Category: revolution
The Kent State shootings (also known as the May 4 massacre or the Kent State massacre) occurred at Kent State University in the US city of Kent, Ohio, and involved the shooting of unarmed college students by the Ohio National Guard on Monday, May 4, 1970. The guardsmen fired 67 rounds over a period of 13 seconds, killing four students and wounding nine others, one of whom suffered permanent paralysis.
Some of the students who were shot had been protesting the Cambodian Campaign, which President Richard Nixon announced during a television address on April 30. Other students who were shot had been walking nearby or observing the protest from a distance.
There was a significant national response to the shootings: hundreds of universities, colleges, and high schools closed throughout the United States due to a student strike of four million students, and the event further affected public opinionâat an already socially contentious timeâover the role of the United States in the Vietnam War. (read more)
“I do, like many of you, appreciate the comforts of every day
routine- the security of the familiar, the tranquility of repetition. I
enjoy them as much as any bloke. But in the spirit of commemoration,
thereby those important events of the past usually associated with
someone’s death or the end of some awful bloody struggle, a celebration
of a nice holiday, I thought we could mark this November the 5th, a day
that is sadly no longer remembered, by taking some time out of our daily lives to sit down and have a little chat.
There are of course those who do not want us to speak. I suspect even
now, orders are being shouted into telephones, and men with guns will
soon be on their way. Why? Because while the truncheon may be used in
lieu of conversation, words will always retain their power. Words offer
the means to meaning, and for those who will listen, the enunciation of
truth. And the truth is, there is something terribly wrong with this
country, isn’t there?
Cruelty and injustice, intolerance and
oppression. And where once you had the freedom to object, to think and
speak as you saw fit, you now have censors and systems of surveillance
coercing your conformity and soliciting your submission.
How did
this happen? Who’s to blame? Well certainly there are those more
responsible than others, and they will be held accountable, but again
truth be told, if you’re looking for the guilty, you need only look into
a mirror. I know why you did it. I know you were afraid. Who wouldn’t
be? War, terror, disease. There were a myriad of problems which
conspired to corrupt your reason and rob you of your common sense. Fear
got the best of you, and in your panic you turned to the now high
chancellor, Adam Sutler. He promised you order, he promised you peace,
and all he demanded in return was your silent, obedient consent.
Last night I sought to end that silence. Last night I destroyed the Old
Bailey, to remind this country of what it has forgotten. More than four
hundred years ago a great citizen wished to embed the fifth of November
forever in our memory. His hope was to remind the world that fairness,
justice, and freedom are more than words, they are perspectives.
So if you’ve seen nothing, if the crimes of this government remain
unknown to you then I would suggest you allow the fifth of November to
pass unmarked. But if you see what I see, if you feel as I feel, and if
you would seek as I seek, then I ask you to stand beside me one year
from tonight, outside the gates of Parliament, and together we shall
give them a fifth of November that shall never, ever be forgot.”
- Labels: corruption, fascism, government, revolution, truth
“People shouldn’t be afraid of their government
governments should be afraid of their people.”
- Labels: corporations, corruption, government, greed, people, rebel, revolution
Ladies and Gentlemen,
There really isn’t much reason to beat around the bush, I imagine. By now you have noticed the manipulation and bias within the media. You’ve watched as your government has sold you down the river. Corporations have buried their money into your politics and now influence the decisions of your government. The banks continue to grow more ruthless and unethical in practice. All in the name of profit. Your future, your childrenâs future…it means nothing to them. The only desired outcome is maximum profit, obtained with the least possible expense. And whether you want to admit it to yourself or not, you already know this.
Is this what it has come to? A price-tag on life? A world coursing with greed, intoxicated on monetary gain and material conquest? Why have we allowed this?
Ladies and gentlemen, these are questions you should be asking yourselves. The world around us has been manipulated, coerced in a direction where human life is outweighed by profit. Corporations and bankers now influence the policies, regulations, and even the decisions made by our own governments who have sold us down the river. They took our dreams. Our futures. They took them from you. From all of us. And in their own arrogant, condescending fashion they expect you to roll over and accept it.
They pass into law further restrictions on your personal rights and freedoms. They want to shut you up! To keep quiet! Keep you alone and all of us divided. Marketing has you chasing an image, telling you what you need to do, what to think and say…how to feel, how to dress. How to be you. Who are you? Do you even know? Can you honestly tell me that you are happy with life as it is defined for you? Open your eyes! It’s all out there in front of you. Stop trusting these crooked politicians. They donât care about you! They don’t care. The will of the people is not a profitable investment.
All the while you chase the dream life they created for you, waving it in front of your face like a carrot on a stick. Stop it! Stop being guided through life! We need to quit letting the decisions of a few control the lives of the many. We need to take our future, our childrenâs future…back into our hands.
When did we become so careless?
So wreckless, apathetic and submissive?
When did we lose our connection with others, with community and family?
Stop focusing on our differences and start acknowledging and building upon our common grounds. Start sharing, connecting, teaching one another and learning from each other as well. Build our bond as human beings. Find your strength in unity. Find your voice…and then let it be heard. Because, my friends…what you have to say does matter. We just need to get off our knees, stand on our own two feet, and remind them just how much we do matter!
Become the change that you want to see. Build the future together! A decent future. A future where life is cherished, rather than spent worshipping money. Where justice, fairness and liberty is doctrine. A world invested in education, ingenuity and creativity rather than war and conquest.
Rid yourself of your cynicism, your ego, your fear. Instead open your hearts, your minds and your eyes. Broaden your horizons. Respect others for their own opinions, just as you can expect the same in return. It’s time to change our ways. To evolve and break free of this vicious cycle. Itâs time to educate ourselves on the issues affecting us and to work together to create progressive, effective solutions.
- Labels: banks, corporations, corruption, military, now, revolution
Civil disobedience becomes a sacred duty
when the State becomes lawless or corrupt.
Mahatma Gandhi
Ernesto “Che” Guevara (June 14, 1928 â October 9, 1967), commonly known as el Che or simply Che, was an Argentine Marxist revolutionary, physician, author, intellectual, guerrilla leader, diplomat, and military theorist. A major figure of the Cuban Revolution, his stylized visage has become a ubiquitous countercultural symbol of rebellion and global insignia within popular culture.
As a young medical student, Guevara traveled throughout Latin America and was radically transformed by the endemic poverty and alienation he witnessed. His experiences and observations during these trips led him to conclude that the region’s ingrained economic inequalities were an intrinsic result of capitalism, monopolism, neocolonialism, and imperialism, with the only remedy being world revolution. This belief prompted his involvement in Guatemala’s social reforms under President Jacobo Arbenz, whose eventual CIA-assisted overthrow solidified Guevara’s political ideology. Later, while living in Mexico City, he met Raúl and Fidel Castro, joined their 26th of July Movement, and sailed to Cuba aboard the yacht, Granma, with the intention of overthrowing U.S.-backed Cuban dictator Fulgencio Batista. Guevara soon rose to prominence among the insurgents, was promoted to second-in-command, and played a pivotal role in the victorious two-year guerrilla campaign that deposed the Batista regime.
Following the Cuban Revolution, Guevara performed a number of key roles in the new government. These included reviewing the appeals and firing squads for those convicted as war criminals during the revolutionary tribunals, instituting agrarian land reform as minister of industries, helping spearhead a successful nationwide literacy campaign, serving as both national bank president and instructional director for Cubaâs armed forces, and traversing the globe as a diplomat on behalf of Cuban socialism. Such positions also allowed him to play a central role in training the militia forces who repelled the Bay of Pigs Invasion and bringing the Soviet nuclear-armed ballistic missiles to Cuba which precipitated the 1962 Cuban Missile Crisis. Additionally, he was a prolific writer and diarist, composing a seminal manual on guerrilla warfare, along with a best-selling memoir about his youthful motorcycle journey across South America. Guevara left Cuba in 1965 to foment revolution abroad, first unsuccessfully in Congo-Kinshasa and later in Bolivia, where he was captured by CIA-assisted Bolivian forces and executed.
Guevara remains both a revered and reviled historical figure, polarized in the collective imagination in a multitude of biographies, memoirs, essays, documentaries, songs, and films. As a result of his perceived martyrdom, poetic invocations for class struggle, and desire to create the consciousness of a “new man” driven by moral rather than material incentives; he has evolved into a quintessential icon of various leftist-inspired movements. Time magazine named him one of the 100 most influential people of the 20th century, while an Alberto Korda photograph of him entitled Guerrillero Heroico , was cited by the Maryland Institute College of Art as “the most famous photograph in the world”. (read more)
“Guerrillero Heroico”
Che Guevara at the La Coubre memorial service.
Taken by Alberto Korda on March 5, 1960.
- Labels: equality, freedom, liberal, liberation, rebel, revolution
Assad massacres
while the West fiddles.
The Syrian regime will commit genocide to survive, while the international community amuses itself with sanctions. If it were not so sad, it would be funny.
It was hard to miss the huge headlines reporting the death of US journalist Marie Colvin. Colvin and her colleague, French photojournalist Remi Ochlik, were in a makeshift press center in the Baba Amru neighborhood in Homs, when artillery shells fired by the Syrian army hit their building.
Their death was sad and unnecessary, as was the task they went out to perform. There are blood-drenched locations, where the presence of war journalists reveals to an indifferent world, atrocities that they did not know about. Syria is not such a place. Syrian bloggers, iPhone photographers, and human rights activists tell the stories themselves. If there is a journalistic story that is worth getting killed for, they are not the ones that brought Ochlik and Colvin to Syria. Granted, people around the world have done little for the wretched citizens in Syria, but it was well aware of their hardships before Western journalists arrived on the scene. (read more)
- Labels: death, fascism, revolution, war
A revolution (from the Latin revolutio, “a turn around”) is a fundamental change in power or organizational structures that takes place in a relatively short period of time. Aristotle described two types of political revolution:
1.Complete change from one constitution to another.
2.Modification of an existing constitution.
Revolutions have occurred through human history and vary widely in terms of methods, duration, and motivating ideology. Their results include major changes in culture, economy, and socio-political institutions.
Scholarly debates about what does and does not constitute a revolution center around several issues. Early studies of revolutions primarily analyzed events in European history from a psychological perspective, but more modern examinations include global events and incorporate perspectives from several social sciences, including sociology and political science. Several generations of scholarly thought on revolutions have generated many competing theories and contributed much to the current understanding of this complex phenomenon.
There are many different typologies of revolutions in social science and literature. For example, classical scholar Alexis de Tocqueville differentiated between 1) political revolutions 2) sudden and violent revolutions that seek not only to establish a new political system but to transform an entire society and 3) slow but sweeping transformations of the entire society that take several generations to bring about (ex. religion). One of several different Marxist typologies divides revolutions into pre-capitalist, early bourgeois, bourgeois, bourgeois-democratic, early proletarian, and socialist revolutions.
Charles Tilly, a modern scholar of revolutions, differentiated between a coup, a top-down seizure of power, a civil war, a revolt and a “great revolution” (revolutions that transform economic and social structures as well as political institutions, such as the French Revolution of 1789, Russian Revolution of 1917, or Islamic Revolution of Iran).
Other types of revolution, created for other typologies, include the social revolutions; proletarian or communist revolutions inspired by the ideas of Marxism that aims to replace capitalism with communism); failed or abortive revolutions (revolutions that fail to secure power after temporary victories or large-scale mobilization) or violent vs. nonviolent revolutions.
The term “revolution” has also been used to denote great changes outside the political sphere. Such revolutions are usually recognized as having transformed in society, culture, philosophy and technology much more than political systems; they are often known as social revolutions. Some can be global, while others are limited to single countries. One of the classic examples of the usage of the word revolution in such context is the industrial revolution (note that such revolutions also fit the “slow revolution” definition of Tocqueville). (read more)
- Labels: control, corruption, government, power, revolution
“Civil disobedience
becomes a sacred duty
when the state has become
lawless and corrupt”
- Labels: fascism, fear, mahatma gandhi, now, revolution
Prince Charles and Camilla, Duchess of Cornwall, react as their car is attacked by protesters in London. Photograph: Matt Dunham/AP
A Rolls-Royce limousine carrying Britain’s Prince Charles and his wife Camilla, Duchess of Cornwall, was attacked and 12 police officers were injured in London late Thursday amid violent student protests.
A rear window was smashed and the vehicle was splattered with paint as up to 20 demonstrators lunged at the vehicle, carrying the couple to a theater in the West End.
Clarence House said the couple were “unharmed” and they arrived on time at the London Palladium for the Royal Variety Performance, although the Duchess of Cornwall appeared shaken by the ordeal.
Reports said the vehicle was attacked with fists, kicks and bottles, with protesters chanting “Off with their heads!” and “Tory scum.”
Clashes escalated among thousands of students gathered in parts of the capital Thursday evening after MPs controversially voted to increase UK college fees from £3,290 ($5,200) to £9,000 ($14,000) per year — a vote that saw splits within the ruling Conservative-Liberal Democrat coalition. (read more)
- Labels: audacity, protest, revolution
“Rise and rise again
until lambs become lions”