EP30 So, you say you want a revolution?

What is discussed, and when

1. 0:00 – 10:00: Hardcore History
2. 10:00 – 20:00: Civil Rights Movement, Thomas Jefferson
3. 20:00 – 30:00: Black Panthers, Malcolm X, Robert Kennedy, Abby Hoffman
4. 30:00 – 40:00: Civil Rights Movement
5. 50:00 – 1:00:00: Democratic National Convention, Abby Hoffman, Lyndon Johnson, Prague Spring
6. 1:00:00 – 1:10:00: Black Panthers, Lyndon Johnson
7. 1:10:00 – 1:20:00: Abby Hoffman, Prague Spring, Democratic National Convention
8. 1:20:00 – 1:30:00: Black Panthers, Malcolm X
9. 1:30:00 – 1:37:47: Anonymous, Hardcore History, Occupy, Prague Spring

Notable quotes from "EP30 So, you say you want a revolution?"

• It's hardcore history there are two kinds of people that listen to this podcast one group are history fans the other group are people who are in the.

  about Hardcore History · at 0:02

• While you could feel the tension ratcheting up for well one might say from the mid1 1950 S I mean the Civil Rights Movement gets going in mid late 1950s strong and you know when President Kennedy's assassinated in November.

  about Civil Rights Movement · at 11:53

• Thing you know who said that one of the United States's most revered founding fathers Thomas Jefferson and it sounds good in theory right the United States itself was of course…

  about Thomas Jefferson · at 16:00

• Was some of Black America also this was cited as one of the reasons for the creation of the Black Panthers in 1966 and in my narration I said quote anger over the killing of…

  about Black Panthers · at 23:03

• Months later it was Robert's turn this is a time of tragedy and loss Senator Robert Kennedy is Robert Kennedy affirmed this country affirmed the essential decency of its people they're longing for peace and then mercifully for all of us.

  about Robert Kennedy · at 27:48

• Ammunition to those who wanted to argue for measures Beyond mere dissent events surrounding the Democratic National Convention in Chicago in 1968 helped crystallize things the…

  about Democratic National Convention · at 28:36

• Hold of the Communists on their society in Czechoslovakia had something called the Prague spring in 1968 and on March 5th the entry says the government of Czechoslovakia…

  about Prague Spring · at 57:47

• Storm Even in our recent past we in the US have seen the rise of groups like the tea party occupy and Anonymous challenging A system that seems less than responsive to the…

  about Anonymous · at 1:35:08

Who and what is mentioned in this episode?

People

• Abby Hoffman — Person · 4 mentions · first at 28:55
  Nomination of his party for president at this convention but while he won't be there Abby Hoffman will end quote and that's sort of the end of the sizzle reel but it's given us…
• Malcolm X — Person · 3 mentions · first at 22:52
  Last leader gunned down in the 1960s far from it end quote Malcolm X was gunned down in May 1965 and while White America was relatively scared of Malcolm X and so was some of Black America also this was.
• Robert Kennedy — Person · 3 mentions · first at 27:56
• Lyndon Johnson — Person · 2 mentions · first at 58:21
  Or four days after a primary which showed that a peace candidate running against the sitting president LBJ Lyndon Johnson was performing shockingly strong against him and…
• Thomas Jefferson — Person · 1 mention · first at 16:05
• George Santayana — Person · 1 mention

Companies & orgs

• Black Panthers — Company · 5 mentions · first at 23:08
• Hardcore History — Company · 3 mentions · first at 0:02
• Smithsonian Magazine — Company · 3 mentions

Concepts & topics

• 1968 — Concept · 5 mentions
• Democratic National Convention — Concept · 4 mentions · first at 28:42
• Prague Spring — Concept · 4 mentions · first at 57:51
• Civil Rights Movement — Concept · 2 mentions · first at 11:58
• Anonymous — Concept · 1 mention · first at 1:35:14
• Occupy — Concept · 1 mention · first at 1:35:14
  Storm Even in our recent past we in the US have seen the rise of groups like the tea party occupy and Anonymous challenging A system that seems less than responsive to the…
• Tea Party — Concept · 1 mention · first at 1:35:14
  Storm Even in our recent past we in the US have seen the rise of groups like the tea party occupy and Anonymous challenging A system that seems less than responsive to the…

Full transcript with timestamps

0:02 it's hardcore history there are two kinds of people that listen to this um podcast one group are history fans the other group are people who are in the process of becoming history fans and so um like to talk to them for a minute history fans already know what I'm going to say here but it's an interesting aspect of why the asked in terms of a field of study should matter to us today we exist in a time period where uh the value of a history education for example among several Humanities um SL social science disciplines are sort of at a low E because a whole bunch of factors including people who come out of college with huge student loans they have to pay back is geared towards you know trying to maximize the investment that was your you know University education which is totally understandable but it causes us to sort of look to knee jerk at the connection between education and earning potential

1:11 right you study computer science you get out you have a job as opposed to you become a more formidable person uh by immersing yourself in the humanities which helps you in a whole bunch of ways as life requires you to adapt over and over again um I understand people devalue it and maybe those subjects are not the same as they used used to be but there was always a practical value to learning about things like history although not always in the way non-history fans assume again history fans already know this let me let me use my favorite example you'll often hear usually when we're talking about some military uh Affair that might involve um you know combating a dictator or something you'll hear the 1938 Munich appeasement argument brought into Play You'll often see this some will say we learned in 1938 that you can't appease dictators cuz we appeased Hitler and look what happened this is a standard non-history

2:10 fan understanding of cause and effect where they look and say Well it happened this way once therefore it'll happen this way again ignoring what history fans obviously already understand that there are bazillion variables and all those variables make the situation you know that you're using that 1938 aasan example to you know make an argument point in that the two situations are not comparable first of all dictators don't always act the same way right Hitler is a human being he acts a certain way doesn't mean Saddam Hussein is going to act like Hitler automatically I mean there is no automatic you know way you can just predicted well Hitler would have done this therefore saddam's going to do it too it just it doesn't work that way that's a VAR and then that's one of millions right it's in the interest sometimes though of people to have you believe history works that way journalist head couo once said history is a tool used by

3:02 politicians to justify their intentions and of course it only works if the audience on the receiving end of that kind of a discussion also doesn't really understand all the variables and the way history works not enough history fans in the electorate I'm comfortable saying so that's how history doesn't teach lessons but so many people think that it does I mean there's a great line that's famous um from the philosopher George santiana who said those who cannot remember the past are condemned to repeat it implying that you have to learn these lessons um like don't appease Hitler in 1938 or you know you'll have to appease uh someone all over again and then you'll have a third world war in other words you know learn from the past but that's not the quote if you look it up the actual quote is about tension of memory societies building upon ideas that came before allowing them to progress as they build idea upon

4:08 idea here's the whole quote progress far from consisting in change depends on retentiveness when change is absolute there remains no being to improve and no direction is set for possible Improvement and when experience is not retained as among Savages infancy is Perpetual those who cannot remember remember the past are condemned to repeat it end quote now never mind that the 1905 um writing there uh didn't acknowledge that so-called Savages also keep a remembrance of what came before um technologically or oral storytelling wise but nonetheless that aside you can see that the quote actually doesn't refer to the idea of how it's commonly used right this idea that there are these Les you have to learn but if there are no lessons that have to be learned why would you study history sometimes you'll hear that and sometimes you'll hear it even amongst academics where they'll say what's what's the Practical value of this what

5:13 are you going to do I mean you know if these are just a bunch of stories if there's no practical value to this right all these wonderful stories in the past that's ignoring though the things that history really does teach us I mean put aside the big military questions like history teaches us uh you know don't get involved in a land war in Asia history teaches us don't invade Russia in the winter I mean you know those are I would say those are pretty good lessons and history taught them but they're not trying to predict the way an individual dictator might act in Czechoslovakia 1938 fact Sim situation right it's a little different but the things history reliably teaches us is what can happen right because it's happened before and I always say there's only two ways things can go they can go the way they have in the past or they can go in a different direction either one of those is fascinating most of the time it goes the

6:12 way it's always gone doesn't mean it has to but most of the time it does and then you can look at situations and go well look at how bad it got in this situation when it went this way that's something to learn from history that's putting your hand on a hot stove experiencing something like I don't know a World War in your lifetime and saying can't have another one of those how long does that lesson last you burn your hand really badly on a hot stove you can teach your kid about that you could say look at this scar don't put your hand on a hot stove how long does that lesson go down grandchildren great-grandchildren eventually you know given the right circumstances that hot stove might look like just the right answer one of the reasons I started this Hardcore History Dum feed was to put stuff in here that just didn't fit in the history show or stuff we could just produce more quickly or stuff that just

7:00 was weird maybe that's Today's Show because I was thinking you know it's been a momentous week or two in political history I don't know when you're going to get this we had a you know assassination attempt on uh Donald Trump president Donald Trump we had a you know Donald Trump's adversary in the election up until five minutes ago Joe Biden just dropped out of the presidential race so there's a lot going on right now right the the the boiling or simmering pot that is our you know National debate is about to blow up you know um and some people want it to Once Upon a Time I probably would have done a Common Sense Show about it and lots of people have been asking but we live in an era and I think it's one of the fascinating aspects of it there are times and I I imagine many of you history fans out there do this too where you could sort of step backwards and try to see this from a much longer view perspective and ask

7:59 yourself you know can we see what's going on here can we see you know um and and one of the fascinating aspects is this the way that the climate and the the people who already have these uh beliefs and where Purity tests on all sides are in full force I mean it's a it's a very weird time to try to influence the public debate with some you know thinking of your own because everybody can just write it off as partisan or or you know a sign of your leanings so rather than play around with things like opinion or analysis that might be bias I thought maybe we could just look at what's already happened and maybe learn one of the lessons that history does teach the lesson of if we're not careful it can get this bad in 1968 just like what just happened a Democratic president you know shocked the world and said he was not going to run for reelection this caught almost everyone by surprise and the Democratic Convention

9:40 was not that far away obviously I don't know when you're going to get this but that just happened to US History doesn't repeat itself but it sometimes Rhymes right in 1968 when Lindon Johnson did this we're kind of in a potential mirr image of where we are now when Johnson decides not to run for reelection the country is exploding now it feels like the country is pregnant with disaster maybe is a good way to put it everybody just sort of on pins and needles and maybe I'm misreading the situation let me just say that at the outset I could be completely misreading I'm not out there circulating all the the time so I could be misreading everything but it feels a little pregnant with anticipation and there's almost a date right the election coming up um and and almost a drooling going on now among some let's just talk about what might happen and I don't mean exactly the same but there are things we

10:55 can learn from the past as I said and some of it is how things devolve and what might occur and ways things might go and we actually have seen a version potentially of this you know I don't want to call it dystopian future who knows how bad it will be um but if it's as bad as 1968 um one might ask if we really want to go there now we wouldn't actually be going there as we all know all those variables I talked about in the 1938 ccha Slovakia example are in play here too but there is a weird funhouse mirror sort of reflection going on between that time period and now including the fact that by the time things explode they had been clearly heading that way for a while you could feel the tension ratcheting up for well one might say from the mid1 1950 S I mean the Civil Rights Movement gets going in mid late 1950s strong and uh and you know when President Kennedy's assassinated in November 1963 uh well every baby boomer book

12:12 you've ever read points to that as a huge sort of cultural change in Outlook and everything I read a quote by Lance Morrow that I thought really was the best summation of that sense that you get reading some of the stuff written by the baby boom folk and uh it said quote the real 1960s began on the afternoon of November 22nd 1963 it came to see that Kennedy's murder opens some malign trapo in American culture and the wild bats flapped out end quote but I've noticed the funh house mirror similarities for a long time and actually back in late 2013 early 2014 so a decade ago I wrote a Sizzle reel about the subject now let me back up for a minute that's what's going to make this a weird show by the way is that I'm actually sort of relying on work I did a while ago for something that never got done I mean I think this is a world got done but we never did anything with it I was working with a very talented group

13:19 of filmmakers and they asked me uh for an example of what a show might be and a subject matter piece might be and I chose the revolutionary period you know the new Left revolutionary period in like um 1967 to like 1971 72 and even back then the interesting parallels and stuff were such that um because you could almost as I said in the same way you could see 1968 and the explosion and all that uh percolating for a long time ahead of time you can see what's coming in front of us has been percolating for a long time too with stressor piled upon stressor for years again 100 50 years from now historians are going to look back on this and be able to piece it together maybe better than we can 1968 is certainly about the edge of recentness for me I usually don't do anything any newer well I usually don't even do 1968 so this is this is like the edge of where I'll talk about history usually but it was a wild period And I

14:20 wrote a narrative script that was supposed to be interspersed with all sorts of video plus Recreations and and I was actually technologically going to be inserted into these scenes as they happen it was going to be really cool so what I've done is I've got my material here that I wrote I did take you know version after version after version of a lot of these scripts uh leaving the stuff in that I liked and taking the stuff out that I didn't so it got quite a bit more tight than this but I'm using one of my earlier versions because I like all that other stuff we had to take it out we took it out for brevity's sake but some of it's really kind of interesting I think you'll have to be the judge but I don't normally read as you know the show's improvised it sounds that way when I had to do the recording for my audio book I always thought it sounded weird because it's me reading uh and not sort of improvising but the same is

15:09 going to happen here and it's it's when you take out all the video stuff in between it's actually quite a bit of text so I apologize for the lengthy quote but I do know some podcasts that are popular are nothing more than reading from scripts so uh and let's just say first time for everything I've never quoted myself I don't think on on the program so a long quote of me narrating uh with a bunch of images and stuff that you probably won't have uh we'll see how much of a myth Ben is if he can sneak any of it in there uh but long block of text now that sets up this subject that I think is still today well maybe even more interesting than it was 10 or 11 years ago when I wrote this so quoting myself for the first time I believe quote I hold it that a little Rebellion now and then is a good thing you know who said that one of the United States's most revered founding fathers Thomas Jefferson and it sounds

16:08 good in theory right the United States itself was of course founded on an act of rebellion and Jefferson was one of the people leading that but when does a little Rebellion turn into something more what if I told you that next year the United States would experience more than than 150 violent riots would you classify that as a little Rebellion if I told you that in one 12-month period in our near future the US would suffer more than 170 bombings or bombing attempts on American soil what would run through your mind what would you think had happened these may sound like hypothetical questions but the fact is when the right historical ingredients are present a witch's brew of revolutionary activity can be conjured up more often and more quickly than most governments find comfortable it happened for example in 1848 the so-called year of Revolution when more than 50 European and Latin American countries spontaneously erupted

17:19 in anti-government protests and violence in the same year 13 years later the United States saw the most serious threat to its government in its history history when civil war broke out between the Southern and northern states now while no one is alive today who remembers those events plenty of people now living can recall in Vivid color the last time Americans engaged in a little Rebellion now let me stop here and say at this point you were supposed to see all sorts of images and videos that helped uh negate the need for me to explain everything that was going on but um lots of showing of all of the tensions and how it broke out into open problems in the streets and my narration continues quote and it wasn't just hundreds of riots and bombings it also included multiple highlevel political assassinations tens of thousands of arrests hundreds of thousands of demonstrators in the streets universities shut down and buildings

18:21 occupied and protesting students shot down on campus by campus police and National Guardsmen it was the late 1960s and early 1970s and calling the anti-establishment actions back then a little Rebellion doesn't do them Justice in reality it was probably the closest the United States came to Revolution since the Civil War and it happened less than a half century ago it's still controversial too how do you decide if Insurrection is a positive or negative thing sometimes you get a United States of America out of a rebellion but sometimes you get a Soviet Union do the reasons for an Insurrection justify it and who decides if those reasons are good enough The Establishment the rebels or maybe the great mass of people caught between the extremes are the ones who make the call well sometimes that verdict is rendered by history and sometimes the court of History even reverses itself on appeal but history

19:29 or those viewing it has the luxury of looking at extreme events from the safe distance of the future it's as though we're looking at a movie we've already seen there are no risks we know how things turn out the participants living through events in real time didn't and the stakes could be insanely High I mean in just one 16-month period from 1969 to 1970 there were more than 40,000 bombings bombing attempts or bomb threats in the United States that's an average of more than 80 a day if we were experiencing anything like that today during the 24-hour news cycle and the era of 21 century Homeland Security don't you think we would consider the stakes insanely high and no target was immune New York Police Headquarters was bombed the US capital was attacked and on M 19th 1972 a young lady who was part of an extremist group of people that we today would call domestic terrorists planted a bomb inside the military nerve center of

20:39 the United States she planted it in the Pentagon a nation that proudly celebrated its own founding Revolution every year was dealing with members of their own citizens who thought it was time for another one how on Earth did the United States go from a Leave it to Beaver reality in the early 1960s to one better represented by The Mod Squad in just a few years make no mistake about it the transformation was traumatic during that period many emerging Trends came together to create one of the most turbulent eras in American history it spanned several years but 1968 was the Tipping Point ultr dramatic events kept ratcheting up the pressure all through that year that the Beatles went from singing All You Need Is Love in 1967 to Revolution a mere year later is symbolic of the mood shift anyone old enough to have gotten married and started a family after World War II would have been forgiven if they'd had a

21:49 case of historical Whiplash how did the bucolic crew cut All-American 1950s morph into the angry 1960 and early 1970s and how did it do so so quickly well it had a lot to do with the young people coming of age during those years and the events that were impacting their lives end quote then I have a notation here shots fired JFK killed show films so you have to imagine the interspersing of all of this sort of stuff and I continue quote the end of a period that is so romantic ized it's recalled as Camelot signaled the first change of mood the violent death of a popular glamorous president in such a traumatic fashion scarred a generation and added a dose of cynicism into the national Outlook JFK wouldn't be the last leader gunned down in the 1960s far from it end quote Malcolm X was gunned down in May 1965 and while uh White America was relatively scared of Malcolm X and so was some of Black America also this was

23:06 cited um as one of the reasons for the creation of the Black Panthers in 1966 and in my narration I said quote anger over the killing of Malcolm X Who as a member of the Nation of Islam had been seen as a dangerous figure by much of White America and by some of Black America too was one of the reasons cited for the creation of the Black Panthers in 1966 the Panthers were to become one of the more Angry forceful and revolutionary of the groups pushing for racial equality they picked up on the Mantra of Freedom by any means necessary and attracted people who felt that the results gained among more peaceful approaches like those of Martin Luther King were either too slow in coming or too modest in scope and then I wanted to insert a video of H rap Brown saying his famous quote quote I say you better get a gun violence is necessary it's as American is Cherry Pie end quote I have a lot of great quotes I'd like to incorporate

24:11 into this today that I looked up from the era that just sort of all of them are little data points or pieces of a mosaic that when you throw them all together you start to assemble sort of a better picture of what we're talking about here but there's a ton of stuff going on in this area it's crammed I mean if you have a detailed timeline it's an amazing list of ever increasingly tense situations that crop up one right after another my narration continues quote the Reverend Martin Luther King Jr was at the opposite end of the violence scale from groups like the black panthers in fact he was one of the most famous proponents of nonviolence in history but by 1968 even King couldn't seem to prevent violence from erupting at his events King said in early 19 68 quote maybe we just have to admit that the day of violence is here and maybe we have to just give up and let violence take its course the nation won't listen to our

25:09 voice maybe it will heed the voice of violence end quote then my narration here says quick cut to the Martin Luther King shooting an aftermath my narration continues quote after Martin Luther King was assassinated the country exploded 130 US cities experienced everything from unrest to riots at the same time machine gun nests were set up around the nation's capital snipers in high-rise buildings engaged in gun battles with police on the ground several major urban areas had turned into war zones it would take 65,000 Riot troops to restore temporary order around the country Martin Luther King had said before he died that the summer of 1967's riots the previous year couldn't be repeated without something really bad happening quote we cannot stand two more Summers like last summer without leading inevitably to a right-wing takeover and a fascist State end quote King's death would almost assure 1968 would see even

26:18 more unrest than 1967 how long do you think our society today could weather storms of this magnitude and what if just when you think the tension meter has maxed out at 10 it gets turned up to 11 John F Kennedy's brother Robert former Attorney General of the United States was running for the presidency himself on a peace and Racial equality platform when he received the news of King's death during a campaign speech and had to break it to a stunned and horrified crowd andert the famous RFK doing this I ladies and gentlemen I'm only going to talk to you just for a minute or so this evening because I have some very sad news for all of you could you lower those signs please I have some very sad news for all of you and I think uh sad news for all of our fellow citizens and people who love peace all over the world and that is that Martin Luther King was shot and was killed tonight in Memphis

27:42 Dene Martin Luther King dedicated his life then I said two months later it was Robert's turn this is a time of tragedy and loss Senator Robert Kennedy is Robert Kennedy affirmed this country affirmed the essential decency of its people they're longing for peace and then mercifully for all of us uh the text ends with this summation quote there were some that saw some level of horrible irony in the fact that two of the most prominent proponents of Peace in American society both were violently gunned down by assassins the deaths of King and Kennedy didn't just silence two of the most eloquent voices counseling peace it gave ammunition to those who wanted to argue for measures Beyond mere dissent events surrounding the Democratic National Convention in Chicago in 1968 helped crystallize things the now dead Robert Kennedy had hoped to get the nomination of his party for president at this convention but while he won't be

28:55 there Abby Hoffman will end quote and that's sort of the end of the sizzle reel but it's given us sort of a little introduction into the elevator pitch for the time period right you think of any society out there trying to absorb all of the different cultural inputs that were happening at that time period and I mean it if you were looking at an ancient society and you said it had all this going on you were wondering you would wonder how it kept together this is part of the funh house mirr reflection thing because there's a there's a sense that you almost feel that way now right that the level of sensory input amongst everything going on is on overload and on self-destruct right and in November you know boom but let's start with stressor number one in 1968 you had the war in Vietnam and truthfully we don't have anything quite like that now I can't even find an analogy for that you might say

30:02 something like Ukraine or the situation in the Middle East but we don't have Americans dying in that sort of circumstance we had a steady drum beat of people dying during the Vietnam War in 1967 the year of course before 1968 9,353 or so people died in the Vietnam war in the American military forces that's added to an existing total by that point of almost 16,000 people already and we'd only really been heavily involved in the war since about November 14th 15 1965 and I only have that date on my you know tip of the tongue because that's when I was born and that was during the battle of the Yad Drang Valley which is really maybe I you can argue this but probably the point where things exploded into outright fullon you know here we go I mean this or the Gulf of tonen type stuff but the drip drip drip of casualties I mean you'd have like you know hundred and something people a week and they

31:03 they'd sometimes well actually they'd weekly show like their High School graduation photos or the ones from graduating you know basic training photos in the magazines and you'd see all these nice you know good-look clean-cut American kids not coming home and you'd ask The Logical question as time goes on when's the end of this coming you know what are the victory conditions how do we win and when does that happen and you know even if none of these people were related to you and it didn't hit you hard all Americans were paying a fortune for this I mean the daily cost of the war and the monthly cost of the war was insane I mean you go back and you read the stuff that was going on I mean uh President Johnson was telling people not to travel to foreign countries because it you know takes US Dollars and sends them away from the country and that's how I mean he was trying to fund a great society program

31:52 run a war I mean something had to give and so even if you didn't have a kid or a dog in the war fight of things even if you supported the war the taxes were a burden and you might logically Wonder so what are we getting for our money and when do we get to stop paying it the administration and proponents of the war continually said basically that it's happening it's going to be soon we have a light at the end of the tunnel and they pushed this narrative for quite a while as more and more people uh you know would would hop off the we're winning the war train um and then finally and event happened again in our year of 1968 in January in fact that had an impact out of all proportion to the battlefield situation you've probably heard of the Tet Offensive and that's what it was in the Ted offensive uh North Vietnamese forces and Viet Kong guerillas took over a bunch of territories and cities in Vietnam South

32:51 Vietnam which was our Ally all at once which then required um you know massive response uh a ton of it was shot by news cameras in ways that you couldn't do today you would never get in I mean it just wouldn't be allowed the governments would censor it it it was this crazy little moment in the history of uh military news Gathering where and it was only really like at the last third maybe of of the war maybe the last half when the cameraman could get in there and shoot real footage I mean it's crazy stuff but there was a lot of stuff shot during T and the images were on American television and during Ted I mean Walter kronite the most trusted man in America who was a rah rah supporter basically of the government a second world war guy uh he turned around and basically said clearly we're not winning so this light at the end of the tunnel uh excuse you know Falls dead on its feet after the

33:51 Ted offensive increasing something at the time that was called The credibility gap in other words how much you could believe what the president was saying um and and even though none of the conditions of being a president of the United States were different than in earlier eras the sort of Misty Rosy Glow with which Americans believed everything their president said uh that's what's wearing off in this era right that facade of credibility you know if Eisenhower had told you 95% of Americans would have believed it that's goes away here because it's been abused and this idea that the Vietnam war is ending and yes we have to send more troops no we have to send more troops again well we have to send more troops again but it's all you know we're wrapping it up we're Victory is right around the corner and T showed that it wasn't and this was in January 1968 now one of the problems connected with the war that might not be

34:41 as big of a deal today is that a bunch of the people in the military in 1968 did not want to be in the military this was not a volunteer military although there were Volunteers in the military as there always are but this was a conscript Army just like the Army by the way of the United States in the second world war and the first I mean there's a ton of people who are there because Uncle Sam sends them a draft notice in some eras that draft notice is expected and people uh buy and large you know heed what the letter tells them and they go show up show up they take the oath they go to basic training and they're in the military in this era less and less people were doing that there's going to be one day for example where a thousand people around the country send their draft notices back to the government how many people can you arrest on draft evasion before you have a very different kind of problem on your

35:38 hands and what sort of signal does that send to the other side in your Conflict by the way so if you look at all the different things that are going on to this generation that are that are taking an old social contract and sort of break breaking it and then seeing what's left once you do this this is revolutionary change even if a lot of these people aren't for revolution right even if they're not the hard edge of the Revolution listen to these things and think about how this would change a society that did not have these things as important inputs as recently as a decade previously and imagine the funh house Mir reflection on how you can make all sorts of analogies for these things today right something today that's equal to something back then or some of the same damn problems in 1968 that we're dealing with now how about television we don't think about that a lot but that was something that I mean

36:44 this is Gutenberg Mo movable press I mean this is one of those benchmarks in the history of communication that had an impact on the society unlike anything that had come before it now today of course we have the internet and all these things that make TV look like a minor development but think about how important TV was when everybody started watching it it had like three channels and it had a couple of major newscasts and the whole world watched these things and the the impact on society was absolutely enormous the opinion-making power and one of the lines about the Vietnam War uh whether or not it was true is that the war was lost in America's living rooms because the TV was showing them the war and by the end of 1967 in addition to the you know 26,000 dead in the war already there was almost 100,000 guys wounded and when you think about the toll that that takes on society seeing a lot of these wounded veterans some of

37:41 them at protest some of them angry at protesters but I mean all of that is it always Fosters the question in your mind what did they lose that leg for right I mean what are we doing this whole situation that in some ways prevented theed unit States from going for like a second world war Victory and rolling the tanks into you know Saigon or something like that and then taking them way up to the north that was all impacted by the fact that they now lived the people in 1968 in an era of nuclear weapons and you go look at the impact for example in the literature or in the television popular media the movies of the time period this threat this sort of Damocles threat of nuclear weapons hung over this whole generation they were very conscious of it because they were born in a world where that threat didn't trouble them and as we had said in the destroyer of worlds U show that we did there's a difference and I feel the

38:39 same way with computers right I was basically born in an analog world and lived through like my generation into the new world right the post analog world the computer World um you're very conscious of what the world was like before what it's like now and people who were born in a non-nuclear war world uh and then find themselves in one are very conscious of it and the literature proves I mean this impacted the way you know your outlook on life will we even be around hard to quantify how big of a deal that was or not but clearly this is a big change and it impacts how people think the Civil Rights movements another one I wrote all these things down on on the stuff from 11 years ago um you know civil rights movement has been going on in this country since people uh have been denied their civil rights I mean you you could follow the dominoes all the way back hundreds of years if you want to but in the 1950s things really

39:36 exploded and by the 1960s of course this is the high Watermark of Martin Luther King and all those kinds of things or you know malol X and and some of the more radical groups the Panthers um civil rights is an enormous concern and remember during this era it's only in the 1960s that this stops you still had Jim Crow and separate but equal going on you know you had you couldn't get a hotel unless it was a hotel for black people in some of the Southern cities you couldn't you know stay at the same waiting room you couldn't use the same bathrooms you couldn't use the same drinking fountain that's crazy and you could see how anybody would demand that that stop and the Civil Rights marches and the movement was very powerful and of course um you know when you talk about revolutionary change um that was going to be revolutionary change especially in the states that had preserved a very different sort of relationship between

40:33 uh the races up until that time period there was an interesting report called the um Kennan commission report that LBJ had commissioned after a bunch of the riots that had happened in ' 67 6665 basically saying you know what's going on here and the report said that the nation is quote moving towards two societies one black one white separate and unequal end quote now the Civil Rights concerns are wrapped up in maybe we could call it a larger umbrella issue of a greater concern for human rights all the way around and the rights of people in countries for example that didn't often make the news in a lot of these societies because this is these are Global Trends by the way the United States is affected by things like um you know the Vietnam War specifically but they don't you know have a monopoly on that I mean in Britain for example or all over the world TV is having its impact the threat of nuclear war is

41:39 having its impact human rights is having its impact and a lot of this stuff was really exploding in power because of the youth revolution of the time period right we have uh the famous baby boom generation that was you know in its 17s 18s 19s 20s I mean this is is the era where people go out and look at the world and realize it's not the way it was sold to them and they see all the injustices around them and when there's tons more of those people in that age range than there normally is you can expect something right and the cultural zeit starts to change I mean go look at Beatles albums covers if you want to see it change or go look in my family you can just go look at old family photographs and everybody it changes so in 1965 the year I'm born everybody sort of looks button down kind of gray the clothes are black and doesn't seem like a lot of color everybody's just short and then I mean

42:36 within a couple of years everybody's wearing like laughing daylow colors the hairstyles have gotten crazy I mean it it's a it's a change that happens in like if I had to guess now I think three years and it never reached some places by the way so for example you know the the hip families in La New York and a bunch of other places might be doing that it might never make it to you know the the farming community in the center of the country not near any big CI so that creates a divide right there there's this giant cultural revolution but not everybody's participating in it and the people not participating in it don't necessarily look kindly on it because it Rebels against a lot of things they hold dear whether we're talking about religious beliefs or ideas on cultural things like guns and hunting and you know I mean we all the divides we see now really start in Earnest during this era right we're still fighting about a

43:31 bunch of the 1968 divisions and it's never been resolved but in 1968 I mean that's a year that there were a significant number of Americans that thought it could be resolved by some sort of Uprising or revolution student movements were everywhere universities would get taken over all the time uh this is also the era once again you know it doesn't look very unusual to us now where feminism was exploding gender issues and the sexuality rights issues like you know homosexuals emerg from sort of the background during this period where they've just sort of been a closeted group in society remember there were laws against some of this and uh and all of a sudden you know you have Stonewall and all that kind of stuff and things change the abortion issue becomes acute that's been an issue ever since the Vietnam War and the draft was a Perpetual threat that kept it all going this was sort of the um nuclear

44:24 reactor that powered the whole thing this is why when Nixon ends the draft in 1973 he didn't do it as a favor to anybody he thought it was going to be a great way to undercut all of the student protests and the anti-vietnam war protest because he cynically assumed and maybe had some was correct in some of his assumptions that if a lot of these people weren't actually threatened with having to go to war they wouldn't get up off their rear ends and go protest it and so that's why the draft was really ended but before it was ended it was a prime mover in getting people motivated to get their rear ends out there and protest the war because they didn't want to go to the war and a lot of people didn't and it wasn't missed by anyone that a lot of the people that didn't were in the kinds of groups in society that normally don't have to you know do some of the terrible jobs right I mean College deferments

45:23 well that sort of benefits people who have money more than people who don't um if you could get a good doctor's report that you had some you know problem that made you ineligible you might not have to go it's interesting to look who served and who didn't and I think it was the percentage of uh for example African-Americans who served were like twice the number uh in the general population so there was this sense that this burden was unequally shared and that a lot of the people who were having to go into this war didn't have any way to vote against it and this is when the question of the voting age sort of ran smack dab into the Vietnam War if if you couldn't vote till you were 21 but you could be drafted into the war when you were 18 something didn't seem right right it's it's something like taxation without representation but it's you know conscription without representation so this tied into the voting age

46:18 question the interesting thing to me when I was working on this Sizzle reel was I was coming up with little thoughts and we always do this in the history podcast don't we these little things that just occurred to me that just are sort of interesting and one of them was a line I came up with almost like a marketing line you could see it on a movie poster they don't look dangerous now and it was about your grandparents right you look at your grandparents today they don't look particularly dangerous but some of them were absolutely lethal when you look at the various groups of people that were out there um in militant sort of s we mentioned all those bombings and bombing attempts and stuff that were going on who do you think did that you know your grandparents some of them anyway some of them were conservatives uh I mean it's the the the hippie side of things and the Revolutionary side of things is sort

47:12 of always overplayed but that's always the case in society isn't it it's a small group sometimes of people on the activist Ed edges of the political spectrum that get all the attention or make the most noise that's why Richard Nixon had this idea of the silent majority that he always talked about maybe there's always a silent majority but remember when you have like Hollywood on your side and they were embracing in Hollywood um as they often did they always embraced sort of progressive ideas and and when the progressive ideas in 19 in the late 1960s involved all those things we mentioned well then if you're in Lincoln Nebraska and you're watching you know what Hollywood's putting out in the movies and TV shows it might look like a direct assault on your values on the other hand to the people who Embrace those values that just looks like justice doesn't it so see we get that divide again and it starts in ' 68 and in ' 68

48:09 one side exploded and the other side had a counter reaction to it look at the timeline and think about what this timeline would do to us today first of all just like today imagine that you had a lot of years leading up to this and things have been progressively getting crazier and crazier and then 1968 Starts Now this masonian there's a lot of timelines for 1968 the smithonian has a good one and I'm going to basically follow theirs uh and leave out some I'm leaving out some of it that tells you this I'm leaving out some of it so it's worse than this there are assassinations that play into all this and we'll get into those during the timelines um there is a as we said earlier a president who decides not to run there is international stuff going on with major geopolitical foreign policy events you know that come at just the wrong time coincidentally enough and there's another element that's one of the variables of the time

49:12 period I have no idea how to quantify it either but um and I trying to figure out what the analogy in today would be if we were looking at the weird circus funhouse mirror but drugs and the impact of drugs and what we would call today influencers and music sort of a trifecta there on the society as a whole I think it's probably safe to say that if we exempt the regular accepted drugs of the society in the you know 50s let's just say I mean alcohol is a longstanding accepted drug uh tobacco all those kind of things if we exempt those I think it's fair to say that all of a sudden there were a lot of Americans using drugs that had never used drugs before and they were different drugs than had ever been used before marijuana was an underground sort of thing that hipsters and actors and some other people would use but the country as a whole wasn't so used to it until the 60s and then seemed like every

50:10 young person was using it again broad generalization because a lot of people weren't then there was something like LSD which again how to quantify it but just look at the art just look at the see none of these things would have had the same impact if it hadn't bled through to popular culture which then descend minated it across the country which then influenced artists and beliefs and I mean it's a wonderful example looking at it in hindsight of how you could you know sort of inject things into the popular culture if you're pardon the pun and watch its impact Downstream hard to quantify though what the drugs and the music and the connection of those things and then adding politics to the mix how that impacted things but a fun game to always play is the counterfactual game and ask yourself to view 1968 and imagine it without the impact of the drugs now you may still have it you're certainly going to have the Civil Rights

51:04 stuff for example does it look different I don't know uh I certainly think what happened for example at like the 1968 Democratic National Convention and those sorts of things would be different because in that case you're not dealing with civil rights people you're dealing with people that are deliberately embracing the whole 1960s ethos which includes the drugs the music and everything else that's why we had said at the end of the script that when it comes to the Democratic National Convention Robert Kennedy won't be there but Abby Hoffman will if I was trying to sort of find what looked like the best analogy for our modern situations in that circus funhouse mirror um what if I said the social media aspect maybe plays a similar load bearing foundational element to the current situation that the drugs did in the 1960s in the same way you can't imagine 1968 without the drug aspect playing its

52:08 important role can you imagine us being in the situation we're in right now without the impact of the social media and the connectivity and all that I mean we could start going down this rabbit hole and there's a lot of weird things I mean in the 1960s it was governments of the world thinking that the Communists were using all of the left-wing revolutionaries and they're not so radical uh liberal Brethren to divide the country and undermine the values and all that kind of stuff now the same thing is thought by governments but they're worried about Russia instead of the Soviet Union uh undermining and dividing the country by appealing to right-wing America I mean it's it's fascinating like I said circus fun house Mir kind of feeling but maybe if we're writing this story today it's the social media and all that that forms one of the key building blocks that when future historians look back on the now from the

53:06 future they're going to say was an integral element to the whole you know Witches Brew of the future problems that we may or may not have depending on how things go so as I said there's a timeline here you can follow and there's a lot of 1968 timelines this one I'm using is from Smithsonian mag we'll put a link to it in the show notes but I'm I'm just sort of skimming it and I'm leaving a bunch of stuff out which is crazy as I said earlier if you look at the timeline and you just imagine living through these events Bam Bam Bam Bam while already sort of being primed by the previous few years for being maybe nervous or seeing things as what did I say earlier pregnant with disaster so start on January 30th so the end of January just the big first month of the year uh the Ted offensive happens as we had said earlier I believe the Ted offensive was um the funny thing is is from a military perspective it's a disaster for

54:06 the north they lose so many people they have uh it took them years to recover but war is not always about body counts right in fact it often isn't and by sending a message almost directly to the American public specifically but to the rest of the world that how can the light be at the end of the tunnel when we can still do this it was a capsize moment for us public opinion and so in that sense in the Claus witan sense right war is policy by other means or politics by other means you got to call the Ted offensive a victory even if from a you know tactical military standpoint or an operational military standpoint I mean it looks like a total loss but all the people that were sacrificed in that loss ended up creating the conditions where eventually the north wins I like this entry on February 7th according to the Smithsonian mag timeline this is what they write after a battle for the Vietnamese Village of

55:07 bentree almost certainly a mispronunciation an American officer tells Associated Press reporter Peter arnat quote it became necessary to destroy the town in order to save it end quote the quotation it says here printed in newspapers Nationwide becomes a catchphrase for opponents of the the Vietnam War I remember it too it became necessary to destroy the village in order to save it it sort of exemplified some of the just strange aspects the um Doctor Strange lovian type aspects of the war sometimes February 8th which is the very next day this entry quote at the South Carolina State campus police open fire on students protesting segregation at orangeburg's only bowling alley three protesters died and 27 more are wounded nine officers are tried and acquitted of charges related to the use of force a protest coordinator is convicted of inciting to Riot serves s months in prison and is pardoned 25

56:10 years later none of these things by themselves is enough but every single one of them is another straw on the camel's back right February 27th is when you have the famous Walter kronite you know saying on television that the war is ired in stalemate the most trusted man in America right that was his nickname uh that's pretty big if you're the administration LBJ and the Democrats couldn't have been too happy about that on February 29th you get that kerer commission I said kenon the kerer commission report uh that said that the society is moving towards two separate and unequal societies one black and one white a few days later for a whole week 15,000 Latino high school students in La walk out of classes to protest uh and demand uh better education on March 5th so all happening in the same week the government of Czechoslovakia this is what I meant when I said that there's International stuff

57:09 going on which we can relate to today can't we don't we have a ton of international stuff going on now you know look at your headlines I mean Ukraine the Middle East I mean China it's all um in this situation the Soviet Union which after the second world war occupied a bunch of you know Sovereign Nations uh they became the upack places like you know Poland Czechoslovakia East Germany um Romania Bulgaria places like that were all um incorporated into the Soviet Union and over time some of them would attempt to either break away or loosen you know the hold of the Communists on their society in Czechoslovakia had something called the the Prague spring in 1968 and on March 5th the entry says the government of Czechoslovakia abolishes censorship underscoring the expansion of Freedom during the Prague spring and angering its communist overlords in the Soviet Union on March 16th Robert F Kennedy

58:10 entered the presidential race this happened after only like three or four days after a primary which showed that a peace candidate running against the sitting president LBJ Lyndon Johnson was performing shockingly strong against him and Robert F Kennedy was basically running on a similar peace agenda but was a much more high profile candidate he'd been the Attorney General he's part of that you know Camelot thing that gives him a special shine and when he enters the race the um Smithsonian mag timeline says that the M that he said that the McCarthy showing in New Hampshire quote has proven how deep are the present divisions within our party and Country it is now unmistakably clear that we can change these disastrous divisive policies only by changing the men who make them end quote something else happened on March 16th but nobody's going to know about it in the general public for about a year and a half

59:10 November 1969 I think the news hit on March 16th when Robert F Kennedy is entering the race the Mei Massacre happens in Vietnam the mili Massacre is one of the worst atrocities in US military history there's just no getting around that American troops patrolling an area around uh uh numerous Villages that they referred to as pinkville because they thought them communist sympathizer Villages American forces went on what can probably best be described as some kind of a rampage um and killed between 350 and 500 villagers overwhelmingly women children infants old men we're not talking about killing fighting age males it had all the Hallmarks of the sorts of atrocities one normally expects American forces to be fighting against right gang rapes I mean it was it was just it was so offbrand is a good way to put it now no Army is clean right we all understand the myths of that but the American Army's sort of brand is the good guys

1:00:19 right the white hats we're not the people that do all the horrible things so in a way this is just another American institution that's getting tarnished and that's losing its luster the same way the presidency is losing its automatic trust that the American people um previously had always sort of defaulted the government with the military is the same sort of way and when it starts acting like this one gets the sense you know that even the best and brightest the young people overseas putting their life on the line you know to protect us in our way of life even they've been broken by the times and the kinds of stories you saw by the way uh played into this that the US Army was drug addicted unmotivated uh brutal I mean it's there was a sense if you read the Memoirs of people who were in The colen Powell generation right the guys who were the junior officers in Vietnam when they are dissecting what went wrong and

1:01:22 the general feeling is it took a decade to rebuild the capacities and capabilities of the military that had been worn down like a pencil to a point where incidents were happening that just would have been Unthinkable a few years before I mean the number of officers that were getting killed by their own troops is just was it's an unacceptable military number in the American Military it was a symptom of something and it was a symptom that the rest of the country was feeling too in a citizen in any army but especially a citizen conscript Army what's going on back at home home that's part of the cultural zeist is going to make its way to the fighting forces and the tip of the spear eventually by 1968 a significant amount of the sharpness of the tip of the spear has whittel away and with all the other stuff going on in Vietnam and when the argument is to save the people from the Communists um 350 to 500 villagers it

1:02:21 was absolutely awful uh the American public nobody will become knowledgeable of this for a while so it doesn't impact the 1968 level of tension but you better believe when it comes out in November 1969 that it will March 31st so like two weeks later Lyndon Johnson surprising almost everybody drops out of the presidential race we can relate to that right now can't we and by the way just like now um without a lot of time until the convention now we're quite a bit shorter than that today but at the time it opened everything wide but the end was um you know the ultimate shocker when he said this I do not believe that I should devote an hour our day of my time to any personal partisan causes or to any duties other than the awesome duties of this office the presidency of your country accordingly I shall not seek and I will not accept the nomination of my party for another term as your president but let men

1:03:48 everywhere know however that a strong and a confident and a Vigilant America stands ready tonight to seek an honorable peace and stands ready tonight to defend an honored cause whatever the price whatever the burden whatever the sacrifice that Duty may require thank you for listening good night and God bless all smithonian m says that on April 3rd which is what 3 days later uh a thousand or so Men return their draft card to government offices all over the country so this was happening routinely with people burning their draft cards but if a thousand people on the same day return their draft cards uh to government offices that's a protest but what do you do I mean you can jail some people but at a certain point um that's an interesting problem to have in a free Society isn't it what's the critical mass number by which you can no longer punish people on April 4th which is the next day Martin Luther King is assassinated

1:05:05 in Memphis um by a guy who uh you know if you say this you're going to get some push back because uh Martin Luther King's assassination is like others in the period where there's it's a it's a conspiracy type thing and whether or not James Earl Ray was really the ass all this stuff I mean if you're playing the aams razor thing James Earl Ray who was basically a white supremacist type thinker uh killed MLK but of course you know he says a guy named Raul was working with I mean so I don't know but that's the that's the situation and that's how it would have been seen at the time so if you're measuring an event like this um from the standards of the people who are viewing it based on the information they would have had at the time period as far as they knew some white supremacist killed Martin Luther King with a rifle while he was on a balcony the more than a 100 cities that experienc riots over the next week saw

1:06:02 almost 40 people killed more than 2600 injured and 21,000 arrested as I believe we said earlier and two days later there's a 90minut shootout between Black Panthers and the police in Oakland so again think about if you're watching your TV news and the TV news was was Tik Tock social media a word of mouth satellite it's everything we have today rolled into one in terms of its its ability to influence on April 23rd there's a famous student protest at Columbia University where they take over five buildings and briefly hold a Dean hostage they call for the University to cut its ties to military research and when the police are finally called in bring in a thousand officers arrest more than 700 people and the injuries total more than 130 students four faculty and 12 officers again none of these things by themselves break the camels back but it's another straw the Smithsonian mag then has an entry that um gives us a sense of this

1:07:17 being a global phenomenon and not connected specifically to the US at all when they talk about the uh the May 6 riots that breakout in Paris between police and 5,000 more than 5,000 University students and then sympathy strikes threatening the French economy breakout within a week the story here says another straw this is an interesting entry on May 27th the Supreme Court rules 7:1 that burning a draft card is not an act of free speech protected by the First Amendment so there's a free speech limitation how do you feel about that that's an interesting question to ask on June 4th I mean think about how quickly all these things are happening on June 4th Robert F Kennedy in Los Angeles celebrating a uh primary win is assassinated at The Ambassador Hotel is a famous scene again another conspiracy story whether you believe Siran Sirhan acted alone or was the shooter or not uh it is amazing how many of these kinds of

1:08:20 things we have during this time period and and these sorts of things have a way of filtering into the psyche of the population hurting and and deepening that credibility gap you know we talked about earlier and look at the effect now after decades I mean the whole idea I mean nobody believes anything anymore everything's a conspiracy now and this is all this is the era where that starts to happen because the broad majority of people especially in the United States before this era um believed right they didn't believe the conspiracy theories they believe the official line and the people who didn't were were very Fringe and and small numbers of people and that begins to change when you have major people assassinated and conspiracy theories and let's be honest in a lot of these cases you know not wild but but worth talking about conspiracy theories begin to you know shatter your faith in the reality As Told to you by you know

1:09:17 those who are in power according to the Smithsonian mag on July 23rd uh in Cleveland the Glen Ville shootout between police and black militants leaves three dead on each side plus one bystander this leads the timeline entry says to riots rocking the city for five days this is an interesting entry and reminds us of the Zeitgeist of the time and all these different inputs we were talking about that were sort of shattering the traditional Norms of the culture at large on July 25th the pope reaffirming uh the Roman Catholic Church's opposition to artificial contraception issues a sort of ruling if you will so no artificial contraception if you're a Catholic the pill comes around the birth control pill during this time period and is always cited as one of the Revolutionary changes that creates this this new Society right this revolutionary new thing that in three years as I said if I look at the old

1:10:17 family photographs transforms my family from a bunch of people that look like they're in the 1950s to you know daylow 197 7s people almost on August 20th the Soviet Union invades Czechoslovakia stopping the Prague spring and doing so in a way that the rest of the world feels powerless to respond to because of the whole nuclear weapons issue and the Soviet Union forget the Czechoslovakia angle if Czechoslovakia is allowed to get away with these uh liberalizing things than all of the other nations that the Soviet Union sort of has under their thumb are going to be tempted to do it too so everyone's watching so this is a message it's cracking down in Czechoslovakia but also saying to everyone else don't think about doing the same thing and the same thing had happened in Hungary in the 1950s it would happen in Poland in the 1980s uh the Czechoslovakia uh the Prague spring uh gets slammed down hard on August 20th

1:11:18 and that ratchets up Global tensions of course and then on August 28th you get the Democratic National Convention where everyone knows a giant demonstration is planned and the mayor of Chicago has sort of made public statements that Law and Order is going to Prevail because he's heard the rumors he's ratcheted up the number of you know police and security that he's going to have and and the demonstrators are going to be there too they're basically anti-war demonstrators but a lot of different groups are attracted I have never seen good numbers uh for the size of the number of demonstrators but when you look at the size of the forces that the city and um even the national government has arrayed against them in the streets of Chicago during the 68 convention and they have their hands full by the way you have to assume it's large the interesting part about it from a historical perspective specifically is

1:12:21 that this is a televised event it is a globally televised event generation beforehand it wouldn't have been like this but as the chanting of the protesters would reveal to everybody during the entire event they were saying the whole world is watching and it was and what they saw well there's nothing quite like it it's something uh that was referred to by an investigator who looked into it afterwards as a police Riot but reporters were involved byst standards were involved um one of my favorite parts of the whole thing as an MC5 fan is that there were supposed to be a bunch of musicians arriving to play this event before it started and only one band showed up the the Revolutionary band right that pushed for all these revolutionary things to the MC5 and we lost the last two members of the MC5 early this year 2024 one of them was Wayne Kramer and I was talking to what I assume was Wayne Kramer's wife for the

1:13:21 longest time trying to do a show with him and HHA by the way about the history of that that era and the music uh they played and when that ended all hell kind of broke loose and the whole world was watching I have some stats here um showing the size of the forces AR raay against the demonstrators there were 12,000 Chicago Police 5,000 Army troops 6,000 National Guards troops and this is an interesting side here I read that 43 soldiers were Court marshaled afterwards because they refused Duty that day because they believed in the values of the people protesting and what was going on outside the convention sort of made its way into the convention when people who were speaking at the microphone um would make reference to you know what they call gestapo tactics right outside the door now now there's an interesting lesson in this by the way that I think runs through a lot of these kinds of movements and revolutionary

1:14:37 eras where the very activities of those on the Revolutionary change side of things create a backlash that gives them an end result that's the exact opposite of what they wanted Abby Hoffman had said because of our actions in Chicago Richard Nixon will be elected and uh if I remember the context of the quote he wasn't all that unhappy about it but he might have lived to regret that one that is a problem though that extremists on either side often provoke a backlash from what Nixon called as we said earlier the silent majority which sometimes their overriding concern is Law and Order and stability and Richard Nixon ran on a Law and Order platform in 1968 and he won and that was definitely the candidate that most of the people on the you know revolutionary Side Of The Ledger uh that was the candidate they least wanted on October 2nd again to show that this was a global thing in Mexico City

1:15:49 police and troops fire on a student L protest the Smithsonian mag then uh deals with the interesting question of how many people died by saying um police and troops fire on a student Le protest killing or wounding thousands the precise number is still unknown on October 16th in the Olympics Americans Tommy Smith and John Carlos receiving the gold and bronze medals in the 200 yard dash raised their gloved fist to the national anthem to protest violence towards and poverty among African-Americans the next day the Smithsonian timeline says the international Olympic Committee strips their medals and sends them home on November 5th Nixon wins the presidency barely beating um Hubert hrey and the segregationist candidate as the smithonian timeline points out George Wallace uh carried five southern states this is in 1968 folks carried five southern states that was back when the South was a solidly democratic stronghold the

1:16:55 called dixie crats and the northern Democrats and the southern Democrats were not like each other at all but they work together to win elections and staff administrations and all that kind of stuff but the South was moving away from the Democrats starting in the 60s Nixon had his famous southern strategy to pull away more the states and Reagan's uh campaign was very good at that too and turn the South basically Republican and in terms of the things that impact what we're talking about here that that's basically those are the that's the high Watermark of that list and you try to imagine living through that in real time after already being primed for this by the previous few years and it's interesting to contemplate how well we would be able to adapt to that level of change and shattering number of events um happening that quickly you would feel like things were falling apart wouldn't you one of the things that was a Twist

1:17:51 in that Sizzle reel I was working on because you know I always have to have those twists um sort of these weird ways of looking at I always compared to sort of Twilight Zone type things but one of the elements the TV show was going to have was Recreations and I didn't want to do Recreations of historical events because I always think they look a little cheesy but I didn't mind the idea of doing Recreations of things that had never happened and I thought well if you had today's 21st century Homeland Security tactics laws powers and all those kinds of things right the post 911 America in 1968 how would things have been different and so we filmed a recreation scene of Abby Hoffman in his you know trademark famous American flag shirt being waterboarded by the authorities I was told this did not go over well with some of the viewing audience who looked at the sizzle reel but to me it was the key piece because

1:18:43 it was the part that made what was happening in ' 68 a relevant sort of thing to look at today and say h could we have gotten away with that level of dissent today and then of course the next question is should we right I mean what's a good reason to have a revolution as we said and isn't it a little like deciding on the old game show Let's Make a Deal what's behind door number two we don't like what we have now so we're going to open up the door and hope we get better um that's what I mean about a revolution sort of being uh uh a bit of a crapshoot you don't know if you're getting an American Revolution or a Bolshevik one in in terms of the outcome and even the Russian Revolution I mean there were several different stages where different groups were in charge and it might have looked like a liberal Revolution for 5 minutes till it didn't I told you earlier I have some quotes here that I wrote down that when

1:19:41 taken together you get this sort of picture of things I mean like when the bombing started that that's a crazy element in this I just don't know what we would even do today with with the level of bombings but um they asked a group of you know sort of television Savvy radicals if they were behind a bombing that had recently happened and they had a great line they said we didn't do it but we dug it and that gives you a sense of the times right they're not just saying that they're that's calculated to appeal to the people who believe as they do it's an interesting time period in American history um listen to these quotes I already read the first one but it's worth reading again it's Martin Luther King when he said we cannot stand two more Summers like last summer without leading inevitably to a right-wing Takeover in a fascist State how about this one alienation is when your country is at War and you want

1:20:35 the other side to win that was um the cover of a 1969 issue of rampart's magazine which was a a leftwing magazine it said it was shown under a picture of an All-American Huck fin like six-year-old boy waving a Viet Kong flag that was the adversary in the V Vietnam War and how about this chant ho ho hoien the NLF is going to win that's the North Vietnamese that are military was fighting and that was a US protester slogan oh this is so I wrote down this one this is what Charles Manson had said in court um it's interesting if you go back now and you look at some of the underground newspapers and stuff that catered sort of to the radical crowd on the left in the 1960s and see that for a little while Charles Manson was sort of not a terrible guy uh eventually of course everything changes but there was a sort of an element of he's one of us maybe and um he said in his trial and I quoted it here quote I haven't got any

1:21:42 guilt about anything because I've never been able to see any wrong I've always said do what your love tells you and I do what my love tells me now it says three dots here which means it's just giving you highlights is it my fault that your children do what you do what about your children you say there's just a few there are many many more coming in the same direction they're running in the streets and they're coming right at you end quote that's one of the great Charles Manson lines isn't it but but that's a sense of maybe how a society might have felt when they're kind of scared of their own kids what do we say right the they may be your grandparents and they don't look dangerous now but once upon a time hairy and scary right and I tend to believe that in whatever period you're talking about when you're talking about um an outsize amount of influence on the part of people at the extremes of the political

1:22:43 Spectrum right extreme left extreme right whatever it might be I tend to believe that's a small amount of people and they tend to get an outsize amount of attention right I think they know that too they more influence than their actual numbers might warrant but if you think and I'm not so sure this isn't true if you consider the percentage of people that are prone to radicalization to be a constant let's say 3% of the people in normal times because it might fluctuate in rough times but if you say 3% of the people are prone to radicalization and you have more people than you've ever had in the history of the world and they just happen to be between those ages say 17 to 25 years old where you know people are most prone to being extreme politically well maybe it's the same percentage of radicals you've always had there's just more of them you know in real terms I don't know but if you're in Middle America and you

1:23:37 hear somebody from the Weather Underground who had a public meeting and some of the quotes were published I mean what would you think about your children you know who are already growing their hair over the years and looking pretty funky and hanging out with weird people and dressing strange and listening to Strange Music and what's that smell I sometimes smell in their car um and then you hear stuff like this what would you think in his book days of Rage author Brian burrow wrote this quote few Gatherings Illustrated the dark Borderlands between the end of the 60s and the onset of the 70s more clearly than the one weathermen held in the days between Christmas 1969 and New Year's 1970 build as the national war council or wargasm it was the pepper Rally from Hell A 5-day orgy of violent rhetoric intended to set the stage for the underground Revolution the leadership was now ready to begin it was held in a

1:24:35 Tumbl Down dance hall in the heart of a Flint Michigan ghetto on his arrival Mark Rudd who continued to have doubts about their plans fingered a hole in the plywood front door the result of a shotgun slug that had killed a patron just the night before and thought how appropriate the Detroit Collective burrow writes had handled the decorations hanging large psychedelic portraits of Castro Shay guara hoochi Min mauo Malcolm X and eldrich Cleaver one wall was lined with posters of the Fallen Fred Hampton above the stage they had hung their centerpiece a 6- foot cardboard machine gun end quote one attendee said we're against everything that's good and decent in honky America and also that we will burn and loot and Destroy we are the incubation of your Mother's Nightmare another laughed at the recent Manson Murders which I believe were on trial at the time uh talking about how they stuck a fork in one of the victims

1:25:42 and how Wild that was and burough says for the rest of the meeting attendees were doing sort of a sideways peace sign symbolizing the fork it's like sticking it to the Man literally but let's understand something the outsize amount of attention these people get play their role in dividing America and making the generations more suspicious of each other but in real terms the number of people who probably ascribe to such extreme beliefs is small this may be something that's true in most times but this is the bleeding edge and the bleeding edge of the other side of was just as you know off the map yeah here's a quote nothing is more American than Revolution that's Jerry Rubin the famous yippe members line and then there's President Eisenhower right the general who was so important in the second world war who was president for two terms in the 1950s who a lot of the more traditional elements of America saw

1:26:49 as a person who preserved the Norman Rockwell you know side of America that's got gotten so screwed up by the 1960s and he said the anti-war protesters were guilty of rebellion and were giving Aid and comfort to the enemy so these are battle lines right governments around the world thought this is communist inspired you you hear I mean from all the US presidents to leaders of France and all these other countries saying that this is orchestrated stuff especially when you see these riots appear all at once and that something's behind them so you have this sense of society being under siege by the very enemy that they've been worried about for decades and decades communism and that communism is undermining their youth their values and sending them out in the streets to protest the very people who are trying to keep the country from going communist there's a section here on my notes that says random interesting

1:27:44 notes and uh there's two in there the first one is the Black Panthers were calling for exempting blacks from military service they were 11% of the population but made up 23% of the troops fighting in Vietnam in an army of draes I wrote freeing all blacks from prison and demanding that all future Trials of blacks be held with all black juries they were feeding hungry children in Oakland while parading in menacing clothes with rifles in the streets well I don't know how I feel about the parading with rifles in the streets part but some of that other stuff is rather rather interesting if we think about the idea of juries of our peers and how that um would go I these are fascinating things though that you you hear something like that today and if you did a poll on it and took out the Black Panthers part which might influence you know what people would say I wonder what sort of reaction you'd get

1:28:44 here's another one of the random interesting notes I made at least seven Americans lit themselves on fire self imulation as part of protest in the war in Vietnam and an attempt to Garner attention for their cause many of them did so I wrote because they had religious beliefs that were anti-war Quakers Catholics Etc and then I ended with almost all of them died and then there's the part I entitled The Deep question so if you ever hear our open where the late great wonderful Bill Barrett you know sort of lists what the show is about the Imaging of the show it's you know uh the the Deep Thoughts the deep questions those kinds of things are all part of it the Twilight Zone twists are all part of it um so my first deep question was how much destabilization should a free Society be willing to put up with what is the limit before a government is Justified spying on things like their ideological dissidence right when is it

1:29:48 okay to say the government should be spying on people like that then I wrote what if the D izers aren't some foreign element but a significant percentage of your own young people exhibiting radically different views from their Elders so when we talk about destabilization in a free Society what if the destabilization is generational got another deep question here I wrote what if you thought the policies of your country were wrong or immoral what would you be willing to do to change the situation what if you felt that the traditional Avenues of change built into the system offered no way to do this anymore what would you be willing to do protest break the law self imulation violence is that ever Justified if so when another question I'd written down in my notes was this one I wrote what if an extremist bombed a building to combat a situation that you yourself oppose right this idea that um you know what they're bombing is

1:31:00 something you feel very strongly about too right you're on the same side as the person that took it farther than you would likely take it right that gets back to that quote we said we didn't do it but we dug it that's a good question to ask in the future if somebody does something extreme that you would never do but you're on the same side of them ideologically how do you handle that here's another deep questions on here which I've alluded to already a little bit but it's more specific how different would our post 911 21st century World handle the circumstances of those in the late 1960s early 197s would black panther or Weather Underground members be sent to Guantanamo would we dare water board or use post 911 enhanced interrogation techniques on them for info on future violence groups may have in the planning stages right if you know you you You' planted a bomb somewhere do we get to waterboard you to find out

1:32:01 um in the late 1960s they might have been taken downstairs to a private level of the police station and beaten with the phone book till the information came out but nobody would have asserted it was legal in the post 911 World they may have a few laws on their side if they want to do the functional equivalent I wrote this like I said 11 years ago 10 years ago here's another question quote what if the views of protesters in the future are the equivalent of giving Aid and comfort to our enemies I said maybe show a video of 1960s protesters waving a North Vietnamese flag at a US anti-war demonstration and morph it into an Al-Qaeda one in the Green Screen Video behind me so a little note to the producers again we can see the funh house mirror reflection ction a little bit can we not I made a point here in the notes that in dictatorial systems you know like the Soviet Union crushing movements

1:33:05 like this is much easier the way the Soviets did at the pr at the Prague spring crushing um it's not so easy to do in a free society and get away with it right if if you're too harsh you're going to have the backlash against you that Abby hoffin was suggesting was going to happen to the protesters when they got Richard Nixon when their Pro protesting for a more leftist Society if the police go too crazy in Chicago a bunch of people who otherwise would support them flip to the other side so you're getting a lot of that with this extremism on both sides prompting a counter reaction which you could easily get again that's more of the you know what does history teach history teaches that for every action there's an equal and opposite reaction right the Newtonian law here's another one of the deep questions I wrote it's easy to denounce extremism when the causes are so obviously negative at least in most of

1:33:58 our minds the water is muddy though when the reasons behind them seem righteous to some are riots Justified if there were a reaction to racism is domestic terrorism Justified if it's done to end an immoral War that's hurting more people than the anti-war motivated terrorist acts is violence the lesser of two evils if it's done to promote something like saving the planet from climate change or nuclear war when do the ends justify the means or do they ever this is the way that it ended um my little suggestion of a script here and I think it's a good way to end this show too quoting myself for potentially the last time ever quote if you think this is all simply the past you haven't been paying attention the past can of be prologue as the saying goes when conditions are right when the ingredients are available when the stars align and they periodically do you can have all the elements in place for the

1:35:05 creation of a perfect revolutionary storm Even in our recent past we in the US have seen the rise of groups like the tea party occupy and Anonymous challenging A system that seems less than responsive to the demands and concerns of the protesters these could easily be the early Sparks leading to Future Flames Being kindled John F Kennedy famously said those who make peaceful Revolution impossible will make violent revolution inevitable perhaps if we heed history's example of how far these things can go we may avoid having to repeat the same sorts of outcomes end quote as I said the times seem pregnant with disaster thinking about what disaster means and putting ourselves in the positions of ourselves after whatever is going to happen is all over is a better way to look at whether or not it should happen in the first place than anything else I can think of and since we don't know what's going to

1:36:14 happen in the future looking back at the past and seeing what has happened might give us well a little bit more insight into the road ahead remember what I said earlier there's two roads right one road is doing what we've always done before and the other road is not doing what we've always done before as I said earlier either way it goes is fascinating from a historical entertainment point of view but as is often the case when history is being made it's better to read about it than to live through it sometimes so we will all keep our fingers crossed stay safe how would you like to receive an email whenever a new Hardcore History show is released just sign up for Dan Subs deack newsletter we will send you a note when a new show drops or whenever there's something worth telling you about it's free and it's easy just go to Dan harlan. substack do.com sure the older Hardcore History shows can be a

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Questions about this episode

What is discussed in "EP30 So, you say you want a revolution?"?

In order: 0:00 Hardcore History; 10:00 Civil Rights Movement, Thomas Jefferson; 20:00 Black Panthers, Malcolm X, Robert Kennedy, Abby Hoffman; 30:00 Civil Rights Movement; 50:00 Democratic National Convention, Abby Hoffman, Lyndon Johnson, Prague Spring; 1:00:00 Black Panthers, Lyndon Johnson; 1:10:00 Abby Hoffman, Prague Spring, Democratic National Convention; 1:20:00 Black Panthers, Malcolm X; 1:30:00 Anonymous, Hardcore History, Occupy, Prague Spring.

What is mentioned in this Dan Carlin episode?

16 people, works and ideas are mentioned, including Black Panthers, 1968, Democratic National Convention, Abby Hoffman, Prague Spring, Hardcore History. Each one on this page links to its own page with every episode that mentions it.

How long is "EP30 So, you say you want a revolution?"?

The episode runs 1 h 38 min; the transcript is about 15,977 words in 94 timestamped sections.

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