Is this what the world felt like at the end of 1968?

The rose in the barrel of the tank is withering. The poppy drips blood on the lapel. The flower fell from the braided hair of the Haight Ashbury hippy long ago, mourned only by those who have lived long enough to remember what a world once felt like that had lurched out of the nightmare tunnel and found a new, brighter, kinder future.

The Sixties didn’t come out of nowhere. The world had been a dank, harsh place from the time Adolf Hitler first was elected to power – chosen by the people, note – in the Weimar Republic Germany of 1933, until his final solution found its own defeat by allied forces that included in no small measure the might that America’s liberating military brought to bear on the Third Reich.

That America, the one that arguably was the “great” one that Donald Trump and his drooling fang club think they are aspiring to, was able to come out of that war and slowly, and with much effort and many bumps in the road, find its way into the Sixties and the hope that the American youth of that era brought to those who sought peace and harmony.

There was no quick fix once the war ended; more rations and belt-tightening than letting your hair down and inviting the crowd around except maybe for dog biscuits and flasks of water. But these things take time, and once the Fifties came around, fashion brightened up, dance turned to jive and rock ‘n’ roll, and contemporary music became unrecognisable by anybody who had lived through that war.

As ever, it was young people who led the charge, just as they (falteringly, perhaps wanly) started to lead the charge in the new United States that is emerging before our horrified gaze, then kind of faded away like the intro to the Neil Young song when, introducing it, he says, this song “sorta starts off real slow and then fizzles out altogether” (I think we call them Save SA marches). In the Fifties, mom and pop might have preferred their kids to listen to Pat Boone and Doris Day but the sprogs were were having none of that. Enter a slew of edgy pop stars, from Carl Perkins and Bo Diddley to Chuck Berry, Buddy Holly and of course Elvis Presley, and the seeds were sown for a new movement far across the Atlantic as ears in Liverpool took to the sound and turned it into a revolution.

By 1963, the Beatles and the Rolling Stones were creating the music that was the bedrock for the entire world of popular music we still have five decades later. The British Pop Invasion saw the results of that Fifties rock ‘n’ roll era fly back across the pond as young Americans drank it in and one sensational tour by the Beatles in 1966 turned the pop revolution truly global. Even in my tiny town in southern Namibia, I knew all about it, devouring magazine articles and listening to every album I could.

And with it came everything else. Guys grew their hair way down their backs, hemlines went thigh-high, Mary Jane went mainstream (culminating, in our own time, in marijuana being legalised in several US states, for now at least), the cumulative movement having ignited a spark of creativity that has everything to do with the technological revolution we have been living through. Everything was touched by the Sixties’ magic wand – movies, theatre, art, design – as a wave of hope and a striving for peace and a new world order coloured an entire decade.

That decade is not strictly speaking the period from 1960 to 1970, but rather the cultural decade spanning roughly from 1963 to 1972. It started with the assassination of John F Kennedy and the concomitant rise of the Beatles and their music and moptops, and ostensibly was brought crashing to earth with the Watergate scandal a decade later. By then the psychedelic hues had dulled, the music was changing, the flowers had fallen. The hope that had been the protest movements of the Sixties had made way for the rest of the world as we have known it.

But there are dire things happening in the USA now that turn the troubled mind to a seminal year in the annals of protest – to 1968. It was the year of Martin Luther King’s assassination (on April 4). Riots in pretty much every US city you can name, as many as a hundred. The nation reeled again when Robert became the second Kennedy to be assassinated (on June 5). And come August, the infamous Democratic Convention in Chicago’s International Amphitheatre.

The Democratic Convention of 2016, with Hillary Clinton smoothly sailing through a week of highly charged electioneering, searing her points and policies home whether or not you agreed with them, was nothing like the 1968 event. In 1968 it happened in Chicago, and all hell broke loose. What had been intended as a “festival of life” by the democrats turned ugly when anti-Vietnam War protests (against President Lyndon B Johnson’s war policies) in the city and at the convention centre were met with force by the Chicago PD with help from the Illinois National Guard. Battles between police and protesters raged in the city streets and parks. The riots became a benchmark for political protests, influencing many protest movements ever since.

Watch this disturbing footage of the Chicago protests showing police clubbing protesters; note particularly the woman in pink near the end being manhandled into a police van while singing We Shall Overcome. A searing moment of protest: