AMONG the most popular of the new proverbs daubed across the riot-scarred faces of Parisian buildings during the early, heady days of the 1968 student-led unrest read: "Be realistic/Demand the impossible."

Such catchy but self-contradictory sloganeering captured the flawed essence of this latter-day children's crusade ? and the reason why it imploded just weeks after threatening to collapse the granite edifice of the Fifth Republic.

The revolution died a-borning.

But 1968, was of course, the Year of Unfinished Revolutions. The student protests in France spread across Europe. To England, Germany, Northern Ireland, and then across the Atlantic to America. Then south to Mexico.

Even Bermuda was not exempt from the fiery spirit of the times.

Torn from its usual land-where-time-stood-still complacency, the island was convulsed by politically-motivated, paramilitary violence during the run-up to the May 1968 General Election.

The first held in Bermuda under the new, two-party Constitution, the first under the Universal Franchise, it was a watershed event in the island's history.

The Progressive Labour Party advocated not just a changing of the political guard but a fully transfiguring social and cultural revolution akin to the French Revolution of 1789. Its language and thinking were shaped primarily by the anti-colonialist philosophies then prevalent in Europe and the emerging black nationalist movements they had inspired in the US. The United Bermuda Party adopted a gradualist, evolutionary approach to remaking a Bermuda that was politically and ethically untenable by 1968. The UBP won that first election 30 seats to ten, taking 60 per cent of the popular vote.

Not for the first time would the PLP, despite its perceived demographic advantage, experience resistance at the ballot box to its radical agenda from deep-rooted Bermudian conservatism.

It was not until 1998 when, as a result of Frederick Wade's steadfast efforts to refurbish his party along with the UBP's concurrent ? and precipitous ? fall from grace, that the PLP won a General Election. Its radical manifesto was now seemingly mothballed, the sleaze-ridden UBP perceived as morally compromised. Even so Bermudian voters did not exactly embrace the PLP that year. They simply decided the newly dehorned devil they didn't know couldn't possibly be worse than the one that had self-destructed over the preceding five years.

Within months of forming its first Government, it became clear that elements within the PLP and its core support base still subscribed to the radical notion that only revolution could bring about profound social change. Even the otherwise inexplicable outreach to Cuba can be interpreted in this light: to the unreconstructed left, Cuba is a symbol of scrappy resistance to hostile American imperialism, so the manifest shortcomings of its own revolution are to be ignored.

An article in Britain'snewspaper last week on Bermuda's fits-and-starts Independence campaign talked directly to a point that most Bermudians still prefer to talk around. Namely, that the Independence initiative is backed primarily by those Government MPs and supporters who still embrace the black nationalism/anti-colonialism agenda of the 1960s.

The was right.

At times there only seems to be a single volume in the libraries at hard-core PLP homes ? by the Martinique-born Algerian revolutionary Frantz Fanon. Perhaps overly optimistically described by its American publisher in the 1960s as "the handbook of the black revolution", it is cited by Parliamentary true believers and their supporters almost as often as men of the cloth invoke the Bible.

That's hardly a facetious analogy.

Among the faithful in Bermuda Fanon has attained prophet-like status. His writings are regarded as Holy Writ. Even his most curious and incendiary pronouncements are deemed to be beyond question ? as off-limits and entirely impervious to reason as Articles of Faith.

As little read today as Herbert Marcuse and the other philosophers who the Class of '68 dragooned to add a veneer of academic respectability to their radical activities, Fanon joined the Algerian resistance to French rule in 1953.

Predating Cuba as an international emblem of opposition to imperialist designs, Fanon's record of his Algerian experiences were published in 1961 and immediately embraced by the French left. Later published into 25 languages, it was a perennial best seller on university campuses throughout the decade. Veering between predictable anti-colonialist tirades, sometimes insightful psychological profiling of both colonisers and colonised and apocalyptic aphorisms about the purging nature of violence ("Violence is a cleansing force. It frees the native from his inferiority complex and from his despair and inaction: it makes him fearless and restores his self-respect"), Fanon's book found a world-wide audience during the era of decolonisation.

In the US at the beginning of the civil rights era wasread by oppressed African-Americans trying to overthrow white subjugators who felt an immediate kinship with oppressed North Africans trying to free themselves from French rule. At much the same time found a a similar audience in Bermuda for similar reasons.

But today's guru is often tomorrow's embarrassment. And Fanon's philosophy has not aged well.

An apostle of violence and incendiary direct-action against the Imperial powers he loathed, Fanon's beliefs were repudiated by the left in the early 1970s. Hannah Arendt, most famously, cited him as a malevolent influence on the left's humanist tradition in an essay entitled .

Arendt pointed out that Fanon's call to all colonised peoples to embrace violence to free themselves was counter-productive in an environment where Independence was viewed by the former empire-building European powers as a birthright that could no longer be denied to those who sought it. When an oppressor did define the terms of engagement with oppressed people using violence, violence was an understandable and justifiable reaction. But not otherwise.

A Communist and so, by definition, an atheist, Fanon's beliefs do not even sit well in the Independent, Islamic Algeria he helped to create. References to his role in the revolution have been expunged from the state-published history texts circulated in schools.

There are no monuments to him. If anything his call to arms in is viewed as an embarrassment in a country fighting an ongoing rear-guard action against religious fundamentalist revolutionaries who view themselves as that country's newly oppressed.

But in Bermuda Fanon's programme as outlined in is not only viewed by more radical elements in this Government as the blueprint for taking Bermuda to Independence and building a new, post-Independence order. Even this Government's increasingly disturbing record for dissembling when it comes to its real Independence agenda seems to be inspired by Fanon, who argued the objective truth is entirely dispensible in the anti-colonial struggle ("Truth is that which hurries on the breakup of the colonialist regime ... In this colonialist context there is no truthful behavior and the good is quite simply that which is evil for 'them'.")

Fanon's Bermudian disciples clearly have yet to reconcile their revolutionary fantasies with the day-to-day realities of administering a multicultural community.

Attempting to pursue Independence using Fanon as the moral standard bearer in the current cultural climate is about as realistic as Alabama dusting off Bull Connor and expecting him to serve as the state's poster boy for race relations.

It is being unrealistic. It is demanding the impossible.