, mark the end of the civil rights movement after a decade of successes. Black power grew out of the long-standing black self-help tradition and of the general black opposition to imperialism.135 These were roots that black power shared with the civil rights movement, too, and both sets of activists worked together to transform citizenship and democracy in America.136 Carmichael’s ambitions also went beyond the United States, leading him to embark upon a tour of foreign countries throughout 1967 that was to bring him to London in July for the Dialectics of Liberation Congress.137 The head of its planning committee wanted this event to bring together ‘groups [from] all over the world [that] are doing much the same’ and to ‘get this transnational network established’.138 One of the connections made was between Carmichael and McCann.139 When Carmichael addressed the congress, he declared that black militants were ‘going to extend our fight internationally and hook up with the Third World [because] the fight must come from the Third World’.140 A few months later, McCann’s Irish Militant newspaper, which ‘carried’ the ‘banner’ of the ‘Fourth International’, urged its readers to ‘do what the Afro-Americans are doing’.141
An African-American radical was also among the star performers at another European congress which had been organized to ‘commence the co-ordinated battle against imperialism’: the International Vietnam Congress held in West Berlin during February 1968.142 Although she did not mention his name in her article, Ulrike Meinhof, who was on a winding road from pacifism to armed struggle herself, quoted him urging the packed hall to move from ‘protest to resistance’.143 The West German New Left had been taking inspiration from African Americans since the start of the decade; exchange students had returned home after participating in civil rights campaigns as evangelists for non-violent direct action.144 With the escalation of both police brutality and the Vietnam War, however, radicals were now borrowing and adapting the black power narrative and its fantastic promise of global revolution. As one of them summarized it, ‘the intelligentsia … must unite with the suffering masses of the Third World and themselves employ illegal, direct action against the state apparatus to weaken the imperialist powers’.145 Black power – especially the strand that posed as urban guerrillas fighting a national liberation struggle in America’s ghettos – served as a stepping stone between very different worlds and helped make the leap of imagination taken by the New Left appear more plausible.
Foreign delegations came away from the International Vietnam Congress eager to put into practice what they had seen and heard in West Berlin.146 French militants, for example, took illegal, direct action against the Paris offices of American Express by smashing its windows in March 1968. A number of student radicals from the Nanterre campus were arrested and this, in turn, led to rival leftist groups coming together to invade the administration building.147 Like their comrades at West Berlin’s Free University, the Nanterre activists disrupted classes, occupied buildings, staged pickets, showed films on Cuba and China, went on marches, insulted staff and their fellow students, covered walls in political and obscene graffiti and held seemingly endless meetings.148 They also turned non-violence into a euphemism. The March occupation caused 15,000 francs’ worth of property damage; the Enragés in particular were referencing, not King or even SNCC, but the Watts rioters, who had set their black Los Angeles ghetto ablaze in August 1965.149 The French philosopher Raymond Aron described these tactics as ‘non-violent violence’.150
Britain’s Vietnam Solidarity Campaign (VSC), with which McCann was heavily involved, had also sent a delegation to West Berlin, and they had asked their German hosts to act as movement consultants.151 While London’s demonstrations may not have matched the militancy of those taking place on the continent, British-based Trotskyites were nonetheless part of the global trend.152 In the autumn of 1967, ahead of the March on the Pentagon and the solidarity marches around the world, the Irish Militant argued that one of the ‘duties to Vietnam’ owed by ‘socialists in Western Europe’ was to provide a ‘diversion of attention’. ‘It [i.e. the day of marches] will be the first occasion that the imperialists have been confronted in all countries of the world at the same time’.153 Activists in London confronted the police outside the American