Letters to the Editor

This letter is associated with the following article:
A new book argues that the '60s counterculture achieved nothing of lasting importance. So why does the era continue to fascinate us?
  • The author of this tome seems to have left out one very important word: COINTELPRO.

    COINTELPRO, while promoting, financing, encouraging, co-opting and otherwise lifting up the shallow, cruel, consumerist, and ineffective sex-drugs-and-rock-and-roll "counterculture", were systematically destroying the real agents of change, the hard working and committed New Left revolutionaries. Leaving out this aspect of the "60's" renders this book and all it's assertions entirely irrelavent.

    DeGroot is doing what most ordinary folk do, and are meant to do, but as an "historian" he should know better: conflating the cultural with the political elements of the '60's. He charges a cultural movement with failing to achieve political goals The amorphous mass of mayhem loving youth one associates with the "counterculture" were more interested in 'tuning out'of the sytem, not fixing, changing, or overturning it.

    Degroot also seems also to have left out the series of ruthless murders of people who could have led the revolutionary change he rightly laments as being a myth.