Notes: May '68 vs. Charles de Gaulle

questionsquestions.net, 8 Mar 05

In a his article, 'Coup d'Štat in Disguise: Washington's New World Order "Democratization" Template' Jonathan Mowat discusses the complex origins of the "Post Modern Coup" tactics typified by the meddling by the US and its european allies in Ukraine's "Orange Revolution". He observes astutely that an early predecessor to the current use of manipulated "people power" as a geopolitical weapon (largely involving, of course, people who aren't aware of how their interests and actions are being used) was the destabilization of France's government under Charles de Gaulle in 1968 by remarkably ill-timed student uprisings:

As in the case of the new communication technologies, the potential effectiveness of angry youth in post modern coups has long been under study. As far back as 1967, Dr. Fred Emery, then director of the Tavistock Institute, and an expert on the "hypnotic effects" of television, specified that the then new phenomenon of "swarming adolescents" found at rock concerts could be effectively used to bring down the nation-state by the end of the 1990s. This was particularly the case, as Dr. Emery reported in "The next Thirty years: concepts, methods and anticipations,'' in the group's "Human Relations," because the phenomena was associated with "rebellious hysteria." The British Military created the Tavistock Institute as its psychological warfare arm following World War I; it has been the forerunner of such strategic planning ever since. Dr. Emery's concept saw immediate application in NATO's use of "swarming adolescents" in toppling French President Charles De Gaulle in 1967 [sic].

[http://globalresearch.ca/articles/MOW502A.html]

The motivation behind the destabilization of de Gaulle (this followed CIA-linked attempts to assassinate de Gaulle in preceding years) was related in part to an ongoing battle over international monetary relations, pitting France and some european allies against the financial powers of London and Wall Street:

...while other nations were obliged to settle their trade deficits in a currency other than their own, the US could do so by paying their creditors in dollars which those creditors agreed to hold.

The US enjoyed this privilege because, at least since the war, her trading partners lived in constant fear of running short of dollars (the "dollar gap") and because the International Monetary System set up at Bretton Woods was designed so that the various national currencies were linked to the price of gold expressed in dollars. A fall in the value of the dollar against the other currencies could therefore only be engineered by raising the price of gold expressed in dollars.

The inequality of the system had been noted by a number of economists, including Robert Triffin in 1959, and Jacques Rueff had for many years been an ardent protagonist of reform involving primarily an increase in the price of gold. Criticism of the system took on a far more directly political dimension, however, when expressed by a figure as striking as General de Gaulle, speaking in the name of a France which was no longer in debt to the USA.

Initially, General de Gaulle was not opposed to the suggestion, made by French experts themselves, that an international instrument of payment should be devised, along the lines of the European Payment Union settlement mechanism (1950-1958), which would be based on both gold and a "basket" of major currencies and which would be used by central banks in their reciprocal settlement procedures (the "Collective Reserve Unit").

After it proved impossible to reach agreement, and after having converted dollars into gold on a number of occasions in order to maintain pressure on the USA, de Gaulle adopted a harder position in his famous press conference of 4 February 1965 and proposed a return to the principles of the gold standard.

While his attack on the dollar's privileges won general approval, the need to supplement gold with a complete system of credit facilities - which would have to be virtually automatic if they were to compete with and eventually replace the dollar - steered International Monetary System reform towards the creation of an instrument designed for use by the International Monetary Fund, Special Drawing Rights (SDR).

France was not in favour of this solution, but its bargaining position had been seriously undermined by the events of May 1968. After de Gaulle left power, France gave its support to the creation of SDRs, although not without expressing scepticism as to the chances of success. That scepticism would prove to be fully justified. [http://spip.mond.net/article.php3?id_article=172]

Economist and historian William Engdahl gives a more detailed account:

After [World War 2], under Bretton Woods, Britain, through her Sterling Bloc ties with colonies and former colonies, had been able to make the Pound Sterling a strong currency, which in many parts of the world was regarded the equal of the dollar as a stable re-serve currency. Member countries in the British Commonwealth were required, among other "courtesies," to deposit their national gold and foreign exchange reserves in London and to maintain Sterling balances in City of London British banks. Britain's quota share in the IMF was second only to that of the United States. Therefore, the Pound was disproportionately important to the stability of the Bretton Woods dollar order in the 1960's, despite the clearly depleted condition of her economy.

During the 1960's England, like America, was a net exporter of funds to the rest of the world, despite the fact that her technologically stagnant industrial base created increasing trade deficits. Continental European economies, through growth of trade within the new Common Market and their productive advantages from strong investment in technology, grew at strong rates.

Thus Britain's deficiencies and lack of new technological investment grew ever larger by comparison. The powerful financial interests of the City of London again preferred to focus single-mindedly on drawing the world's financial flows into London banks by maintaining the highest interest rates of any major in-dustrial nation throughout the mid-1960's. Industry went into a slump, unable to borrow for needed technological innovations.

By 1967, the British position was alarming. Despite several large emergency borrowings from the IMF to help stabilize the Pound Sterling, British foreign debts continued to grow, rising another $2 billion, or some 20% in that year alone. In January, 1967, de Gaulle's principal economic adviser, Jacques Rueff, came to Lon-don to deliver a proposal for raising the official price of gold held by the leading industrial nations. The United States and Britain continuously refused to hear such arguments, which would have meant a de facto devaluation of their currencies.

Throughout 1967, the Bank of England's gold reserves declined. Foreign creditors, sensing the obviously imminent devaluation of the weakening Pound, scrambled to redeem paper for gold, which they calculated must rise in value. By June 1967, de Gaulle's government announced that France had withdrawn from the American-instigated "Gold Pool." In 1961, under U.S.pressure, the central banks of ten leading industrial countries had created the Group of Ten as it became known. In addition to the U.S., Britain, France, Germany, and Italy were added Holland, Belgium, Sweden, Canada, and Japan. The Group of Ten had agreed in 1961 to pool reserves in to a special fund, the Gold Pool, to be administered in London by the Bank of England. Under the arrangement, a band-aid at best, as events revealed, the U.S. "central bank contributed only half the costs of continuing to maintain the world price of gold at the artificially low $35/ounce of 1934. The other nine, plus Switzerland, agreed to pay the sec-ond half of such "emergency" interventions, on the argument the situation would be temporary.

But the "emergency" had become chronic by 1967. Washington refused to bring its war spending deficits under control, and Sterling continued to weaken along with the collapsing British economy. De Gaulle withdrew from the Gold Pool, not wanting to lose additional French central bank gold reserves to the bottomless pit of interventions. American and British financial press, led by the London Economist, began a heightened attack against French policy.

But de Gaulle made one tactical blunder in the process. On January 31,1967, a new law came into effect in France which allowed unlimited convertibility for the French Franc. At the time, with French industrial growth among the strongest in Europe, and the Franc, backed by strong gold reserves, one of the strongest curren-cies, convertibility was seen as a confirmation of France's success-ful economic policy since de Gaulle took office in 1958. It was soon to become the Achilles heel which finished de Gaulle's France at the hands of Anglo-American financial interests.

French Prime Minister Georges Pompidou, in a public speech in February 1967, reaffirmed French adherence to a gold-backed monetary system as the only way to avoid international manipulations, adding that the "international monetary system is functioning poorly because it gives advantages to countries with a reserve currency [i.e., U.S. and UKów.e.]: these countries can afford inflation without paying for it."

In effect, the Johnson administration and the Federal Reserve simply printed dollars and sent them abroad in place of its gold. The lines were more sharply drawn over the course of 1967. France's central bank determined to exchange its dollar and Sterling reserves for gold, leaving the voluntary 1961 "gold pool" arrangement. Other central banks followed. The situation assumed near panic dimensions; some 80 tons of gold were sold on the Lon-don market toward the end of the year in an unheard-of period of five days, in a failed effort to stop the speculative attack. Fear grew that the entire Bretton Woods edifice was about to crack at the weakest link, the Pound Sterling.

By the second half of 1967, financial speculators were selling Pounds and buying dollars or other currencies, which they then used to buy commercial gold in all possible markets from Frankfurt to Pretoria, sparking a steep rise in the market price of gold, in contrast to the $35/ounce official U.S. dollar price. The Sterling crisis indirectly focussed attention on the growing vulnerability at the core of the international monetary system, the U.S. dollar itself. By November 18, 1967, the British Labour government of Harold Wilson bowed to the inevitable, despite strong pressure from Washington, and announced a 14% devaluation of Sterling from $2.80 down to $2.40 per Pound, the first devaluation since 1949. The Sterling crisis abated, but the dollar crisis was only beginning.

Once Sterling was devalued, speculative pressures turned directly to the U.S. dollar at the end of 1967. International holders of dollars went to the New York Federal Reserve Gold Discount Window and demanded their rightful gold in exchange. The market price of gold began an even steeper rise as a result, despite efforts of the U.S. Federal Reserve to dump its gold reserves onto the mar-ket to stop the rise. Washington, under the sway of the powerful dollar-based New York banks, adamantly refused to budge from the $35/ounce official valuation of gold. But the withdrawal of France, one of the largest holders of gold, from the Group of Ten Gold Pool, had intensified Washington's problem. By the end of the year, Washington's official gold stock declined another $1 bil-lion, to only $12 billions.

De Gaulle is toppled

The crisis gathered momentum into 1968, and between March 8 and March 15 of that year the Gold Pool in London had to provide nearly 1,000 tons to hold the gold price. The weighing-room floor, loaded with gold at the Bank of England, almost collapsed under the weight. U.S. Air Force planes were commandeered to rush gold in from the U.S. depot at Fort Knox. On March 15, the U.S. requested a two-week closing of the London gold market.

By April, 1968, a special meeting of the Group of Ten was con-vened, on Washington's request, in Stockholm. U.S. officials planned to unveil yet another scheme, the creation of a new "paper gold" substitute through the IMF, so-called Special Draw-ing Rights (SDK), in an effort to postpone the day of reckoning. At the Stockholm gathering, designed to set the stage for official IMF adoption of the Washington SDR scheme at the upcoming IMF meeting the following month, France defiantly blocked unan-imous agreement, with France's Minister Michel Debre reassert-ing traditional French policy on a return to the original rules of Bretton Woods. De Gaulle's adviser Rueff had repeatedly pro-posed a "shock" devaluation of the U.S. dollar of 100% against gold, which would have been elegantly simple, would have doubled official U.S. gold reserves in dollar terms and would have been sufficient to allow the U.S. to convert the approximate $10 billion of foreign-held dollars, while still maintaining the value of its gold reserves as before. This would have been far more rational and painless, in human terms, than what ensued from Wash-ington's side. But, tragically, it did not happen.

Within days of the French refusal to back Washington's SDR dollar bailout scheme, France itself was the target of the most serious political destabilization of the postwar period. Beginning with leftist students at the University of Strasbourg, soon all of France was brought to a chaotic halt as students rioted and struck across France. Coordinated with the political unrest (which, interestingly the French Communist Party attempted to calm down), U.S. and British investment houses started a panic run on the French Franc which gained momentum as it was touted loudly in Anglo-American financial media. The May 1968 student riots in France were the response of the vested London and New York financial interests to the one G-10 nation which continued to defy their mandate. Taking advantage of the new French law allowing full currency convertibility, these financial houses began to cash in Francs for gold, draining French gold reserves by almost 30% by the end of 1968, and bringing a full-blown crisis in the Franc.

Sadly, the counterattack of the Anglo-Americans succeeded. Within a year, de Gaulle was out of office and France's voice severely weakened. In one of his last meetings while still President, de Gaulle agreed to meet with British Ambassador to France, Christopher Soames, in February 1969. The General told Soames, in a broad review of French postwar policy, once again, that Europe must be independent, and that that independent stance had been profoundly compromised by various "pro-American" senti-ments of many European countries, most especially Britain.

One other country openly daring to defy the powerful financial interests of London and New York at this time was the largest gold-producer in the west, the Republic of South Africa. During the early part of 1968, South Africa refused to sell its newly-mined gold for Pounds or dollars at the official price of $35/ounce. France and South Africa had been holding talks to form a new gold basis for reforming the Bretton Woods monetary order. This provoked a U.S.-led central bank boycott of South Africa, a move again repeated by the same interests almost exactly 20 years later, in the mid-1980's. Despite the apparent elimination of the French "threat," it was to prove a phyrric victory for Washington and London.

[F. William Engdahl, A Century of War, 1992; pp. 139-143]

It's worth noting that some US pundits are speaking openly of triggering a youth rebellion in Iran, at a time when that government has launched a major challenge to the Wall Street - London financial axis, in the form of a planned Euro-based oil exchange (see http://www.globalresearch.ca/articles/CLA410A.html).

The May '68 millieu also notably served as a launching-pad for several important postmodernist "philosophers". Among them were Michel Foucault, many of whose books were published by Tavistock, and Jacques Derrida, who was introduced to the US around this time through two of the old Skull and Bones network's academic flagships, Yale and Johns Hopkins. In 1967, Tavistock operatives ran another influential "happening", the Dialectics of Liberation conference.

A sample of the Tavistock method in action, from Gary Lachman's Turn off Your Mind:

...if England didn't have a Vietnam, the more intellectual side of the underground found itself in the European tradition of radical dissent and critical philosophy, a heritage of savants like Jean Paul Sartre and Theodor Adorno, which got some airing in the pages of International Times. During the first two weeks of July, 1967, while the Haight was buckling under the influx of disaffected hippie youth in the disastrous summer of love, the Roundhouse found itself host to an event that was rather different fare than the mindbending sounds of Pink Floyd and the Soft Machine. The aim of the Congress for the Dialectics of Liberation, put on by the Institute for Phenomenological Studies, was to 'demystify human violence in all its forms'. It wound up with a commitment to support anti-colonial violence in the Third World, but passed on the suggestion to dose the nation's water supplies.

The line-up sported some heavy names: Cybernetician Gregory Bateson [Bateson had been a psychological warfare expert for the OSS in WW2, and was the instigator behind the Cybernetics conferences sponsored by the Macy Foundation, a funding front for MK-ULTRA -QQ]; writer Paul Goodman; Black Power leader Stokeley Carmichael; Julian Beck from the Living Theatre; Alien Ginsberg (a regular at practically every counterculture confer-ence); Michael X; the Dutch poet and Situationist Simon Vinkenoog, who had made a splash at the Albert Hall during Wholly Communion when he grabbed the mic and rendered an acid-prompted mantra of 'Love, love, love'. Timothy Leary made an appearance, and anti-psychiatrist David Cooper [associated with Tavistock -QQ]. With one of the other main speakers, Cooper had developed a curious approach to the treatment of schizophrenia and other mental illnesses, one that might be called 'letting it all hang out'.

Cooper's colleague at Kingsley Hall in the East End, a 'therapeutic residential community' in which residents were encouraged to explore their madness, was a Scots psychiatrist who in recent years had developed a celebrity among under-ground and progressive thinkers. Ronald David Laing (1927-1989) had made a name for himself as a respectable psychiatrist working with the prestigious Tavistock Clinic [the "respectable" Tavistock clinic originated in the British military's psychological warfare programs, and its postwar private version was set up with Rockefeller money. -QQ]; he was later chairman of the Philadelphia Association, a charity that offered help and support to individuals facing mental stress often exacerbated by orthodox psychiatry. In 1960 Laing published his first book, The Divided Self, a phenomenological study of schizophrenia, the aim of which was to make the condition comprehensible to those considered sane. Laing had hoped The Divided Self would make him famous overnight, as Colin Wilson had become with the publication of The Outsider. Laing's rise to intellectual stardom was less meteoric but longer lasting. By the mid-sixties, when Wilson's reputation had faded (he would make an impressive comeback with his 1971 bestseller The Occult), Laing was the undisputed guru of the British counterculture. His basic idea, developed in the books that followed, was a radical development of Jung's belief that neurosis is the psyche's attempt to deal with an intolerable situation. What we call schizophrenia, Laing argued, is a sane reaction to an insane world. It put him in the front ranks of counterculture intelligentsia like Leary, Ginsberg and Watts.

Laing had met Leary in 1964 at Castalia; in Flashbacks, Leary describes a 'Sufi ballet' the two psychologists performed. Although never as injudicious an advocate as Doctor Tim, Laing soon entered the psychedelic circus, experimenting with acid, mescaline and hashish. In 1967 he published The Politics of Experience and the Bird of Paradise, two slim, philosophical-poetic works in one volume.

Here he made some of his most radical statements. 'Around us are pseudo-events, to which we adjust with a false consciousness adapted to see these events as true and real, and even as beautiful,' Laing told his readers. 'We are all murderers and prostitutes - no matter to what culture, society, class, nation one belongs, no matter how normal, moral or mature one takes oneself to be.' [note "liberation" gets paired up with collective-guilt dogmas -QQ] 'From the moment of birth, when the stone-age baby confronts the twentieth-century mother, the baby is subjected to forces of violence, called love.' And at the close of the book, Laing made perhaps his most quoted cri de cceur: 'If I could turn you on, if I could drive you out of your wretched mind, if I could tell you I would let you know.'

Laing would make his own journey to the East in the early seventies, taking up meditation in a serious way, living with holy men in India and Sri Lanka; on one visit to the Himalayas he spent four weeks in a cave with a guru [during these travels, he as also initiated into a cult of the Kali, the wrathful Hindu goddess of destruction and re-creation -QQ]. But it was as a 'philosopher of Madness' - as the October 1971 issue of Life magazine called him - that he interests us here. Laing himself had a penchant for giving way to strange forces, propelled by psychedelics or, more frequently, booze. His performance at the Dialectics of Liberation Congress was described by poet lain Sinclair as 'swinging dangerously between pub toughness and visionary withdrawal'. Laing had a compulsion to push things to their limits ('drive you out of wretched mind') and an incorrigible need to dominate situations. A pattern of confrontation marked his life. In between lectures on 'Con-scious Purpose Versus Nature' (Bateson) and 'Imperialism and Revolution in America' (John Gerrasi), Laing wound up Black Power leader Stokeley Carmichael by asserting that his ances-tors must have been slaves to Laing's Scottish predecessors, the 'Viking-Laings'. If that wasn't bad enough, Laing hammered at Carmichael with an ill-chosen dig throughout the conference. A cat had defecated on Carmichael's hotel bed, and the smell clung to Stokeley. Laing kept up a running gag that 'Stokeley smelled really bad', and made non-PC remarks about never getting used to black people's smell. A famous photograph of Laing from the conference shows him wearing Carmichael's trademark shades, as if he had appropriated his image.

Laing and Kingsley Hall had become famous through Mary Barnes, a nurse who entered the residence not with the inten-tion of helping others, but in order to go mad. Laing told Mary that she needed therapy twenty-four hours a day. On entering Kingsley Hall she soon regressed to the condition of a newborn baby. Not long after she installed herself in the basement, where, naked, she would shout and scream for hours, smear herself with her excrement, refuse food and generally 'let it all hang out'. Mary Barnes became Laing's test case for his theories of schizophrenia, his belief in madness as a kind of existential rebirth (much as Leary saw the psychedelic experience) and insanity as a process of self-healing.

[Gary Lachman, Turn of Your Mind, 2001; pp. 348-351]