remember the events of May '68!so many to choose from:
- soldiers open fire on protesters, kill 7, wound 15, as crowd chants "no justice no peace" and demands release of radical political prisoner
- US president Johnson narrowly avoids impeachment
- nationalist revolutionary publicly hanged
- European monarch forced to flee the country, is captured, later tried and executed
- birthdate of aristocrat and governmental figurehead later executed by Russian revolutionaries
- war in Tokyo
- war in Netherlands
- USA establishes formal holiday to celebrate militarism
- colonizer's forces negotiate peace accords with restive indigenous populations
- Middle Eastern city invaded and razed, entire population slaughtered or enslaved
- Parliamentary session in London, previously postponed due to plague, further postponed
- European powers end year-long war, redistribute holdings
- German Communist writes to his co-author regarding the difficulty of popularizing their economic writings in the UK, given "the English review philistines"
- future US president buys a male teenager to be his personal slave, makes notations of the purchase in his cash accounts ledger
- in China, date is inscribed on object later known as the earliest dated book
So what about it?
We could now proceed to lard this post up with the usual pseudo-intellecual nonsense, maybe this time about:
- the dangers of fetishization & ritualization of anniversaries
- warning against historical narcissism
- interrelationship between remembrance and forgetfulness, or
- the slippery nature of naming & indexicals,
but who would want to read that? Other than us, two days from now? Well, that's one reason.
posted by TiR at 7:01 AM
