Friday 19 February 2010

Real Voices Of WWII

Here is a link to a sneak preview of a documentary called No Bridge Too Far, a story of the Engineer Corps of the US Army during the war who served in North Africa, Italy, France and Germany. It features the voices of veteransm now in their 80's and is a great source of primary information.

Tuesday 16 February 2010

The Bridgend Great Escape

Don't say that nothing interesting ever happens in South Wales....













Sunday 14 February 2010

Russia, old and new

This is just a quick note, I've got a lesson about Napoleon III to teach in a moment so I will return to this later. This article in the Independent caught my eye. This is interesting for a number of reasons. Firstly, this is nothing new, it's a pretty time honoured response of Russia to the states on her border and also to the management of the shared past in Russia itself. Mikhail Gorbachev wanted to adopt a scandanavian style of democractic socialism at the end of the 1980s when it became abundantly clear that the command model of economic mangement wasn't working. In The Shock Doctrine Naomi Klein makes a number of interesting parallels between the October Revolution/Bolshevik coup d'etat and the establishment of the oligarch's Russia. In both instances, a democratic people's revolution had taken place beforehand, and in both instances a dedicated, power hungry and deeply politicised elite group clung on to the coat tails of the people's revolution and subverted it using armed force.

She writes: "Once again a group of self-described revolutionaries huddled in secret to write a radical economic program. As Dimitry Vasiliev, one of the key reformers, recalled, "At the start, we didn't have a single employee, not even a secretary. We didn't have any equipment, not even a fax machine. And in those conditions, in just a month and a half, we had to write a comprehensive privatization program, we had to write twenty normative laws... It was really a romantic period."

On October 28, 1991, Yeltsin announced the lifting of price controls, predicting that "the liberalization of prices will put everything in its right place." The "reformers" waited only one week after Gorbachev resigned to launch their economic shock therapy program-the second of the three traumatic shocks. The shock therapy program also included free-trade policies and the first phase of the rapid-fire privatization of the country's approximately 225,000 state-owned companies."

Following this Yeltsin effectively staged an anti parliamentary coup by attacking Russia's White house in October 1993, he did so to quell the many mutinous voices who lamented the pillaging of the Russian economy by domestic and foreign 'capitalists'.

"A clear signal from Washington or the EU could have forced Yeltsin to engage in serious negotiations with the parliamentarians, but he received only incouragement. Finally, on the morning of October 4, 1993, Yeltsin fullfilled his long-prescribed destiny and became Russia's very own Pinochet, unleashing a series of violent events with unmistakable echoes of the coup in Chile exactly twenty years earlier. In what was the third traumatic shock inflicted by Yeltsin on the Russian people, he ordered a reluctant army to storm the Russian Whitehouse, setting it on fire and leaving charred the very building he had built his reputation defending just two years earlier. Communism may have collasped without thr firing of a shot, but Chicago-style capitalism, it turned out, required a great deal of gunfire to defend itself: Yeltsin called in five thousand soldiers, dozens of tanks and armored personel carriers, helicopters and elite shock troops armed with automatic machine guns-all to defend Russia's new capitalist economy from the grave threat of democracy"

This was the political backdrop to the previously most recent re-writing of Russia's history. Glasnost has very little to do with burying the memory of Stalin and discrediting October 1917, instead the violent imposition of free market capitalism has required a wholsale re-writing of history. Soviet communism wasn't regarded as a mistake from any human or humanist point of view, as many of the violent anti democratic practices from state repression to imperialist war in Chechnaya still endure. It was regarded as a mistake from the point of view of market orthodoxy, the free market revolutionaries of the 1980s and 90s helped to create a coup in Russia's system of ownership and in her collective memory.
More fool them, Russians are up there with the Irish for long cultural memory, the sufferings of the Russian people have been such that their very survival has depended on an ability to remember. Neoliberalism is in tatters, a totally bankrupt and utterly discredited idea, spread throughout the world with evangelical zeal. Unfortunately the former USSR bought into the idea when she was in a vulnerable position, it was a mistake that cost, New Internationalist estimates $400 billion in wealth siltd out of the country, never to be returned. History is being re-written again, authoritarian nationalists are in charge, the old glory days of Kursk and Berlin are being reimagined for a new generation as many Russians are waking up to the strong suspicion that they've been done over royally by the perennially untrustworthy west. In the west there is a new and mounting post Litvinenko paranoia about Russia. Again, thisis nothing new, the last 200 years have been marked by an almost never ending concern about Russia and her plans, the 1840's saw extraordinary levels of British public animosity towards Russia, all fuelled by rampantly jingoistic newspapers, the 'Great Game'.

Sunday night

Sunday night roundup
At the moment I am being the very worst of my book junkie self and reading first chapters of lots of different books. Last night I read the first chapter in Howard Zinn's People's History of the USA, I am a great hedger of bets when it comes to allying myself with different schools of history, I don't completely discount the idea that 'great men' have in some instances, had an impact on history, but I am far keener on the idea that it is historical forces that are far beyond the control of individuals or movements that determine things to a far greater extent. A people's history can be loosely described as a view of the world that is the story of mass movements and of the outsiders. Society's curent default setting when coming to evaulate the past is heavily influenced by today's hyper induvidualism. A society that worships the self above all things is hardly likely to pay any attention to the notion that their current wealth and prosperity is based in large part on a forgotten notion of solidarity, collective struggle and sacrifice for ideals greater than the individual. It's far easier for the children (and in some cases grandchildren) of the ME generation to look at history as a succession of 'great men' who did things becuase they were determined, single minded and above all 'right'.

The first of these 'great men' that Zinn looks at is of course Columbus. The Venetian weavers son and master mariner decided to try to emulate Marco Polo but this time to find a sea route to Asia, knowing, as all the most educated men of the age knew, that the world was round. He did not expect for the continent of the Americas to be in the way. He discovered the Bahamas, then Cuba, and then Haiti and in doing so began the genocide of the Arawak people. The figures vary, whether Columbus and his successors murdered one million, three million or eight million people is unclear, but surely on of the most monstrous and bloodthirsty campaigns in history was perptrated against the peoples of the Carribean, and it was their extinction that made the Spanish think next of African captives to replace them. Columbus was desperate for the Arawak's gold, gold that barely existed, in order to pay back the loans underwriting his voyage, so desperate that he forced every Arawak to deliver a quantity of gold per month, those that did got a copper trinket, those found without the trinket had their hands chopped off. Columbus will never, ever be mentioned in the same breath as Hitler, Stalin, Ivan the Terrible or Mao, even though he is guilty of comparable crimes. the reason for this is because the ideologies underpinning the Nazis or the Russian or Chinese Communists is too alien to us, to contrary to our ways of understanding the world. Greed we can get, empire, we understand. The idea that in creating something as glorious as the Americas, a few eggs had to be broken along the way is something that most of us have assimilated and naturalised a long time ago. It does not make for comfortable thinking that a large part of the West (and therefore our) way of life is built upon genocide. Columbus the Mariner is the limits of what we can accept, not Columbus the mass murderer.
Other books I perused last night were a couple of second hand titles on the Wilson Plot and Kenneth O. Morgan's The People's Peace. More on both later.

Saturday 13 February 2010

Two views on Welsh history

I recently mannaged to acquire a copy of "When Was Wales?" by Gwyn Alf Williams, a book which I'd had recommended to me by a couple of people that I know as a good overview of Welsh history from a marxian perspective. (The book is sadly out of print, which is a great shame as it offers a a lively and clearly written commentary on the history of Wales.)

During the 1980s, Williams was something of a household name in Wales due to the success of The Dragon Has Two Tongues, a TV series which he co-hosted with Wynford Vaughan-Thomas, in which the two historians engaged in bitter polemical exchanges concerning the way in which the history of their country ought to be interpreted. The casting of Williams the firebrand and the gentrified Vaughan-Thomas as ideological sparring partners was a stroke of televisual genius which drew in a wider audience than most historical programming of the time - I've been told (perhaps with some exaggeration) that the pubs would empty when it was on. Hard to imagine something similar happening for Simon Schama. The first episode of this landmark documentary can be viewed on YouTube. Unfortunately no DVD release appears to be forthcoming.

The book opens with R.S. Thomas' poem Welsh History, which is appended by a caveat from Williams: "This fine poem expresses some historical truths. It also sanctifies a monstrous historical lie." The truths and the lie are not identified by the author. The reader must proceed and attempt to establish these things on their own.

Williams' main preoccupations are "when to begin?", "when, if ever, has Wales been able to describe itself as an independent nation?" and "will it ever be able to do so again?". He sees the Welsh people as a nation emerging from the ruins of the declining Roman Empire - an embattled group of Brythonic speakers who would come to be left isolated in two Western peninsulars of Great Britain. The Welsh people, as they would come to be known, are a people continually in a state of crisis, moulded by a series of shocks inflicted from outside. It's in this aspect of his analysis that Williams' thinking is most obviously Marxist - Marx's famous dictum to the effect that "men make their own history, but not in circumstances of their own choosing" echoes resoundingly throughout these pages. The withdrawal of the Romans, the Anglo-Saxon ascendancy beyond Offa's Dyke, a series invasions from other parts of Britain and Ireland, the instability of the various historical kingdoms of Wales, the "Act of Union", partial industrialisation and Anglicisation are all narrated as a stream of events influencing the development of the Welsh as a stateless nation.

Williams has a gift for witty and provocative turns of phrase, one of my favourites being "those who the Gods wish to destroy, they first inflict with a language problem" - a wry comment on the linguistic divisions that affect Wales. (One of the notable features of modern Welsh nationalism is its traditional difficulty in attracting English-speaking voters from south Wales - given that over fifty percent of the population of Wales resides in south Wales, this is a problem with significant implications for the success of the Welsh nationalist project. Compare the position of the SNP: unafflicted by such a linguistic divide, save for a small number of scattered communities, its succeeded in securing a leading position in the Scottish Parliament.)

In many ways this is very much a book of its time: written in the aftermath of the disastrous 1979 St David's Day referendum on an elected assembly for Wales (in which only 20% voted in favour), the author sees little hope for the future of the Welsh nation - indeed, he concludes by describing the Welsh as "nothing but a naked people under an acid rain".

It's interesting to compare the content and tone of William's work with John Davies' A History of Wales. At over 700 pages, it's a much more weighty work than "When Was Wales?" (in comparison, a relatively concise work at just over 300 pages). Originally published in Welsh as Hanes Cymru in 1990, then published in English in 1993, the new 2007 edition contains a new chapter on developments in Wales since 1997. In contrast to Williams, Davies opts for a more sober reporting of what is thought to have occurred over the course of Welsh history. The first chapter begins with a brief discussion of the various points at which the beginning of the history of the Welsh people have been posited and then, accepting that while there are valid arguments for starting the story at any of those dates, chooses to start with a discussion of the archeological evidence concerning the earliest life in what we now know as Wales.

The scope of the text is amazing; Davies weaves a skillful synthesis of the political, social and cultural history of Welsh life which is undoubtably fast becoming the definitive book on the subject. I think what I most admire about his writing is that it offers a detailed description of events, presenting to the reader a considered analysis that never loses its lucidity.

The point at which the tone of the two books is most noticably different is in their conclusion. As already noted, Williams' book is rather pessimistic about the future of the Welsh. Davies, in contrast, seems remarkably upbeat. In the closing pages of his book, he notes a number of structural and cultural developments that he regards as "the building blocks of a nation" and states that he believes "the Welsh nation in its fullness is yet to be". Can this difference in perception be attributed mainly to the age in which the two texts were published - about thirty years apart - or to one of temperament and political sensibility? Williams states in his closing chapter: "Small wonder then that some, looking ahead, see nothing but a nightmare vision of a depersonalised Wales which has shrivelled up into a Costa Bureaucratica in the south and a Costa Geriatrica in the north; in between, sheep, holiday homes burning merrily away and fifty folk museums where there used to be communities." He sees the economic devastation of vast swathes of his country, plundered over the ages by an extractionist economy. Davies sees a number of symbols of future statehood emerging and concludes that there is hope for the future. Which of these two visions will be realised remains open to question. What is certain is that both of these books are required reading for anyone interested in the subject.
-- Contributed by David H

The German Revolution 1918

Was Germany fighting a low level civil war from 1918 onwards? A social truce the Burgfreid (peace within the fortress) had been informally agreed upon at that outset of World War One by the left and right, the social tensions that had in some ways made war more attractive to the Kaiser were suspended until at least 1916, thus indicating to the Emperor that an appeal to national sentiment had paid off.
From 1916 onwards Hindenburg and Ludendorff ruled Germany as de-facto military dictators. The failure of the Schlieffen Plan had placed unsustainable pressures on Germany, she was now faced with a war on two fronts, the kind of war that Bismarck had spent three decades trying to keep Germany out of because he could predict the likely consequences.
One of those consequences was an end to the Burgfried, and by 1918 there was more than simply a clamour for peace. Germany's working classes, represented by the SPD and KPD parties (the KPD having split off from the SPD during the war) now began to articulate a very different idea of what Germany should be about. They looked beyond simply an armistice and began to envision a post- Imperial Germany, a country without a warlike and militaristic Kaiser, who seemed to have dragged Germany into a titanic conflict she couldn't win. They agitated for both political and social revolution, a profound re-ordering of society, the removal of the anachronistic Junker class and on the moderate left, the creation of a fully representative party. On the far left the likes of Karl Liebnicht and Rosa Luxembourg demanded a soviet style government, akin to the new USSR.
In the end the decision to send the German Navy back out to see in one last suicide mission against British Admiral Jellicoe's Dreadnoughts to salvage German honour and die in the process, pushed German sailors over the edge, resulting in mutiny. Convinced the revolution had broken out and that he was likely to suffer the Czar of Russia's fate, The Kaiser fled, ensuring that the 'revolution' of 1918 was successful. It was Ludendorff that helped to send the Kaiser on his way, telling him that he had no other choice and then arranging for a civilian government to take his place. Prince Max of Baden headed up a government of Social Democrats and Centre Party members, while Ludendorff laughed into his sleeve. Their first task would be the task that meant they were permanently despised by most Germans, it would be the signing of the armistice and then the Treaty of Versailles.

Ludendorff ensured that he and the army and his old aristocratic Junker friends were not tarred with the traitor brush by having nothing at all to do with Versailles. Max of Baden was quickly replaced by Friedrich Ebert, Social Democrat, and Germany's old order, the aristocracy, army, civil service and judiciary sat back to see how the new civilian government would get along. Knowing that the government was forever crippled by the treaty of Versailles meant that it would be easy at some point to take power back from them and re-shape German society in the interests of those on high.

The left were not the only people in 1918 with new ideas about how Germany should be run. Soldiers returning from the war found it difficult to comprehend how the war had been lsot, from their perspective, they had been winning, in the summer of 1918 they were 40 miles from Paris. Many of them thought that the war had been lost at home, but instead of blaming the failure of the Schlieffen Plan, the British Naval Blockade, the incompetence of the Kaiser's rule and the end of the Burgfreid, they looked to more convenient scapegoats. When Hitler began ministering to demobbed soldiers about the Jews in 1919, his words filled an emotional and conceptual gap in the thinking of many demobbed Wehrmacht men. Further to this there were many on the right in the 1920s who thought a new war was necessary and that an Imperial Germany with an empire in the east was the goal that should really be achieved. All the ideas that appear in Mein Kampf were free floating around the trenches and the barracks and other centres of reaction by 1919. Hitler articulated these ideas, crystalised them and repeated them ceaslessly to a receptive audience

The best laid plans sometimes don't exist.

Why didn't the Bolsheviks have a plan, or indeed any idea about what to do after they took power in 1917? Why didn't Hitler have anything more than broad policy objectives and rhetoric when he took power in 1933?

A month before the October Revolution, Lev Kamenev and Grigori Zinoviev told a meeting of the Military Revolutionary Committee that whilst it would be comparatively easy to take power, holding on to it and wielding it would be next to impossible. Leon Trotsky, in the same month announced that the role of the Bolsheviks would be to issue decrees on the abolition of the Czarist State, private property and to end the war, and also to publish the secret communiques of the Czar and the Provisional Government to the Allies, discrediting both parties permanently. After that, he famously stated, the Bolsheviks could 'shut up shop'. This seemed to fit in with the line that Marx had taken in Das Kapital, the notion that the bourgeois state would cease to exist after a socialist revolution. A brief period of the dictatorship of the prolateriat would allow for all state mechanisms to be dismantled, and something much closer to anarchism would represent the ultimate form of social organisation. One can hardly be surprised at the Bolsheviks antipathy to the idea of the state, as far as active revolutionaries were concerned, the state was something to hate and fear, an organisation that either imprisoned, exiled or censored them. Kamenev and Zinoviev were perhaps more circumspect than Trotsky, who's arrogance and faith in doctrine allowed him to make a number of assumptions and mistakes throughout the revolutionary and civil war period.
Both of them realised that running Russia even in the short term, post 1917 would be difficult because of the shattered economy, food shortages, failing transport infrastructure and continuing war against the Germans. Lenin seems to have been in no doubt how to deal with post revolutionary Russia, while he ommitted to mention it in speeches he had long envisioned a revolutionary terror and desired a civil war in order to legitimise that terror. Lenin's ability to abandon doctrine when it suits him and to adopt the most pragmatic and brutal methods in order to safeguard the revolution were qualities that were present later on in Hitler in the 1930s.

Like Lenin, Hitler believed that he was appointed by history in order to drive forward some version of historic destiny, Lenin's change had been social, Hitler's would be racial. It is curious how two atheists endorsed beliefs which were bordering on mysticism. The notion of having been chosen by powerful invisible forces to bring history to its logical conclusion, in one instance a worker's utopia, and in the other a 1,000 Year Reich, seems ill at ease with the powerful rationalist (or irrationalist) ideas both espoused. Hitler was pragmatic in his anti democratic, anti socialist, anti semitic acts, acting where opportunity presented itself and backing off when presented with sufficient opposition. He, like the Bolsheviks, seems to have been gifted only with some very hazy notions of how a future Reich should be run, prefering to focus on rhetoric and speech making, watching films and dreaming about the size and shape of his future capital Germania. Hitler had little interest in day to day administration and yet he also looked upon civil servants who did the work he felt was beneath him with an undisguised contempt. In the manner of many autocrats before and since, he thought that a civil service was an effective block between him and the German people, a spiritual barrier. One of the things that is most curious about popular perceptions of Hitler today is the notion that whilst he was capable of unspeakable cruelty, he was, in essence, a brilliant organiser. Nothing could be further from the truth. He was not lacking plans for the same reasons as Trotsky, because he had based his beliefs about society rather naievely on a theory that was as yet untested, no Hitler's disorganisation has more banal roots, and roots that are deeply personal to him.
Firstly Hitler seemed to reject every change in the policy of government since the end of the middle ages, with Der Fuhrerprincip, or leadership principal. He felt that societies would operate as they should simply through blind obedience to the right 'visionary' leader ie him. Hitler was sure that any failings in a democracy existed because it was a democracy, and that the German people had a higher perpose, that perpose could only be achieved if he led them. Hitler once said that he would never have children because they would only turn out to be dissapointments to him, none could be the genius that he clearly was. The source of this delusional megalomaniacal thinking is probably deeply embeded in childhood, a violent father and an overly protective, smothering mother, a life of acute failure and disappointment, rejection and self loathing. The results of this megalomania for Germany was catastrophic. Hitler ruled like a feudal lord, playing off Nazi party bosses against one another, duplicating offices, tasks and positions and watching as they fought amongst themselves for his favour. Access to Hitler was also very difficult and often his personal secretary would convey whether or not the Fuhrer approved of a policy or not.

It seems that both Bolshevik and Nazi Leaders viewed their plans to get into power as being extraordinarily important, and their plans on what to do when in power as rather trivial. Both viewed parliamentary democracy as an anathema, and neither seem to have had any sort of relationship with their civil servants, other than one of mutual antagonism. Perhaps the route cause of their thinking is their confidence in differing kinds of utopian visions, and the notion that once power was siezed and a workers or aryan utopia was commenced, nothing else would matter. For our times, with the resergance of a far right that still admires Hitler, any claims they might have to some sort of visionary leadership on his part must be exposed as the myths they are. Hitler may well go down as the laziest dictator in history, spending half the day in bed or watching hollywood movies. Similarly on the left, who still fete Trostsky, and to some extent Lenin as visionary heroes, not the men who encouraged a civil war that killed nearly 10 million people (these are the same people who are quick enough to damn Bush and Blair for starting a war that killed 1 million) the myth of their competence must also be exposed.

Friday 12 February 2010

Rock History week Part 5: Dark Side Of The Moon



Without question one if the most successful albums of all time, what was it about Dark Side of the Moon that resulted in such extraordinary success. Well it's something that has cropped up several times this week, when we looked at bowie we saw that his successes relied upon him reading the social and cultural changes of the 1960s and reflecting them in his new incarnations, but as the 60's became the 70's he neatly abandoned the rather clumsly attempts at donovan-eque folk music and adopted a more science fiction influenced look, combined with androgeny and sexual ambiguity. The abandonment of the hippy movement in 1969 by many in Britain and America due the seeming exceeses of the lifestyle and the feeling that the protest movement was peetering out again saw a departure by many artists from the counter culture and into areas such as country music. Dark Side of the Moon was a rejection of the heady social optimism of the mid 1960s and was a damning attack on mass society and culture. Songs like Money, Us and Them, and Time were collectively described by lead singer Roger Waters as 'An expression of political, philosophical and humanitarian empathy that we were desperate to get out.'
What does he mean by this? The album features five long continual pieces of music that each signify different life stages of human beings. The album concentrates on the idea of the futility of aspects of human existence, particularly life in modern consumerist society. The ever present possibility of alienation and madness is a clear inheritence from the post marxist thinkers and post freudians of the 1960s.

Perhaps the most successful song on the album, later referenced in the film version of The Wall is Money. Opening with the sound of cash registers and loose change, the first track on side two, "Money", mocks greed and consumerism using tongue-in-cheek lyrics and cash-related sound effects ("Money" has been the most commercially successful track from the album, with several cover versions produced by other bands).

The sequel to this album is, as everyone knows, OK Computer by Radiohead.

Thursday 11 February 2010

Rock History week Part 4: Woodstock and Altamont

The Hippy era, in essence runs for about two and a half to three years, as with all great musical and cultural trends, it had a fairly brief lifespan. The era was at its zenith in 1969 with the Woodstock Musical Festival, in New York State, at its time, the largest free music festival in history. It was billed as 'Five Days of Music and Peace', implicit in the title was an opposition to the Vietnam War. The Who were one of the headlining acts.



Rolling Stone has called it "the most famous event in rock history." The Woodstock Music and Art Fair, on a 600-acre farm in the township of Bethel, New York, from August 15-18, 1969, represents more than a peaceful gathering of 500,000 people and 32 musical performances. Woodstock has become an idea that has suffused popular culture, politically and socially, as much as musically. Joni Mitchell, who didn't attend but wrote an anthemic song about it, once said, "Woodstock was a spark of beauty" where half-a-million kids "saw that they were part of a greater organism." According to Michael Lang, one of four young men who formed Woodstock Ventures to produce the festival, "That's what means the most to me – the connection to one another felt by all of us who worked on the festival, all those who came to it, and the millions who couldn't be there but were touched by it."

Lang met Artie Kornfeld, a Capitol Records A&R man and songwriter, in late 1968, and the two envisioned producing a festival in Woodstock, New York.and building a building a recording studio there. In search of financing they connected with John Roberts and Joel Rosenman, a pair of young venture capitalists who were already building Media Sound studios, a large-scale recording facility in New York City. In February of 1969, the four men incorporated Woodstock Ventures, Inc., and they began work on the festival. Soon, the conservative townsfolk of Wallkill became alarmed by the growing number of longhairs arriving to prepare the festival grounds, and a number of lawsuits were filed to stop the festival. After weeks of tension, town meetings, and legal maneuverings, Woodstock Ventures were refused permission to produce the festival.The studio project was put on hold so they could focus all their energy on saving the festival. Miraculously, 600 bucolic acres belonging to White Lake dairyman Max Yasgur, in the township of Bethel, New York, were discovered after Lang recieved a call from a local motel owner Elliott Tiber the day after the Wallkill site was lost. Work rapidly got underway to turn the rural acreage into a concert site with camping areas for 200,000. Three weeks later, during the week of August 11, thousands of people from all over the country began flocking to the festival site.

By Wednesday, August 13, the lush green bowl in front of the massive 75-foot stage was already filled with some 60,000 people. On Friday the roads were so clogged with cars that the only way most artists could reach the festival was by helicopter from a nearby airstrip. Though over 100,000 tickets were sold prior to the festival weekend, they became unnecessary: The fences and gates were never finished and people simply swarmed over those that were in place. "It's a free concert from now on!" was announced from the stage. As John Roberts later pointed out, "It took us eleven years to break even, but it was a success in every other way."

The music was scheduled to start at 4 p.m. on August 15, and just after 5 it did, thanks to New York-born folksinger Richie Havens. His improvised and rhythmic "Freedom" set the tone for the weekend. "The vibe at Woodstock was an expression of the times," says Joel Rosenman. "Energized by repugnance for a senseless war and for the entrenched discrimination of the establishment, a spirited but nonviolent counterculture was sweeping the country. That counterculture burst into bloom like the mother of all Mother's Day bouquets at Woodstock."

The occasional cloudburst delayed the primarily acoustic music as Friday night wore on, but eight acts, plus a swami, made it to the stage. Around 2 a.m, Joan Baez closed the first night with the spiritual "We Shall Overcome."

Saturday boasted the most music of the weekend, starting just after noon and continuing until Sunday at dawn (with Jefferson Airplane performing "morning maniac music," as described by Grace Slick). Highlights included the then-unknown Santana in mid-afternoon, and that night spectacular back-to-back performances by Sly and the Family Stone and The Who. Blues-rock was featured via Canned Heat and Mountain, followed by such legendary California-based artists as the Grateful Dead, Creedence Clearwater Revival, and Janis Joplin. Sunday featured another long span of music, though violent thunderstorms wreaked havoc just after Joe Cocker and The Grease Band's finale of "A Little Help From My Friends." The music was delayed until late afternoon but carried on throughout the night with more highlights including the Texas bluesman Johnny Winter and Crosby, Stills, Nash and Young (their second gig). On Monday morning at 8:30, Jimi Hendrix closed out the festival. His magnificent, improvisational version of "The Star Spangled Banner" has come to symbolize the weekend.

Around 10:30 a.m. on August 18, the festival came to an end. The innovative concert film Woodstock, directed by Michael Wadleigh, was released in March of 1970 and took the festival's message around the world. The movie documented a community of a half million people who managed to peacefully co-exist over three days of consistent rain, food shortages, and a lack of creature comforts. "Woodstock is a reminder that inside each of us is the instinct for building a decent, loving community, the kind we all wish for," according to Joel Rosenman. "Over the decades, the history of that weekend has served as a beacon of hope that a beautiful spirit in each of us ultimately will triumph."

Recordings of the music played that weekend still evoke the magic and power felt by those who were there. "It was a privilege to help found something that has meant so much to so many," adds Rosenman. "Woodstock turned out to be a sort of permanent relative of the Family of Man—the adventuresome, kind-hearted uncle you're always happy to see at Thanksgiving and graduation. I'm really grateful that we both ended up in the same family."

Two days after Woodstock ended, the New York Times ran an editorial praising what had happened at Bethel (a reversal from a previous editorial condemning the festival). It concluded with a quote from Shakespeare's Henry V, which seems appropriate upon the fortieth anniversary of Woodstock: "He that outlives this day, and comes safe home, will stand a-tiptoe when this day is nam'd."


If The Woodstock Festival captured the counterculture of the 1960s, Altamont Festival, later in 1969, killed it.
In a response to the success of Woodstock, the Rolling Stones planned a music festival at Altamont Speedway in California. The event had a line up that included the Rolling Stones themselves, the Greatful Dead and Carlos Santana. However the decision by the Stones to employ Hells Angels as security after the other security contractors pulled out proved fateful.
By some accounts, the Hells Angels were hired as security by the Rolling Stones, on the recommendation of the Grateful Dead, for $500 worth of beer — a story that has been denied by parties who were directly involved. According to Rolling Stones' road manager Sam Cutler, "the only agreement there ever was ... the Angels would make sure nobody tampered with the generators, but that was the extent of it. But there was no 'They're going to be the police force' or anything like that."



Hells Angels member Sweet William recalled this exchange between Cutler and himself at a meeting prior to the concert, where Cutler had asked them to provide security:
"We don't police things. We're not a security force. We go to concerts to enjoy ourselves and have fun."
"Well, what about helping people out - you know, giving directions and things?"
"Sure, we can do that."

Since LSD evangelist Ken Kesey had invited the Hells Angels to one of his outdoor Acid Tests, the bikers had been perceived by the hippies as akin to "noble savages", a naieve assessment if the book Hells Angels by Hunter S. Thompson is anything to go by. These were members of California's most marginalised underclasses and had not taken part in the great peaceful intellectual flowerings of the 1960s, civil rights and ban the bomb had very much passed them by. They were considered "outlaw brothers of the counterculture". They had provided security at Grateful Dead shows without reported violence. Further, the Rolling Stones may have been misled by their experience with a British contingent of self-described "Hells Angels", a non-outlaw group of admirers of American biker-gear, who had provided nonviolent security at a free concert the Stones had given earlier that year in Hyde Park, London.

Although peaceful at first, over the course of the day, the mood of both the crowd and the Angels became progressively agitated, intoxicated and violent. The Angels had been drinking their free beer all day in front of the stage, and most were highly drunk. Fueled by LSD and amphetamines, the crowd had also become antagonistic and unpredictable, attacking each other, the Angels, and the performers. By the time the Rolling Stones took stage in the early evening, the mood had taken a decidedly ugly turn as numerous fights had erupted between Angels and crowd members and within the crowd itself. Denise Jewkes of local San Francisco rock band the Ace of Cups, six months pregnant, was hit in the head by an empty beer bottle thrown from the crowd and suffered a skull fracture. The Angels proceeded to arm themselves with sawed-off weighted pool cues and motorcycle chains to drive the crowd further back from the stage.

Some of the Hell's Angels got into a scuffle with 18-year-old Meredith Hunter when he attempted to get onstage with other fans. One of the Hell's Angels grabbed Hunter's head, punched him, and chased him back into the crowd. Footage from the documentary that was filmed at the concert shows Hunter drawing a long-barreled revolver from his jacket, and Hells Angel Alan Passaro, armed with a knife, running at Hunter from the side, parrying the gun with his left hand and stabbing him with his right. In the film, Passaro is seen delivering only two stabs, but he is reported to have stabbed Hunter five times in the upper back. Witnesses also reported Hunter was stomped on by several Hells Angels while he was on the ground. Passaro was eventually tried for murder but acquitted.

Many people looked at the Altamont festival as the end of the hippy dream, it was the argument that conservatives put forward, that too much freedom, too much experimentation led to man's worst instincts coming to the fore. The argument of the hippy generation was that man set free was inherently good and peaceful. The establishment pointed to Altamont and begged to differ. It seems that the Hippy era was drawing to a close anyway, in three years America's direct involvement in Vietnam had ended, many people who had experimented with drugs either moved on from them or beccame lost in addiction, and for many great acts of the 1960s, The Greatful dead, the Byrds, Bob Dylan and Crosby Stills and Nash, psychedlia had had its day, the next albums all the above acts made were country albums.

Rock music critic Robert Christgau wrote in 1972 that "Writers focus on Altamont not because it brought on the end of an era but because it provided such a complex metaphor for the way an era ended"

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Wednesday 10 February 2010

Rock History Week Part 3: Give Peace A Chance....



This was one of the most controversial episodes in John Lennon's Career. at the end of the 1960s and the beginning of the 1970s the movement against the war in Vietnam convulsed American society. On their Honeymoon in 1969 John and Yoko Ono Lennon staged this unusual protest against the war. They stayed in bed and held a press conference, indicating their opposition to the conflict. when asked by a reporter what he was trying to achieve by staying in bed, Lennon answered spontaneously "All we are saying is give peace a chance"



This video is another example of John Lennon's increasing radicalism two years later in 1971. The John Sinclair in question was the manager of punk band MC5, who had been arrested for supplying two joints to an undercover police officer, and sentenced to 10 years in prison. Lennon asks the question in the song, was Sinclair arrested and jailed so harshly for a drugs offence or because he represented a culture that was repugnant to the Nixon regime. Many strongly suspected the latter, and it was John Lennon who was approached by Abbie Hoffman and Jerry Rubin of the Youth International Party, a counterculture anarcho-syndicalist group, to take part in a benefit conference for Sinclair. John Sinclair was released three days after the concert.

Tuesday 9 February 2010

Rock History Week! 1965 Don't Follow Leaders




Was this the first rap music? Inspired by Bob Dylan's reading of Jack Kerouac and Fyodor Dostoevsky, Subterannean Homesick Blues was recorded for Dylan's 1965 Bringing it All Back Home album. Since his emergence in the bohemian underground of early 60's Greenwich Village, Dylan had been an iconic figure for the American Counterculture, just as Kerouac had been an inspiration for them in the 1950s. As the 50's became the 60's the 'beats' were replaced by Hippies, Yippies and the LSD culture, the civil rights and anti war movements heavily influenced the tone of the song particularly the line 'Don't follow leaders'. This was a clear break with the stiffling and authoritarian conformity of the 1950s. The Rabbi in the background is beat poet Allen Ginsburg

Monday 8 February 2010

Rock History Week! 1972

Why did this cause a stir to British music fans in July 1972?



Born in 1947, David Jones (later Bowie) had tried verything he could think of to be famous. Throughout the 1960s he'd been a mod, a failed hippy and by the 1970s the times were changing again and Bowie decided to change with them. The 60's were a decade of rapid social change in Britain, attitudes towards gender, sexuality and appearance had been very conservative at the start of the decade, but by 1969 had begun to be challenged. In the 1970s these social changes continued.

The early 1970s reflected this with a pop fad known as glam. Performers like David Bowie, Mark Bolan and Roxy Music experimented with 'glamorous' stage personas, Bowie reinvented himeself as Ziggy Stardust, an alien who visits a dying earth and who is greeted as a rock messiah but ultimately undone by a people unworthy of him. When this performance of Starman from the Ziggy Stardust Album was broadcast in 1972, Bowie went from a figure on the fringes of avante garde pop music to a household name, he was shocking to some as he wore makeup and had his arm draped over guitarist Mick Ronson (just showing us how our attitudes towards intimac and personal space have changed since 1972, if nothing else) but to millions of teenagers up and down the land he was something else, captivating, exciting and subversive.

Here is another interview with Bowie in 1964 where the contentious issue of long hair and its socially subversive connotations are discussed

Guest Contributors Sought.

I'm looking to expand the content of the history blog in the next few months and so I need a team of good dependable writers and essayists to help out. If you are an armchair historian, history pupil, student, teacher, PhD student or professor I'd love to hear from you. I am particularly interested in people who would like to write essays and articles on modern world history, but I am open to ideas from all contributors. In the next few months I hope to showcase the best new historical writing on a seperate web page, so if you've got an argument you're passionate about, if you've researched something or read something you think you can put across to the blog readers in an interesting and accessable way, drop me a line at misterlazlo@gmail.com and let me know about your idea, or just email me an article. Also the best articles will go out in the weekly blog page news letter.

Sunday 7 February 2010

The Epic Speech of Martin Luther King Jr



Martin Luther King had an entirely different strategy to Malcolm X or the Black Panthers. He begins his speech by saying that the it is 'the greatest demonstration of freedom in the history of our nation.' Note the use of the word OUR, many of the more radical black activists rejected America as being 'their' country, and simply viewed themselves as enslaved subjects of an enemy power. King wanted to associate his movement with the best traditions of liberal, democratic and above all Christian America. He wanted to appeal to white Americans and persuade them that to be American is to stand against tyranny, that the country was born in a struggle for freedom and had not so long ago fought Nazism.

Saturday 6 February 2010

Suffragette Primary Evidence Link (Gold Dust!)

This is the kind of thing that will really help with your history coursework! Here is a link to a report in the Times in 1911 on how Suffragettes boycotted the census of that year in protest at not having the vote.

New Deal or Raw Deal?

This is an interesting article on the subject of Roosevelt and the New Deal. Now, as you all know (and yes, we did study this) not everyone greeted the New Deal with enthusiasm, the Republican rigt particularly thought that the best medicine for the depression was none intervention in the market and to let events take their natural course. Economic downturns do tend to remedy themselves over time, but normalyl not until a lot of hardship has taken place. There was a general feeling in the 1930s also that whilst cyclical economic downturns had been seen before, there was nothing quite like the great depression to have taken place in living memory. JM Keynes argued that individuals and businesses did not possess the capital to drag America (or anywhere else for that matter) out of the slump, so government would have to act. Read this article for the pros and cons of the New Deal.

Wednesday 3 February 2010

Super link for historians

Here is a daily digest of history online, it's the site of the editor of History Today, well worth a read for all sorts of useful handy articles and ideas.

Haiti

Haiti was a product of the French Revolution. French Slave owners in the 18th Century were confronted by black revolutionaries demanding their freedom. When Napoleon Bonaparte came to the throne of France as Emperor in 1800 he had no qualms about crushing the revolt, even though he claimed to be spreading freedom and enlightenment across Europe using his vast armies. Read more on this hidden aspect to Haiti's past here. Coming up, how America ruthlessly exploited Haiti after the French....

Tuesday 2 February 2010

The making of the modern middle east

The signing of the secret Sykes Picot Agreement in 1916 was the first act in the making of the Middle East crises of the 20th Century. It was the secret accord between Britain and France that designated how the dying Ottoman Empire should be dissected. Britain would control Iraq and Jordan and Palestine, France would control Syria and Lebanon. Check out this link that demonstrates exactly how the region was to be carved up.