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.
The baby boomers want an end to the Vietnam War and they take their protest to the streets. America: The Story of the US: Millennium, History 2010
1970: there’s been thousands of anti-Vietnam war protests. Kent State University, Ohio: the National Guard are ordered in to control five hundred protesting students. Television is here watching. Four students are shot dead. ibid.
America’s campuses began to buzz with activism ... One hundred thousand people rallied in Washington. Oliver Stone’s Untold History of the United States VII: Johnson, Nixon and Vietnam: Reversal of Fortune, Showtime 2012
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
Then she lay down in the street
Right before the horse’s feet
Expecting with a patient eye
Murder Fraud and Anarchy ...
Tis to work and have such pay
As just keeps life from day to day ...
From the workhouse and the prison
Where pale as corpses newly risen
Women, children, young and old
Groan for pain and weep for cold ...
And that slaughter to the nation
Shall steam up like inspiration,
Eloquent, oracular;
A volcano heard afar.
And these words shall then become
Like oppression’s thundered doom,
Ringing through each heart and brain
Heard again, again, again –
Rise like lions after slumber
In unvanquishable number
Shake your chains to earth like dew
Which in sleep had fallen on you.
Ye are many. They are few. Percy Bysshe Shelley, The Mask of Anarchy
1947: shortly after the close of World War II 23 nations signed a general agreement on tariffs and trade: GATT. Battle in Seattle 2007 starring Woody Harrelson & Andre Benjamin & Jennifer Carpenter & Martin Henderson & Ray Liotta & Connie Nielsen & Michelle Rodriguez & Channing Tatum & Charlize Theron et al, director Stuart Townsend
It has very little to do with trade and it is certainly not free. ibid. protester
Of course we’re going to get hurt. What do you think this is? Protests get me excited and depressed at the same time. ibid. her to him
I am watching a completely unprovoked attack by police here in downtown Seattle. ibid. Jean
The Battle in Seattle turns into a war. ibid.
How do they keep putting themselves on the line like that, for a cause they can’t win? ibid. Jean
Isn’t it time that people mattered more than profit? ibid. Medicine sans Frontiers dude
People are protesting with us in thirty cities across the world. ibid. protester
Thanks WTO It’s Been A Riot. ibid. cinema sign
2003: As the WTO floods local markets with imports, 40,000 Indian farmers commit suicide to escape their debt. ibid. caption
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.
The Peasants’ Revolt – the greatest uprising in the history of medieval England. Professor Robert Bartlett, The Plantagenets III, BBC 2014
I got my head bashed in at a demonstration against the Vietnam War. Police were losing control because they were up against a world they really didn’t understand. Terry Gilliam
What is this, the sound and rumour? What is this that all men hear,
Like the wind in hollow valleys when the storm is drawing near,
Like the rolling on of ocean in the eventide of fear?
’Tis the people marching on. William Morris, Chants for Socialism, 1885
Huge anti-war demonstrations were held in sixty countries. The Iraq War I: Regime Change, BBC 2013
In London about one million people took to the streets. ibid.
Vietnam was, and still is, the only question that can mobilise the masses. Grin Without a Cat aka The Base of the Air is Red, Paul Verges, 1977
Saint-Nazaire May 1st 1967: End of the longest strike of the post-war in Sud-Aviation. ibid.
1967: We feel we had a real movement. ibid. striker
On April 11th 1968 Rudi was gravely wounded by gunfire while he cycled in a Berlin street. He’d written, We Must Revolutionise Revolutionaries. ibid.
Paris 1962 Metro Charonne: A new attitude in the demonstrations, more aggressive, born from a real need of striking back. ibid.
This is where the New Left was born. ibid.
It’s a struggle between rich and poor. ibid. Douglas Bravo
May 68 and all that: For me, May 68 happened in the Boulevard Saint-Michel. ibid.
But never has this authentic courage, this everyday courage, which consists of sacrificing your personality completely to become effective. ibid.
Indeed, we have occupied the Sorbonne. ibid.
Paris Latin Quarter May 6th: At once the State reveals its oppressive side; the one that stays more or less hidden in everyday life. ibid.
The occupation of the Latin Quarter went fine until 8 p.m. It was the police that set off the incidents attacking us with chlorine grenade-launchers. ibid.
Birth of a legend. Birth of an image. ibid.
It’s always the same scene: a few blows and then they arrest them. ibid.
That time showed us that street violence does not lead automatically to political change. ibid.
In Latin America a whole generation of political fighters would end up under fascist regimes. ibid.
They want a change: political and economic. ibid.
In Saint-Etienne, however, the CGT strikers shunned by their comrades from the other two unions take to counter-attack and attack the CRS with stones, screws and iron bars. ibid. Newsreel October 1948
Anyway, history wasn’t being written in Avignon that summer; it was being written in Prague.’ ibid. striker
In Prague, the archives of the Gestapo were thrown into the streets. ibid. French newsreel
The first Soviet tank that entered Free Prague carried the number 23. It was the same tank, now a monument, that was surrounded by other Russian tanks in August 1968. ibid. commentator
Dubcek goes to Moscow and finds another Brezhnev who threatens with military invasion and ‘normalization’. ibid.
What are you doing in Prague? And you call yourself a communist. ibid. demonstrator to man in tank
Student demonstration, May 68, quickly repressed the Mexican way. Two hundred dead, and the game opened in a pacified capital. ibid. commentator
The lights are out all over Egypt. The Square, opening scene, 2013
Egypt was living without dignity. Injustice existed everywhere. Before the revolution I lived from one job to the next. I started working when I was eight years old. ibid. Ahmed
They forced us to live for 30 years under emergency law. ibid.
We will go down and demand our fundamental human rights. ibid. protester
We have taken Tahrir Square! … The entire nation erupted at once. ibid.
When Mubarak stepped down the armed forces took over the country’s affairs. They swore to God to meet the people’s demands. So the people went home. And nothing happened. ibid.
So we went back to the square. ibid.