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.
#JOHN LENNON POWER TO THE PEOPLE LYRICS SKIN#
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. T owards the end of 1968 I discovered that John Lennon, who I had never met, really didn't like me very much.
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