Laudator Temporis Acti

Richard Cobb (1917-1996), Something to Hold Onto: Autobiographical Sketches (London: John Murray, 1988), p. 1:

About the only thing to be said in favour of ces événements of May-June 1968, is that they happened when they did, that is in the middle of the Oxford University term. I was a tutor at the time at Balliol, and my teaching load made it impossible for me to have crossed over to Paris to witness what was going on. Not that, in any case, I would have had any desire to see, even from a prudent distance, the endless and meaningless violence, the uprooted trees, the burning cars, the idiotic graffiti, the posturing, the mountains of filth and rubbish, and to smell the whiff of tear-gas and smouldering rubber. There is something indecent about sitting in on someone else's revolution (not that this disgusting carnival could have been gratified with the dark title of a revolution). I am grateful that I missed out on that episode of French history in action, as portrayed in Thirty-one Tableaux and a hundred side-shows. I would not have enjoyed the sight of the burning books or the flames coming out of the roof of the Sorbonne Library, I would have found it hard to stomach the lying slogans: maintenant nous sommes tous des juif allemands, a triple insult to the Germans, the Jews, and the German Jews, on the part of bored, teen-age, middle-class pseudo-revolutionaries who were French and spoilt and from the VIIIme and the XVIme arrondissements. I did at least draw a little satisfaction from a member of the Central Committee of the French Communist Party whom, in June, I got to address Balliol J[unior] C[ommon] R[oom], and who called the events of the previous month: ces enfantillages. Very nasty childish tricks, indeed.

Maintenant nous sommes tous des juif allemands = "Now we are all German Jews."

Hat tip: Ian Jackson.

Related post: Identity Theft.