Alex Jones - Storyville: Tiananmen: The People v the Party TV - Our World: Inside the Hong Kong Protests TV - Robert Louis Stevenson - John Pilger - Louis Sullivan - Robert A Heinlein - Cesar Chavez - Carl Sagan - Gerrit Smith - Saul Bellow - Theodor Adorno - Noam Chomsky - Vive le Revolution! Joan Bakewell on May 1968 TV - Michael Hudson - Exterminate All the Brutes TV -
The elites have said that they want a final revolution – that they know the public’s going to revolt against them, so that’s why they’ve scientifically set up the surveillance grid, the cashless society, this whole continuity of government system is designed to suppress and control the people of America. Alex Jones
In June 1989 a lone figure halting a battalion of tanks in the Chinese capital Beijing sent shockwaves around the world. It is an act which China itself prefers to forget. What had started as a peaceful student protest calling for freedom and democracy ended seven weeks later in carnage. Storyville: Tiananmen: The People v the Party, BBC 2019
Thirty years on, eye-witness accounts and secret documents now help provide a deeper understanding of how the Tiananmen massacre changed the course of Chinese history. ibid.
Large scale protests broke out in 21 provinces. ibid.
On the evening of May 19th Premier Li Peng revealed to the Party the emergency plan to suppress the students. ibid.
More than 200,000 soldiers from the People’s Liberation Army had been deployed. ibid.
The hunger strike was abandoned in favour of the permanent occupation of the Square. ibid.
Martial law was under threat from within through an unprecedented mutiny within every rank of the People’s Army itself. ibid.
On May 23th one million Beijing workers staged a mass strike in support of the student’ call for democracy. ibid.
News of the crackdown had brought more people out on the streets … They were the first to discover the brutal truth. ibid.
For five months huge protests have rocked Hong Kong. Hundreds of thousands of people taking on the authorities and the might of China. So why are they risking so much in an ever more violent battle? And how will this struggle end for ordinary Hong Kongers? Our World, Inside the Hong Kong Protests, BBC 2019
Since June hundreds of thousands of protesters have been out on the streets in Hong Kong. The demonstrations were sparked by a proposed law change allowing the extradition of Hong Kongers to face trial on mainland China, but they morphed into a movement demanding democracy and an end to the steady erosion of rights. ibid.
Holly is one of many dedicated first aid volunteers. ibid.
Those sham impartialists, wolves in sheep’s clothing, simpering honestly as they suppress. Robert Louis Stevenson
BBC: Its long-documented history of suppression, of doing the bidding of British governments, and of serving Western power. John Pilger, lecture 2018
After four and a half months British relief forces arrived ... The pretence of British rule had been shattered; the bluff called. Jeremy Paxman, Empire I, BBC 2012
How strange it seems that education, in practice, so often means suppression: that instead of leading the mind outward to the light of day it crowds things in upon it that darken and weary it. Yet evidently the true object of education, now as ever, is to develop the capabilities of the head and of the heart. Louis Sullivan, Emotional Architecture as Compared to Intellectual: A Study in Subjective and Objective
When any government, or any church for that matter, undertakes to say to its subjects, This you may not read, this you must not see, this you are forbidden to know, the end result is tyranny and oppression no matter how holy the motives. Robert A Heinlein
Once social change begins it cannot be reversed. You cannot uneducate the person who has learned to read. You cannot humiliate the person who feels pride. You cannot oppress the people who are not afraid any more. We have seen the future, and the future is ours. Cesar Chavez
The suppression of uncomfortable ideas may be common in religion or politics. But it is not the path to knowledge. And there’s no place for it in the endeavour of science. Carl Sagan & Ann Druyan, Cosmos: Heaven and Hell, PBS 1980
Truth and mercy require the exertion – never the suppression – of man’s noble rights and powers. Gerrit Smith
Everybody knows there is no fineness or accuracy of suppression; if you hold down one thing, you hold down the adjoining. Saul Bellow
When intellectual formulations are treated simply by relegating them to the past and permitting the simple passage of time to substitute for development, the suspicion is justified that such formulations have not really been mastered, but rather they are being suppressed. Theodor Adorno, cited Michael Bull ‘Sounding Out the City’
Democratic forms can be tolerated, even admired, if only for propaganda purposes. But this stance can be adopted only when the distribution of effective power ensures that meaningful participation of the ‘popular classes’ had been barred. When they organize and threaten the control of the political system by the business-landowner elite and the military, strong measures must be taken, with tactical variations depending on the ranking of the target population on the scale of importance. At the lowest rank, in the Third World, virtually no holds are barred. Noam Chomsky, Deterring Democracy
In Greece in the same years, hundreds and thousands were killed, tortured, imprisoned or expelled in the course of a counterinsurgency operation, organized and directed by the United States, which restored traditional elites to power, including Nazi collaborators, and suppressed the peasant- and worker-based Communist-led forces that had fought the Nazis. ibid.
Italy: The US planned military intervention in the event of a legal Communist political victory in 1948 ... Washington’s intention to resort to violence if free elections came out the wrong way is not very easy to deal with, so it has been generally suppressed, even in the scholarly literature. ibid. p345
Spain: Fascists, Communists, and liberal democracies were united in opposition to the libertarian revolution that swept over much of the country, turning to the conflict over the spoils only when popular forces were safely suppressed. ibid.
In earlier years, when he was better behaved, Figueres recognized that the Costa Rican Communist Party, particularly strong among plantation workers, was posing an unacceptable challenge. He therefore arrested its leaders, declared the Party illegal, and suppressed its members. The policy was maintained through the 1960s, while efforts to establish any working-class party were banned by the state authorities. ibid.
Well, I’m not sure the The New York Times was consciously trying to trivialise me, but the effect of it is to put everything in the same category as the gossip you read in the magazines you pick up at supermarket counters. I was asked, for example, why I thought there were so many euphemisms for genitalia. It’s not a serious question. Whatever the purpose of such a tone is, the effect is to make it appear that anyone who departs from orthodox political doctrine is in some ways laughable. Noam Chomsky
Orwell wrote that although the country [England] is quite free nevertheless popular ideas can be suppressed without the use of force … Noam Chomsky, lecture The New School New York City, ‘On Power and Ideology’, Youtube 1.16.30
Czechoslovakia: But for the time being the dreams were not fulfilled. After three months of dizzy optimism the Russian tanks rolled across to the border to suppress what had been a defiant challenge to the Soviet grip on eastern Europe. Vive le Revolution! Joan Bakewell on May 1968, BBC 2018
We really don’t need to pay taxes. We pay taxes because the financial sector and the banks do not want the governments simply to create the money on its own printing press. We pay taxes as a way of keeping down labour. We tax labour and industry but we don’t tax real estate, we hardly tax finance at all, and we don’t tax monopolies, which are large enough to have off-shore banking centres where they don’t pay taxes. We pay taxes so that the 1% can push the whole tax burden on to the 99% and prevent it from rising in the economy. Prevent it from having economic power that might turn into political power to make productivity to help its own living standards and help society instead of helping the 1% to make society worse and worse. Dr Michael Hudson, interview The Keiser Report September 2020