After Charlottesville Frontline and Pro Publica reporter A C Thompson investigates who was behind the violent riot and uncovers a network across America that goes beyond Charlottesville. Frontline: Documenting Hate: Charlottesville, PBS 2018
Charlottesville, Virginia, August 12th 2017: Charlottesville was a crime scene … The largest gathering of White Supremacists in a generation: they called it Unite the Right. ibid.
I’m able to identify several more RAM [Rise Above Movement] members. ibid.
American campuses exploded. The American Experience: The Presidents: Nixon II: The Triumph, PBS 1990
Angry protesters returned to Washington ... That night, protesters circled the White House with chains and candles. ibid.
In the 1370s with a series of national poll taxes which hit everyone ... The Peasants’ Revolt was an English phenomenon ... 63 women rebels were indicted in Sussex alone ... Once the rebels had dispersed, the government reneged on the deal. Michael Wood, The Great British Story: A People’s History 4/8: The Great Rising, BBC 2012
The Tolpuddle Martyrs – still a landmark in British labour history. Michael Wood, The Great British Story: A People’s History 7/8: Industry & Empire
The rights of the British people were not handed down from on high but won by the people themselves – at a cost. ibid.
The Peterloo Massacre inspired new forms of social action. ibid.
The peasantry had had enough: they rose up in the largest mass rebellion in English history and marched on London. This was a class war. Dr Janina Ramirez, Chivalry and Betrayal: The Hundred Years War II: Breaking the Bonds 1360-1415, BBC 2013
The ringleaders of the uprising were hunted down and hanged. ibid.
Off to the Tower went the Leveller leaders like so many traitors ... A petitioning campaign to demand the release of the Levellers was mobilised in London by Leveller women. Simon Schama, A History of Britain s2e2: Revolutions, BBC 2001
On April 10th 1848 a monster Chartist petition signed by around two million men and women, so huge it would take two Hackney cabs to bring it to Parliament, was brought to London. Around 150,00 Chartists converged. Simon Schama, A History of Britain s3e2: Victoria and Her Sisters
From London revolt spreads to towns and villages across the country. The British II: People Power, Sky Atlantic 2012
The Peasants’ Revolt – the greatest uprising in the history of medieval England. Robert Bartlett, The Plantagenets III, BBC 2014
The only weapon that we have in our hands this evening is the weapon of protest. That’s all. Martin Luther King, Montgomery Bus Boycott speech December 1955
Those who profess to favor freedom and yet depreciate agitation, are people who want crops without ploughing the ground; they want rain without thunder and lightning; they want the ocean without the roar of its many waters. The struggle may be a moral one, or it may be a physical one, or it may be both. But it must be a struggle. Power concedes nothing without a demand. It never did and it never will. Frederick Douglass
Find out just what people will submit to, and you have found out the exact amount of injustice and wrong which will be imposed upon them; and these will continue until they are resisted with either words or blows, or both. The limits of tyrants are prescribed by the endurance of those whom they oppress. Frederick Douglass
I shall write to the lead singer of Echo and the Bunnymen. The Young Ones s2e4: Sick, Rick, BBC 1984
Elsewhere in Europe the protest movement is alive and well. Horizon: Jimmy’s GM Food Fight, BBC 2008
Thousands took to the streets in protests against the apparent insanity of the arms race. The End of the World: A Horizon Guide, BBC 2011
On Christmas Eve, I dropped in on Brian Haw, whose hunched, pacing figure was just visible through the freezing fog. For four and a half years, Brian has camped in Parliament Square with a graphic display of photographs that show the terror and suffering imposed on Iraqi children by British policies. The effectiveness of his action was demonstrated last April when the Blair government banned any expression of opposition within a kilometre of parliament. The high court subsequently ruled that, because his presence preceded the ban, Brian was an exception.
Day after day, night after night, season upon season, he remains a beacon, illuminating the great crime of Iraq and the cowardice of the House of Commons. As we talked, two women brought him a Christmas meal and mulled wine. They thanked him, shook his hand and hurried on. He had never seen them before. ‘That’s typical of the public,’ he said. A man in a pinstriped suit and tie emerged from the fog, carrying a small wreath. ‘I intend to place this at the Cenotaph and read out the names of the dead in Iraq,’ he said to Brian, who cautioned him: ‘You'll spend the night in the cells, mate.’ We watched him stride off and lay his wreath. His head bowed, he appeared to be whispering. Thirty years ago, I watched dissidents do something similar outside the walls of the Kremlin.
As the night had covered him, he was lucky. On 7 December, Maya Evans, a vegan chef aged 25, was convicted of breaching the new Serious Organised Crime and Police Act by reading aloud at the Cenotaph the names of 97 British soldiers killed in Iraq. So serious was her crime that it required 14 policemen in two vans to arrest her. She was fined and given a criminal record for the rest of her life.
Freedom is dying.
Eighty-year-old John Catt served with the RAF in the Second World War. Last September, he was stopped by police in Brighton for wearing an ‘offensive’ T-shirt which suggested that Bush and Blair be tried for war crimes. He was arrested under the Terrorism Act and handcuffed, with his arms held behind his back. The official record of the arrest says the ‘purpose’ of searching him was ‘terrorism’ and the ‘grounds for intervention’ were ‘carrying placard and T-shirt with anti-Blair info’ (sic).
He is awaiting trial.
Such cases compare with others that remain secret and beyond any form of justice: those of the foreign nationals held at Belmarsh Prison who have never been charged, let alone put on trial. They are held ‘on suspicion’. Some of the ‘evidence’ against them, whatever it is, the government has now admitted, could have been extracted under torture at Guantanamo and Abu Ghraib. They are political prisoners in all but name. They face the prospect of being spirited out of the country and into the arms of a regime which may torture them to death. Their isolated families, including children, are quietly going mad.
And for what?
Between 11 September 2001 and 30 September 2005, 895 people in total were arrested under the Terrorism Act. Only 23 have been convicted of offences covered by the act. As for real terrorists, the identities of two of the 7 July bombers, including the suspected mastermind, were known to MI5, yet nothing was done. And Blair wants to give the security services more power. Having helped to devastate Iraq, he is now killing freedom in his own country.
Consider parallel events in the United States. Last October, an American doctor, loved by his patients, was punished with 22 years in prison for founding a charity, Help the Needy, which helped children in Iraq stricken by an economic and humanitarian blockade imposed by America and Britain. In raising money for infants dying from diarrhoea, Dr Rafil Dhafir broke a siege which, according to Unicef, had caused the deaths of half a million under the age of five. John Ashcroft, the then US attorney general, called Dr Dhafir, a Muslim, a ‘terrorist’, a description mocked by even the judge in a politically motivated travesty of a trial.
The Dhafir case is not extraordinary. In the same month, three US circuit court judges ruled in favour of the Bush regime’s ‘right’ to imprison an American citizen ‘indefinitely’ without charging him with a crime. This was the case of Jose Padilla, a petty criminal who allegedly visited Pakistan before he was arrested at Chicago airport three and a half years ago. He was never charged and no evidence has ever been presented against him. Now mired in legal complexity, the case puts George W Bush above the law and outlaws the Bill of Rights. Indeed, on 14 November, the US Senate in effect voted to ban habeas corpus by passing an amendment that overturned a Supreme Court ruling allowing Guantanamo prisoners access to a federal court. Thus, the touchstone of America's most celebrated freedom was scrapped. Without habeas corpus, a government can simply lock away its opponents and implement a dictatorship.
A related, insidious tyranny is being imposed across the world. For all his troubles in Iraq, Bush has carried out the recommendations of a Messianic conspiracy theory called the Project for the New American Century. Written by his ideological sponsors shortly before he came to power, it foresaw his administration as a military dictatorship behind a democratic facade: ‘the cavalry on the new American frontier’, guided by a blend of paranoia and megalomania. More than 700 American bases are now placed strategically in compliant countries, notably at gateways to sources of fossil fuels and encircling the Middle East and central Asia. ‘Pre-emptive’ aggression is policy, including the use of nuclear weapons. The chemical warfare industry has been reinvigorated. Missile treaties have been torn up. Space has been militarised. Global warming has been embraced. The powers of the president have never been greater. The judicial system has been subverted, along with civil liberties. The former senior CIA analyst Ray McGovern, who once prepared the daily White House briefing, told me that the authors of the PNAC and those now occupying positions of executive power used to be known in Washington as ‘the crazies’. He said: ‘We should now be very worried about fascism.’