I should welcome Billy as the latest entrant to the Cherwell24 blogging community. His funereal post on how McCain’s going to be six feet under before he's even finished in the White House made us rather depressed, but here’s something about the younger generation to get us a in a bit more of an optimistic mood.
Those of you who don’t waste all the day reading blogs (ahem) might not have seen this. Barack Obama’s campaign HQ is ‘decorated’ with a nice poster of the Marxist revolutionary Che Guevara.
What’s this got to do with the topic of this blog? Good question. Hold on.
Yesterday I took the trip up to Marburg (nice university town) to interview an activist from Die Linke, the hardline socialists who’ve just won their first rural West German state seats. The party are holding a congress in May to mark the 40th anniversary of 1968, the year that student activism (especially on the far left) was born. You’ll hear more about the interview in due course, but I’ll mention one thing a few things now.
He denied the aim of the “1968-Kongress” was to glorify 1968 (the name’s just a coincidence, I assume), and when I asked him if his party were in fact communists, he gave a five-minute response about there being loads of different strands of thought in his party. You can usually tell more about a politician from what questions he or she doesn’t answer than from any actual responses, so I took it as a “yeah, kind of”. And did he condone the German anti-capitalist terrorists of the 1970s? No, they were wrong, he said.
At least they’ve got Obama’s support, I guess.
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