From 1968: the Year That Rocked the World by Mark Kurlansky

Kurlansky discusses a total of sixteen popular uprisings – in addition to those in the US, France, and Czechoslovakia – that occurred in 1968. I  list four more that have clearly altered the course of world events. As I recall, the way the mainstream media reported them minimized the threat they posed to established authority. Perhaps this is why many progressives tend to underestimate their significance.

Mexico

• Tlaleloco Massacre in lead-up to 1968 Olympics (September)

According to Kurlansky, the Tlaleloco Massacre, like the Soviet invasion of Czechoslovakia, was the beginning of the end for Mexico’s corrupt and totalitarian PRI party, which ruled continuously between 1929 and 2000. Mexico’s 1968 student movement was extremely fractured until it unified in response to systematic and brutal police and army repression. Mexican President Gustavo Diaz Ordaz, who was intensely paranoid about the increasing politicization of the Olympics (by black athletics protesting efforts to reinstate South Africa’s apartheid team), especially in light of the massive street protests that occurred a month earlier at the Chicago Democratic Convention.

The London Guardian reported 325 “official” dead in the massacre, though thousands more were imprisoned or simply “disappeared.” This triggered more than a decade of well-organized protests by family members demanding to know the whereabouts of their loved ones.

Spain

• Public emergence of the underground Basque separatist movement (ETA), with the adoption of a strategy of violent resistance to violent repression by Spanish police.

Palestine

• Adoption of strategy of violence by Fatah and the Palestinian Liberation Army (under Yassir Arafat)

In response to Israel’s territorial gains in the 1967 war (the Golan Heights from Syria, the West Bank from Jordan, Gaza Strip from Egypt and East Jerusalem from Jordan), Fatah and the Palestinian Liberation Organization, under Yassir Arafat, became the dominant force in Palestinian politics. Previously Palestinian/Israeli policy was controlled by pro-Baathist Arab nationalists in the Arab countries bordering Israel. Fatah and the PLO openly advocated a strategy of violence and the training thousands of Palestinian refugees in Syria, Lebanon, and Jordan as guerrillas.

Nigeria

• Brutal siege by Nigerian army (with British assistance) of Biafra independence movement in oil-rich Niger delta.

Biafra was spun by the US media as yet another African famine, with all the images they showed is of starving Biafran children with their swollen Kwashiorkor bellies. The real story was that Nigerian forces (with British assistance) were brutally suppressing the Biafran separatist movement in the oil-rich Niger Delta. Besides shooting more than fifty thousand of them, the Nigerian army was deliberately starving them to death.

The US response was to turn it over to private relief agencies to airlift supplies. Lyndon Johnson and the UN turned a deaf ear to an urgent plea for military support for aid aircraft that were being shot down by the Nigerian army. He said we couldn’t interfere in the internal affairs of an African country (only an Asian country like Vietnam).