1968 - The Year When We Were Born Again

Stockholm in August 1968. A protest against Soviet's invasion of Czechoslovakia.
Photo: Hans Sandberg

The year 1968 took us by storm, especially if you were a teenager. We had been awaken to the world's unfairness and now change was in the air. We followed the news about the Vietnam War, the May Revolt in Paris, Black protest movements in the USA, and the invasion of Czechoslovakia. And we took to the streets to protest.

We were born-again even though we didn't believe in God. I had lost my childhood faith when I was eight years old. I cursed God and hid under my pillow, but nothing happened. That's how easy it was to see through the supernatural, but it was different with the Jesus, the human. I remember saying prayers, singing psalms in the morning and thanking God for the food at lunch time in elementary school. 

We had an illustrated blue textbook in second or third grade that told of the twelve-year-old Jesus who debated the learned at the temple and how he as an adult fed the poor when the fishermen came in with their catch. Maybe most of all, I remember how he cast out the merchants from the temple.

The step from Jesus to Marx was not as long as one might think. This maybe even harder to understand here in the USA, where religious sects and churches had grown through competition with other beliefs or interpretations. Christianity was the largest faith in this diverse religious marketplace, but it came to be dominated by a branch that drew narrow circles around the groups that were to be included in the “brotherly love." It was a Christianity that took part in, or closed its eyes to, the genocide of the native population, to the slavery, the oppression of women, racism and lynchings, exploitation, and imperialist wars. It’s true that there were other branches who fought against slavery and for equality, both before and after Martin Luther King Jr., but the loudest branch was the one that today takes Trump as its savior.

We who were awakened in the years around 1968 actually had a lot in common with the early Christian church and later popular awakenings. The Christian socialist and theologian David Bentley Hart recently raised the question of whether the first Christians were not in fact communists. They sold their property and shared their wealth so that everybody had what they needed. The rest was owned collectively. They loathed private property, which to many modern believers are more important than the Golden Rule. 

“The great John Chrysostom frequently issued pronouncements on wealth and poverty that make Karl Marx and Mikhail Bakunin sound like timid conservatives. According to him, there is but one human estate, belonging to all, and those who keep any more of it for themselves than barest necessity dictates are brigands and apostates from the true Christian enterprise of charity.” 

(Are Christians Supposed to Be Communists?, David  Bentley Hart, New York Times, November 4, 2017) 

Marx may not have been as radical as Chrysostom, but he shared the first Christians' dream of an equal society. He borrowed words from the New Testament when he in 1875 wrote that the society of the future would “inscribe on its banners: From each according to his ability, to each according to his needs!” 

Maybe it wasn’t a coincidence that we let our hair grow long and walked in Jesus sandals. The world I grew up in had taken shape after the second World War and its moral foundation had cracked in the shadow of the Vietnam war and 1968. This raised questions that the old generation and society could not answer, fundamental questions that were particularly challenging for us youths. 

Mark Lilla, an American author and professor, wrote about the process in a personal essay in 2005. He had grown up as a Catholic in Detroit during the 1960s and turned atheist at thirteen only to discover the Bible after having attended a Christian rock concert. He found faith after a night reading the New Testament and soon found himself among a group of born-again Christians. 

“This group was my substitute family throughout high school in the early 70's. I spent most nights with them, at prayer meetings, or guitar practice, or just sitting around on the shag carpeting of their living rooms, Bibles open on our laps. Ours was a rolling theological seminar devoted to interpreting the biblical message, and an open psychotherapy session where we helped each other adjust to being born again.” 

(Getting Religion, Mark Lilla, New York Times, Sunday Magazine, September 18, 2005) 

He described how the Bible became his only path at age fourteen. 

“Then I discovered the strange new world of the Bible. That discovery might have led me to other books, but there was no one to guide me onto that path. So the Bible became my only portal into the realm of ideas — ideas about morality, justice, cosmology, psychology, eschatology, mortality. The Bible posed all the important questions, questions that were vaguely forming in my adolescent mind, but that now took on shape and contour. And, of course, it answered those questions.” (ibid) 

For us young revolutionaries The Capital was our Bible and Mao’s Little Red Book our Small Catechism. We too sat around in circles with the books that explained everything in our laps. Lilla wrote that “all teenagers are dogmatists; a teenager with a Bible is simply a more intense teenager” and related how he would wander around in his school with a Bible at the ready, looking for sin and spiritual degeneracy, thinking that he did his victims a favor. I used to walk around with Mao’s Little Red Book at the ready, looking for bourgeois ideas.

Over time our passions ossified around Mao’s version of Marxism-Leninism. It became our canon and Beijing became our Jerusalem, just as Mecca, Paris, Washington, and Moscow had been to earlier generations. 

It was relatively easy to keep the faith when Mao was alive. He was like a living God who hadn’t hesitated to send a flood against the party he had founded, but ten years into the Cultural Revolution, we began to receive conflicting signals from the Middle Kingdom and Mao’s meeting with Nixon was followed by the Theory of the Three Worlds, which replaced the revolutionary class struggle with an international alliance against the two superpowers. Reactionaries and brutal dictators were now seen as allied in the struggle against the Soviet social imperialism. And when Deng Xiaoping had established himself as China’s leader a year after Mao’s death, the course shifted even more radically. China’s peasants were allowed to sell their surplus on free markets and foreign companies were welcomed to Special Economic Zones.

And as if that was not enough, Vietnam invaded Kampuchea at the end of 1978 and installed a puppet regime which led China to invade Vietnam in February 1979. Deng said that China wanted to “teach Vietnam a lesson.”

We didn’t immediately understand it, but it was the beginning of the end of Maoism. At first, we tried to patch-up our broken faith, but every time we thought we had the pieces right, the puzzle fell apart again. Everything was now open to debate. We had preached that wars were caused by capitalism and imperialism, but how could you then explain what was happening in IndoChina? And if Mao’s Cultural Revolution had not been able to prevent the corruption of socialism — was there any guarantee at all? We were convinced that the dictatorship of the proletariat was a democracy for the people and a temporary dictatorship over the former oppressors, but had not the people been oppressed during the Cultural Revolution? 

To a seventeen-year-old it was easy to live for the revolution. It felt meaningful to attend meetings, sell magazines, and lead study circles. The tiredness you felt when you came home from a long work session was not the tiredness of a wage slave, but the proud tiredness of a fighter. What others took as unselfish sacrifices was for the believer a pleasant duty. But when doubt set in, the many meetings and heavy tasks began to feel like sacrifices, colliding with other interests. 

“…the spell that transformed costs into benefits will be broken and the more usual kind of cost accounting will reassert itself. … As a result, the citizen will feel that he has vastly and unnecessarily overextended himself into the public domain and that a ruthless cutting down is in order.” 

(Albert O. Hirschman, Shifting Involvements, 1982, p 126) 

We had however invested so much in the revolutionary struggle that our first reaction was to persist and push harder than ever. And if a comrade slacked, the rest of us would step in. We read and debated even more in search of the correct analysis of the situation and the right path forward. We spent almost all our time at meetings and campaigns, why we didn’t see much of our families, friends or partners. 

A decennium had passed since 1968, and the revolution we had dreamt of never came. The cultural revolutions and protest movements of the 1960s had been followed by a reaction that gave us Reagan and Thatcher. 

Instead of saving the world, it was now about investing in yourself. 

 We tried to hold on to our faith as long as possible, but in the end you could not escape reality.

    Some switched side and became conservative, many became social democrats, while others tried to deal with their disappointment. Yet others came to wrestle with understanding what had happened. 

Posters in Stockholm. Photo: Hans Sandberg, 1969.

We Swam in the Caspian Sea Before Getting Stoned in Golestan (1974)

On September 29, 1974, I wrote in my diary that we had passed by a village whose mud houses had domed roofs. We had left Mashhad in northeastern Iran, a large city that was once an oasis on the Silk Road, and later became a major destination for Shia pilgrims. I remember an old man in turban waving angrily at me when I took photos from across the street of the Imam Reza shrine. A young guy offered to guide us through a museum within the shrine, but he rushed us through the rooms and didn’t seem to know much about the objects. The only thing he knew was that everything was worth millions of dollars… 

The Imam Reza shrine in Mashhad, Iran.
Photo: Hans Sandberg, 1974.

Before we knew it, we were at the exit, and he showed us that he expected a tip for his service. I don’t remember if we gave him anything, but maybe we did to get rid of him. 

The road from Mashhad to Herat in Afghanistan went southeast through a desert plain with mountains on both sides. The landscape was mostly sand-colored, except for where the land had been plowed making it dark brown. The only vegetation consisted of low bushes and tufts of grass.

Between Iran and Afghanistan. Photo: Hans Sandberg, 1974.

For some reason I didn’t write anything about the time when we were stoned by local kids in a Turkmen town. It must have been the previous day. We had driven north from Tehran, across Mount Damavand, and once we had descended from the mountain, we were met by a green and lush riviera on the southern shore of the Caspian Sea. After a break for swimming, we continued east towards Gorgan, capital of the Golestan province. Our drivers drove into a small town, hoping to find a restaurant. They parked the buses on the main street, and we left the buses to take a look at the town but were soon surrounded by a dozen young boys who soon began to grope the women, who in their eyes were indecent as they did not wear the burka. Several boys stuck their hands between the girls' legs. The situation quickly escalated, so the girls retreated into the buses, while a couple of us men formed a chain to hold back the rough kids. The buses slowly began to move. Once all the girls were safe on board, we ran after the buses and jumped in through the open front doors. We could hear rocks falling all around us and some hit the buses, but none of us were hit.

It was a nasty experience, and we were shocked to have been treated with such hostility. The only explanation I could come up with at the time was that the British colonialists once had staged a massacre in the area, which Jan Myrdal had written somewhere. But that was a long time ago, and it was more likely that the aggression reflected cultural intolerance and Islamic fundamentalism. Recently, I learned that the area at the south-eastern corner of the Caspian Sea has been subject to a long series of invasions, including one by Alexander the Great (ca 330 BCE.) If we had continued north, we could have visited the remains of the Great Wall of Gorgan – 195 km of fortifications – which protected the Iranian Parthian Empire from attacks by the nomads to the north at about the same time as the Chinese built the Great Wall of China for similar reasons. (For those who want to delve into the long and dramatic history of the nomads, I recommend Kenneth W. Harl's fascinating lecture series The Barbarian Empires of the Steppes published by The Teaching Company/The Great Courses in 2014).

*

We arrived at the Islam Kalah border station on a paved road through a flat, dry, and desolate desert landscape. We first stopped at the Iranian side and continued a short distance through no-man's land until we entered the Afghan side where the soldiers walked at their own pace, wearing uniforms that had not seen an iron for many years. I re-read Myrdal's Afghanistan book where he describes his and Gun Kessle's visit to Islam Kalah in the summer of 1958. They had slept in their Citroën CV2 on the Iranian side, and were happy when they entered Afghanistan, where the customs chief offered tea and introduced his brothers to the long-distance guests. We didn't get any tea, but we there were 41 of us in the two buses, so it was perhaps a bit too much to ask for. I interpreted the Afghans' behavior as bold and proud. They didn’t bow to worldly authorities in the same way as in Iran, I thought, influenced by my Swedish prophet.

When customs were completed, we set off in the direction of Herat, which for millennia has been located in the strategic and fertile valley of the river Hari Rud. This location has been both Herat's fortune and curse. Over and over, the city has been invaded, looted, pillaged, and the population slaughtered. The city was always rebuilt, but its bloody history continues to this day. Herat was called Artacoana and was the capital of Ariana, when Alexander passed by in search of the satrap Bessus of Bactria, who was fleeing after having murdered the Persian ruler Darius the Third.

The Citadel in Herat. First built under Alexander the Great,
the fortress was destroyed many times. The current building
was built in 1305. Photo: Hans Sandberg, 1974. 

A Thousand Year Old Thoughts About Love

Abū Muḥammad ʿAlī ibn Aḥmad ibn Saʿīd ibn Ḥazm al-Andalusī -- better known as Ibn Hazm -- lived in Andalusia, Spain, between 994 and 1064 (except for a period of exile in Mallorca after 1040.) 

He wrote a book about love in 1022 under the suggestive title The Ring of the Dove. I don't know if he had read Aristotle's Nicomachean Ethics, but I sense an echo of the latter's reflections about friendship in the learned Arab's text.  

Here is a part that captivated me. 

”The noblest sort of Love is that which exists between persons who love each other in God either because of an identical zeal for the righteous work upon which they are engaged, or as the result of a harmony in sectarian belief and principles, or by virtue of a common possession of some noble knowledge. Next to this is the love, which springs from kinship; then the love of familiarity and the sharing of identical aims; the love of comradeship and acquaintance; the love, which is rooted in a benevolent regard for one's fellow; the love that results from coveting the loved one's worldly elevation; the love that is based upon a shared secret which both must conceal; love for the sake of getting enjoyment and satisfying desire; and passionate love, that has no other cause but that union of souls to which we have referred above.

All these varieties of Love come to an end when their causes disappear, and increase or diminish with them; they are intensified according to the degree of their proximity, and grow languid as their causes draw further and further away. The only exception is the Love of true passion, which has the mastery of the soul: this is the love, which passes not away save with death.” 

(The Ring of the Dove, Ibn Hazm)

Note to the illustration: Manuscript to The Ring of the Dove can be found in the Leiden University Library.

Tea, Hashish, and an Arabic License Plate

Leaving Afghanistan.
Photo: Hans Sandberg, 1974.

2014

I’m searching for the name of the border crossing between Afghanistan and Pakistan. I remember that our buses rolled into a dusty customs station and parked at some distance from the administrative building. I don’t think there were any other vehicles there. After googling for a while, I find Torkham, which in 2014 looks like a very different place than when we arrived in 1974. The once sleepy customs station is now full of armed soldiers. Google shows images of long queues of trucks and cars, as well as many people waiting. No camels or goats, but burning or burnt-out trucks, explosions, dead soldiers. I also find news reports of wars and attacks, most recently  a Taliban attack on a NATO convoy near Torkham, which occurred on June 19, 2014. It destroyed 37 trucks carrying fuel and supplies.

We arrived late in the afternoon on October 4, 2014, and were told that we could not continue the same day. We had to wait until the morning since it was too dangerous to cross the Khyber Pass at night. There were bandits and robbers, and one of the villages along the way was called the "Den of Thieves".

Elisabeth and I were dead tired and fell asleep early in our bus. When we woke up the next morning, we were told by the others that the customs chief had invited everybody to a party in the customs building where they danced and were served hashish and tea. 

The next morning, one guy traveling with the other bus was caught while trying to steal an Arabic script license plate from a wreck behind the customs house. We were told that he normally should go to jail in Kabul, but the customs officer was a friendly man and let us move on once every one of us had apologized for our fellow traveler's behavior.

"I see that you are nice people and will let it pass, but be careful in the future," the customs officer said.

We all shook hands with him and two other officials. Then they walked us out and waved us off.

Later that day we begin the descent along a road that twists and turns through hairpin bends and tunnels. Behind us we see the silhouettes of the mighty mountains in the moonlight. The landscape is becoming more and more green. We are approaching Pakistan and are met by cultivated fields and long stretches where the road is lined with trees.

In Pakistan we are met by water and a green landscape. 

Photo: Hans Sandberg, 1974.

Footnote: There are about 40 languages in Afghanistan, with Dari and Pashto as the most common. Both are written in Arabic script.

(Translated from my October 4, 2014 post on Sandbergs hörna)

On the Way We Traveled to India in 1974

Approaching the Khyber Pass. The road is washed away.

Photo: Hans Sandberg, 1974.

January 2015

We traveled privately, without power. We were not spies, emissaries, traders, scientists, explorers, diplomats or luxury tourists. We traveled on two old buses to and from India, and then by train and local buses.

Each mode of traveling has its pros and cons, whether you walk to India like Thomas Coryat in the 16th century, or travel with caravans like John Mildenhall in the 17th century, or cycle, hitchhike, drive, take a bus, train, plane, or boat. Of course, walking or cycling from Stockholm to New Delhi would have been possible, but it would have taken a long time and been risky in more ways than one.

Hitchhikers are constantly meeting new faces and have a good chance of getting to know local people, but traffic was often quite light through eastern Turkey, northern Iran, and Afghanistan. Of course, on trains you can also meet interesting people, but you might as well spend days isolated in a compartment where no one speaks English. Moreover, there were no railways in Afghanistan, a consequence of the fact that the British never managed to colonize the country.

The advantage of taking a charter bus was that it was cheap and allowed us to gradually approach Asia instead of getting on a plane in Europe and landing in New Delhi 12 hours later. The flight is fast and efficient, but you don't experience any of the countries you fly over. On the bus, we spent much of the time looking out the window and experiencing the changes in landscape and culture. Besides, we had to go out among the common people every day to buy food and beverages. The disadvantage of travelling by bus was that we were stuck with the group and always had to return to the bus. We couldn't join people we met along the way or stop at a place we found exciting. The journey had to go on.

Maybe it would have been better to go by car, or take local trains and buses, but that would have been much harder, required more time, experience, and preparations. In contrast, a cruise I took with my family in the summer of 2014 included visits to Istanbul and Ephesus in Turkey. This is, of course, a very comfortable way to travel, but the ship locks the traveler into a world that he can leave only briefly and temporarily. The boat docks, you go ashore, take a tour, photograph, eat and shop, but then you must get back on board. It’s almost impossible to break out of the safe bubble of the boat to reach people on land.

You might think our journey was slow – five weeks to New Delhi – but it was hardly slow enough for John Ruskin, a highly influential English art critic in the Victorian era. In The Art of Travel, Alain de Botton recounts Ruskin's critique of travel at the time.

”He deplored the blindness and haste of modern tourists, especially those who pride themselves on covering Europe in a week by train (a service first offered by Thomas Cook in 1862): ‘No changing of place at a hundred miles an hour will make us one whit stronger, happier, wiser. (…) The really precious things are thought and sight, not pace.’” (p 218)

The only way to truly appreciate beauty was, according to Ruskin, to understand it and it was through writing or drawing that one gained this insight. The most important and underrated of the two was the art of drawing, which is why he founded the Ruskin School of Drawing and Fine Art. The school's mission was not to teach the art of drawing, but the art of seeing.

Ruskin was, according to de Botton, initially enthusiastic about photography, but would soon conclude that photography easily became a way of not seeing.

”The camera blurs the distinction between seeing and noticing, between seeing and possessing; it may give us the option of true knowledge, but it may also unwittingly make the effort of acquiring that knowledge seem superfluous.” (de Botton, p 220)  

* 

As for myself, I kept a diary on my journey, but the quality of my notes was low, and they were too egocentric. I had no professional training in either travel writing, drawing or photography. And I hadn't read Ruskin, so I didn't understand the importance of drawing to see. Rory Stewart, in his account of traveling on foot through Afghanistan after the fall of the Taliban, The Places Inbetween, describes how he works with drawings and systematically describes what he sees, whether it's the inside of a room where he's staying or the nature he's traveling through. I would be surprised if he hadn't read and learned from Ruskin.

Anybody who has reflected on photography knows that there is a conflict between taking pictures and experiencing. I've often thought while looking through the viewfinder that I should put the camera aside and just watch, just experience, but it's a difficult choice, especially when you're traveling fast and don't think you have time.

We write, draw, and take photos because we know our memory is limited and therefore sacrifice experience for documentation. The advantage of writing a diary, of course, is that we do it after the fact, but it also means we miss things that we simply don't remember. A drawing happens in the moment. And a photographic image replicates a two-dimensional slice of an experience. But in defense of photography – and Ruskin agreed – the camera allowed me to capture a piece of reality, at least virtually. When I go through my images from the India trip forty years later, it becomes a journey of discovery, a detour, allowing me to see what I was not ready to see at the time. The camera was only a complement to my experience, but today it is this complement, combined with print and digital resources, that allows me to reconstruct the journey and dig out memories that have been lost.

(Transl. from my January 17, 2015 post on my Swedish blog, Sandbergs hörna.)