This is a much abused word. It originated in the Black Ghettoes of America,
where it was an abreviation of hipster, and referred to White people who
lived in the Ghetto and who had absorbed enough of the culture to become
conscious or 'hip'. Later it was distorted to refer to a brand of pacifism
in a historicisation of the sixties which obscured the consistent violence
meted out to the Black communities, and the resistance put up against this
violence.
A group which had accepted the term as referring to themselves buried the
Hippy movement in 1967, i.e. just when it was
being taken up by the mass media. By the seventies it was such a term of
contempt, that people who would have been content to call themselves hippies
called themselves punks and pretended to be nothing to do with the hippies,
concocting slogans such as "Never trust a hippy",
a parody of the sixties slogan "Never trust anyone over thirty".
Certain propaganda emanating from the Islamic Republic of Iran called them
"Sham Callandars" a reference to stray wandering mystics in Islamic
culture. The worthy Mullahs behind this propaganda even suggested that Skinheads
were simply hippies who had cut off all their hair.
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