Student rebels were 'frighteningly radical' (original) (raw)

A secret intelligence report drawn up to assess the threat from the May 1968 international student revolt warned the cabinet that a "shallow but destructive explosion" was to be expected in Britain "in the fairly near future".

British rebel student groups fuelled by nihilistic Marcusian philosophy were "frighteningly radical, badly lacking in theory, but dead-set on violence", according to the secret assessment for the cabinet's "anti-communism (home) official working group" chaired by Sir Burke Trend.

Whitehall files, released yesterday at the public record office, also show that the British government killed off, behind the scenes, a Council of Europe proposal at the peak of the 1968 riots to hold a Europe-wide summit between student leaders and the authorities. British officials were accusing their European counterparts of a "crisis of nerve" in the face of student unrest.

The report, drawn up by the Foreign Office's information research department, a shadowy anti-communist intelligence outfit, says the revolutionary student element in Britain was confined to small groups and individuals associated with the Radical Student Alliance, which was formed at the end of 1966 by Fergus Nicholson, student organiser of the British Communist party, a number of young communists, young liberals and a Trotskyist group which controlled the National Association of Labour Student Organisations.

Its purpose - in which it had little success - was said to be to wrest control from the moderates who had led the National Union of Students for many years. The RSA had been involved in the organisation of "most of the recent protest demonstrations at British universities".

The report says: "Under the influence of Trotskyists and Syndicalists, the RSA was concerned with the Vietnam Solidarity Campaign [another revolutionary Trotskyist organisation] in the violent demonstrations against the American embassy in March, and following the shooting of [Rudi] Dutschke in the demonstrations at the Germany embassy in April. It has regular contacts with the West German extreme leftwing Socialist Students League - which sent a strong arm delegation to Grosvenor Square."

The IRD report said that 100 members of the German SDS, led by Dutschke, had played a leading and organised part in the Grosvenor Square riot in front of the American embassy in London on March 17 1968. The German group were said to be the "acknowledged experts in methods of riot against the police and [they] send homemade Molotov cocktails and disciplined gangs to take part in militant demonstrations across Europe. Some of these activists are trained to attack police cordons in phalanx formation - a technique believed to have been evolved by Japanese student militants."

"It is generally known that Tariq Ali and David Robinson, secretary of the Vietnam Solidarity Campaign, which organised this demonstration, attended the international conference on Vietnam convened by the SDS in Berlin in February 1968, and there made contact with Dutschke, no doubt in order to make the necessary arrangements."

The report goes on to say that the VSC had links with the Trotskyist Fourth International, based in Paris, which had a network of contacts through which Trotskyist student militants kept in touch with each other. British student militants took part in riots in Bonn, Berlin and the revolt in the Sorbonne, Paris.

The IRD report also identified an influence from the American New Left in British student protesters saying many of them enjoyed "dollar remittances from home which makes them relatively prosperous in countries with devalued currencies". The report suggests the student movement was characterised by a disillusion with traditional ideologies and party politics - including communism.

"The militants look for revolution as an aim in itself. They turn to the exponents of revolution for their inspiration - Castro, Che Guevera, Mao and Ho Chi Minh - rather than to the ideologies which inspired their revolutions.

"If they have an ideological bible it consists of the work of Professor Herbert Marcuse, One-Dimensional Man. Marcuse is a 70 year old German Marxist professor ... His book has a simple theme: the complete rejection of the existing order ... The Marcusian philosophy is essentially destructive: it offers no clear model for a new order after the destruction of existing society. But young idealists who see a need for radical change, but no means to effect it, are ready to take first things first. The extent to which they are likely to carry this nihilistic philosophy into adult life will depend largely on the extent to which they can achieve satisfying careers when they leave university - hence the limited appeal of Marcusian philosophy to scientists."

Whitehall refused to be too alarmed by the prospects for student revolt in Britain and the broad mass of students reacted against the violence in Grosvenor Square. "There are seeds of trouble in the survival of Victorian ideas of student discipline, and in dissatisfaction with the level of student grants," the report said. The intelligence services regarded "the threat to the west presented by student protest" as a "potentially dangerous adjunct" to the communist subversion of west European morale and security.

But they also acknowledged the frustrations which gave rise to student protest in Britain were less acute than elsewhere and suggested more thought should be given to personal relations between university staff and students.