08.1 Hist 20 podcast: 1970-79

events in the 8th decade of the 20th C

Transcript

University of California UCOP | Hist20 podcast 8.1

Hi, guys. Sometimes it's really hard to take the '70s seriously, because when you think about-- you know, what

comes to mind when you think about the '70s? Well, I'm going to assume it's bell bottom jeans and shaggy green

carpet. And that comes from shows that have been on television, like That '70s Show or the VH1's I Love the '70s

that really focus on the psychedelic, kind of, very Euro-American version of the '70s.

And the '70s did include more than a fair share of psychedelic colors and terrible hair, but you can also think about

them as a means of breaking free from a very cautious 1950s and nuclear-war-obsessed 1960s. And so in this

context, the '70s are not just bad fashion, but, in this case, fashion is a means of breaking free.

So think about the '70s fashion choices as a version of the 1920s flapper dress. After the constraints of World War

I and the shock of World War I, the '70s-- it's not equivalent in terms of what they're responding to. This is not a

war that the '70s are breaking free of, but it is a breath of fresh air and experimental fresh air after two decades

that were really overwhelmingly impacted by the Cold War and these two camps, the USA and USSR kind of

establishing a new world order that can seem constraining too many.

And so in the '70s, many of the cultural choices are reflections about this desire to break free of the constraints of

this new world order. And think about contemporary trends, like Eco Chic, crafting and craft working, vintage

shopping and the revivalism of a vintage decorating ideal, gender-bending androgyny, do-it-yourself thrift

shopping-- all this, this comes from the '70s, right?

It was a reaction against factory manufacturing, mechanization, modernization, a discourse in which progress

primes above everything and a discourse in which you had to choose one side or another.

'70s-- in a sense, this

fashion mish mash or mishap is a refusal to comply with having to choose between one side or another. This was

a decade of experimentation. And we can look down on the shag rug look, but there's about the '70s that prevails,

as I said. Some of these-- the environmentalist movement, it has a strong, sort of, were really, really powerful in

the '70s.

But some of you might like wearing these little wrap dresses. They're very functional, very easy. That was-- the

first one we sold in 1974 but by Diane Furstenberg. And those of you who like tie dye and Birkenstocks-- that look

became acceptable and widespread in the 1970s. Disco balls-- I love them. It's the 1970s.

And androgyny in a post gender world, right? David Bowie kind of shocked the bourgeoisie with Ziggy Stardust.

But that also made it really cool amongst a certain group of the population to mess with gender expectations. And

that-- let's just say that that doesn't just influence the current fashion and position of about gender and sexual

orientation, but it really-- if you look at the hairbands of the '80s and '90s, you can see an influence on that.So the '70s are actually a really important cultural moment, because it's not just about bell bottom pants. It's about

pushing boundaries. Charlie's Angels, Abba, Elton John-- these are all icons of the '70s, not high art icons, but

certainly cultural icons. And they all played with gender roles, and they combined this questioning around gender

roles with music and fashion. And all these three collide in the '70s, and that becomes a feature of fashion and

music today.

The decade of the '70s is also the decade when the entire world-- not just the west-- is influenced by this. So

Africans and Asians are all watching European and American television. And, you know, to a certain degree,

Americans are watching programs and influences that are coming from the rest of the world.

And this is really, in a way, why you can start having celebrities that are celebrities across the world. And one of

those first celebrities was Muhammad Ali, the boxer. When he visited Africa in the late '60s and early '70s, he was

the biggest celebrity ever. And that has a lot to do not just with who Muhammad Ali was in the United States but

the fact that that message gets beamed across the world by television.

Now we do have to focus on not-so-groovy parts of the 1970s, because the 1970s were also a time of great

conflict. The Vietnam War is raging on. It continues until 1975. And when the Vietnam War is over, the United

States leaves that part of the world. It's not over for that part of the world. I mean, since the horrors continue-- just

look up what went on in Cambodia in the mid-

'70s under Pol Pot. It's not good.

The Middle East is still exploding in one confrontation or another of the existence of the state of Israel. And we

need to talk about in the '70s about the Yom Kippur War, which happened on October 6, 1973. Yom Kippur is a

high holy day in the Jewish religion. This is a day of atonement and during which most adults in Israel would have

been fasting and really thinking about their past year. This is not a-- this is a quiet moment of contemplation. And

this is the day that the Egyptian and Syrian army chose to attack the country, knowing full well that the country

would not be expecting it and would not be prepared to fight. It was a religious holiday.

On this day, the Egyptians managed to push really deep into the Sinai. And the Syrians took the Golan Heights.

And so these were key buffer zones that the Israelis had, in fact, taken in the '60s. The Israeli army managed to

recover very, very quickly. And they pushed both attacks back. So they reclaimed the Golan Heights, and they

took the Sinai back.

And, in fact, the retaliation was so swift, so strong, and looked like it was going to completely destroy Egyptian

forces that the Soviet Union had to threaten to get involved,

'cause that eventually got the Americans really

worried and advocated on the-- in order not to get to a nuclear war they managed to push everybody back and

calm the Israelis down. So the moment the Soviets get involved, the Americans have to get involved. And sinceneither of them wanted to get involved because this is the Cold War, that ended the Yom Kippur War.

Now the Arab world felt that the reason why they had lost in this war was because the west-- and by that, they

meant Europe and the United States-- had been unbelievably supportive of Israel. They, in a sense, had

demonized the Arab world and lost perspective on what Israel had caused. And so the Arab world decided that it

would put pressure on the oil-reliant west.

The oil-wealthy Arab nations had formed the Organization of Oil Exporting Countries in 1960, and it was Arab

nations that produced oil and Venezuela. And in 1973, they realized that OPEC-- which is what the acronym for

Organization of Oil Exporting Countries was-- could use oil as a political weapon. And so in 1973, they raised oil

prices and imposed an oil embargo on the west-- on all the countries that had supported Israel during the war.

And the result, as you can imagine, was chaos. There were huge gas lines at gas stations. Essentially, the

shortages were so bad, there was rationing of gas. You just couldn't fill your tank up more than a few times a

week or once a week. And then there were real constraints on supplies of goods that had to be transported in.

And since there was no gas to put in trucks or ships that were oil-fueled, there was enormous disruptions in the

flow of goods.

Now what is the consequence? What comes after that chaos? Well on the one hand, people rode their bike. So

people found alternatives for their transportation. But you can't really bike in goods to supermarkets. And what

that actually generated was an enormous growth of the industry for fuel alternatives. That now became a serious

business.

And so that led both to offshore drilling in countries that had oil reserves, like the Netherlands and Norway and the

US, but also an exploration of non-fossil fuels. So if we think about that the non-fossil fuel industry today-- wind

turbines, hydroelectric-- that all has a very strong origin in the 1970s realization of how dependent the west was

on oil that came from a different part of the world in which politics and economics could collide.

Now the other thing that this confrontation, the war, led to was it forced a peace negotiation between two major

enemies in the Middle East. Egypt and Israel, actually after the Yom Kippur War, realized that they needed to talk

to each other. And, in fact, this came from Egypt.

The negotiations between the president Anwar Sadat and Menachem Begin, the prime minister of Israel, were key

in really changing the balance of power and the balance of confrontations in the Middle East. They both got the

Nobel Prize for sitting down and talking to each other. And this was born in pragmatism.

Why did they start talking to each other? Well, Egypt was in trouble. The Yom Kippur War had been a resounding

defeat, and Egypt really needed support to recover from it. It needed access to its oil fields, which were still underdefeat, and Egypt really needed support to recover from it. It needed access to its oil fields, which were still under

Israeli control. And it couldn't rebuild without aid.

And one could argue that Egypt should have asked help from the oil-rich neighboring countries in the Middle East,

right? But that's not how the Middle East works. And you have to think about religion in this equation. Egypt was

and is a Muslim country, but it was not exclusively Muslim, and it was not a religious autocracy. The Egyptian

government was not a religious government, and many Egyptians are not Muslim. And those that are are not all

fundamentalists.

The wealthiest country in the Middle East is Saudi Arabia. And it is an autocracy. It doesn't have a legislator. And it

doesn't have political parties. It doesn't have elections. The laws are written and they're adjudicated by the

executive power in Saudi Arabia. And Sharia law and the Qur'an are the law of the land. And so one could argue

that Egypt had, in fact, more in common with the United States and Israel when you think about its political system

than it did with Saudi Arabia.

And so Egypt appealed for help to rebuild in this context from the United States, because it knew that it wasn't

going to be able to negotiate on a basis that could be tenable with Saudi Arabia. And the United States was only

going to help them if they agreed to end the conflict with Israel. So this is an important thing to understand about

the Middle East then, but it also helps explain, in some respects, the Middle East today.

And so the Camp David talks in 1977 were historic because they got Egypt to recognize the state of Israel--

something that every other Arab nation had refused to do. And after these Camp David talks, Egypt and Israel

agreed to a permanent peace. They would never go to war with each other again.

And in exchange for that, Israel returned the Sinai to Egypt, so Egypt had access to oil fields and scaled back its

presence in the Golan Heights. And they also agreed that they would negotiate the terms for an autonomous

Palestinian state in Gaza and the West Bank, which ultimately led to the PLO, which is the Palestinian Liberation

Organization, which was still considered by Israel to be a terrorist organization, an observer status and the United

Nations.

So this is historic, by any means. This was a case in which mortal enemies negotiated an agreement by which

they could both exist. We have a lot to learn from the diplomacy that led to that agreement. Was this the end to

the conflict in the Middle East? Absolutely not. It's the end of the conflict between Egypt and Israel.

But Anwar Sadat, the president of Egypt, was assassinated in 1981 by an Islamist faction of his old bodyguards

who are so disgusted that he had betrayed-- and I'm using air quotes here-- the Arab cause. So the Middle East, if

you're reading newspapers now, is still a complicated situation. But there is an example, in the 1970s of a means

of diplomatic means by which you don't have to love your neighbor. You don't even have to like anybody you livewith, but you can find a way to live together.

So while we're on that front-- on this front of war and negotiations, terrorism was never higher in the world than it

was in the 1970s. And terrorist attacks, actually up until 1994, were quite common in Europe. I mean, there was

Northern Ireland, the Republican Army-- the IRA, the Basque separatist group-- ETA. There were Italian terrorists-

- the Anni di piombo, years of lead. There was the Red Army faction in Germany.

These were all extremist political groups that organized bombings in each of these countries and across Europe.

And it was a phenomenon. I mean, the peak was reached in 1979 when there were more than 1,000 attacks in

Europe. And throughout the '70s,

'80s, and '90s, there was an average of about 10 terrorist attacks per week.

Now this doesn't mean that they were with mass casualties. This means these are small, targeted attacks that

were just meant to terrorize and essentially push towards negotiations.

Now terrorism did not just happen in Europe. In the late 1969, terrorists had kidnapped an American ambassador

to Brazil. There's is a great film about this called Four Days in September, and I really highly recommend it

because it's not just a 1960s film. This is actually about a situation in Latin America in the 1970s.

The reason why they had kidnapped the ambassador was because friends of theirs, their comrades, had been

imprisoned by the right wing military Brazilian regime that ruled into the '70s. And so they kidnapped the American

ambassador because they saw the United States as, in a sense, allowing this right wing military regime from

operating in Brazil. Because, remember, what the United States was most concerned at the time was at controlling

communist activity in the world. And this right wing military regime in Brazil had the support of the United States

because it was ostensibly protecting Brazil from communist activity. So there you go.

And European terrorism was not just perpetrated by Europeans. Palestinian terrorists took 11 Israeli athletes and

coaches hostage at the Munich Olympics in 1972. And the entire world watched as the event unfolded on their

TVs. This hostage taking ended with the massacre of all hostages and the deaths of most of the terrorists. It was

a really frightening thing to observe on television. I was too young to remember that, but I remember hearing

about it. I remember people talking about it years afterwards.

And then there was airborne terrorism. The first airline hijacking attached to political demands-- that actually

happened in 1968. But it started a trend. And in 1970, Palestinian terrorists really upped the ante with mass

hijacking of five commercial airlines at the same time. Three of the planes carrying hundreds of hostages made it

to a landing strip in Jordan, which created an international crisis because that's a lot of planes. And that's a lot of

politics to put in a small country in the Middle East. And it ended in civil war.

That same year, terrorists also sabotaged a Swiss Air flight that crash landed and killed all 47 aboard. And in themid-1970s, airline hijackings and airline bombings worldwide were occurring at a rate of one a month. Can you

imagine one a month? I can't believe anybody would get on a plane in the 1970s.

Why was terrorism on such a scale in the 1970s? And that's a really good question. Why was it going on? I still

have a hard time putting myself in the mind of a terrorist except when you think about how extreme and, perhaps,

how powerless that people felt And it's not easy to explain why terrorism was such a feature of the 1970s as

opposed to another part or time of the year-- or a time of the decades and the century.

But if you think about this experimentation I was talking about at the beginning of the lecture-- this discomfort with

the new world order. That's part of the answer, right? The dissatisfaction with a world order that forced people to

choose one side or the other without an alternative-- that's not a good place to put people.

And if you add to that that on the one hand, there are two world powers and nothing in between, there's also a

growing sense that many of the power structures that seemed to have been destroyed by World War II were still in

place. The Northern Irish nationalism and Basque terror, they were directed at governments they considered to be

imperialistic. They were not representatives. Spain did not represent the Basque nation. And Great Britain was not

representative of Northern Ireland.

And so there was a desire to break free of an imperial structure that still existed. And Arab terrorism-- that was a

violent response to the creation of a state of Israel by foreign powers in their territory. And so, in a sense, there

was enormous resentment both against Israel but against the British who had essentially allowed this to happen--

the United Nations, who had vindicated it legally, the United States that continued to protect it.

Now this kind of dissatisfaction-- that makes for some pretty good film, by the way. The Day of the Jackal is a

great film, and you should all watch it immediately. Bloody Sunday, another phenomenal film that are based on

real events in the 1970s. And they're also a good example of how aware the world was both in terms of reading

the newspapers but in a kind of popular, cultural way that the world is avoiding a global nuclear war.

We're aware that that's the end goal, but all is far from well, right? Instability is, in fact, global. And it's not a world

war. It's many little wars-- many little but very significant conflicts in which few but important lives are being lost.

And so this is also a really important part of the '70s. And it's not quite as easy to convey as shag green carpet

and bell bottoms.

Let's continue to one more really key transformation in the 1970s. And that's the Stonewall riots, and they

happened in New York, but they essentially catapulted the gay movement to the front page of any newspaper

across the world. Stonewall riots were three days of riots in a small bar on Christopher Street in New York. It was

really common in the '60s to harass people considered to be-- again, air quotes-- abnormal. It was routine by thepolice to raid bars that were known to serve gay patrons.

That day in July in late 1969, the patrons of the Stonewall Inn had finally had it with harassment from police, and

they resisted. And that resistance turned violent. And that riot lasted three days. And that three-day riot against

police harassment of gay patrons in a bar in New York was the beginning of a groundswell of support for-- and

also against, but essentially of the discussion over the right to equal treatment under the law no matter what the

sexual orientation was.

Race and gender had only been engaged with right, and sexuality was the next frontier. And, in many respects, it

still is. Christopher Street Liberation Day was June 28, 1970. And that marked the first anniversary of the

Stonewall Riot, and, essentially, it was also the first gay pride March. It didn't call itself that, but that's what it was.

And there were simultaneous marches in Los Angeles and Chicago that same day.

And, essentially, if you go back in time, those were the first gay pride marches in US history. They didn't call

themselves that. They were gay liberation marches. The next year, 1971, there were gay pride marches in

Boston, Dallas, Milwaukee, but also London, Paris, West Berlin, and Stockholm. And the concept went global.

Why? Because this was a global issue.

Now the Stonewall riots may be an American event, but the effect was global. This was not just a US movement. It

was not just a European movement. It was varying degrees of social acceptance. Stonewall and the pride

marches opened the door to mainstream discussions of gay issues and eventually all LGBTQ issues. Now today,

gay pride demonstrations are fairly common. And in many parts of the world, they're kind of a big family affair. If

you've ever been in Los Angeles on the day of gay pride, it's a very happy, family-friendly celebration.

But there's still 10 countries today where homosexual acts are punished by death. And there are other countries

where while it's not a capital crime, it's significantly frowned upon. Russia, for example-- Russia doesn't make

homosexuality a crime, but it criminalizes acts that constitute propaganda about homosexuality. And so that gives

police an extremely wide berth.

So bell bottoms, shag green carpet-- let's hope they are never in style again. But let's hear it for a decade during

which, for better or for worse, freedom of expression to get really public and sometimes really psychedelic and

bell-bottomed turn. Let's hear it for the '70s, because the '70s-- as bad as the fashion was-- were pretty, pretty

awesome.