It wasn't only in my immediate surroundings that life was in turmoil, but the world at large seemed to echo the high waves we had been wading. One of my earliest sharp memories was of a big commotion in the streets, large crowds assembling with banners, an overall palpable tension in the air, my own parents at home in the same agitated state. A name was repeated many times, "Allende". Somewhere, on a far away corner of the world, one of the most brutal military putsches in history was unfolding. It was the 11th of September, 1973.
While Latin America was being brutalized by military fascists, while the Soviet Union sank into the deep freeze of the Brezhnev era, Western Europe was still blooming in dreams of revolution. Students occupied all the venues of higher learning and turned them into a permanent Woodstock. Philosophers delivered fiery speeches calling people to arms against the tyranny of the bourgeois society. Interpersonal and social relations were undergoing deep changes like metamorphic rocks. They were being reconstituted and reinvented. People were beginning to shed off the burden of traditional society at last, but repression was quick on their heels. Philosophers ended up in jail, students were beaten up by ruthless police forces, anarchists were defenestrated. When a future Nobel laureate for literature protested against the brutality of the repression, his theater house was burnt down and his company evicted. Anyone who called for a radical change in the texture of society was branded a dangerous terrorist.
I might have ended up among them, had I been some fifteen years older. I fit the right psychological profile and that's why I raise red flags with any security agency I come in contact with. I never had the occasion to become a real troublemaker though, I was always too young or too busy with other occupations. I produced my best over my high school years, and got all the right training on how to "hold the square" during a demonstration and similarly useful skills I seldom practiced later in life.
Back to my childhood days, my parents and their friends had been with the revolutionary movement from the start. As former resistance fighters in the late stages of World War II, they sympathized with the new student uprising against a society where fascism had been slowly creeping back, even though by then they were too old to mingle with that crowd of teenagers. I knew Communist and Anarchist songs long before I had heard any of the popular children tunes of the day.
When it came to sending me to school, all of a sudden I was faced with a very different type of environment. At the time, public schools did not offer extra curricular afternoon hours for the pupils whose parents were at work until five or six in the evening. Only a few private schools had that service available. Additionally, my father's parents increased steadily their pressure on the choice of the school. With all those Jews, Anarchists, Communists, and other riffraff in the family, they demanded that I be given at least a few years of proper education in a proper catholic school. Given that the private schools offering afternoon hours were all run by catholic organizations, and that there happened to be one just a block away from where we lived, my parents reluctantly agreed.
That was my first encounter with religion and within a week I was a militant atheist.
When I confided one day to my mother that I couldn't stand churches, priests and nuns, and all that mambo jambo about gods, angels, and demons, she approvingly gave me Voltaire's "Dictionnaire philosophique", which became one of my favorite childhood books.
