EP30 So, you say you want a revolution?
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It's Hardcore History. There are two kinds of people that listen to this podcast. One group are history fans. The other group are people who are in the process of becoming history fans. And so I'd like to talk to them for a minute. History fans already know what I'm going to say here, but it's an interesting aspect of why the past in terms of a field of study should matter to us today.

We exist in a time period where the value of a history education, for example, among several humanities slash social science disciplines are sort of at a low ebb because a whole bunch of factors, including people who come out of college with huge student loans they have to pay back, is geared towards trying to maximize the investment that was your university education.

Which is totally understandable, but it causes us to sort of look too knee-jerk at the connection between education and earning potential, right? You study computer science, you get out, you have a job, as opposed to you become a more formidable person by immersing yourself in the humanities, which helps you in a whole bunch of ways as life requires you to adapt over and over again. I understand people devalue it, and maybe those subjects are not the same as they used to be.

But there was always a practical value to learning about things like history, although not always in the way non-history fans assume. Again, history fans already know this. Let me use my favorite example. You'll often hear, usually when we're talking about some military affair that might involve war,

you know, combating a dictator or something, you'll hear the 1938 Munich appeasement argument brought into play. You'll often see this. Somebody will say, we learned in 1938 that you can't appease dictators because we appeased Hitler and look what happened.

This is a standard non-history fan understanding of cause and effect where they look and say, well, it happened this way once, therefore it'll happen this way again, ignoring what history fans obviously already understand, that there are a bazillion variables. And all those variables make the situation, you know, that you're using that 1938 appeasement example to, you know, make an argument point in that the two situations are not comparable. First of all, dictators don't always act the same way, right?

Hitler is a human being. He acts a certain way. It doesn't mean Saddam Hussein is going to act like Hitler automatically. I mean, there is no automatic way you can just predict it. Well, Hitler would have done this. Therefore, Saddam is going to do it, too. It just it doesn't work that way. That's a very. And then that's one of millions. Right.

It's in the interest sometimes, though, of people to have you believe history works that way. Journalist Ted Koppel once said history is a tool used by politicians to justify their intentions. And, of course, it only works if the audience on the receiving end of that kind of a discussion also doesn't really understand all the variables and the way history works. Not enough history fans in the electorate, I'm comfortable saying.

So that's how history doesn't teach lessons, but so many people think that it does. I mean, there's a great line that's famous from the philosopher George Santayana who said, those who cannot remember the past are condemned to repeat it, implying that you have to learn these lessons, like don't appease Hitler in 1938, or, you know, you'll have to appease...

someone all over again and then you'll have a third world war in other words you know learn from the past but that's not the quote if you look it up the actual quote is about retention of memory societies building upon ideas that came before allowing them to progress as they build idea upon idea here's the whole quote

Progress, far from consisting in change, depends on retentiveness. When change is absolute, there remains no being to improve, and no direction is set for possible improvement. And when experience is not retained, as among savages, infancy is perpetual. Those who cannot remember the past are condemned to repeat it. End quote. Now, never mind that the 1905, um,

writing there didn't acknowledge that so-called savages also keep a remembrance of what came before technologically or oral storytelling wise but nonetheless that aside you can see that the quote actually doesn't refer to the idea of how it's commonly used right this idea that there are these lessons you have to learn but if there are no lessons that have to be learned why would you study history

sometimes you'll hear that and sometimes you'll hear it even amongst academics where they'll say what's what's the practical value of this what are you going to do i mean you know these are just a bunch of stories if there's no practical value to this right all these wonderful stories in the past

That's ignoring, though, the things that history really does teach us. I mean, put aside the big military questions like history teaches us, you know, don't get involved in a land war in Asia. History teaches us don't invade Russia in the winter. I mean, you know, those are I would say those are pretty good lessons and history taught them, but they're not trying to predict the way an individual dictator might act in the Czechoslovakian 1938 facsimile situation. Right. It's a little different.

But the things history reliably teaches us is what can happen, right? Because it's happened before. And I always say there's only two ways things can go. They can go the way they have in the past or they can go in a different direction. Either one of those is fascinating.

Most of the time it goes the way it's always gone. Doesn't mean it has to, but most of the time it does. And then you can look at situations and go, well, look at how bad it got in this situation when it went this way. That's something to learn from history. That's putting your hand on a hot stove, experiencing something like, I don't know, a world war in your lifetime and saying, can't have another one of those. How long does that lesson last?

You burn your hand really badly on a hot stove. You can teach your kid about that. You can say, look at this scar. Don't put your hand on a hot stove. How long does that lesson go down? Grandchildren, great-grandchildren. Eventually, you know, given the right circumstances, that hot stove might look like just the right answer. One of the reasons I started this Hardcore History Addendum feed was to put stuff in here that just didn't fit in the history show or stuff we could just produce more quickly or stuff that just was weird. Maybe that's today's show.

Because I was thinking, you know, it's been a momentous week or two in political history. I don't know when you're going to get this. We had an assassination attempt on Donald Trump, President Donald Trump. We had Donald Trump's adversary in the election up until five minutes ago. Joe Biden just dropped out of the presidential race. So there's a lot going on right now, right? The boiling or simmering pot that is our

you know, national debate is about to blow up, you know, and some people want it to. Once upon a time, I probably would have done a common sense show about it, and lots of people have been asking. But we live in an era, and I think it's one of the fascinating aspects of it. There are times, and I imagine many of you history fans out there do this too, where you can sort of step backwards and try to see this from a much longer view perspective and ask yourself, you know, can we see what's going on here? Can we see... You know, um...

And one of the fascinating aspects is this, the way that the climate and the hyper-partisanism and the stakes being so high and all those things have taken things like opinion when it comes to talking about politics or current events or analysis and made it relatively irrelevant.

Something where it only is directed at the people who already have these beliefs and where purity tests on all sides are in full force. I mean, it's a very weird time to try to influence the public debate with some, you know, thinking of your own because everybody can just write it off as partisan or, you know, a sign of your leanings. So rather than play around with things like opinion...

or analysis that might be biased, I thought maybe we could just look at what's already happened and maybe learn one of the lessons that history does teach. The lesson of if we're not careful, it can get this bad. In 1968, just like what just happened, a Democratic president, you know, shocked the world and said,

he was not going to run for re-election. This caught almost everyone by surprise, and the Democratic Convention was not that far away. Obviously, I don't know when you're going to get this, but that just happened to us. History doesn't repeat itself, but it sometimes rhymes, right? In 1968, when Lyndon Johnson did this,

We're kind of in a potential mirror image of where we are now. When Johnson decides not to run for re-election, the country's exploding. Now it feels like the country is...

Pregnant with disaster, maybe is a good way to put it. Everybody just sort of on pins and needles. And maybe I'm misreading the situation. Let me just say that at the outset. I could be completely misreading. I'm not out there circulating all the time. So I could be misreading everything. But it feels a little pregnant with anticipation. And there's almost a date, right? The election coming up. And almost a drooling going on now amongst some people

Let's just talk about what might happen. And I don't mean exactly the same, but there are things we can learn from the past, as I said, and some of it is how things devolve and what might occur and ways things might go. And we actually have seen a version potentially of this happening.

you know, I don't want to call it dystopian future. Who knows how bad it will be. But if it's as bad as 1968, one might ask if we really want to go there. Now, we wouldn't actually be going there, as we all know. All those variables I talked about in the 1938 Czechoslovakia example are in play here, too.

But there is a weird funhouse mirror sort of reflection going on between that time period and now, including the fact that

that by the time things explode, they had been clearly heading that way for a while. You could feel the tension ratcheting up for, well, one might say from the mid-1950s. I mean, the civil rights movement gets going in mid-late 1950s strong. And, you know, when President Kennedy's assassinated in November 1963, well, every baby boomer book you've ever read points to that as a huge sort of

cultural change in outlook and everything. I read a quote by Lance Morrow that I thought really was the best summation of that sense that you get reading some of the stuff written by the Baby Boom folk. And it said, quote,

The real 1960s began on the afternoon of November 22nd, 1963. It came to see that Kennedy's murder opened some malign trap door in American culture and the wild bats flapped out, end quote. But I've noticed the Funhouse mirror similarities for a long time. And actually back in late 2013, early 2014, so a decade ago, the

I wrote a sizzle reel about the subject. Now, let me back up for a minute. That's what's going to make this a weird show, by the way, is that I'm actually sort of relying on work I did a while ago for something that never got done. I mean, I think the sizzle reel got done, but we never did anything with it. I was working with a very talented group of filmmakers, and they asked me for...

for an example of what a show might be and a subject matter piece might be. And I chose the revolutionary period, you know, the new left revolutionary period in like 1967 to like 1971, 72.

And even back then, the interesting parallels and stuff were such that because you could almost, as I said, in the same way you could see 1968 and the explosion and all that percolating for a long time ahead of time, you can see what's coming in front of us has been percolating for a long time too with stressor piled upon stressor for years. Again, 150 years from now, historians are going to look back on this and be able to piece it together maybe better than we can today.

1968 is certainly about the edge of recentness for me. I usually don't do anything any newer. Well, I usually don't even do 1968. So this is like the edge of where I'll talk about history usually, but it was a wild period. And I wrote a narrative script that was supposed to be interspersed with all sorts of video plus recreations and

And I was actually technologically going to be inserted into these scenes as they happen. It was going to be really cool. So what I've done is I've got my material here that I wrote. I did take, you know, version after version after version of a lot of these scripts, leaving the stuff in that I liked and taking the stuff out that I didn't. So it got quite a bit more tight than this, but I'm using one of my earlier versions because I,

I like all that other stuff we had to take it out. We took it out for brevity's sake, but some of it's really kind of interesting. I think you'll have to be the judge, but I don't normally read, as you know, the show's improvised. It sounds that way.

when i had to do the recording for my audio book i always thought it sounded weird because it's me reading uh and not sort of improvising but the same is going to happen here and it's when you take out all the video stuff in between it's actually quite a bit of text so i apologize for the lengthy quote but i do know some podcasts that are popular are nothing more than reading from scripts so and

And let's just say, first time for everything, I've never quoted myself, I don't think, on the program. So a long quote of me narrating with a bunch of images and stuff that you probably won't have. We'll see how much of a myth Ben is, if he can sneak any of it in there. But long block of text now that sets up this subject that I think is still today, well, maybe even more interesting than it was 10 or 11 years ago when I wrote this.

So quoting myself for the first time, I believe, quote, I hold it that a little rebellion now and then is a good thing. You know who said that? One of the United States' most revered founding fathers, Thomas Jefferson. And it sounds good in theory, right? The United States itself was, of course, founded on an act of rebellion. And Jefferson was one of the people leading that. But when does a little rebellion...

turn into something more? What if I told you that next year the United States would experience more than 150 violent riots? Would you classify that as a little rebellion? If I told you that in one 12-month period in our near future, the U.S. would suffer more than 170 bombings or bombing attempts on American soil, what would run through your mind? What would you think had happened?

These may sound like hypothetical questions, but the fact is, when the right historical ingredients are present, a witch's brew of revolutionary activity can be conjured up more often and more quickly than most governments find comfortable.

It happened, for example, in 1848, the so-called Year of Revolution, when more than 50 European and Latin American countries spontaneously erupted in anti-government protests and violence in the same year. Thirteen years later, the United States saw the most serious threat to its government in its history when civil war broke out between the southern and northern states.

Now, while no one is alive today who remembers those events, plenty of people now living can recall in vivid color the last time Americans engaged in a little rebellion. Now, let me stop here and say at this point you were supposed to see all sorts of images and videos that helped negate the need for me to explain everything that was going on, but...

Lots of showing of all of the tensions and how it broke out into open problems in the streets. And my narration continues, quote, And it wasn't just hundreds of riots and bombings. It also included multiple high-level political assassinations.

Tens of thousands of arrests, hundreds of thousands of demonstrators in the streets, universities shut down and buildings occupied, and protesting students shot down on campus by campus police and National Guardsmen. It was the late 1960s and early 1970s, and calling the anti-establishment actions back then a little rebellion doesn't do them justice.

In reality, it was probably the closest the United States came to revolution since the Civil War. And it happened less than a half century ago. It's still controversial too. How do you decide if insurrection is a positive or negative thing? Sometimes you get a United States of America out of a rebellion, but sometimes you get a Soviet Union. Do the reasons for an insurrection justify it?

And who decides if those reasons are good enough? The establishment? The rebels? Or maybe the great mass of people caught between the extremes are the ones who make the call. Sometimes that verdict is rendered by history. And sometimes the court of history even reverses itself on appeal. But history, or those viewing it, has the luxury of looking at extreme events from the safe distance of the future.

It's as though we're looking at a movie we've already seen. There are no risks. We know how things turn out. The participants living through events in real time didn't, and the stakes could be insanely high. I mean, in just one 16-month period from 1969 to 1970, there were more than 40,000 bombings, bombing attempts, or bomb threats in the United States. That's an average of more than 80 a day.

If we were experiencing anything like that today, during the 24-hour news cycle and the era of 21st century homeland security, don't you think we would consider the stakes insanely high? And no target was immune.

New York police headquarters was bombed. The U.S. Capitol was attacked. And on May 19th, 1972, a young lady who was part of an extremist group of people that we today would call domestic terrorists planted a bomb inside the military nerve center of the United States. She planted it in the Pentagon.

A nation that proudly celebrated its own founding revolution every year was dealing with members of their own citizens who thought it was time for another one. How on earth did the United States go from a leave-it-to-beaver reality in the early 1960s to one better represented by the Mod Squad in just a few years? Make no mistake about it, the transformation was traumatic.

During that period, many emerging trends came together to create one of the most turbulent eras in American history. It spanned several years, but 1968 was the tipping point. Ultra-dramatic events kept ratcheting up the pressure all through that year. That the Beatles went from singing All You Need Is Love in 1967 to Revolution a mere year later is symbolic of the mood shift.

Anyone old enough to have gotten married and started a family after World War II would have been forgiven if they'd had a case of historical whiplash. How did the bucolic, crew-cut, all-American 1950s morph into the angry 1960s and early 1970s? And how did it do so so quickly? Well, it had a lot to do with the young people coming of age during those years and the events that were impacting their lives.

End quote. Then I have a notation here. Shots fired, JFK killed, show films. So you have to imagine the interspersing of all of this sort of stuff. And I continue, quote, The end of a period that is so romanticized it's recalled as Camelot signaled the first change of mood.

Malcolm X was gunned down in May 1916.

And while white America was relatively scared of Malcolm X, and so was some of black America also, this was cited as one of the reasons for the creation of the Black Panthers in 1966. And in my narration, I said, quote,

Anger over the killing of Malcolm X, who as a member of the Nation of Islam had been seen as a dangerous figure by much of white America and by some of black America too, was one of the reasons cited for the creation of the Black Panthers in 1966. The Panthers were to become one of the more angry, forceful, and revolutionary of the groups pushing for racial equality.

They picked up on the mantra of freedom by any means necessary and attracted people who felt that the results gained among more peaceful approaches like those of Martin Luther King were either too slow in coming or too modest in scope.

And then I wanted to insert a video of H. Rapp Brown saying his famous quote, quote, I say you better get a gun. Violence is necessary. It's as American as cherry pie, end quote. I have a lot of great quotes I'd like to incorporate into this today that I looked up from the era that just sort of

All of them are little data points or pieces of a mosaic that when you throw them all together, you start to assemble sort of a better picture of what we're talking about here. But there's a ton of stuff going on in this area. It's crammed. I mean, if you have a detailed timeline, it's an amazing list of ever increasingly tense situations that crop up one right after another.

My narration continues, quote, The Reverend Martin Luther King Jr. was at the opposite end of the violence scale from groups like the Black Panthers. In fact, he was one of the most famous proponents of nonviolence in history. But by 1968, even King couldn't seem to prevent violence from erupting at his events. King said in early 1968, quote,

Maybe we just have to admit that the day of violence is here. And maybe we have to just give up and let violence take its course. The nation won't listen to our voice. Maybe it will heed the voice of violence. End quote. Then my narration here says, quick cut to the Martin Luther King shooting and aftermath. My narration continues, quote, After Martin Luther King was assassinated, the country exploded.

130 U.S. cities experienced everything from unrest to riots at the same time. Machine gun nests were set up around the nation's capital. Snipers in high-rise buildings engaged in gun battles with police on the ground. Several major urban areas had turned into war zones. It would take 65,000 riot troops to restore temporary order around the country.

Martin Luther King had said before he died that the summer of 1967's riots the previous year couldn't be repeated without something really bad happening. Quote, we cannot stand two more summers like last summer without leading inevitably to a right-wing takeover and a fascist state. End quote. King's death would almost assure 1968 would see even more unrest than 1967's.

How long do you think our society today could weather storms of this magnitude? And what if just when you think the tension meter has maxed out at 10, it gets turned up to 11? John F. Kennedy's brother, Robert, former Attorney General of the United States, was running for the presidency himself.

on a peace and racial equality platform when he received the news of King's death during a campaign speech and had to break it to a stunned and horrified crowd. Insert the famous RFK doing this. Ladies and gentlemen, I'm only going to talk to you just for a minute or so this evening because I have some very sad news for all of you. Could you lower those signs, please? I have some very sad news for all of you, and I think sad news...

for all of our fellow citizens and people who love peace all over the world. And that is that Martin Luther King was shot and was killed tonight in Memphis, Tennessee. Martin Luther King dedicated his life... And I said two months later, it was Robert's turn. This is a time of tragedy and loss. Senator Robert Kennedy is dead. Robert Kennedy affirmed this country.

affirm the essential decency of its people. They're longing for peace. And then, mercifully for all of us, the text ends with this summation, quote, "...there were some that saw some level of horrible irony in the fact that two of the most prominent proponents of peace in American society both were violently gunned down by assassins. The deaths of King and Kennedy didn't just silence two of the most eloquent voices counseling peace."

It gave ammunition to those who wanted to argue for measures beyond mere dissent. Events surrounding the Democratic National Convention in Chicago in 1968 helped crystallize things. The now dead Robert Kennedy had hoped to get the nomination of his party for president at this convention. But while he won't be there, Abbie Hoffman will.

End quote. And that's sort of the end of the sizzle reel. But it's given us sort of a little introduction into the elevator pitch for the time period. Right. You think of any society out there trying to absorb all of the different cultural inputs of

that were happening at that time period. And I mean, if you were looking at an ancient society and you said it had all this going on, you would wonder how it kept together. This is part of the Funhaus mirror reflection thing because there's a sense that you almost feel that way now, right? That the level of sensory input amongst everything going on is on overload and on self-destruct, right? And in November, you know, boom. But let's start with stressor number one.

In 1968, you had the war in Vietnam. And truthfully, we don't have anything quite like that now. I can't even find an analogy for that. You might say something like Ukraine or the situation in the Middle East, but we don't have Americans dying in that sort of circumstance.

We had a steady drumbeat of people dying during the Vietnam War in 1967, the year, of course, before 1968. 9,353 or so people died in the Vietnam War in the American military forces.

That's added to an existing total by that point of almost 16,000 people already. And we'd only really been heavily involved in the war since about November 14th, 15th, 1965. And I only have that date on my, you know,

you know, tip of the tongue because that's when I was born and that was during the Battle of the Yadrang Valley, which is really maybe, I mean, you can argue this, but probably the point where things exploded into outright full-on, you know, here we go. I mean, this or the Gulf of Tonkin type stuff, right?

But the drip, drip, drip of casualties, I mean, you'd have like, you know, a hundred and something people a week and they'd sometimes, well, actually they'd weekly show like their high school graduation photos or the ones from graduating, you know, basic training photos in the magazines. And you'd see all these nice pictures.

you know, good looking, clean cut American kids not coming home. And you'd ask the logical question as time goes on, when's the end of this coming? You know, what are the victory conditions? How do we win? And when does that happen? And, you know, even if none of these people were related to you and it didn't hit you hard, all Americans were paying a fortune for this. I mean, the daily cost of the war and the monthly cost of the war was insane.

I mean, you go back and you read the stuff that was going on. I mean, President Johnson was telling people not to travel to foreign countries because it takes U.S. dollars and sends them away from the country. And that's how he was trying to fund a great society program, run a war. I mean, something had to give. And so even if you didn't have a kid or a dog in the war fight of things, even if you supported the war, the taxes were a burden. And you might logically wonder, so why?

what are we getting for our money and when do we get to stop paying it? The administration and proponents of the war continually said basically that it's happening. It's going to be soon. We have a light at the end of the tunnel. And they pushed this narrative for quite a while as more and more people, you know, would hop off the we're winning the war train. And then finally an event happened again in our year of 1968 in January, in fact, where,

that had an impact out of all proportion to the battlefield situation. You've probably heard of the Tet Offensive, and that's what it was. In the Tet Offensive, North Vietnamese forces and Viet Cong guerrillas took over a bunch of territories and cities in Vietnam, South Vietnam, which was our ally, all at once.

which then required, you know, a massive response. A ton of it was shot by news cameras in ways that you couldn't do today. You would never get in. I mean, it just wouldn't be allowed. The governments would censor it. It was this crazy little moment in the history of military news gathering where, and it was only really like at the last moment,

last third maybe of, of the war, maybe the last half when the cameraman could get in there and shoot real footage. I mean, it's crazy stuff.

But there was a lot of stuff shot during Tet and the images were on American television. And during Tet, I mean, Walter Cronkite, the most trusted man in America, who was a rah-rah supporter basically of the government, a Second World War guy, he turned around and basically said, clearly we're not winning. So this light at the end of the tunnel excuse, you know, falls dead on its feet after the Tet Offensive.

Increasing something at the time that was called the credibility gap. In other words, how much you could believe what the president was saying. And even though none of the conditions of being a president of the United States were different than in earlier eras,

the sort of misty, rosy glow with which Americans believed everything their president said, that's what's wearing off in this era, right? That facade of credibility, you know, if Eisenhower had told you 95% of Americans would have believed it, that goes away here because it's been abused and this idea that the

Vietnam War is ending and yes, we have to send more troops. No, we have to send more troops again. Well, let's send more troops again. But it's all you know, we're wrapping it up. Victory is right around the corner. And Tet showed that it wasn't. And this was in January 1968. Now, one of the problems connected with the war that might not be as big of a deal today is that a bunch of the people in the military in 1968 did not want to be in the military.

This was not a volunteer military, although there were volunteers in the military, as there always are. But this was a conscript army, just like the Army, by the way, of the United States in the Second World War and the first. I mean, there's a ton of people who are there because Uncle Sam sends them a draft notice.

In some eras, that draft notice is expected and people, by and large, you know, heed what the letter tells them and they go show up, they take the oath, they go to basic training and they're in the military. In this era, less and less people were doing that. There's going to be one day, for example, where a thousand people around the country send their draft notices back to the government.

How many people can you arrest on draft evasion before you have a very different kind of problem on your hands? And what sort of signal does that send to the other side in your conflict, by the way? So if you look at all the different things that are going on to this generation that are taking an old social contract and sort of breaking it and then seeing what's left once you do this, this is revolutionary change now.

Even if a lot of these people aren't for revolution, right? Even if they're not the hard edge of the revolution, listen to these things and think about how this would change society.

a society that did not have these things as important inputs as recently as a decade previously. And imagine the Funhaus mirror reflection on how you can make all sorts of analogies for these things today, right? Something today that's equal to something back then, or some of the same damn problems in 1968 that we're dealing with now. How about television?

We don't think about that a lot, but that was something that, I mean, this is Gutenberg movable press. I mean, this is one of those benchmarks in the history of communication that had an impact on the society, unlike anything that had come before it. Now today, of course, we have the internet and all these things that make TV look like a minor development. But think about how important TV was when everybody started watching it and had like three channels.

And it had a couple of major newscasts. And the whole world watched these things. And the impact on society was absolutely enormous. The opinion-making power. And one of the lines about the Vietnam War, whether or not it was true, is that the war was lost in America's living rooms because the TV was showing them the war. And by the end of 1967, in addition to the, you know, 26,000 dead in the war already, there was almost 100,000 guys wounded there.

And when you think about the toll that that takes on society, seeing a lot of these wounded veterans, some of them at protests, some of them angry at protesters, but I mean, all of that is, it always fosters the question in your mind, what did they lose that leg for? Right? I mean, what are we doing?

This whole situation that in some ways prevented the United States from going for like a Second World War victory and rolling the tanks into, you know, Saigon or something like that, and then taking them way up to the north, that was all impacted by the fact that

They now live the people in 1968 in an era of nuclear weapons. And you go look at the impact, for example, in the literature or in the television, popular media, the movies of the time period, this threat, the sort of Damocles threat of nuclear weapons hung over this whole generation. They were very conscious of it because they were born in a world where that threat didn't trouble them. And as we had said in the Destroyer of Worlds show that we did,

There's a difference. And I feel the same way with computers, right? I was basically born in an analog world and lived through like my generation into the new world, right? The post analog world, the computer world. You're very conscious of what the world was like before, what it's like now. And people who were born in a non-nuclear war world,

and then find themselves in one are very conscious of it. And the literature proves, I mean, this impacted the way, you know, your outlook on life. Will we even be around? Hard to quantify how big of a deal that was or not, but clearly this is a big change and it impacts how people think. The civil rights movement's another one. I wrote all these things down on the stuff from 11 years ago. You know, the civil rights movement has been going on in this country since people...

have been denied their civil rights. I mean, you could follow the dominoes all the way back hundreds of years if you want to, but in the 1950s, things really exploded. And by the 1960s, of course, this is the high watermark of Martin Luther King and all those kinds of things, or, you know, Malcolm X and some of the more radical groups, the Panthers,

Civil rights is an enormous concern. And remember, during this era, it's only in the 1960s that this stops. You still had Jim Crow and separate but equal going on. You know, you had you couldn't get a hotel unless it was a hotel for black people in some of the southern cities. You couldn't stay at the same waiting room. You couldn't use the same bathroom. You couldn't use the same drinking fountain. That's crazy. And you could see how anybody would demand that that stop.

And the civil rights marches and the movement was very powerful. And of course, you know, when you talk about revolutionary change, that was going to be revolutionary change, especially in the states that had preserved a very different sort of relationship between the races up until that time period. There was an interesting report.

called the Kennan Commission report that LBJ had commissioned after a bunch of the riots that had happened in 67, 66, 65, basically saying, you know, what's going on here? And the report said that the nation is, quote, moving towards two societies, one black, one white, separate and unequal, end quote. Now, the civil rights concerns are wrapped up

in, maybe we could call it a larger umbrella issue of a greater concern for human rights all the way around and the rights of people in countries, for example, that didn't often make the news in a lot of these societies, because this is, these are global trends, by the way, the United States is affected by things like, you know, the Vietnam war specifically, but they don't

you know, have a monopoly on that. I mean, in Britain, for example, or all over the world, TV is having its impact. The threat of nuclear war is having its impact. Human rights is having its impact. And a lot of this stuff was really exploding in power

because of the youth revolution of the time period, right? We have the famous baby boom generation that was, you know, in its 17s, 18s, 19s, 20s. I mean, this is the era where people go out and look at the world and realize it's not the way it was sold to them, and they see all the injustices around them. And when there's tons more of those people in that age range than there normally is, you can expect something, right? And the cultural zeitgeist starts to change.

I mean, go look at Beatles albums covers if you want to see a change. Or go look, in my family, you can just go look at old family photographs.

And everybody it changes so fast in 1965, the year I'm born, everybody sort of looks buttoned down, kind of gray. The clothes are black and it doesn't seem like a lot of color. Everybody's just shorter. And then within a couple of years, everybody's wearing like laughing day glow colors. The hairstyles have gotten crazy. I mean, it it's a it's a change that happens in like five to guess now, I think three years.

And it never reached some places, by the way. So, for example, you know, the hip families in L.A. and New York and a bunch of other places might be doing that. It might never make it to, you know, the farming community in the center of the country, not near any big cities. So that creates a divide right there. There's this giant cultural revolution, but not everybody's participating in it. And the people not participating in it don't necessarily look kindly on it because it rebels against a lot of things they hold dear.

Whether we're talking about religious beliefs or ideas on cultural things like guns and hunting and, you know, I mean, all the divides we see now really start in earnest during this era. Right. We're still fighting about a bunch of the 1968 divisions and it's never been resolved. But in 1968, I mean, that's a year that there were a significant number of Americans that thought it could be resolved by some sort of uprising or revolution.

Student movements were everywhere. Universities were getting taken over all the time. This is also the era, once again, you know, it doesn't look very unusual to us now, where feminism was exploding, gender issues and the sexuality rights issues, like, you know, homosexuals emerged from sort of the background during this period where they've just sort of been a closeted group in society. Remember, there were laws against some of this. And all of a sudden, you know, you have Stonewall and all that kind of stuff and things change.

The abortion issue becomes acute. That's been an issue ever since. The Vietnam War and the draft was a perpetual threat that kept it all going. This was sort of the nuclear reactor that powered the whole thing. This is why when Nixon ends the draft in 1973, he didn't do it as a favor to anybody. He thought it was going to be a great way to undercut all of the student issues

protests and the anti-Vietnam War protests because he cynically assumed and maybe had some was correct in some of his assumptions that if a lot of these people weren't actually threatened with having to go to war, they wouldn't get up off their rear ends and go protest it. And so that's why the draft was really ended. But before it was ended, it was a prime mover in getting people motivated to get their rear ends out there and protest the war because they didn't want to go to the war.

And a lot of people didn't. And it wasn't missed by anyone that a lot of the people that didn't were in the kinds of groups in society that normally don't have to, you know, do some of the terrible jobs. Right. I mean, college deferments. Well, that sort of benefits people who have money more than people who don't.

You could get a good doctor's report that you had some problem that made you ineligible. You might not have to go. It's interesting to look who served and who didn't. And I think it was the percentage of, for example, African-Americans who served were like twice the number in the general population. So there was this sense that this burden was unequally shared and that a lot of the people who were having to go into this war didn't have any way to vote against it.

And this is when the question of the voting age sort of ran smack dab into the Vietnam War. If you couldn't vote till you were 21, but you could be drafted into the war when you were 18, something didn't seem right, right? It's something like taxation without representation, but it's, you know, conscription without representation. So this tied into the voting age question.

The interesting thing to me when I was working on this sizzle reel was I was coming up with little thoughts. And we always do this in the history podcast, don't we? These little things that just occur to me that just are sort of interesting. And one of them was a line I came up with, almost like a marketing line. You could see it on a movie poster. They don't look dangerous now. And it was about your grandparents.

Right. You look at your grandparents today, they don't look particularly dangerous, but some of them were absolutely lethal. When you look at the various groups of people that were out there in a militant sort of sense, we mentioned all those bombings and bombing attempts and stuff that were going on. Well, who do you think did that?

you know, your grandparents, some of them anyway, some of them were conservatives. I mean, it's the hippie side of things and the revolutionary side of things is sort of always overplayed.

but that's always the case in society, isn't it? It's a small group sometimes of people on the activist edges of the political spectrum that get all the attention or make the most noise. That's why Richard Nixon had this idea of the silent majority that he always talked about. Maybe there's always a silent majority. But remember, when you have

like Hollywood on your side, and they were embracing in Hollywood, as they often did. They always embraced sort of progressive ideas. And when the progressive ideas in the late 1960s involved all those things we mentioned, well, then if you're in Lincoln, Nebraska, and you're watching, you know, what Hollywood's putting out in the movies and TV shows, it might look like a direct assault on your values. On the other hand, to the people who embrace those values, that just looks like justice, doesn't it?

So see, we get that divide again. When it starts in 68, in 68, one side exploded and the other side had a counter reaction to it. Look at the timeline and think about what this timeline would do to us today.

First of all, just like today, imagine that you had a lot of years leading up to this and things have been progressively getting crazier and crazier. And then 1968 starts. Now, the Smithsonian, there's a lot of timelines for 1968. The Smithsonian has a good one. And I'm going to basically follow theirs and leave out some. I'm leaving out some of it. That tells you this. I'm leaving out some. So it's worse than this.

There are assassinations that play into all this, and we'll get into those during the timelines. There is a, as we said earlier, a president who decides not to run. There is international stuff going on with major geopolitical foreign policy events that come at just the wrong time, coincidentally enough. And there's another element that's one of the variables of the time period. I have no idea how to quantify it either, but...

And I'm trying to figure out what the analogy in today would be if we were looking at the weird circus funhouse mirror, but drugs.

and the impact of drugs and what we would call today influencers and music, sort of a trifecta there on the society as a whole. I think it's probably safe to say that if we exempt the regular accepted drugs of the society in the 50s, let's just say, I mean, alcohol is a long standing accepted drug, tobacco, all those kinds of things. If we exempt those, I think it's fair to say that all of a sudden,

There were a lot of Americans using drugs that had never used drugs before, and they were different drugs than had ever been used before. Marijuana was an underground sort of thing that hipsters and actors and some other people would use, but the country as a whole wasn't so used to it until the 60s, and then it seemed like every young person was using it. Again, broad generalization because a lot of people weren't. Then there was something like LSD, which again, how to quantify it, but just look at the art of

Just look at the see, none of these things would have had the same impact if it hadn't bled through to popular culture, which then disseminated it across the country, which then influenced artists and beliefs. And I mean, it's a wonderful example looking at it in hindsight of how you could sort of inject things into the popular culture, if you'll pardon the pun, and watch its impact downstream.

Hard to quantify, though, what the drugs and the music and the connection of those things and then adding politics to the mix, how that impacted things. But a fun game to always play is the counterfactual game and ask yourself to view 1968 and imagine it without the impact of the drugs.

Now, you may still have it. You're certainly going to have the civil rights stuff, for example. Does it look different? I don't know. I certainly think what happened, for example, like the 1968 Democratic National Convention and those sorts of things would be different because in that case, you're not dealing with civil rights people. You're dealing with people that are deliberately embracing the whole 1960s ethos, which includes the drugs, the music and everything else.

That's why we had said at the end of the script that when it comes to the Democratic National Convention, Robert Kennedy won't be there, but Abbie Hoffman will. If I was trying to sort of find what looked like the best analogy for our modern situations in that circus funhouse mirror, what if I said the social media aspect maybe plays a similar load-bearing foundational role

element to the current situation that the drugs did in the 1960s in the same way you can't imagine 1968 without the drug aspect playing its important role can you imagine us being in the situation we're in right now without the impact of the social media and the connectivity and all that

I mean, we could start going down this rabbit hole and there's a lot of weird things. I mean, in the 1960s, it was governments of the world thinking that the communists were using all of the left wing revolutionaries and they are not so radical liberal brethren and

divide the country and undermine the values and all that kind of stuff. Now, the same thing is thought by governments, but they're worried about Russia instead of the Soviet Union undermining and dividing the country by appealing to right wing America. I mean, it's it's fascinating. Like I said, circus funhouse mirror kind of feeling.

But maybe if we're writing this story today, it's the social media and all that that forms one of the key building blocks that when future historians look back on the now from the future, they're going to say was an integral element to the whole, you know, witch's brew of the future problems that we may or may not have, depending on how things go.

So as I said, there's a timeline here you can follow, and there's a lot of 1968 timelines. This one I'm using is from Smithsonian Mag. We'll put a link to it in the show notes. But I'm just sort of skimming it, and I'm leaving a bunch of stuff out, which is crazy. As I said earlier, if you look at the timeline and you just imagine living through these events, bam, bam, bam, bam, while already sort of being primed by the previous few years for being maybe nervous or seeing things as, what did I say earlier, pregnant with disaster, right?

So start on January 30th. So the end of January, or just the first month of the year, the Tet Offensive happens. And as we had said earlier, I believe, the Tet Offensive was... The funny thing is, is from a military perspective, it's a disaster for the North. They lose so many people. They have... It took them years to recover. But war is not always about body counts, right? In fact, it often isn't. And by...

But sending a message almost directly to the American public specifically, but to the rest of the world, that how can the light be at the end of the tunnel when we can still do this? It was a capsized moment for U.S. public opinion. And so in that sense, in the Clausewitzian sense, right, war is policy by other means or politics by other means. You got to call the Tet Offensive a victory.

Even if from a, you know, tactical military standpoint or an operational military standpoint, I mean, it looks like a total loss. But all the people that were sacrificed in that loss ended up creating the conditions where eventually the North wins. I like this entry. On February 7th, according to the Smithsonian mag timeline, this is what they write. After a battle for the Vietnamese village of Ben Tre...

almost certainly a mispronunciation. An American officer tells Associated Press reporter Peter Arnett, quote, it became necessary to destroy the town in order to save it, end quote. The quotation, it says here, printed in newspapers nationwide, becomes a catchphrase for opponents of the Vietnam War. I remember it too. It became necessary to destroy the village in order to save it. It sort of exemplified some of the

Just strange aspects, the Dr. Strange-Lovian type aspects of the war sometimes. February 8th, which is the very next day, this entry, quote, At the South Carolina State Campus, police open fire on students protesting segregation at Orangeburg's only bowling alley. Three protesters die and 27 more are wounded.

Nine officers are tried and acquitted of charges related to the use of force. A protest coordinator is convicted of inciting to riot, serves seven months in prison, and is pardoned 25 years later. None of these things by themselves is enough, but every single one of them is another straw on the camel's back, right?

February 27th is when you have the famous Walter Cronkite, you know, saying on television that the war is mired in stalemate. The most trusted man in America, right? That was his nickname. That's pretty big if you're the administration. LBJ and the Democrats couldn't have been too happy about that. On February 29th, you get that Kerner Commission. I said Ken in the Kerner Commission report that said that the society is moving towards two separate and unequal societies, one black and one white.

A few days later, for a whole week, 15,000 Latino high school students in L.A. walk out of classes to protest and demand better education.

On March 5th, so all happening in the same week, the government of Czechoslovakia, this is what I meant when I said there's international stuff going on, which we can relate to today. Can't we? Don't we have a ton of international stuff going on now? You know, look at your headlines. I mean, Ukraine, the Middle East, I mean, China, it's all in this situation, the Soviet Union, which is.

after the Second World War occupied a bunch of sovereign nations. They became the Warsaw Pact, places like Poland, Czechoslovakia, East Germany, Romania, Bulgaria. Places like that were all incorporated into the Soviet Union.

And over time, some of them would attempt to either break away or loosen, you know, the hold of the communists on their society. And Czechoslovakia had something called the Prague Spring in 1968. And on March 5th, the entry says, the government of Czechoslovakia abolishes censorship, underscoring the expansion of freedom during the Prague Spring and angering its communist overlords in the Soviet Union. On March 16th,

Robert F. Kennedy entered the presidential race. This happened after only like three or four days after a primary, which showed that a peace candidate running against the sitting president, LBJ, Lyndon Johnson, was performing shockingly strong against him. And Robert F. Kennedy was basically running on a similar peace agenda, but was a much more high-profile candidate. He'd been the attorney general. He's part of that, you know, Camelot campaign.

thing that gives him a special shine and when he enters the race the um smithsonian mag timeline says that the mccarthy that he said that the mccarthy showing in new hampshire quote has proven how deep are the present divisions within our party and country it is now unmistakably clear that we can change these disastrous divisive policies only by changing the men who make them end quote

Something else happened on March 16th, but nobody's going to know about it in the general public for about a year and a half. November 1969, I think the news hit. On March 16th, when Robert F. Kennedy is entering the race, the My Lai Massacre happens in Vietnam. The My Lai Massacre is one of the worst atrocities in U.S. military history. There's just no getting around that.

American troops patrolling an area around numerous villages that they referred to as Pinkville because they thought them communist sympathizer villages. American forces went on what can probably best be described as some kind of a rampage and killed between 350 and 500 villagers, overwhelmingly women, children, infants, old men. We're not talking about killing fighting-age males.

It had all the hallmarks of the sorts of atrocities one normally expects American forces to be fighting against, right? Gang rapes. I mean, it was just, it was so off-brand is a good way to put it. Now, no army's clean, right? We all understand the myths of that. But the American Army's sort of brand is the good guys, right? The white hats. We're not the people that do all the horrible things, right?

So in a way, this is just another American institution that's getting tarnished and that's losing its luster the same way the presidency is losing its automatic trust that the American people previously had always sort of defaulted the government with. The military is the same sort of way. And when it starts acting like this, one gets the sense that

You know, that even the best and brightest, the young people overseas putting their life on the line, you know, to protect us in our way of life, even they've been broken by the times. And the kinds of stories you saw, by the way, played into this, that the U.S. Army was drug addicted, unmotivated, brutal. I mean, it's

And there was a sense, if you read the memoirs of people who were in the Colin Powell generation, right, the guys who were the junior officers in Vietnam, when they are dissecting what went wrong. And the general feeling is it took a decade to rebuild Vietnam.

the capacities and capabilities of the military that had been worn down like a pencil to a point where incidents were happening that just would have been unthinkable a few years before. I mean, the number of officers that were getting killed by their own troops is just was it's an unacceptable military number in the American military. It was a symptom of something that

And it was a symptom that the rest of the country was feeling too. In a citizen, in any army, but especially a citizen conscript army, what's going on back at home that's part of the cultural zeitgeist is going to make its way to the fighting forces and the tip of the spear eventually.

By 1968, a significant amount of the sharpness of the tip of the spear has whittled away. And with all the other stuff going on in Vietnam, and when the argument is to save the people from the communists, 350 to 500 villagers, it was absolutely awful. The American public, nobody will become...

knowledgeable of this for a while so it doesn't impact the 1968 level of tension but you better believe when it comes out in november 1969 that it will march 31st so like two weeks later lyndon johnson surprising almost everybody drops out of the presidential race we can relate to that right now can't we and by the way just like now um without a lot of time until the convention

Now, we're quite a bit shorter than that today, but at the time, it opened everything wide. But the end was, you know, the ultimate shocker when he said this. I do not believe that I should devote an hour or a day of my time to any personal partisan causes or to any duties other than the awesome duties of this office, the presidency of your country. Accordingly,

I shall not seek and I will not accept the nomination of my party for another term as your president. But let men everywhere know, however, that a strong and a confident and a vigilant America stands ready tonight to seek an honorable peace and stands ready tonight to defend an honored cause, whatever the price, whatever the burden, whatever the sacrifice.

that duty may require. Thank you for listening. Good night, and God bless all of you. The Smithsonian mag says that on April 3rd, which is, what, three days later, a thousand or so men returned their draft card to government offices all over the country. So this was happening routinely with people burning their draft cards. But if a thousand people on the same day returned their draft cards to government offices, that's a protest. But what do you do? I mean, you can jail some people, but at a certain point...

That's an interesting problem to have in a free society, isn't it? What's the critical mass number by which you can no longer punish people? On April 4th, which is the next day, Martin Luther King is assassinated in Memphis by a guy who, you know, if you say this, you're going to get some pushback because Martin Luther King's assassination is like others in the period where there's, it's a conspiracy type thing.

And whether or not James Earl Ray was really the assailant, all this stuff. I mean, if you're playing the Occam's razor thing, James Earl Ray, who was basically a white supremacist type thinker, killed MLK. But of course, you know, he says a guy named Raul was working with. I mean, so I don't know. But that's the that's the situation. And that's how it would have been seen at the time.

So if you're measuring an event like this from the standards of the people who are viewing it based on the information they would have had at the time period, as far as they knew, some white supremacist killed Martin Luther King with a rifle while he was on a balcony. The more than 100 cities that experienced riots over the next week saw almost 40 people killed, more than 2,600 injured, and 21,000 arrested, as I believe we said earlier.

And two days later, there's a 90-minute shootout between Black Panthers and the police in Oakland. So again, think about it. You're watching your TV news, and the TV news was TikTok, social media, word of mouth, satellite. It's everything we have today rolled into one in terms of its ability to influence.

On April 23rd, there's a famous student protest at Columbia University where they take over five buildings and briefly hold a dean hostage. They call for the university to cut its ties to military research. And when the police are finally called in, they bring in a thousand officers, arrest more than 700 people.

And the injuries total more than 130 students, four faculty, and 12 officers. Again, none of these things by themselves break the camel's back, but it's another straw.

The Smithsonian mag then has an entry that gives us a sense of this being a global phenomenon and not connected specifically to the U.S. at all. When they talk about the May 6 riots that break out in Paris between police and 5,000, more than 5,000 university students, and then sympathy strikes threatening the French economy break out within a week, the story here says. Another straw.

This is an interesting entry. On May 27th, the Supreme Court rules 7 to 1 that burning a draft card is not an act of free speech protected by the First Amendment. So there's a free speech limitation. How do you feel about that? That's an interesting question to ask.

On June 4th, I mean, think about how quickly all these things are happening. On June 4th, Robert F. Kennedy in Los Angeles celebrating a primary win is assassinated at the Ambassador Hotel. It's a famous scene. Again, another conspiracy story, whether you believe Sirhan Sirhan acted alone or was the shooter or not. It is amazing how many of these kinds of things we have during this time period. And these sorts of things have a way of filtering into the psyche of the population that

hurting and deepening that credibility gap you know we talked about earlier and look at the effect now after decades i mean the whole idea i mean nobody believes anything anymore everything's a conspiracy now and this is all this is the era where that starts to happen because the broad majority of people especially in the united states before this era um believe

Right. They didn't believe the conspiracy theories. They believe the official line and the people who didn't were very fringe and small numbers of people. And that begins to change when you have major people assassinated and conspiracy theories. And let's be honest, in a lot of these cases, you know, not wild, but but worth talking about, conspiracy theories begin to, you know, shatter your faith.

in the reality as told to you by, you know, those who are in power. According to the Smithsonian mag on July 23rd, in Cleveland, the Glenville shootout between police and black militants leaves three dead on each side plus one bystander. This leads, the timeline entry says, to riots rocking the city for five days.

This is an interesting entry and reminds us of the zeitgeist of the time and all these different inputs we were talking about that were sort of shattering the traditional norms of the culture at large. On July 25th, the Pope reaffirming the Roman Catholic Church's opposition to artificial contraception issues a sort of ruling, if you will. So no artificial contraception if you're a Catholic.

The pill comes around, the birth control pill during this time period, and is always cited as one of the revolutionary changes that creates this new society, right? This revolutionary new thing that in three years, as I said, if I look at the old family photographs, transforms my family from a bunch of people that look like they're in the 1950s to, you know, day-glow 1970s people almost. On August 20th, the Soviet Union invades Czechoslovakia.

stopping the Prague Spring and doing so

in a way that the rest of the world feels powerless to respond to because of the whole nuclear weapons issue. And the Soviet Union, forget the Czechoslovakia angle. If Czechoslovakia is allowed to get away with these liberalizing things, then all of the other nations that the Soviet Union sort of has under their thumb are going to be tempted to do it too. So everyone's watching. So this is a message. It's cracking down in Czechoslovakia, but also saying to everyone else, don't think about doing the same thing.

And the same thing had happened in Hungary in the 1950s. It would happen in Poland in the 1980s. The Czechoslovakia, the Prague Spring gets slammed down hard on August 20th, and that ratchets up global tensions, of course. And then on August 28th, you get the Democratic National Convention, where everyone knows a giant demonstration is planned.

And the mayor of Chicago has sort of made public statements that law and order is going to prevail because he's heard the rumors. He's ratcheted up the number of, you know, police and security that he's going to have. And and the demonstrators are going to be there, too. They're basically anti-war demonstrators. But a lot of different groups are attracted. I have never seen good numbers before.

for the size of the number of demonstrators but when you look at the size of the forces that the city and even the national government has arrayed against them in the streets of Chicago during the 68 convention and they had their hands full by the way you have to assume it's large

The interesting part about it from a historical perspective specifically is that this is a televised event. It is a globally televised event. A generation beforehand, it wouldn't have been like this. But as the chanting of the protesters would reveal to everybody during the entire event, they were saying the whole world is watching. And it was. And what they saw was

Well, there's nothing quite like it. It's something that was referred to by an investigator who looked into it afterwards as a police riot. But...

Reporters were involved bystanders were involved one of my favorite parts of the whole thing as an MC five fan is that they were supposed to be a bunch of musicians arriving to play this event before it started and only one band showed up the revolutionary band right that pushed for all these revolutionary things to the MC five and we lost.

the last two members of the MC5 early this year, 2024. One of them was Wayne Kramer. I was talking to what I assume was Wayne Kramer's wife for the longest time, trying to do a show with him. And HHA, by the way, about the history of that era and the music. They played, and when that ended, all hell kind of broke loose and the whole world was watching.

I have some stats here showing the size of the forces arrayed against the demonstrators. There were 12,000 Chicago police, 5,000 army troops, 6,000 National Guard troops,

And this is an interesting aside here. I read that 43 soldiers were court-martialed afterwards because they refused duty that day because they believed in the values of the people protesting. And what was going on outside the convention sort of made its way into the convention when people who were speaking at the microphone would make reference to, you know, what they call Gestapo tactics right outside the door.

Now, there's an interesting lesson in this, by the way, that I think runs through a lot of these kinds of movements and revolutionary eras where the very activities of those on the revolutionary change side of things create a backlash that gives them an end result that's the exact opposite of what they wanted.

Abby Hoffman had said, because of our actions in Chicago, Richard Nixon will be elected. And if I remember the context of the quote, he wasn't all that unhappy about it, but he might have lived to regret that one.

That is a problem, though, that extremists on either side often provoke a backlash from what Nixon called, as we said earlier, the silent majority, which sometimes their overriding concern is law and order and stability. And Richard Nixon ran on a law and order platform in 1968, and he won. And that was definitely the candidate that most of the people on the

you know, revolutionary side of the ledger, that was the candidate they least wanted. On October 2nd, again, to show that this was a global thing in Mexico City, police and troops fire on a student-led protest. The Smithsonian mag then deals with the interesting question of how many people died by saying, police and troops fire on a student-led protest, killing or wounding thousands. The precise number is still unknown.

On October 16th in the Olympics, Americans Tommy Smith and John Carlos received the gold and bronze medals in the 200 yard dash, raised their gloved fist to the national anthem to protest violence towards and poverty among African-Americans. The next day, the Smithsonian timeline says the International Olympic Committee strips their medals and sends them home.

On November 5th, Nixon wins the presidency, barely beating Hubert Humphrey. And the segregationist candidate, as the Smithsonian timeline points out, George Wallace, carried five southern states. This is in 1968, folks, carried five southern states.

That was back when the South was a solidly Democratic stronghold. The so-called Dixiecrats and the Northern Democrats and the Southern Democrats were not like each other at all. But they worked together to win elections and staff administrations and all that kind of stuff. But the South was moving away from the Democrats starting in the 60s. Nixon had his famous Southern strategy to pull away more of the states. And Reagan's campaign was very good at that, too, and turned the South basically Republican.

And in terms of the things that impact what we're talking about here, that's basically, that's the high watermark of that list. And you try to imagine living through that in real time after already being primed for this by the previous few years. And it's interesting to contemplate how well we would be able to adapt to that level of change and shattering number of events happening that quickly. You would feel like things were falling apart, wouldn't you?

One of the things that was a twist in that sizzle reel I was working on, because, you know, I always have to have those twists, sort of these weird ways of looking at it. I always compare it to sort of Twilight Zone type things. But one of the elements the TV show was going to have was recreations. And I didn't want to do recreations of historical events because I always think they look a little cheesy. But I didn't mind the idea of doing recreations of things that had never happened before.

And I thought, well, if you had today's 21st century homeland security tactics, laws, powers and all those kinds of things, right, the post 9-11 America in 1968, how would things have been different? And so we filmed a recreation scene of Abbie Hoffman in his, you know, trademark famous American flag shirt being waterboarded by the authorities.

I was told this did not go over well with some of the viewing audience who looked at the sizzle reel. But to me, it was the key piece because it was the part that made what was happening in 68 a relevant sort of thing to look at today and say, hmm, could we have gotten away with that level of dissent today? And then, of course, the next question is, should we? Right. I mean, what's a good reason to have a revolution, as we said? And isn't it a little like deciding, you

On the old game show, let's make a deal. What's behind door number two? We don't like what we have now, so we're going to open up the door and hope we get better. That's what I mean about a revolution sort of being a bit of a crapshoot. You don't know if you're getting an American revolution or a Bolshevik one in terms of the outcome. And even the Russian revolution, I mean, there were several different stages where different groups were in charge, and it might have looked like a liberal revolution for five minutes until it didn't.

I told you earlier I have some quotes here that I wrote down that when taken together you get this sort of picture of things I mean like when the bombing started that that's a crazy element in this I just don't know what we would even do today with with the level of bombings but um they asked a group of you know sort of television savvy radicals if they were behind a bombing that had recently happened and they had a great line they said we didn't do it but we dug it and

And that gives you a sense of the times, right? They're not just saying that. That's calculated to appeal to the people who believe as they do. It's an interesting time period in American history. Listen to these quotes. I already read the first one, but it's worth reading again. It's Martin Luther King when he said, we cannot stand two more summers like last summer without leading inevitably to a right-wing takeover and a fascist state.

How about this one? Alienation is when your country is at war and you want the other side to win. That was the cover of a 1969 issue of Ramparts magazine, which was a left-wing magazine. It said it was shown under a picture of an all-American Huck Finn-like six-year-old boy waving a Viet Cong flag. That was the adversary in the Vietnam War.

And how about this chant? Ho, ho, ho chi minh. The NLF is going to win. That's the North Vietnamese that our military was fighting. And that was a U.S. protester slogan.

Oh, this is so I wrote down this one. This is what Charles Manson had said in court. It's interesting if you go back now and you look at some of the underground newspapers and stuff that catered sort of to the radical crowd on the left in the 1960s and see that for a little while, Charles Manson was sort of not a terrible guy. Eventually, of course, everything changes. But there was a sort of an element of he's one of us, maybe. And he said in his trial, and I quoted it here,

Quote, I haven't got any guilt about anything because I've never been able to see any wrong. I've always said, do what your love tells you. And I do what my love tells me. Now it says three dots here, which means it's just giving you highlights. Is it my fault that your children do what you do? What about your children? You say there's just a few. There are many, many more coming in the same direction.

They're running in the streets and they're coming right at you. End quote. That's one of the great Charles Manson lines, isn't it? But that's a sense of maybe how a society might have felt when they're kind of scared of their own kids. What do we say, right? They may be your grandparents and they don't look dangerous now, but once upon a time, hairy and scary, right?

And I tend to believe that in whatever period you're talking about, when you're talking about an outsized amount of influence on the part of people at the extremes of the political spectrum, right, extreme left, extreme right, whatever it might be, I tend to believe that's a small amount of people and they tend to get an outsized amount of attention. Right. I think they know that, too, that more influence than their actual numbers might warrant is

But if you think, and I'm not so sure this isn't true, if you consider the percentage of people that are prone to radicalization to be a constant, let's say 3% of the people in normal times, because it might fluctuate in rough times, but if you say 3% of the people are prone to radicalization and you have more people than you've ever had in the history of the world, and they just happen to be between those ages, say 17 to 25 years old, where you know people are most prone to being radicalized,

extreme politically. Well, maybe it's the same percentage of radicals you've always had. There's just more of them, you know, in real terms. I don't know. But if you're in middle America and you hear radicals

somebody from the weather underground who had a public meeting and some of the quotes were published i mean what would you think about your children you know who are already growing their hair over the years and looking pretty funky and hanging out with weird people and dressing strange and listening to strange music and what's that smell i sometimes smell in their car um and then you hear stuff like this what would you think in his book days of rage author brian burrow wrote this

Quote, few gatherings illustrated the dark borderlands between the end of the 60s and the onset of the 70s more clearly than the one weathermen held in the days between Christmas 1969 and New Year's 1970. Billed as the National War Council or Wargasm, it was the pep rally from hell.

A five-day orgy of violent rhetoric intended to set the stage for the underground revolution, the leadership was now ready to begin. It was held in a tumble-down dance hall in the heart of a Flint, Michigan ghetto. On his arrival, Mark Rudd, who continued to have doubts about their plans, fingered a hole in the plywood front door, the result of a shotgun slug that had killed a patron just the night before and thought, how appropriate.

The Detroit Collective, Burrow writes, had handled the decorations, hanging large psychedelic portraits of Castro, Che Guevara, Ho Chi Minh, Mao, Malcolm X, and Eldridge Cleaver. One wall was lined with posters of the fallen Fred Hampton. Above the stage, they had hung their centerpiece, a six-foot cardboard machine gun."

One attendee said, We're against everything that's good and decent in hunky America, and also that we will burn and loot and destroy. We are the incubation of your mother's nightmare.

Another laughed at the recent Manson murders, which I believe were on trial at the time, talking about how they stuck a fork in one of the victims and how wild that was. And Burroughs says for the rest of the meeting, attendees were doing sort of a sideways peace sign symbolizing the fork, like sticking it to the man, literally.

But let's understand something. The outsized amount of attention these people get play their role in dividing America and making the generations more suspicious of each other. But in real terms, the number of people who probably ascribe to such extreme beliefs is small. This may be something that's true in most times. But this is the bleeding edge. And the bleeding edge of the other side was just as, you know, off the map.

Here's a quote. Nothing is more American than revolution. That's Jerry Rubin, the famous Yippee members line. And then there's President Eisenhower, right? The general who was so important in the Second World War, who was president for two terms in the 1950s, who a lot of the more traditional elements of America saw as a person who preserved the Norman Rockwell tradition.

you know side of america that's gotten so screwed up by the 1960s and he said the anti-war protesters were guilty of rebellion and were giving aid and comfort to the enemy so these are battle lines right governments around the world thought this is communist inspired

You hear, I mean, from all the U.S. presidents to leaders of France and all these other countries saying that this is orchestrated stuff, especially when you see these riots appear all at once and that something's behind them. So you have this sense of society being under siege by the very enemy that they've been worried about for decades and decades, communism, and that communism is undermining their youth, their values, and sending them out in the streets to protest the very people who are trying to keep the country from going communist.

There's a section here on my notes that says random interesting notes. And there's two in there. The first one is the Black Panthers were calling for exempting blacks from military service. They were 11% of the population, but made up 23% of the troops fighting in Vietnam in an army of draftees, I wrote, freeing all blacks from prison and demanding that all future trials of blacks be held with all black juries.

Well, I don't know how I feel about the parading with rifles in the streets part, but some of that other stuff is rather interesting if we think about the idea of juries of our peers and how that would go. I...

These are fascinating things, though, that you hear something like that today. And if you did a poll on it and took out the Black Panthers part, which might influence, you know, what people would say, I wonder what sort of reaction you'd get.

Here's another one of the random interesting notes I made. At least seven Americans lit themselves on fire, self-immolation, as part of protesting the war in Vietnam and an attempt to garner attention for their cause. Many of them did so, I wrote, because they had religious beliefs that were anti-war, Quakers, Catholics, etc. And then I ended with almost all of them died.

And then there's the part I entitled the deep question. So if you ever hear our open where the late, great, wonderful Bill Barrett, you know, sort of lists what the show is about, the imaging of the show is, you know, the deep thoughts, the deep questions, those kinds of things are all part of it. The Twilight Zone twists are all part of it. So my first deep question was how much destabilization should a free society be willing to put up with?

What is the limit before a government is justified spying on things like their ideological dissidents? When is it okay to say the government should be spying on people like that? Then I wrote, what if the destabilizers aren't some foreign element, but a significant percentage of your own young people exhibiting radically different views from their elders?

So when we talk about destabilization in a free society, what if the destabilization is generational? Got another deep question here. I wrote, what if you thought the policies of your country were wrong or immoral? What would you be willing to do to change the situation? What if you felt that the traditional avenues of change built into the system offered no way to do this anymore?

what would you be willing to do? Protest? Break the law? Self-immolation? Violence? Is that ever justified? If so, when? Another question I'd written down in my notes was this one. I wrote, what if an extremist bombed a building to combat a situation that you yourself oppose? Right? This idea that, um,

you know, what they're bombing is something you feel very strongly about too, right? You're on the same side as the person that took it farther than you would likely take it, right? That gets back to that quote we said, we didn't do it, but we dug it. That's a good question to ask in the future. If somebody does something extreme that you would never do, but you're on the same side of them ideologically, how do you handle that? Here's another deep questions on here, which I've alluded to already a little bit, but it's more specific.

How different would our post-911, 21st century world handle the circumstances of those in the late 1960s, early 1970s? Would Black Panther or Weather Underground members be sent to Guantanamo? Would we dare waterboard or use post-911 enhanced interrogation techniques on them for info on future violence the groups may have in the planning stages, right? If you know you've planted a bomb somewhere, do we get to waterboard you to find out?

in the late 1960s, they might have been taken downstairs to a private level of the police station and beaten with a phone book till the information came out, but nobody would have asserted it was legal. In the post 9-11 world, they may have a few laws on their side if they want to do the functional equivalent. I wrote this, like I said, 11 years ago, 10 years ago. Here's another question, quote, what if the views of protesters in the future

are the equivalent of giving aid and comfort to our enemies. I said maybe show a video of 1960s protesters waving a North Vietnamese flag at a U.S. anti-war demonstration and morph it into an Al-Qaeda one in the green screen video behind me. So a little note to the producers. Again, we can see the Funhouse Mirror reflection a little bit, can we not?

I made a point here in the notes that in dictatorial systems, you know, like the Soviet Union crushing movements like this is much easier the way the Soviets did at the Prague Spring crushing, um,

It's not so easy to do in a free society and get away with it, right? If you're too harsh, you're going to have the backlash against you that Abby Hoffman was suggesting was going to happen to the protesters when they got Richard Nixon, when they're protesting for a more leftist society. If the police go too crazy in Chicago, a bunch of people who otherwise would support them flip to the other side. So you're getting a lot of that with this extremism on both sides, prompting a counter reaction, which you could easily get again.

That's more of the, you know, what does history teach? History teaches that for every action, there's an equal and opposite reaction, right? The Newtonian law. Here's another one of the deep questions I wrote. It's easy to denounce extremism when the causes are so obviously negative, at least in most of our minds. The water is muddy, though, when the reasons behind them seem righteous to some.

Are riots justified if they were a reaction to racism? Is domestic terrorism justified if it's done to end an immoral war that's hurting more people than the anti-war motivated terrorist acts? Is violence the lesser of two evils if it's done to promote something like saving the planet from climate change or nuclear war? When do the ends justify the means or do they ever?

This is the way that it ended, my little suggestion of a script here. And I think it's a good way to end this show too. Quoting myself for potentially the last time ever, quote, if you think this is all simply the past, you haven't been paying attention.

the past can often be prologue as the saying goes when conditions are right when the ingredients are available when the stars align and they periodically do you can have all the elements in place for the creation of a perfect revolutionary storm

Even in our recent past, we in the U.S. have seen the rise of groups like the Tea Party, Occupy, and Anonymous, challenging a system that seems less than responsive to the demands and concerns of the protesters. These could easily be the early sparks leading to future flames being kindled. John F. Kennedy famously said, "'Those who make peaceful revolution impossible will make violent revolution inevitable.'"

Perhaps if we heed history's example of how far these things can go, we may avoid having to repeat the same sorts of outcomes. End quote. As I said, the times seem pregnant with disaster. Thinking about what disaster means and putting ourselves in the position of ourselves after whatever is going to happen is all over is

is a better way to look at whether or not it should happen in the first place than anything else I can think of. And since we don't know what's going to happen in the future, looking back at the past and seeing what has happened might give us, well, a little bit more insight into the road ahead. Remember what I said earlier. There's two roads, right? One road is doing what we've always done before,

And the other road is not doing what we've always done before. As I said earlier, either way it goes is fascinating from a historical entertainment point of view. But as is often the case when history is being made, it's better to read about it than to live through it sometimes. So we will all keep our fingers crossed. Stay safe.

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