 |
If 1967 saw the Summer of Love, the following year could not have been more different. As riots swept the streets of Paris, President de Gaulle fled to Germany, seemingly impotent in the face of radical student leaders like Daniel Cohn-Bendit - Dany le Rouge.
Across the Channel 25,000 students marched on the American Embassy in London in a violent outburst against the Vietnam war. At their head the moustachioed Tariq Ali, blessed with film-star good looks, urged the masses on to revolution.
AN ATHEIST AT CATHOLIC SCHOOL
Tariq was born in Lahore, now in Pakistan, then part of British-ruled India, in 1943. A Catholic school education did nothing to shake his life-long atheism, which he shared with his communist parents.
Later, while studying at Government College, part of Punjab University, Tariq Ali was elected President of the Young Students' Union. He organised public demonstrations against Pakistan's military dictatorship and was banned from participating in student politics.
After graduating, his uncle, then head of Pakistani Military Intelligence, told Tariq's parents to send him abroad: his radicalism was becoming dangerous and he risked imprisonment. He came to Britain and studied Politics, Philosophy and Economics at Exeter College, Oxford.
DINNER WITH MARLON BRANDO
Joining the University Labour Club, he was a committed member of its Socialist Group before becoming President of the Oxford Union in 1965. With the Vietnam war at its height, Tariq Ali earned a national reputation through debates with figures like Henry Kissinger and the then British Foreign Secretary, Michael Stewart. After one of these was televised in the United States, the actor Marlon Brando invited Tariq to dinner.
"It was the Vietcong guerrilla fighters who really set the example," he wrote later. "When they showed they could inflict major defeats on the Americans, people all over the world said, 'if they can do it to the Americans, we can too'".
The rampant anti-Americanism which fuelled his student campaigns had begun, by the late 1960s, to evolve into a sophisticated credo. Tariq came to believe that a more systematic political approach was required to further his revolutionary aims.
MARXISM AND MOVIES
Ditching the Labour Party he embraced Leninism, becoming a leader of the International Marxist Group (IMG). "One can see," he said then, "that we shall once again see (workers') Soviets in Europe in the 70s".
But it was not to be. Tariq Ali quit the IMG as the burgeoning consumer society swallowed 60s radicalism and the highly-factionalised radical left imploded under the weight of a host of trivial internecine arguments.
Since then he has devoted himself to writing books, newspaper articles and polemical commentary on social and political matters. Still a radical, he has remained at the forefront of anti-war campaigns. Conflicts in Iraq, Afghanistan and Serbia have all led Tariq to speak out.
He is also a noted broadcaster, reassessing the developing world on Channel Four's Bandung File and collaborating on stage plays with Howard Brenton and on a film about the philosopher Wittgenstein with the late Derek Jarman.
Tariq Ali has always been, and will certainly remain, a dissenter. "The way capitalist politics is functioning," he says today, "is increasingly authoritarian, designed not to wipe out, perhaps, but completely to marginalise dissenting voices."
In his 60s, the firebrand may not be shining as brightly as before but it is, without doubt, still aflame.
|
|
