Age of optimism is now, not in 60s

NOBODY under the age of 30 would write the kind of drivel that has been filling newspapers in the English-speaking world since the death of George Harrison. Take the Globe and Mail of Toronto, where I was when he died: “Central to (Beatlemania) was the profound sense of cheeky, benign optimism, long distant from the cynical, frightened age in which we now live...(But people) were not shocked yesterday in the way they were by John Lennon’s murder in 1980, a defining moment in the erosion of the age of innocence.” Let us conduct a little exercise in historical comparisons. Let’s take the 15 years from 1962, when the Beatles first made the British top 20, to 1977, when Harrison’s divorce from Patti Boyd marked the definitive loss of his own innocence (Boyd ran away with Harrison’s old friend, guitar hero Eric Clapton, who had written the rock anthem Leyla about her), and compare that period with the past 15 years. What was better in the world then, and what was worse? The Beatles’ first hit, Love Me Do, entered the British charts in October 1962, which was the month of the Cuban missile crisis. I was a very young naval officer at the time, and I don’t recall much optimism or innocence. My parents’ generation had finished fighting the worst war in history less than 20 years ago, and here I was about to be killed in a global nuclear war before I even turned 20 myself. After that came the assassination of President Kennedy in 1963, the US take-over of the Vietnam War in 1964-66, the Six-Day War in the Middle East in 1967 (accompanied by another trip to the brink of nuclear war), the Soviet invasion of Czechoslovakia in 1968, the genocide in Biafra, the Indo-Pak war and the slaughter in Bangladesh, millions killed by the Red Guards in China, the destruction of the Allende government in Chile, My Lai, Watergate, the 1973 Middle East War, the fall of Saigon, the betrayal of East Timor, and ‘Year Zero’ in Cambodia. No wonder we were all singing happy tunes. Now compare the period 1986-2001. It opened with the world’s first successful non-violent revolution against a dictator, in the Philippines, and an unprecedented thaw (glasnost and perestroika) in the old Soviet Union. The trickle of democratisation rapidly turned into a flood, with copycat revolutions sweeping first across Asia, then jumping to Europe in 1989, reaching Moscow itself by 1991. Apartheid went under in South Africa without a fight, and even today the phenomenon of non-violent democratic revolution continues to transform countries as different as Indonesia and Yugoslavia. In 1986, at least two-thirds of the world’s people lived under tyrannies. Now, at least two-thirds live in more or less democratic countries. Many of the newer democracies are poor and their governments corrupt, but it is nevertheless an epochal change for the better. The threat of a global nuclear holocaust has simply vanished, and those in the military-industrial complexes of the planet who once made their livings by loudly worrying about (and quietly preparing for) the deaths of hundreds of millions are reduced to talking up the marginal threats from terrorists and “rogue states”. The only really bad war in this entire 15-year period, in terms of deaths, was the Iran-Iraq war that ended in 1988. Despite much terrorist activity, there has been no conventional war between the old enemies in the Arab-Israeli arena or between India and Pakistan. And with the exception of Africa (where a failure of nerve among outside powers has allowed genocide and banditry to ravage countries from Rwanda to Liberia), the major conflicts of the 1990s were fairly small affairs waged in relatively good causes. From the Gulf War through the Bosnia and Kosovo episodes down to the current campaign in Afghanistan, there is at least the semblance of a legal framework for the wars through some form of UN backing, and at least partial justification for the military action in terms of the defence of international law or of human rights. (Of course, the Law of Mixed Motives always applies.) We certainly have not taken up residence in paradise, but compared to the 60s and 70s, THIS is the age of innocence. Of all the fine songs George Harrison wrote, Here Comes The Sun was always my favourite. He thought it had to get better — and it has. Gwynne Dyer is a London-based independent journalist