Isolated killings continued with the murders of the US Sinai Multinational Force commander Leamon Hunt in 1984, the ex-mayor of Florence Lando Conti in February 1986, General Licio Giorgieri in 1987, and Senator Roberto Ruffilli in 1988. Police operations in response led to many arrests and the Red Brigades had virtually ceased to exist as a meaningful entity by the end of 1988. A remnant of the group still exists, possibly a new group with very little connection to the old Red Brigades. It briefly resurfaced in the 1990s and early 2000s murdering several government advisors and some police in gunfights. On October 23rd 2003 police raids in several areas of Italy, including Rome and Sardinia led to the arrest of several members of this group, four of whom were sentenced to life imprisonment in June 2005. It is possible other isolated cells remain and the Red Brigades were certainly a long time in dying even after Soviet support was cut off at the end of the Cold War, but any threat they still pose is more one of criminal activity than any meaningful political action. History of War online article
Brothers and Sisters, what are your real desires? Sit in the drugstore, look distant, empty, bored, drinking some tasteless coffee? Or perhaps Blow It Up Or Burn It Down … You can’t reform profit capitalism and inhumanity … Just kick it till it breaks. The Angry Brigade, Communique 8
Brothers and Sisters, what are your real desires? Sit in the drugstore, look distant, empty, bored, drinking some tasteless coffee? Or perhaps Blow It Up Or Burn It Down … You can’t reform profit capitalism and inhumanity … Just kick it till it breaks. The Angry Brigade, Communique 8
The journey to the guillotine and to the World War would start with the dreams of a philosopher. But not any old philosopher. Jean-Jacques Rousseau who was here ... just outside Paris, reshaped the mental habit of an entire generation, turning them from creatures of thought to creatures of feeling ... And the British couldn’t get enough of it. Simon Schama, A History of Britain s3e1: Forces of Nature, BBC 2002
Men of feeling in tune with the rhythms of nature. What appealed to men and women of feeling in the English provinces was Rousseau’s belief that urbanity, the graces and fashions of Metropolitan life were symptoms of everything that was rotten about the old world, the cosmetic mask behind which lurks the poxy disfigurement of a deceitful vicious terminally-diseased nation. ibid.
But when the lynching started [Edmund] Burke decided the revolution was above all an act of violence ... Democracy? Mobocrasy more like, said Burke. Heads stuck on pikes, the law of the lynch mob – we don’t want that here. ibid.
In August 1792 the monarchy had been overthrown and a revolutionary republic created in its place. ibid.
Fourteen hundred men and women held in Paris prisons were demonised as a fifth column and butchered in cold blood. ibid.
A time for all radicals to ask themselves difficult questions. How could you remain a cheerleader for revolution knowing now what you knew? Having seen the dreams turn to violence and bloodshed? The poet William Wordsworth had been as fervent as anyone in the early days of revolution hope. Now those hopes were turning to doubts. ibid.
Thousands of people reacted to Peterloo by throwing themselves into campaigns of action. Crusades which they embarked on with religious fervour. Those that laboured for change did so now not only in secret political clubs, but in the light of churches and chapels. Their targets were unnatural institutions – the monopoly of the Church of England, the ban on Catholic voters in Ireland. In the manufacturing towns a hue and cry to have their own MPs ... In 1830 a new Revolution in France and a wave of violence in the English countryside meant the votes for change could not be postponed. The Whigs took office for the first time since before 1789 as the champions of reform without revolution. ibid.
Throughout the ‘60s the bravery, eloquence and passion of the Civil Rights Campaign made other liberation movements in America wake up. Simon Schama’s History of Now II, BBC 2022
The choice that you face is that you either continue to be able to make a contribution to the struggle or not. Joe Slovo
All these conditions cannot be fulfilled by pamphlets and leaflets, but only by the living political school, by the fight and in the fight, in the continuous course of the revolution. Rosa Luxemburg
All revolutions are spiritual at the source. All my activities have the sole purpose of achieving a union of hearts. Vinoba Bhave
You don’t have a peaceful revolution. You don’t have a turn-the-other-cheek revolution. There’s no such thing as a non-violent revolution. Revolution is bloody. Revolution is hostile. Revolution knows no compromise. Revolution overturns and destroys everything that gets in its way. Malcolm X
The greatest mistake of the movement has been trying to organize a sleeping people around specific goals. You have to wake the people up first, then you’ll get action. Malcolm X
The Communists disdain to conceal their views and aims. They openly declare that their ends can be attained only by the forcible overthrow of all existing social conditions. Let the ruling classes tremble at a Communistic revolution. The proletarians have nothing to lose but their chains. They have a world to win.
WORKING MEN OF ALL COUNTRIES, UNITE! Karl Marx & Friedrich Engels, The Communist Manifesto
I suggested that we use the panther as our symbol and call our political vehicle the Black Panther Party. The panther is a fierce animal, but he will not attack until he is backed into a corner; then he will strike out. Huey Newton, Revolutionary Suicide, 1973
This is the final struggle
Let us group together, and tomorrow
The Internationale
Will be the human race … Eugene Pottier, L’Internationale, anthem 1871
Revolution is touching all of our lives. Freaks are revolutionaries and revolutionaries are freaks. Green & Siegel, The Weather Underground, 2002
This nation is in a state of turmoil perhaps unparalleled in our history. Poverty amidst wealth, widespread racism, and bewilderment over a strange war, are the seeds of the revolution. ibid. news report
We were entering an incredible period of revolution. ibid. Naomi Jaffe
A revolution is not a spectacle! There are no spectators! Everyone participates whether they know it or not. ibid. protest poster
We felt that doing nothing in a period of repressive violence is itself a form of violence. That’s really the part that I think is the hardest for people to understand. If you sit in your house, live your white life and go to your white job, and allow the country that you live in to murder people and to commit genocide, and you sit there and you don’t do anything about it, that’s violence. ibid. Naomi Jaffe
They’re not romantic revolutionaries; they’re the same thugs and hoodlums that have always plagued the good people. ibid. Richard Nixon
I think that part of the Weatherman phenomenon that was right was our understanding of what the position of the United States is in the world. It was this knowledge that we just couldn’t handle; it was too big. We didn’t know what to do. In a way I still don’t know what to do with this knowledge. I don’t know what needs to be done now, and it’s still eating away at me just as it did thirty years ago. ibid. Mark Rudd
Many a revolution started with the actions of a few. Only 56 men signed the Declaration of Independence. A few hanging together can lead a nation to change. Wynton Marsalis
On July 14th 1789 Paris erupted. Angry crowds stormed through the streets crying, Liberty! Equality! Brotherhood! Empires: Napoleon I: To Destiny, PBS 2000
The Revolution turned into the Terror. Torn by civil war, France was also at war with almost all of Europe. ibid.
The Republic continued to fight for its life. ibid.
On October 5th 1795 crowds of Parisians stormed through the streets alongside national guardsmen bent on restoring the monarchy. ibid.
The revolutions of the Arab Spring happened because people realized they were the power. Mohammed Morsi
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
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.