From the Red Guards to 1968. The dictatorship of youth

This was far more than a few smashed shop windows and a bit of street fighting. It was the most formidable, devastating and bloodiest clash between generations of the twentieth century – perhaps of all time. It was a theatre of unbridled passions and unheard-of cruelty. They killed, tortured and massacred one another in clashes between youth factions – veritable armed gangs. Not just with belt lashes—their weapon of choice—nor just with sticks and iron bars, but with heavy military weapons. They mimicked war and actually waged it. For what exactly? After more than half a century and countless studies, the reason for that hellish chaos remains unclear. They all declared themselves revolutionaries, all loyal to the President, all ready to give their lives for him. They all raised the red flag of the revolution, the Little Red Book with its quotations. Each gang gave itself revolutionary names. And they labelled their opponents as reactionaries, lackeys of imperialism and capitalism. They did not realise they were being manipulated, used as cannon fodder by factions of adults and old men at the top of the Communist Party – by those who truly held the power.

It was a disaster, a tragedy, for hundreds of millions of people. The protagonists of the greatest generational rebellion of all time, the ‘Red Guards’, are sometimes referred to as a ‘lost generation’. Some have called them ‘Mao’s Children’. It was he who had called them to rebellion. He urged them to ‘shoot at headquarters’ – that is, at the party of which he was the leader. He incited them to violence, lynchings, looting and massacres. The first generation of Chinese not to have experienced war or been decimated by famine was a bored generation. They enthusiastically followed the pied piper as he led them into the abyss. At that time, China was not threatened by a foreign invasion; the chaos and the endless chain of atrocities were entirely self-inflicted. To what end? For what purpose? There is only one possible explanation: the struggle for power at the very top of the dynasty.

My generation too – the ’68 generation – was born bored. It needed something new. A breath of fresh air from the daily grind. Think back for a moment to the great films of the 1960s. The gilded, bored youth of Fellini’s "La dolce vita" (1960). La noia (1963) and Gli indifferenti (1964), inspired by Moravia’s novels. Antonioni’s Il deserto rosso (1964), with Monica Vitti crawling desperately along the walls. A jolt was needed. It was in the air; it should have been expected, like torrential downpours after a long, sweltering spell. There had been early signs: the ‘provos’ in the Netherlands, the University of Berkeley protesting against conscription for the Vietnam War, and the black jets ready to explode. Then came May 1968 in France. And the student movements in Italy. The aftershocks of the youth uprisings lasted a decade. They changed their respective countries. They provoked deadly backlashes.

A constant feature of youth protest is the ‘stupidera’. I was studying at the University of Milan. I happened to come across a flyer from the Milanese Student Movement on Facebook, dated 1971, featuring the slogans to be chanted during a march. “People’s war triumphs in Palestine”; “Proletarians, rise up with Red China”; “Long live Marx, long live Lenin, long live Mao Tse-tung”; “Long live the dictatorship of the proletariat”; “No to revisionism, no to factionalism, down with the thought of Mao Tse-tung”. And other daft little things like that. A lecture theatre, obscenely daubed by graffiti artists, had been renamed the ‘Kandebu lecture theatre’, after the slogan ‘ce n’est qu’un début’ from the Paris May 1968 protests. For the record, at the time, although I was young and sympathised with the student movement, I sided with the revisionists of the Italian Communist Party (PCI), whom they hated so much. A few years ago, when I bumped into an old fellow student from my philosophy of science course with Geymonat – who had since become the wife of a magistrate – I dared to tell her that those had been foolish, wasted years. All hell broke loose. She wanted to strangle me.

It is traditional to associate the elderly with wisdom, weariness, and perhaps cynicism. Young people, on the other hand, are associated with impetuosity, recklessness and a thirst for adventure. The conflict between generations has been a recurring theme since ancient myths and theogonies. Sons rebel and kill their fathers, who in turn devour their sons. Oedipus unwittingly kills his father, then is forced to curse his sons, who will ultimately kill one another at the gates of Thebes. Sigmund Freud made psychoanalysis famous through this story. It occurs in Athens and Sparta during the Peloponnesian War: the old guard pitted against the young Alcibiades and Pericles. It also occurs in ancient Rome, where fathers were masters. It is evoked in the Jewish Bible ("Honour your father and mother", as one of the Ten Commandments states). It had been foreshadowed in Hittite and Assyrian-Babylonian mythologies. A collection of essays edited by Stephen Bertman, The Conflict of Generations in Ancient Greece and Rome (Amsterdam, Gruner, 1976), is strikingly relevant today.

Young people have recently sprung into action across the globe. From the Serbian students who ousted the champion of Serbian nationalism, Vucic, to the ‘cockroaches’ – the millions of students in India who are challenging the dominance of the Hindu nationalist Modi, and whose protests began over rigged exams that favoured the usual spoilt brats – to the students in the streets of France and Italy. Observers note that similar mobilizations could soon emerge in American universities, inner-city neighborhoods, and town squares, particularly if former President Donald Trump were to lose and attempt to invalidate the mid-term elections. These are not movements controlled from outside. There are those who would like to label them at all costs. But for other purposes – the purposes of their own political camp. They try to associate them with the ‘casseurs’, with Mélenchon-style populists, with the ‘black bloc’, with insurrectionary anarchists, with ProPal. But those elements were there before, and have always been there. Manipulation and exploitation do not consist in inciting the movement. If anything, they lie in the insistence on lumping everything together. For Trump, it’s all the fault of those ‘communist’ Democrats (as well as, of course, the immigrants). He is said to have despised the generation that truly made America great – the rock ’n’ roll generation. Macron, at least, has been sincere. In a 2005 interview with the writer Emmanuel Carrère, he confessed: ‘I was never a teenager. I don’t like teenagers. I don’t understand them.’ In Italy, officials would be less forthright; such remarks would provoke derision. Instead, they pretend to know their adversaries well and simply blame the judges and the ‘left’ en masse.

There have been calls from many quarters, including highly authoritative ones, to study these ‘unknown’ young people, to understand their motivations and their ‘unprecedented’ forms of protest. A most laudable intention. We do not know them. The suggestion, however, unpleasantly recalls the manner in which oversized insects are studied and dissected in the intergalactic dystopia of Starship Troopers, Paul Verhoeven’s film (1997). A new generational conflict is being evoked – one that is structural and epoch-making. Lorenzo Bini Smaghi has written lucidly about this in these columns. The British conservative historian Niall Ferguson speaks of today’s young people as “an endangered species”. They realise they are being ripped off. But they do not yet seem to have fully grasped who is ripping them off. Obviously, it is us old folk, who are enjoying our pensions and other privileges whilst bequeathing to them a mountain of debt, very little growth and no hope for the future. Pierre Rosanvallon, the venerable theorist of democracy, writes of “a generational conflict supplanting class conflict”. The French, as we know, are prone to hyperbole, and love to express themselves in a convoluted manner, philosophically overcomplicating even the simplest of matters. There are those who bring up a vague notion of “discontent”.

I’m not convinced that the category ‘generation’ is sufficiently explanatory. We older folk, born in the wake of the immediate post-war baby boom, have led an ‘interesting’ life. We once had great hopes, too. Now, as our numbers grow proportionally, we are placing a burden on the healthcare system and on the public debt borne by the younger generation. At some point, it became fashionable to assign a label – usually a letter of the alphabet – to successive generations at intervals of around twenty years. It began with Generation X (nothing to do with the ‘X’ favoured by General Vannacci), those born between 1965 and 1980, made famous by the bestselling novel by the Canadian author Douglas Coupland. Then came the Millennials, who came of age around the turn of the millennium, followed by Generations Y, Z, Alpha, and finally the Betas, born in 2025, who will come of age in 2039. A nomenclature that no longer explains anything.

I prefer to limit myself to recalling the youth rebellions I experienced, or knew first-hand. Neither my schoolmates of ’68 nor Mao’s Red Guards were orphans or beggars. They were not victims of famine or economic crisis. Social hardship had little to do with it. They were, after all, privileged. The first to rebel in China were secondary school and university students. In Beijing and other major cities. They had never gone hungry, not even during the ‘dark years’ that followed the Great Leap Forward. They were not outcasts. They enjoyed grain vouchers and cotton vouchers. At the expense of their peers, who were imprisoned for life, like serfs, in the People’s Communes. The catalyst was their idolisation of the leader. Boredom was also a factor. Making the revolution was infinitely more exciting than doing homework, or enduring the humiliation of selection based on merit, or – worse still – on status (preferably proletarian) and recommendations, or a network of family or political connections (what the Chinese call, with a term of absolute significance, guanxi). At a certain point, the young revolutionaries were rewarded with free trips. Free for all. Special trains carried them en masse to sow the seeds of revolution, to spread the violence throughout the vast expanse of China. For many young people, it was their first exhilarating, unforgettable experience. At last, they too were making the revolution, just like their fathers. ‘Revolution’ had come to mean ‘to beat’, ‘to crush’, ‘to strike’, ‘to smash’. ‘Counter-revolution’ – distancing oneself from Mao – meant ending up in forced labour in the ‘laogai’, the system of ‘re-education’ through labour, or a bullet to the back of the head. Their problem was not hardship, hunger or starvation. Boredom proved stronger than hardship, one might say in the manner of Dante. I have the impression that the same could be said of the Maranza youths or the lads who smashed shop windows in Milan.

Once they had thoroughly enjoyed themselves, Mao sent them to settle permanently in the countryside. “To learn from the peasants.” Seventeen million young people from the cities were mobilised as if in a massive military conscription. They were forced to abandon their studies and settle in remote villages and regions. They are called Zhiqing, “young people sent down”, to be re-educated at the country’s roots. For many, the experience was extremely hard. Yet it was not akin to being sent to Siberia or the gulag; it was perhaps somewhat like going to war – all comrades, all in the same trench – but without anyone firing at them. Those who now govern the Chinese empire were, in their time, all ‘young people sent down’ to cut their teeth. This group included Xi Jinping. Having had his secondary school studies cut short, he volunteered for forced labour in Shaanxi. This was at a time when his father, a general and one of Mao’s most important comrades-in-arms (and therefore his entire family), were vilified as enemies of the people. This “descent” into the labour camps was also a way of protecting him from the wrath of the Red Guards. In his autobiography I Am a Son of the Yellow Earth, the “little prince” – as the children of top leaders are known in China – is keen to make it clear that he is not privileged, that he, too, worked his way up from the bottom.

Half a century earlier, in Europe, another entire generation – roughly the same age as the Red Guards and the Zhiqing – had rushed to enlist as volunteers, full of enthusiasm and joy. Spurred on by elderly politicians and refined poets, ‘aesthetes of war’, from D’Annunzio to Barrès, from Ernst Jünger to T. E. Lawrence. Une génération perdue. Les poètes-guerriers dans l’Europe des années 1930 is the title of the book dedicated to him by Maurizio Serra. The father of Futurism, Marinetti, extolled War, the sole hygiene of the world. An entire generation of the ‘best of the youth’ of the time – fanatical and romantic young people – had been lost in the trenches of the Great War. The survivors channelled their enthusiasm into the European fascist movements. ‘Giovinezza, Giovinezza’, which began as a goliardic – that is, student – anthem, became the triumphal anthem of Mussolini’s fascism. During the Weimar Republic, Nazism and other German right-wing movements appealed to the youth, pitting them against the ‘old’ politics, which they saw as weary and corrupt. The Hitlerjugend, or Hitler Youth, was established early on to organise, indoctrinate and even entertain German youth. After the Nazis came to power, it absorbed all other youth organisations, including the Boy Scouts and traditional student organisations. Membership was compulsory. By 1939, they had gone so far as to threaten parents with taking their children away and placing them in orphanages if they did not join. “You, my young people, are the most precious guarantee of a great future for our nation; you are destined to be the leaders of a glorious new order under the supremacy of National Socialism. Never forget that one day you will rule the world…”Thus did the Führer flatter them. They ended up being enlisted in the combatant SS and were sent to their deaths in Russia. They had to find them something to do to kill the boredom, apart from tormenting people and smashing the windows of Jewish shops.

Dictators and would-be autocrats have always had a soft spot for young people and the myths of youth. The boys and girls of the Hitler Youth swore to devote their lives to Hitler, just as the Red Guards swore to lay down their lives for Mao, and the Komsomol Pioneers to defend communism and Stalin. Among the tyrants of the twentieth century, Stalin was perhaps the least ‘youth-oriented’. During the debate on the decree lowering the age of criminal responsibility to 12 and imposing up to 25 years’ imprisonment for very young offenders, Stalin is said to have cut short any objections: ‘They’re young, they’ll survive!’

The Nazis, as is well known, were formidable when it came to propaganda, discipline, sport, rituals and stage design, theatrical backdrops, mass rallies and massive parades. What is extraordinary is that a significant proportion of German youth during the Third Reich rejected this kind of ‘entertainment’. According to some scholars, as many as 15 per cent of all Germans aged between 10 and 15 preferred alternative pastimes to the Hitler Youth. In some cities, this amounted to one in three young Germans. These dissenters were not necessarily politicised. They lacked the heroic allure of the student group the White Rose (Die Weisse Rose), active between 1942 and 1943 at the University of Munich. Nor did they possess the working-class aura of the group of workers’ children in Hamburg who gathered around Helmuth Hübener, a former Catholic Boy Scout and former member of the Hitler Youth, who was also executed by beheading at the age of 17 for writing and distributing leaflets against the regime. Those who drove the Gestapo mad were young lads and lasses with nothing to their name. Bored by regimentation and officially imposed pastimes, they would gather in gangs with fanciful and adventurous names such as the ‘Edelweiss Pirates’, the ‘Wild Bunch’ or the ‘Navajos’. They stood out for their ‘eccentric’ clothing and hairstyles. They would gather in the woods to dance to the rhythm of ‘Anglo-American’ swing, or frenzied ‘African-American’ rhythms. In short, they were guilty of the crime of raving. It wasn’t Piantedosi who invented it.

In August 1941, Hitler’s Chief of the Chancellery, Martin Bormann, was informed of a serious threat to state security: in Hamburg, 500 or 600 young people from sports clubs and sixth-form students were attending jazz concerts. They were dealing in records of degenerate music – English, American, or even ‘Jewish’. They were gambling. They mocked the Reich and their peers who had volunteered for the war. Even these rebels were almost all members of the Hitler Youth. Naturally, they could not belong to anything else. Yet they rejected its interference and hated its regimentation. They preferred the much-maligned American ‘excesses of freedom’. Worse still. Those degenerate German youths were against the war and refused to enlist. The girls ‘went from bed to bed’. In 1943, in Dortmund, two dozen young people were arrested on charges of having stolen ‘tobacco, alcoholic drinks and sweets’. ‘If they dare to do this in the midst of war, what will they be capable of once the war is over?’, was the obsession of the Nazi security services. There are photographs showing young people in civilian clothes, well-dressed, being hanged in rows on makeshift gallows in the street. They were summarily condemned as vandals, deserters, sympathisers of the ‘enemy’, delinquents and looters. In short, scoundrels: ugly, wicked and filthy.