Black Power: A British Story of Resistance TV - Vive le Revolution! Joan Bakewell on May 1968 TV - The Spanish Civil War TV - Chris Hedges - Dark Net 2016 - Peaky Blinders TV - The Romantics & Us with Simon Schama TV - Black Patriots: Heroes of the Revolution TV - Days that Shook the World TV - Misha Glenny - Red Elvis: The Cold War Cowboy TV - Bob Stubbs - The Festival that Rocks the World TV - Black Power: A British Story of Resistance TV - Adam Curtis TV - World in Action TV - Revolutions that Changed History TV -
De Gaulle’s complacency seems hard to believe 50 years on but he wasn’t alone: few imagined how momentous and tumultuous 1968 would turn out to be. So how did it happen within five months of that new year speech? France was brought to a standstill and De Gaulle’s government almost toppled by the worst rioting seen in Paris since the revolution – the earlier one. Vive le Revolution! Joan Bakewell on May 1968
As the anti-war protests gathered strength they began to coincide with that other great movement that had been sweeping America since the 1950s – the Civil Rights movement. ibid.
Three months into 1968, on March 17th that year, London’s Grosvenor Square became a battleground. ibid.
Czechoslovakia: But for the time being the dreams were not fulfilled. After three months of dizzy optimism the Russian tanks rolled across the border to suppress what had been a defiant challenge to the Soviet grip on eastern Europe. ibid.
Sartre and Simone de Beauvoir, the great feminist writer, both came out in favour of the students. ibid.
On May 13th the trade unions announced a general strike … The workers had their own objectives … By May 22nd that figure had swollen to ten million. ibid.
The Utopian dream of May had not been realised. ibid.
Industry was collectivised, women were liberated, abortion was legalised. Barcelona celebrated its freedom. This was a revolution. The Spanish Civil War II: Revolution, Counter-Revolution and Terror, History 2014
The planet has become a sacrifice zone. Chris Hedges, Constructing Rebellion: The Overthrow of Corporate Tyranny, Youtube 2019 1.33.48
The solution I believe is revolution: it is the overthrow of corporate tyranny. ibid.
The message that is sent to us by the corporate state is that we don’t matter … It’s a game where we don’t count any more. ibid.
We have now created a system internally that replicates the structure of any totalitarian society. ibid.
The reconfiguration of the global economy into a form of terrifying neo-feudalism; the rise of a corporate oligarchy elite that cares nothing for human life. ibid.
They will exploit everything. ibid.
Resistance, as my students taught me, is not about what we can achieve, it is about who we are able to become. Resistance is an act of faith, belief that the good draws to it the good. ibid.
The most dangerous institution in American is the military industrial complex, which is bleeding us dry – one trillion dollars a year, which is terrorising the wretched of the Earth … the disease that is eating at the very core of our society. ibid.
We are seeing corporations feed off the body politic. ibid.
We have to stop sitting here and taking this stuff. We have to recognise that all of these systems are designed to crush us and that it’s time to rise up. It’s time to resist. ibid.
You’ve created fertile ground for the rise of American fascism. And our only response now is sustained mass acts of civil disobedience. Chris Hedges, lecture Seattle University 2018, Corporate Totalitarianism: The End Game *****
The state will be vicious … They will throw everything at us … Just from climate change, we have no time left, and in that sense resistance becomes a moral imperative. We have to stop being constrained by the tyranny of the practical. ibid.
Revolution is what I’m calling for … I’m calling for the overthrow of the corporate state. ibid.
But if we don’t stand up, it can’t be seen and we can’t use the word hope. I don’t know if we will win. I don’t even know if we will survive as a species. But these corporate forces have us by the throat and they have my children by the throat. And in the end, I don’t fight fascists because I will win, I fight fascists because they are fascists. ibid.
You say you want a revolution? Get online. In here, dissidents, disrupters and firebrands tap, click and swipe at the status quo. Dark Net s1e8: Revolt, Netflix 2016
I am my own revolution. Peaky Blinders s5e2: Black Cats, Tommy to Oswald Moseley, BBC 2019
Liberty Leading the People (1830) by Delacroix: It’s been a focal point of intoxicated devotion ever since … Delacroix was born into an age of revolutions in which the monarchy and aristocracy was under siege from the ideals of liberty, equality and the rights of man. The Romantics & Us With Simon Schama, BBC 2020
Delacroix’s image had its most famous resurrection during the Paris Uprisings of 1968 when students and workers came together on the barricades to break apart the rigid conservatism of French society under [Charles] de Gaulle. ibid.
The students took over the most prestigious art school and covered Paris in revolutionary slogans, poetry and street art. ibid.
I came across a book called Black Heroes of the American Revolution and was stunned to learn that African-Americans [and Native Americans] played a crucial part in our country’s fight for independence. What I learned changed my life and my sense of heritage. It’s a story every American should know: it’s a story of black patriots. Black Patriots: Heroes of the Revolution, Kareem Aldul-Jabbar reporting, History 2020
In 1770 in colonial America revolution is in the air. But this idea of independence is very different depending on the colour of your skin. One-fifth of the population is of African descent and slavery is a way of life in all thirteen colonies. Our black patriots begin this story in bondage; by War’s end they will have new identities in the new nation. ibid.
The black loyalists fighting for the British are making a significant impact on the War … A truly integrated unit: the first Rhode Island regiment is born … With roughly 140 black men now in the unit, their first taste of action is the Battle of Rhode Island in 1778. Covering the retreat of six American brigades, they courageously withstand three ferocious British assaults, saving the day … Other colonies followed suit. ibid.
Colonel Tye becomes one of the thousands of blacks killed in the American revolution. ibid.
Another black patriot will emerge as clever as he is courageous to help decide the day … when an enslaved man named James Armistead Lafayett made his mark. ibid.
Revolution creates seismic shifts in power and ideology. At the end of the twentieth century two revolutions set the destiny of the twenty-first. Romania: which defined the collapse of Soviet communism in Europe. And Iran: which heralded the rebirth of Islam as a potent force for political change. Days that Shook the World s3e8: The Road to Revolution, BBC 2005
Throughout much of the forty years that Prague endured communist control, people were kept in fear lest this administrative leviathan came knocking at the their door with an arrest warrant. The Velvet Revolution in November 1989 was meant to put a stop to all this. Misha Glenny, McMafia
Dean Reed lives in East Berlin because he likes it better over there. An entertainer who has become the Soviet version of a superstar: he sings, he acts, and he speaks with what seem to be genuine conviction the Soviet line. Red Elvis: The Cold War Cowboy ***** 60 Minutes, Sky Documentaries 2022
Six weeks after the 60 Minutes interview is broadcast he disappears. ibid. historian
From that point on there is no way back; he is an enemy of the government of the United States. ibid.
By the late 1960s Dean Read is a fully fledged political radical. ibid.
He is rebelling against the government [East German] he previously cooperated with. ibid.
It is nothing new. We have a private revolution going on. A revolution of individuality and diversity that can only be private. Upon becoming a group movement, such a revolution ends up with imitators rather than participants … It is essentially a striving for realization of one’s relationship to life and other people. Bob Stubbs, Unicorn Philosophy