#attica revolt

[loneberry]

Moderating a conversation at Harvard with the authors of two of my most anticipated books of the year: Charisse Burden-Stelly's Black Scare / Red Scare and Orisanmi Burton's The Tip of the Spear.

Jan 23, 3pm at the Hiphop Archive. More info here:

https://hutchinscenter.fas.harvard.edu/event/conversation-burden-stelly-burton?delta=0

#communism #carceral studies #event #events #abolition #Orisanmi Burton #charisse burden-stelly #black communists #attica revolt #black radicalism #attica uprising #prisons

[endlessandrea]

This interview with Orisanmi Burton about what he calls "The Long Attica Revolt" is really good. Can share a .pdf if you like (dm)

#The Long #Attica Revolt #Abolition Internationalism #Black Radicalism #on the ground #The Funambulist

[post-leffert]

Attica, Greece (Dec 6th 2022)

#Attica #Greece #anarchy #anarchism #protest #revolution #riot #ACAB #revolt

[reasoningdaily]

The small town of Attica in upstate New York may appear quaint and subdued today. But it became infamous in 1971 — when the Attica prison riot exploded into the bloodiest prison uprising in U.S. history.

The four-day revolt began on September 9, 1971, and saw more than half of Attica's prison population take up improvised arms. At that point, their calls for improved living conditions had gone unanswered for months. So, 1,281 inmates decided to take matters into their own hands. They took 39 prison guards and employees hostage, hoping to negotiate with state politicians.

At first, it seemed like authorities were willing to cooperate. But when negotiations stalled, police made the fateful decision to launch a raid on September 13. On that day, a helicopter dropped tear gas from the sky — as state police rushed the yard and fired 3,000 rounds — killing 10 hostages and 29 inmates. By the time the uprising was over, 43 people were dead.

These 33 images capture the historic chaos of the Attica prison riot — and how it helped galvanize the prisoners' rights movement.

Meant to hold 1,600 inmates, the Attica Correctional Facility held around 2,200 at the time of the uprising — which led to overcrowding and the harried rationing of essential supplies. Many prisoners were limited to just one roll of toilet paper per month and one shower per week.

As one historian later wrote, "Prisoners spent 14 to 16 hours a day in their cells, their mail was read, their reading material restricted, their visits from families conducted through a mesh screen, their medical care disgraceful, their parole system inequitable, racism everywhere."

It was only a matter of time before tensions boiled over — and that's exactly what happened in September 1971. The riot began shortly after dawn on September 9, when inmates were supposed to be on their way to breakfast.

A small group of prisoners overpowered the nearby guards before charging through a shoddy gate and reaching "Times Square" — a central hub in the prison. Within moments, the initially small band of rioters swelled to 1,281 participants. They quickly began attacking prison officers with homemade shivs and clubs — and it was clear that the Attica prison riot had begun.

After burning down the prison chapel and taking over three cell blocks, the inmates encountered state police wielding tear gas and machine guns. While the authorities soon managed to regain control of the cell blocks, the rioters had already taken 39 prison guards and employees hostage outside.

At around 10:30 a.m., the prisoners settled in an exercise yard, blindfolded the hostages, and dug trenches into the soil. Drawing up their demands, they began delegating duties. Some prisoners would serve as security or medics. Others would serve as representatives to demand negotiations.

Titled The Attica Liberation Faction Manifesto of Demands, the prisoners' proposal listed 33 requests, including better medical treatment, more religious freedoms, "an end of physical abuse for basic necessities" like daily showers, and more than one monthly roll of toilet paper.

The five inmates elected to wield negotiation power called for outside observers to aid in the talks. These included lawyer William Kunstler, New York Times columnist Tom Wicker, Minister Louis Farrakhan, and Black Panther Party co-founder Bobby Seale. While some like Farrakhan declined the invitation, others like Seale agreed to meet with the prisoners.

New York Commissioner of Corrections Russell Oswald eventually agreed to 28 of the demands. Though negotiations moved forward, the prisoners' demand for amnesty for the uprising — and some other requests — proved a bridge too far. On the night of September 12, both Oswald and Governor Nelson Rockefeller decided that force was needed to retake the prison.

How The Police Took Attica Back By Force

Santi Visalli Inc./Getty ImagesThe aftermath of the Attica prison riot on September 14, 1971.

It was 8:25 a.m. on September 13 when Oswald delivered the prisoners a final written warning. It demanded their full surrender — but instead saw them put their blades against their hostages' throats. State Police and National Guard troops lined up outside the gates while the inmates dug into their trenches. Helicopters soon appeared at 9:46 a.m.

With tear gas flooding the yard, hundreds of State Police troopers, Attica correctional officers, sheriff's deputies, and park police officers rushed the field. Brandishing shotguns loaded with buckshot and Geneva Convention-violating unjacketed ammunition, they laid waste to the prisoners.

Thousands of rounds were fired into the yard, killing 10 hostages and 29 inmates and wounding 89 others. One emergency technician witnessed a state trooper shoot a wounded prisoner lying on the ground in the head. Another inmate was shot seven times and then ordered to keep crawling.

By 10:05 a.m., it was all over. "On a much smaller scale, I think I have some feeling of now of how Truman must have felt when he decided to drop the A-bomb," reflected Oswald after the massacre.

Both Oswald and Rockefeller initially claimed that all 10 dead hostages had been killed by the inmates, but autopsies quickly showed that the state had recklessly gunned them down. The death of one prison guard had been correctly attributed to the prisoners — as well as the deaths of three other inmates — but those deaths had happened early on in the uprising.

Ultimately, the Attica prison riot led to nationwide demonstrations in support of prisoners' rights. It also spawned a congressional investigation and a $2.8 billion class-action lawsuit that represented the inmates involved.

Decades later, an $8 million settlement was to be split among just 502 inmates who were involved in the uprising. A further $12 million would be paid out to prison guards and their families in 2005.

Despite the notoriety of the uprising, it did not make nearly as much of an impact on the U.S. prison system as some activists were hoping. Though it did lead to some changes in regard to prison reform — most notably more religious freedom behind bars — many of the inmates' demands for better conditions were either ignored or put into place and later reversed due to the "tough on crime" era of the 1980s and 1990s.

It's little wonder why many prisoners and prisoners' rights activists are still fighting for many of the same things today — such as better wages for prison work and better medical treatment — as they did decades ago.

#attica prison #attica massacre #prisoners in america #american prisoner treatment #new york #prisoner rights #33 Pictures Of The Bloody Attica Prison Riot That Left 43 People Dead #How The Attica Prison Riot Exploded In 1971 #new york state troopers

[aboutanancientenquiry]

A “revisionist” article on the battle of Marathon and its historical significance, with some critical observations of mine on this text

The “revisionist” article to which I refer is written by Dutch historian Jona Lendering, who runs the well known website Livius. I reproduce below in its entirety Lendering’s article on the battle of Marathon and its historical significance (or rather, according to him, insignificance). After his text, I present my critical remarks on it.

“The Significance of Marathon

Battle of Marathon: famous clash between a Persian invasion force and an army of Athenians in 490 BCE. Its signicance is greatly exaggerated

It often said that the battle of Marathon was one of the few really decisive battles in history. The truth, however, is that we cannot establish this with certainty. Still, the fight had important consequences: it gave rise to the idea that East and West were opposites, an idea that has survived until the present day, in spite of the fact that “Marathon” has become the standard example to prove that historians can better refrain from such bold statements.

Presenting Marathon – Then and Now

The Spartans were the first to commemorate the battle of Marathon. Although they arrived too late for the fight, they visited the battlefield, inspected the dead, and praised the Athenians. The story is told by Herodotus, note the author of our main source for the fight. The very first question we ought to ask is why he chose to tell it. After all, his ambition was to record “great and marvelous deeds”, and the late arrival of the reinforcements was neither great nor marvelous. The Spartan presence at Marathon, however, served to present the battle that had been, or ought to have been, a fight by all Greeks.

That “Marathon” had been more than a normal battle, was hardly a new idea. Prior to Herodotus’ writing, monuments had already been erected, which presented the warriors as the equals of the heroes of the Trojan War. Other monuments, like the one mentioned by Pausanias, presented the dead as defenders of democracy: Pausanias mentions an Athenian “grave in the plain with are stones on it, carved with the names of the dead in their voting districts”.note A monument erected in Delphi presented the ten tribes and lauded the democratically elected Miltiades, but conspicuously ignored the polemarch Callimachus.

Herodotus of Halicarnassus

Framing the Battle

Herodotus chose not to present the battle in the same way. Knowing that the Persians had returned in 480 and had tried to conquer Greece, he interpreted the battle as a first attempt to do the same, which made the fight important for all of Greece. This is unlikely to be a correct judgment: the Persian army was too small for conquest and occupation, and most historians have rejected this.

What they did not reject, was the context in which Herodotus presented the violent actions. His Histories presuppose an elaborate model of action and reaction, which is Herodotus’ way to express historical causality: Cyrus conquered the Greek towns in Asia (action), they revolted (reaction), a war broke out in which Athens and Eretria supported the rebels (action), Persia restored order and decided to subdue the allies (reaction), the Persians came to Attica (action), where the Athenians defeated them at Marathon (reaction), so the Persians returned with a bigger army to avenge themselves.

This pattern of action and reaction is unlikely to correspond to historical fact. After all, the first action and the first reaction are separated by a considerable period, and the campaign of 490 was not aimed at the conquest of Greece. So, while Herodotus’ sequence of the events between 500 and 479 is probably correct, we may have some doubt about the causal connections. The Halicarnassian may in the end turn out to be right, but that is not now at issue: what needs to be stressed is that the framework in which we place the battle of Marathon, was created by Herodotus.

This framework also presents the struggle between the Greeks and the Asians as going back to times immemorial. The very first part of the Histories is a slightly ironic account of some ancient legends about women being carried away, but Herodotus continues by pointing at “the man who to the best of my knowledge was the first to commit wrong against the Greeks”, king Croesus of Lydia. The restriction “to the best of my knowledge” suggests that Herodotus believed that the conflict had started earlier. Herodotus is not just the father of history, he is also the father of the idea that East and West are eternal opposites.

Even more importantly, he is the first author to make this antagonism something more than a geographical opposition. The Asians were the slaves of the great king, and they went to war because the ruler ordered them to, while the Greeks were citizens of free cities, who obeyed the law and went to defend their liberty. This is borne out by the words of the Spartan exile Demaratus to Xerxes:

Over the Greeks is set Law as a master, whom they fear much more even than your people fear you”.note

This speech is, of course, one of Herodotus’ own compositions: not only are “tragic warners” in the Histories invariably speaking on behalf of the author, but the topic under discussion, the tension between the rule of a leader and the rule of the law, is typical for the political debate in democratic Athens.note

Herodotus’ framing of the Persian Wars as a struggle between a monarchical Asia and a free Greece explains his authorial choices. He might have mentioned the Spartan visit to the battlefield very briefly, but inserted a long digression, because the incident, although completely irrelevant for the battle, was useful to convert Marathon into a panhellenic event.

Nineteenth-Century Theories

Greece versus Asia: although popular in the classical age, this theme lost relevance in the Hellenistic age. Once Rome had seized power, the main opposition was that between the barbarians outside the Empire and the civilized Mediterranean city dwellers. When Christianity became popular, the main antagonism was between pagans and orthodox believers. In the Early Middle Ages, new self-identifications and oppositions arose: the scholars of Constantinople believed that Islam was the archenemy of the Byzantine Empire, whereas in the Carolingian Empire, scribes believed in an antagonism between Islam and those who were called “Europenses”. The first reference to Europeans as a cultural unity is the Mozarabic Chronicle of 754.

For centuries, the inhabitants of western Europe associated their culture with Rome and Christianity. In the eighteenth century, however, the famous German art historian Johann Joachim Winckelmann created the modern paradigm that Rome had merely continued Greek culture, and that Athens was the real origin of western civilization.

This new idea was successful, and in the early nineteenth century, the belief that Athens was the cradle of a freedom-loving, rational European civilization, was fully accepted. It was freedom, philosophers argued, that had at Marathon been defended by the Athenians. Because their victory had inspired other Greeks to resist Xerxes, Marathon had been an important battle: in Marathon, the foundations of western civilization had been laid. The British philosopher John Stuart Mill judged that “the battle of Marathon, even as an event in English history, is more important than the battle of Hastings”.

That bold, often repeated statement, is based on three assumptions. The first is that the Athenians were fighting for the independence of Greece. The pre-Herodotean monuments prove that this was not the perspective of the participants: Athenian democrats fighting against a Persian army that wanted to bring back the tyrant (sole ruler) Hippias. As indicated above, it was Herodotus who introduced the panhellenic element.

The second assumption is that the political independence of Greece guaranteed the freedom of its culture. In 1901, the great German historian Eduard Meyer wrote in his Geschichte des Altertums (“History of Antiquity”) that the consequences of a Persian victory in 490 or 480 would have been serious.

The end result would have been that some kind of religion … would have put Greek thought under a yoke, and any free spiritual life would have been bound in chains. The new Greek culture would, just like oriental culture, have been of a theocratic-religious nature.

The argument is, more or less, that the great king would have replaced democracy with tyranny, so that the free Athenian civilization would have vanished in a maelstrom of oriental despotism, irrationality, and cruelty. Without democracy, no Greek philosophy, no innovative Greek literature, no arts, no rationalism. In this sense, the Greek victory in the Persian Wars was decisive for Greek culture.

The third assumption is that there is continuity from ancient Greece to nineteenth-century Europe. This sociological statement has never been properly tested, even though there is an obvious counterargument: after the fall of Rome, people did not recognize this continuity. The “Europeans” were not recognized as a cultural unity until 754, and when they were, they were Frankish Christians fighting Iberian Muslims, not Greeks fighting Asians. Some scholars (e.g., Anthony Pagden) have tried to solve this problem by arguing that, in spite of the fact that nobody had noticed it, the spirit of freedom had always been there, just like the spirit of monarchism had always remained alive in the East, influencing individual behavior. This type of argument is called “ontological holism”, and is better known from Marx’ idea that history was forged by the struggle between classes, or the notorious idea that history was a war between races. Class struggle, race war, or the clash between free Europe and tyrannical Asia are abstractions that do not really exist.

A more sophisticated way to refute the counterargument is the idea, best known from Jacob Burckhardt’s famous Geschichte der Renaissance in Italien ("Civilization of the Renaissance in Italy", 1867), is that the Renaissance was a rebirth of Roman civilization and that Winckelmann was the first scholar who understood that Roman civilization had been a continuation of Athenian civilization. This cannot be discarded out of hand, because social scientists have never developed the tools to test such bold statements about continuity.

Meyer’s View Assessed

Today, the German scholar Max Weber is best known as the father of sociology, but he started his career as an ancient historian. In 1904/1905, he published the two “Critical Studies in the Logic of Cultural Sciences”, in which he investigated the epistemological foundations of the study of the past. The second essay deals with “Objective Possibility and Adequate Causation in Historical Explanation”, and has become rightly famous. As it happens, one of Weber’s examples is Meyer’s analysis of the meaning of Marathon, which is shown to be the result of a counterfactual argument: if the Persians had won, the preconditions would not have been met for the rise of Athenian civilization. But, Weber argued, this was nothing but speculation. Counterfactual arguments are usually fallacious.

For example, how did Meyer know that the Persians, after a victory in the Persian Wars, would have put an end to democracy? We must pause for thought when we read that Herodotus explicitly states that the Persian commander Mardonius supported Greek democracy.note Another point is that very few historians, right now, will accept that the ancient Near East was “of a theocratic-religious nature”: it was in Persian Babylonia that astronomers developed the scientific method. Plato and Aristotle might have lived in a Persian Athens. Likewise, Eric Dodds’ The Greeks and the Irrational (1951) meant the end of the idea that Greek culture represented a more rational view of life.

So, Meyer’s reading of the Persian War has been decisively challenged. We cannot make bold statements about the meaning of Marathon. Unfortunately, not everybody is aware that there are limits to what we can understand about the past: over the past years, several books have appeared that pretend that there is a direct continuity from Marathon to our own age. Historians and social scientists have something really important to discuss.

[Originally published in the Marathon Special of Ancient Warfare (2011).]

This page was created in 2011; last modified on 15 October 2020.”

Source: https://www.livius.org/articles/battle/marathon-490-bce/the-significance-of-marathon/

Jona Lendering is Dutch historian and runs the website Livius (see about him https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jona_Lendering )

And now my critical remarks on Lendering’s article: 

1/ In the battle of Marathon Athens, a free city-state and fledgling ancient democracy, dared to resist the most powerful Empire the world had seen till that time and, against all odds, she won the day. If one bears this truth in mind, the historical significance of the battle of Marathon is obvious for all humans of all ages who see with favor the cause of freedom and sympathize with peoples who dare to fight powerful empires in order to defend their independence. This is even more the case for people who see with sympathy democracy and the defense of democracies face to imperialism and authoritarianism.

2/ The fact that, when the Athenians fought at Marathon, they had quite naturally first of all in their minds the defense of their city does not exclude the Panhellenic significance of the battle. Marathon was not of course the decisive and final battle of the Persian Wars. However, it was the battle which proved to the Greeks that the Persian Empire was not invincible. Moreover, as Herodotus says, the Persians had already decided to subjugate (in the one or the other form) the whole mainland Greece. If they had won at Marathon and taken Athens, the Athenian army and above all the powerful navy that Athens built in the years 490-480 BCE would have been out of the equation. If one properly understands the critical role played by Athens in the Greek defense during Xerxes’ invasion of Greece in 480-479 BCE, it becomes evident why Marathon, although not the decisive battle itself, played a major role in the eventual outcome of the Persian Wars. 

3/  It is true that, as Herodotus writes, the Persians and more particularly Mardonius experimented with democracy in the Greek cities of Asia Minor which they occupied again after the quelling of the Ionian revolt. We can only speculate about the reasons which made a Persian satrap (moreover, according to Herodotus, the most hawkish one) introduce democracy in the occupied by the Persians Greek cities. However, we should not have illusions about what “democracy” meant in such conditions: this “democracy” was no more than a form of limited self-government of cities which were in fact under the total domination of the Persians. I don’t think that we can compare this “democracy” under Persian control with the great democratic experiment of sovereign Athens in the fifth and fourth centuries BCE and with the tremendous stimulus the latter gave to Greek political thought and intellectual life. 

Moreover, one of the aims of the Persian campaign in Attica in 490 BCE was to reestablish as tyrant of Athens the Peisistratid Hippias, who had been expelled about two decades before, a thing which means that there would be no repetition in Athens of Mardonius’ experimentations in Ionia. The other aim of the Persian campaign was of course to punish the Athenians for their previous support to the Ionian revolt. This punishment would have meant destructions of the one or the other extent in Athens, but also captivity and deportation to Persia of an important part of the Athenian population, as the Persians were already doing with Eretria, the other Greek city besides Athens which had sent troops to support the revolted Greeks of Asia Minor. Families and groups which had been the most hostile toward the Peisistratids and had played a prominent role in the political life of the city and in its involvment in the Ionian revolt would have been of course the first among the deported (if the Persians and Hippias did not choose to put them to the sword). Now, I think that it is obvious that an Athens largely depopulated and under a vindicative pro-Persian tyranny could not have become the intellectual and artistic center of Greece that she became after the Greek victory in the Persian Wars. So, although Lendering is right that the Persians would not have imposed some kind of “oriental mystical religion” on Athens, I think that it is evident that, if the Athenians had lost at Marathon and the Persians had subdued Athens, a very important damage in the development of the classical Greek civilization would have occured.

4/ Herodotus is not the inventor of some eternal opposition between West and East and between Europe and Asia. The “West” and “Europe” as civilization and as political and cultural identity meant nothing for him; it is for instance obvious that he saw as far more relevant for the ancient Greek cultural identity the Egyptians than the Celts. Herodotus chose for sure as the central theme of his work the conflict between on the one hand Greece and on the other hand the Persian imperial monarchy, which had under its command all the resources not only of Iran, but also of the ancient civilizations of the Near East and of parts of Central Asia and of India. But this conflict, which culminated with Xerxes’ invasion of Greece, was of course a historical reality, not some invention of Herodotus. 

Now, concerning the ideological aspect of the same conflict as opposition between on the one hand freedom and law and on the other hand despotism, again what Herodotus writes is not out of touch with reality, because, put aside some rhetorical exaggerations from Greek writers (less in Herodotus and more in later authors), there was a very real ideological dimension in the Persian Wars. I say this because the Persian Wars were the endeavour of the Persian imperial monarchy, characterized by an immense concentration of power in the hands of the Great King, to subdue the Greek free city-states, which were implementing to various degrees and in various forms institutional experiments with rule of law, balance of power, political participation of the people, and active citizenship, and even, in the case of Athens, an institutional experiment with political equality between free people, equal free speech, and direct political democracy. I don’t say that we should idealize these experiments, first of all because slavery was a feature (and a major flaw) of the ancient Greek social and economic life (although this was also the case with most societies of the ancient world, including of course the Persian Empire), secondly because among these city-states there were Sparta and some other Dorian polities ressembling Sparta, which were undoubtedly militaristic and one-sided in their development. However, despite these flaws and historical limitations, in their pluralism the institutional experiments of the ancient Greek republics and first of all of course Athens were the great precusors of later historical developments and experiences with political, social, and individual freedom and with democracy. Therefore, the successful defense of these republican Greek experiments face to the autocracy and imperialism of the Persian Empire is obviously of major importance not only for the political and military history, but also for the history of ideas.

All this does not mean that we should subscribe to some essentialist opposition between a supposedly by nature free-loving West and a supposedly by nature despotic/servile East, notions that Lendering correctly criticizes. And I remind here that Herodotus is far more nuanced in his presentation of Greeks and non-Greeks than many believe: on the one hand, he describes tyranny and tyrants like Periander, Polycrates, and Gelon as an important problem of the Greek world, and most scholars believe today that his work contains implicit warnings about the Athenian imperialism of the Periclean and post-Periclean age; on the other hand, he accepts that the “Oriental’ monarchs, although for sure too powerful for the Greek standards, were not necessarily hybristic despots (Cyrus the Great was seen as “father” by the Persians, Egypt before Cheops was governed according to justice and custom), and he describes freedom-loving “barbarians”, like the Scythians, the Massagetae, and even the Persians, when they followed Cyrus and overthrew the yoke of Astyages and of the Medes. Moreover, in the “Constitutional Debate” of Book III of Histories Herodotus presents the Persians as able to envision other constitutional dispensations than monarchy, including even democracy. 

5/ Marx’ theory of history is not of course above criticism, but I believe that Lendering’s grouping in his text above of Marxism with the racialist (racist) theories on history as instances of “ontological holism” is very unfortunate on many levels.

6/ Lendering alludes in his text to some idiosyncratic and erroneous views of his on the origin of science and scientific method, for instance to his belief that the scientific method developed in Antiquity not in Greece, but exclusively in Babylonia, and that Aristotle would have borrowed his theory of science, of scientific syllogism, and of scientific truth from the Babylonian “Astronomical Diaries” (see with more details about his views on these topics and my criticism of them https://at.tumblr.com/aboutanancientenquiry/the-babylonian-astronomical-diaries-and-their/9kwxss8gyvuf and https://at.tumblr.com/aboutanancientenquiry/the-babylonian-astronomical-diaries-and-their/8m68it6lzmru ). Moreover, contrary to what Lendering thinks, the reality that the ancient Greek civilization was not only rationalism had been understood before Dodds, as for example already in the 19th century Nietzsche had discerned the existence of the “Dionysian’ element in it. More generally, it would be illusory to search for some purely rationalist ancient civilization (and we should not forget that our own civilization has its own types of irrationality), and in fact one of the great triumphs of the ancient Greek culture was that it transformed the “irrational” in human life (extreme passions, reversals of fortune, undeserved suffering etc) and ‘irrational” myth into great literature, which contains immortal insights into the human condition. However, it is beyond doubt that rationalism too was something of major importance in the ancient Greek civilization. And I think that Lendering underestimates grossly the great innovations, breakthroughs, and contributions of the Greek rationalist thought and their importance for the intellectual and cultural evolution of humanity.

8/  I think that it is also beyond doubt that, although it is true that there is not some direct continuity between ancient Greece and Western Europe, the ancient Greek heritage played a very important role in the formation of the Western European cultural identity, either indirectly (via Rome and Western Fathers of the Church heavily influenced by Platonism like Augustine) or directly (above all with the rediscovery of ancient Greece in the last centuries of Middle Ages and in Renaissance). However, it seems that Lendering suggests that the Western European heritage is in fact exclusively Roman and Germanic and that ancient Greece has been included in this heritage rather artificially much later, a view which is shared today also by others in Western Europe. I don’t agree of course with this point of view, but I recognize that people have every right to include and exclude things from what they see as their cultural heritage and identity. Moreover, I recognize also that, although erroneous, such a point of view has at least the merit that it may facilitate the appreciation of the great ancient Greek civilization for what it was in itself and not just as an ancestor of the modern West.

#battle of marathon #athens #persian wars #herodotus #jona lendering

[mi6011alishia]

Reading List

Communist manifesto

Wage labour and capital

Value Price and Profit

Stayin Alive The 1970s and the last days of the working class

The state and revolution

Reconstruction America's unfinished Revolution 1863-1877

Socialism Utopian and Scientific

The Lessons of October

The Revolution Betrayed

Reason in revolt

Stalinism and Bolshevism

Das Kapital

Manufacturing Consent

Freedom is a Constant Struggle

The New Jim Crow

The Underground Railroad

A People’s History of the United States

Blueprint for Revolution

The Healing of America: A Global Quest for Better, Cheaper, and Fairer Health Care by T.R. Reid

Evicted: Poverty and Profit in the American City by Matthew Desmond

In Between the World and Me

Nickel and Dimed: On (Not) Getting By in America by Barbara Ehrenreich

The Handmaid’s Tale by Margaret Atwood

Citizen: An American Lyric

Just Mercy: a Story of Justice and Redemption

The Fire Next Time

Lead from the Outside

On the Other Side of Freedom

March

Blood in the Water: The Attica Prison Uprising of 1971 and Its

Legacy

The Making of British Socialism

The People’s Republic of Walmart

The Fall and Rise of the British Left 

Economics For The Many

The Making of Global Capitallism

Black Resistance to British PolicingThe Enemy within: Thatcher's Secret War Against the Miners

Women Don’t Owe You Pretty

Invisible Women: Data Bias in a World Designed for Men

Ancien Regime and the Revolution

Louis XVI and Marie Antoinette: 1 - Before the Revolution

[bookclub4m]

35 Non-fiction Graphic Novels by BIPOC Authors

Every month Book Club for Masochists: A Readers’ Advisory Podcasts chooses a genre at random and we read and discuss books from that genre. We also put together book lists for each episode/genre that feature works by BIPOC (Black, Indigenous, & People of Colour) authors. All of the lists can be found here.

This Place: 150 Years Retold

Zodiac: A Graphic Memoir by Ai Weiwei with Elettra Stamboulis & Gianluca Costantini

Nat Turner by Kyle Baker

The Talk by Darrin Bell

The Best We Could Do by Thi Bui

I’m a Wild Seed by Sharon Lee De la Cruz

Messy Roots: A Graphic Memoir of a Wuhanese American by Laura Gao

Stamped from the Beginning: A Graphic History of Racist Ideas in America by Joel Christian Gill and Ibram X. Kendi

Wake: The Hidden History of Women-Led Slave Revolts by Rebecca Hall and Hugo Martinez

The 500 Years of Resistance Comic Book by Gord Hill

Good Talk: A Memoir in Conversations by Mira Jacob

The American Dream? A Journey on Route 66 Discovering Dinosaur Statues, Muffler Man, and the Perfect Breakfast Burrito: a Graphic Memoir by Shing Yin Khor

Banned Book Club by Kim Hyun Sook, Ryan Estrada, and Ko Hyung-Ju

In Limbo by Deb J.J. Lee

This Country: Searching for Home in (Very) Rural America by Navied Mahdavian

Mexikid: A Graphic Memoir by Pedro Martín

Monstrous: A Transracial Adoption Story by Sarah Myer

Steady Rollin': Preacher Kid, Black Punk and Pedaling Papa by Fred Noland

Citizen 13660 by Mine Okubo

Your Black Friend and Other Strangers by Ben Passmore

Kwändǖr by Cole Pauls

Worm: A Cuban American Odyssey by Edel Rodriguez

Power Born of Dreams: My Story is Palestine by Mohammad Sabaaneh

A First Time for Everything by Dan Santat

Persepolis: The Story of a Childhood by Marjane Satrapi

Grandmothers, Our Grandmothers: Remembering the "Comfort Women" of World War II by Han Seong-Won

Death Threat by Vivek Shraya and Ness Lee

Palimpsest: Documents From A Korean Adoption by Lisa Wool-Rim Sjöblom

Big Black: Stand at Attica by Frank "Big Black" Smith, Jared Reinmuth, and Améziane

Victory. Stand!: Raising My Fist for Justice by Tommie Smith, Dawud Anyabwile, and Derrick Barnes

The High Desert by James Spooner

They Called Us Enemy by George Takei, Justin Eisinger, Steven Scott, and Harmony Becker

Feelings by Manjit Thapp

The Black Panther Party: A Graphic Novel History by David F. Walker and Marcus Kwame Anderson

Now Let Me Fly: A Portrait of Eugene Bullard by Ronald Wimberly and Braham Revel

#booklists #non-fiction #graphic novels #comics

[spectaculardistractions]

"Nor must it be thought that this is a case of putting yourselves into danger for a country which is not yours. Lesbos may appear far off, but when help is wanted she will be found near enough. It is not in Attica that the war will be decided, as some imagine, but in the countries by which Attica is supported; and the Athenian revenue is drawn from the allies, and will become still larger if they reduce us; as not only will no other state revolt, but our resources will be added to theirs, and we shall be treated worse than those that were enslaved before. Buf if you will frankly support us, you will add to your side a state that has a large navy, which is your great want; you will smooth the way to the overthrow of the Athenians by depriving them of their allies, who will be greatly encouraged to come over; and you will free yourselves from the imputation made against you, of not supporting insurrection. In short, only show yourselves as liberators, and you may count upon having the advantage in the war.

Thucydides, History of the Peloponnesian War

#thucydides #history of the peloponnesian war

[seventyfishes]

"A telling example occurred in 1978, when the SHU cell of a Sunni Muslim captive named Musa Abdul Mu’Mim mysteriously caught fire and, according to eyewitness accounts, was allowed to burn for several minutes before guards came to his aid. Musa, who witnesses claim was sent to the SHU after observing a KKK meeting involving the guards, later died in the hospital. His death was not an isolated incident.”

Tip of the Spear: Black Radicalism, Prison Repression and the Long Attica Revolt, Orisanmi Burton

#tip of the spear #orisanmi burton #political writing #black libertion

[kamreadsandrecs]

#books #history #nonfiction #tip of the spear #orisanmi burton

[kammartinez]

#books #history #nonfiction #tip of the spear #orisanmi burton

[the-goth-catte]

†† BLACK MASS @ PANDEMONIO || 0 7 . 0 2 . 2 3 ††

Apoptygma Berzerk - Ok, Amp. Let me out. Aesthetic Perfection - Rhythm + Control (Electro Version) NamNamBulu - Now or Never Ashbury Heights - SmAlLeR Combichrist - This Shit Will Fcuk You Up Steinkind - Disco-Anarchie Faderhead - When The Freaks Come Out Wumpscut - You Are A Goth Bigod 20 - Like A Prayer Actors - Post Traumatic Love Linea Aspera - Attica Boy Harsher - Electric All Your Sisters - Tension TR/ST - Shroom Spider Lillies - The Error Is You Gossamer - Run (Wayne Hussey Mix) Ulver - Machine Guns and Peacock Feathers Depeche Mode - Never Let Me Down Again Siouxsie and the Banshees - Peek-A-Boo Velvet Acid Christ - Caustic Disco Alien Sex Fiend - Ignore the Machine Crocodile Shop - Order + Joy Apoptygma Berzerk - Unicorn Pixel Grip - Club Mania Frontline Assembly - Mindphaser Front 242 - Headhunter V3 MCL - New York Front 242 - Welcome to Paradise Buzz Kull - Into the Void Orgy - Stitches Health - Excess Public Memory - Heir Nine Inch Nails - Terrible Lie Pixel Grip - Dancing on Your Grave Nine Inch Nails - The Hand That Feeds Pastel Ghost - Dark Beach Twin Tribes - Zodiac X-Axis - Occidental She Past Away - Dudu Dünya Diva Destruction - Enslaved La Scaltra - The Spell Actors - Face Meets Glass Fever Ray - Even It Out Hante. - Lies//Light Trevor Something - Enjoy the Silence Rein - Dystopia TR/ST - Bicep Cabaret Voltaire - Do Right KMFDM - Godlike (12” Mix) HEALTH - Cyberpunk 2.0.2.0 Night Club - Show It To Me William Control - Mother Superior Project Pitchfork - Timekiller Suicide Commando - Hellraiser (Psychopath 01 Version) Velvet Acid Christ - Fun With Drugs Apoptygma Berzerk - Until the End of the World (Dark Club Mix) VNV Nation - Honour 2003 SITD - Firmament Revolting Cocks - Attack Ships on Fire Santa Hates You - Scum Apoptygma Berzerk - Kathy’s Song (Ferry Corsten Remix) Skinny Puppy - Assimilate Noisuf-X - Orgasm Ministry - Effigy (I’m Not An) Front 242 - No Shuffle Nine Inch Nails - Sin KMFDM - Juke Joint Jezebel Bigod 20 - The Bog Wumpscut - Soylent Grun Rotersand - Exterminate Annihilate Destroy (Reclubbed) The Cruxshadows - Helios (Solar Night Mix) Boy Harsher - Yr Body Is Nothing Diva Destruction - Heathcliff She Past Away - Ritüel Twin Tribes - Dark Crystal Combichrist - Happy Fcuking Birthday Sisters of Mercy - Lucretia, My Reflection The Mission - Deliverance Siouxsie and the Banshees - Spellbound Bauhaus - In The Flat Field Christian Death vs Creux Lies - Spiritual Cramp The Cure - Fascination Street

#pandemonio #setlist #8 bit witch

[brookstonalmanac]

Events 9.13 (after 1950)

1953 – Nikita Khrushchev is appointed General Secretary of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union. 1956 – The IBM 305 RAMAC is introduced, the first commercial computer to use disk storage. 1956 – The dike around the Dutch polder East Flevoland is closed. 1962 – An appeals court orders the University of Mississippi to admit James Meredith, the first African-American student admitted to the segregated university. 1964 – South Vietnamese Generals Lâm Văn Phát and Dương Văn Đức fail in a coup attempt against General Nguyễn Khánh. 1964 – Martin Luther King Jr. addresses a crowd of 20,000 West Berliners on Sunday, in Waldbühne. 1968 – Cold War: Albania leaves the Warsaw Pact. 1971 – State police and National Guardsmen storm New York's Attica Prison to quell a prison revolt, which claimed 43 lives. 1971 – Chairman Mao Zedong's second in command and successor Marshal Lin Biao flees China after the failure of an alleged coup. His plane crashes in Mongolia, killing all aboard. 1977 – General Motors introduces Diesel engine, with Oldsmobile Diesel engine, in the Delta 88, Oldsmobile 98, and Oldsmobile Custom Cruiser models amongst others. 1979 – South Africa grants independence to the "homeland" of Venda (not recognised outside South Africa). 1982 – Spantax Flight 995 crashes at Málaga Airport during a rejected takeoff, killing 50 of the 394 people on board. 1985 – Super Mario Bros. is released in Japan for the NES, which starts the Super Mario series of platforming games. 1986 – A magnitude 6.0 earthquake strikes Kalamata, Greece with a maximum Modified Mercalli intensity of X (Extreme), killing at least 20 and causing heavy damage in the city. 1987 – Goiânia accident: A radioactive object is stolen from an abandoned hospital in Goiânia, Brazil, contaminating many people in the following weeks and causing some to die from radiation poisoning. 1988 – Hurricane Gilbert is the strongest recorded hurricane in the Western Hemisphere, later replaced by Hurricane Wilma in 2005 (based on barometric pressure). 1989 – Largest anti-Apartheid march in South Africa, led by Desmond Tutu. 1993 – Israeli Prime Minister Yitzhak Rabin shakes hands with Palestine Liberation Organization chairman Yasser Arafat at the White House after signing the Oslo Accords granting limited Palestinian autonomy. 1997 – A German Air Force Tupolev Tu-154 and a United States Air Force Lockheed C-141 Starlifter collide in mid-air near Namibia, killing 33.[8] 2001 – Civilian aircraft traffic resumes in the United States after the September 11 attacks. 2007 – The Declaration on the Rights of Indigenous Peoples is adopted by the United Nations General Assembly. 2007 – The McLaren F1 team are found guilty of possessing confidential information from the Ferrari team, fined $100 million, and excluded from the constructors' championship standings.[9] 2008 – Delhi, India, is hit by a series of bomb blasts, resulting in 30 deaths and 130 injuries. 2008 – Hurricane Ike makes landfall on the Texas Gulf Coast of the United States, causing heavy damage to Galveston Island, Houston, and surrounding areas. 2013 – Taliban insurgents attack the United States consulate in Herat, Afghanistan, with two members of the Afghan National Police reported dead and about 20 civilians injured. 2018 – The Merrimack Valley gas explosions: One person is killed, 25 are injured, and 40 homes are destroyed when excessive natural gas pressure caused fires and explosions.

#Events

[umflowers]

thing i was just reminded of: the prison revolt at attica was one of the worst (and most justified) in u.s. history and one of my like great-uncles was the guy in charge who was such a monster the inmates revolted

[reasoningdaily]

https://x.com/KeneAkers/status/1702105333718712350?t=hM4o9w4mOlms-vdd26glGw&s=09

Insurrection at Attica Prison - Buffalo New York 9/9/71

September 9, 1971—tensions reached their peak within the walls of the Attica Correctional Facility near Buffalo, New York. Over 1,000 prisoners, including Arthur Harrison, who had been sentenced to five years at Attica that same year, revolted against their circumstances. Seizing 39 guards as hostages, they took control of the prison, driven by a sense of injustice. Harrison, reflecting on the experience, recalled the severe treatment Black prisoners endured, akin to the dehumanizing conditions of slavery.

The four-day revolt at Attica Correctional Facility would tragically come to an end with a violent climax. In a barrage of gunfire, hundreds of state police officers stormed the complex, responding to the impasse reached in negotiations. The outcome was catastrophic, resulting in the loss of 39 lives.

Among the casualties were 29 prisoners and 10 prison guards and employees who had been held captive since the beginning of the ordeal. The turmoil began on September 9 when the prisoners rose up, seizing control of the overcrowded state prison. In the chaos that ensued, a prison guard lost his life, a haunting reminder of the volatile nature of the situation.

While the state police managed to regain control of most of the prison later that day, a group of 1,281 convicts remained defiant in D Yard, an exercise field, where they held the 39 hostages, enduring four harrowing days.

As negotiations reached an impasse, New York Governor Nelson A. Rockefeller made the fateful decision to order the state police to forcefully regain control of the prison.

The consequences of this decision would forever be etched into the history books, serving as a stark reminder of the tragic events that unfolded at Attica Correctional Facility that ended on September 13 1971.

#Attica #attica prison massacre #nelson rockerfeller #ny #white lies #13th amendment #Insurrection at Attica Prison - Buffalo New York 9/9/71 #9/9/71

[batmanaday]

Detective Comics 43 (1940)

Robin The Boy Hostage: take a shot!

Bet you thought superheroes going on irresponsible vacations was only for infuriatingly underwritten Spider-Man movies. Nope. Golden Age Batman has you covered.

Well, I guess this is as good a time as any to have an opinion on slash and an opinion on shipping.

I’m actually going to step out on a limb here and say that ol’ Wertham and even the yaoi fangirls who have gone many moons without touching grass have a point. Bruce and Dick aren’t exactly written with a father-son relationship; that’ll come later.

But, obviously, we’re not meant to take their relationship as at all sexual or romantic. How can this be?

Well, I think what people lose sight of is just how aimed at children these comics were. Robin was specifically added to be an audience identification figure for male children, a wish fulfillment fantasy, and as these tykes were reading Batman comics, I’m betting a lot of them had the fantasy of being friends with Batman.

Does this make much sense, given the age difference? No. But these were meant to be entertaining fairy tales, not anything like the height of realism, so an adult man and an adolescent boy could be best friends. Why not? It’s only later, as a fear of male sexuality--and an awareness-cum-phobia of homosexuality spread--that the idea came about that a man with an interest in a young boy could only be perverse. Which is, on the face of it, ridiculous. Imagine if you were watching Aliens and when a scene with Ripley and Newt came on, your friend insisted Ripley intended to molest Newt, rather than having a normal adult urge to protect and comfort a vulnerable young child. You wouldn’t think your friend was keyed in to some hidden meaning of James Cameron’s sci-fi masterpiece--you’d think they were a loon. And that’s pretty much my take.

It’s not gay, it’s just a story with a vastly different level of realism, intended for a vastly different audience than the predominantly adult modern comic readership, and written with a vastly different social view of male camaraderie and intimacy.

That said, on with the show.

If you’ve watched, like, any seventies TV show ever, you pretty much get what’s going on here. This small town has been taken over by thugs and the citizenry is just waiting for the A-team/Knight Rider/the Incredible Hulk/Simon & Simon to stand up for free speech, eh? Sounds based. But is Batman redpilled?

Oh hell yes. Let’s have an armed revolt against the government! Attica! Attica!

#batman #bruce wayne #dick grayson #robin