“Revolutions are festivals of the oppressed and the exploited. At no other time are the mass of the people in a position to come forward so actively as creators of a new social order, as at a time of revolution. At such times the people are capable of performing miracles, if judged by the limited, philistine yardsticks of gradualist progress”
– Lenin (1905)
“If you allow a lot of young people to do nothing for a few years but read books and talk to each other then it is possible that given certain wider historical circumstances, they will not only begin to question some of the values transmitted to them but begin to interrogate the authority by which they are transmitted.”
– Terry Eagleton
“ I suppose, if Malcolm X were alive today, they would kill him.”
–Kevin Alexander Gray (2004)
“Doing nothing in a period of repressive violence is itself a form of violence.”
–Naomi Jaffee
“Nothing’s more important than stopping fascism because fascism will stop us all.”
–Fred Hampton
“The first stage of the black freedom movement in the 60s– the civil rights struggle– began as a black response to white violent attacks and took the form of a critique of everyday life in the American South. The critique primariliy consisted of attacking everyday cultural folkways that insulted black dignity. It was generated, in part, from the mulitfarious effects of economic transformation of dispossessed southern rural peasants into downtrodden industrial workers, maids, and unemployed city dwellers within the racist American South. In this regard, the civil rights movment prefigured the fundamental concerns of the American New Left: linking private troubles, accenting the relation of cultural hegemony to political control and economic exploitation.”
–Cornel West
“The duty of every revolutionary is to make revolution. We know that in America and throughout the world the revolution will be victorious. But revolutionaries cannot sit in the doorways of their homes to watch the corpse of imperialism pass by. The role of Job does not behoove a revolutionary. Each year by which America’s liberation may be hastened will mean millions of children rescued from death, millions of minds, freed for learning, infinitudes of sorrow spared the peoples.”
–Castro (1962)
“I experienced my oppression as the inability to grasp anything real beyond my own subjectivity. I was in revolt against the experience of unreality.”
– Osha Neumann (NYC Motherfuckers)
“No Frozen Moments For Tomorrow’s Fantasy Revolution!”
– Slogan of the Free City Diggers (1968)
The nihilist
He wore his pants
tapered,
hip. He dug Hemingway
too. But his father
said glumly
“Son, your taste
is un-Russian…”
Thus he saddened
his family
hard-working
boosters of output—
all the time
arguing with them
about weird
predilections.
—Yevgeni Yevtushenko (1960)
“ The student is a stoic slave: the more chains authority heaps upon him, the freer he is in phantasy. He shares with his new family, the University, a belief in a curious kind of autonomy. Real independence, apparently, lies in a direct subservience to the two most powerful systems of social control: the family and the State. He is their well-behaved and grateful child, and like the submissive child he is overeager to please. He celebrates all the values and mystifications of the system, devouring them with all the anxiety of the infant at the breast.”
–Situationist International
“A little less conversation, a little more action.”
– Elvis Presley
“The acid experience is so concrete. It draws a line right across your life– before and after LSD– in the same way you felt that your step into radical politics drew a sharp division. People talked about that, the change you go through, how fast the change could happen on an individual level and how liberating and glorious it was. Change was seen as survival, as the strategy of health. Nothing could stand for that overall sense of going through profound change so well as the immediate, powerful and explicit transformation that you went through when you dropped acid. In the same way, bursting through the barricades redefined you as a new person. It’s not necessarily that the actual content of the LSD experience contributed to politically radical or revolutionary consciousness– it was just that the experience shared the structural characteristics of political rebellion, and resonated those changes so that the two became interdependent prongs of an over-arching transcending rebellion that took in the person and the State at the same time.”
– Carl Oglesby, “On Revolution”
“Finally you just split if you couldn’t cope.”
– former Love Child/ Acid Freak (now a roofer and parent living in california)
“What is a revolutionary? Someone who says no, but whose refusal does not imply a renunciation.”
–Albert Camus
“If it takes a bloodbath, let’s get it over with. No more appeasement.”
–Ronald Reagan, 4/7/70
“They felt it’s just, ‘they’re assholes and we’re the heroes.’”
Anthony Bonza, NYPD
“Fuck ‘em.”
– Abbie Hoffman
“Democracy is in the streets.”
– SDS slogan
“I come all over the pavement.”
– grafitti on Paris wall, May 1968
The Long 60s Timeline
1957
Independence of Ghana
Little Rock 9
Civil Rights Act (gives Justice dept. greater authority in elections)
African Decolonization : French Cameroon, Togo, the Malagasy Republic (Madagascar), the Independent Congo Republic, Somalia, Dahomey, Upper Volta, Ivory Coast, Chad, the Central African Republic, Gabon, Mali, Niger, Senegal, Nigeria, the Islamic Republic of Mauritania.
Freedom Riders challenge segregation of interstate travel.
69 anti-apartheid demonstrators killed in the Sharpeville massacre (South Africa).
GI Joe doll introduced. In 1969, Joe– newly available in black and white colors– demilitarized and became an “adventurer” who battled the elements rather than killing other dolls. Even so, the toy was discontinued in 1976, only to be re-introduced in the Reagan 80s (1982) with a new (“Real American Hero” series) look.
1965
The 1st Marine Division lands in Da Nang (Vietnam).
Sustained bombing campaign (“Rolling Thunder”) of North Vietnam.
“The Crisis of the Negro Intellectual”, Harold Cruse.
“Tiger Force”, a 45 member Army reconaissance platoon, roams the Central Highlands of Vietnam from May to November, killing hundreds of unarmed civillians.
Edward Brooke (R-Mass) becomes the first African-American senator since Reconstruction, almost 100 years before.
Liberation of People’s Park followed by the occupation of Berkeley. Gov. Reagan: “If they want a bloodbath, let’s get it over with. No more appeasement.”
Panther 21 indicted.
“Homecoming”, Sonia Sanchez.
US begins secret bombing of Cambodia and Laos.
The internet.
“Okie from Muskogee”, Merle Haggard/ “This is Madness”, Last Poets.
Dear blooger apciv,
I would like to use one of the pictures above and kindly ask you therefore to come back to me via Email so that I can provide you with further information.
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Dear blooger apciv,
I would like to use one of the pictures above and kindly ask you therefore to come back to me via Email so that I can provide you with further information.
Thanks in advance and regards