This page is presented in calendar order first, because many of the
listings are about events that are important in themselves, and not
specifically about any individual who was involved; however there were also
individuals involved, and there are many individuals who are not linked to any specific event, and so there is a second listing on a second page for those individuals (click here), several of whom recur more than once in the calendar-list.
Bullying and Coercion come in many forms, from corporate bosses to shut-up-and-listen classroom teachers, from religious ideologues to those of a more political persuasion; all of them stem from a human desire to have power over other people, and to control them, and so it makes no difference whether it is slavery in chains, or slavery on Zero Hours contracts, or slavery through patriarchal marriage laws; or whether the control is focused on the mind first or on the body. The bullies in whatever form control the world, and to them there are only three available responses:
a) active complicity: you join the mafia as a civilian, doing the godfather's dirty work for him because you want to be a bully yourself, but don't have fists as firm as his. When this occurs between countries it is generally known as a "special relationship"
b) passive complicity: usually heard in daily life as "sorry, sir, but those are the rules; I'm just doing my job"; Auschwitz Syndrome in my lexicon
c) victimhood collaboration: we need some Jews to run this ghetto for us and to draw up the lists for deportation to the camps; any volunteers?
Much more on this on Feb 6
And yes, of course there is a fourth response available; only, very, very few people ever take it up. In its embryonic form it is called “saying no”; at the next level merely singing or writing or protesting about it; but it could very well extend all the way to active, even armed, resistance.
Having said which, resistance does not, implicitly, require taking up the gun or the grenade; a whistleblower or a protester is just as much a resistance fighter as someone who refuses to give up their seat on a bus; and so is he who sits in jail for thirty+ years, getting out coded messages through a complicit security guard, waiting for the regime to fall and himself ready to take up the Presidency; or indeed the man who spends his days in the public library, creating a blog with the theme "Responses to Bullying and Coercion".
Then maybe I should rename this as "The Fighting-Back List", or "The Refusal To
Surrender List", as my literary agent has told me I must do or he will not feel able to take this in book-form to a publisher (I sacked the agent; I set up my own publishing imprint; the name stays).
And of course there are also those who deal with the aftermath by under-taking the clean-up, whether by burying the dead (that wouldn't require the hyphen in undertaking) or through some sort of Truth & Reconciliation process, or by rebuilding from the ruins; and another for those who simply write about their experience in vain hope that others will read it and try to ensure its non-repetition... several of each of these are included in both of the lists, and I shall leave my reader, if I have one, to draw the category-distinctions for her or himself.
Though there is, of course, that fifth category of humans, the ones who cause the problems in the
first place, the ones who do the bullying and the coercing; they can all be found in a special prison in the vault of this blog,
known as the GER page
*
But I am interested in the ones who fought back, in all their many, many different ways, and to whatever degree of success or failure. This is what you will find on the blog,
in calendar order (and yes, I know you could probably make the case for several other blog-entries being included here, but these are the ones I have chosen):
Jan 1:
1808: The importing of slaves to America was made illegal; well, it was a
start; apparently those who came from now on were to be regarded as “migrant
workers”, and were simply taking up “job opportunities” on “zero hours
contracts” in “the Land of the Free”
Jan 11:
1961: Hannah Arendt and the Eichmann
trial: the clean-up, but also an attempt to prevent repetition by understanding the complexities of what happened (sadly she got it very, very wrong)
Jan 14:
Charlie Hebdo: banned, revived, re-banned, re-revived
Jan 16:
1938: Benny Goodman
walked out of Carnegie Hall because black musicians were not allowed to perform
there and his band included several (apparently they didn’t mind Jews)
Jan 20:
1265: Britain's House of Commons met for the first time (with a link to June 15 for Magna Carta, which is regarded as
a great achievement but is in fact no different from what Joseph did in the
latter chapters of the Book of Genesis, and the Romanovs for four centuries in
Russia: the enshrinement of vassaldom in a document that claimed to proclaim freedom, but only did so in fact for the bosses)
Jan 26: Les Femmes de la Résistance - you'll find them all on the Individuals list
Jan 31:
1865: the official abolition of slavery in the USA; links to Aug 1, March 1,
June 23; slavery is also a theme on Jan 1 and Feb 9;
and see Frederick
Douglass on Feb 14 and Aug 11, William Wilberforce
(albeit fictitiously) on Jan 8 and Aug 24, John Brown on Dec
2). you will also find a link back to Jan 31
on March 6 for “affirmative action”, which simply demonstrates that nothing meaningful had happened since the official abolition... and I can confirm that, living in Baltimore fifty years after “affirmative action”, it still hadn't.
Feb 6:
2018: Polish Death Camps (Cock Robin); this is not simply about the failure to
respond to slavery and genocide; this is about active complicity, and then,
even worse, the refusal to accept responsibility afterwards
Feb 11: 1990: Nelson
Mandela freed, and in the weeks before, secretly, he and De
Klerk had laid out the plans for the new South Africa, so the event, the precise moment, matters historically just as much as, perhaps even more than, the individuals involved
Feb 16:
1949: Chaim Weizman
inaugurated as Israel’s 1st President: a nation’s response to two thousand
years of expulsions even from the places of exile, plus ghettoisation, pogroms,
and finally holocaust; the same comment applies to Weizman, and to 1st Prime Minister David ben
Gurion, as to the freeing of Mandela in the paragraph above
Feb 23:
2004: Katharine Gün;
whistle-blowers; people fighting back against intellectual slavery and the lies
of the people in power; her statement in court especially, when accused of
disloyalty, insisting that her responsibility was to the people in her country,
not to those who ran it corruptly and then told lies about their actions
Feb 26: "The
Communist Manifesto" published in 1848
March 1: 1870: Pennsylvania became the first [American] state to actually abolish
slavery, though whether it has yet been properly implemented is something you
will have to ask the Black and First Nation communities (see my note at Jan 31, above)
March 6: My “Human Lives Matter” poster for 1961:
Affirmative Action by JFK, and LBJ’s follow up in 1965 (and again, see my note at Jan 31, above)
March 9: The end of the McCarthy era began right here, and all it took was one man on one TV show: Ed Murrow. See it now at this wesbite
March 12: Esther standing
up to Haman: though it probably wasn't a historic event at all, but simply an attempt by the Jews in Persian exile to absorb the Persian rites of Ishtar, converting Ishtar into Esther, Marduk into Mordechai, and the Chaman, the ikon of the sun-god, into the wicked Prime Minister who is mispronounced in English as Haman, and by doing so to establish a tale of response to bullying and coercion that could become embedded in the national psyche; it worked. The three links are all to my work on this in TheBibleNet, but also see my note on Phoenician Ba'al here, and Joshua 14:2
March 18: The Paris Commune of 1871: yes, overthrow the existing system, but first you have to have a better one to set up in its place; so many revolutions end up as anarchies or military take-overs; this one failed, because the bullies beat it up (see May 28), but at least it offered a worthwhile alternative
March 19: 1848: The first edition of "La Voix des Femmes" ("The
Women's Voice"); several of its key-names can be found on the Individuals
page
also: 1944: Michael Tippett: "A Child Of Our Time" given its first performance. Herschel Grynspan’s tale told, and a link to “The Night of the Broken Glass” on Nov 9
March 24 [but not yet written so not yet Indexed/Mmed or on the Individuals list]: Southern African Liberation Day,
and also the day on which the "Party of the African Federation (PFA) was
established in West Africa (then ruled by the French), on March 24, 1959, by
Léopold Sédar Senghor, a renowned poet and a politician"(click here):
March 31: 1990: Poll Tax riots in England (links to June 15 and Oct 21)
April 12: [not yet written, but I will be adding a piece on Ferdinand
Lassalle: today was his Berlin speech that became known as the
Workers’ Programme, and he will also appear on Oct 22 for the founding of the Socialist Party [plus a link to my poem about him, “A Letter”, in "Welcome To My World", and he will need to be added to the page of the political ideologues]
April 19: 1943: Warsaw Ghetto uprising, and see Jacub Praszkier and Rosa Mastbaum, with
the entire command group, on the Individuals page
April 24: The Easter Uprising in Éireland
April 28: Mutiny on the Bounty, 1879: local brutality on the small scale
is no different for the victims than national or international brutality on the
grand scale. Ask the kids in the school playground
May 2:
1946: Alcatraz prison revolt: same comment as the last para
May 3:
1845: The first black lawyer in the USA to be admitted to the bar - Macon
Bolling Allen - passed his final exams: as with Weizman earlier, the individual matters, but it could have been anyone and just happened to be this one; what matters more is that the event took place
May 7: 2000: Frank Foley
honoured; and this is one is a little different, because a memorial of this kind is about teaching future generations, and that is why I am so opposed to tearing down the statues. "Who was Frank Foley grandpa?" will get a hero's tale and an inspiration for the listener's own behaviour; "who was Edward Colston grandpa?" will get a lesson in what not to let happen again (click here); and future generations need both
and
on the same date, but back in 1429, the siege of Orléans broken by Joan of Arc, another Queen Esther, and probably the psychologically embedded reason why there were so many women at the forefront of the 1789 French revolution, and of the World War Two resistance movement
May 8: 1943: Yad Mordechai
(Mordechai Anielewicz): the Warsaw Ghetto uprising inspiring the refusal to surrender to an invading army out of Egypt: symbolism, like Esther and Joan of Arc, and indeed Frank Foley and so many others on these lists: statues of the mind
May 11: 1960: Eichmann's kidnap. Peter
Z. Malkin: make them pay, even if it takes a decade and more, for their
crimes against humanity; even if it takes centuries.
May 14:
1948: Israel born - the perfect response to two thousand years of Christian
anti-Semitism, and too bloody bad if the Jew-hating Moslems don’t like it
May 24:
1917: Russian peasants revolted
June 1:
1958: Charles André Joseph Marie de Gaulle
elected Premier of France, but the significance for this page lies in his leadership of the battle to free France from the Nazis, for which see Jean Pierre Moulin on Jan 26 for the Alliance Francaise building in Dorset Square (its website here)
June 4: Tianenmen Square - a failed
protest, but a protest nonetheless
June 7:
1893: Gandhi’s “Rosa Parks” moment
June 10: 1916: The Great Arab Revolt began
June 12: 1963: Medgar Wiley Evers,
civil rights leader, assassinated by a bullet from the back of a bush; and again the event not the individual, because the impact of the event on others transformed America
June 15: 1381: Peasants Revolt and 1990 Trafalgar Square riots
(see also March
31); both events triggered by the same political stupidity, the imposition of a Poll Tax on ordinary folk
June 16: 1976: Soweto uprising
also 1917:
first Congress of Soviets convened in Russia. and you are wondering why all these
mentions of the Red Revolution are on this list, given how vile the CCCP
became. But the Czarist regime was even worse, and the vast majority of the
people found their lives radically improved by the revolution, and Trotsky, and Lenin,
and Kerensky, all dreramed of
creating a fair and harmonious and free society: they simply failed to achieve
that, and then came Stalin. So it belongs here, until about 1923, when it gets removed to the GER list. One of the saddest lessons of
history - and equally true of the equivalent revolution in England, in the
1640s, and the French that led to Robespierre and then Napoléon, and the Maoist revolution in China in the 1940s... And look what
happened to South Africa after Mandela
died…
June 23: 1772: Slavery abolished in England (we now out-source
it back to the former colonies, or simply call them "migrant workers")
June 28: 1914:
Archduke Ferdinand
assassinated by Gavrilo Princip: yet again the event, not the individuals
also 1966:
First black US cabinet member sworn in (Robert Clifton Weaver); this
goes with Macon Bolling Allen, the first black lawyer, on May 3, and should go with something on Uncle Tom Obama but I haven't written that yet
also 1969:
Stonewall Inn riots started in New York
and still one more: 1971
June 29: 1870: two letters to George Sand from Gustave Flaubert
July 3: Raid on Entebbe; if you allow the
terrorists to get away with it, they will know you are weak, and strike again.
Ask Hamas!
July 6:
1923: USSR formed
July 13: 1985: "Live Aid" Concerts. Like George Harrison’s “Bangladesh Concert” a decade earlier (see Aug 1 below), this was a response to
extreme hunger and poverty in the Third World, but it was a hunger and poverty
caused entirely by the imperialistic greed of the very countries where those
concerts took place. Charity as a form of protest!
July 14: 1789: storming of the Bastille: huge numbers of key players on the Individuals list
July 16: 1918: execution of the Tsar
July 23: "Blue-Stocking Day", at least on this blog
Aug 1: 1838: Slavery abolished in Jamaica and 1971: George Harrison's Concert for Bangladesh
Aug 4: 1912: Raoul Wallenberg, Swedish architect; others who did much as he did elsewhere on the blog; Frank Foley especially, and Madame Tallien (see July 28), but the small-scalers too like Hans von Dohnányi; all of them can be found on the Individuals list, but I am grouping them here because I want to create an opportunity to honour my great uncle Max Goldman, who spent fifteen years doing what he could to get one here and two there of his family out of Poland, maybe forty of them in total, before the Holocaust ate up the rest
Aug 11:
1841: Frederick Douglass, runaway
slave, first spoke in public: he is on the Individuals page, but the impact of what he said, and went on saying for many, many years, needs to be on this list
Aug 13: 1789: the first edition of
"Journal d'État et du Citoyen"
Aug 21 and Aug 23: 1831: Nat Turner led an uprising of blacks - but see Oct 2 and Nov 11, below
Aug 28:
1963: Martin Luther King led a civil rights rally in Washington DC. Dylan sang his “Medgar
Evans” song at the rally, but coincidentally this is the date
of the lynching of Emmett Till, which
also prompted him to song
Aug 29: 1897: Opening of the First
Zionist Congress, in Basle - Theodor Herzl,
but elsewhere there are pieces on both Benjamin
Disraeli and George Eliot, drawing the same conclusion
about “the Jewish problem” years before Dreyfus inspired Herzl:
“Tancred” the former (read it here), “Daniel Deronda” the latter (read it here)
Aug 30:
1800: rebellion of Gabriel’s army in
Virginia
Aug 31:
1980: Solidarność (Solidarity) founded in Poland
Sept 11: World Trade Centre bombing by
al-Qaida - oh yes, that too counts among the responses to bullying
Sept 22: 1862: Abraham Lincoln
issued the Emancipation Proclamation: read it here and see Nov 19
Sept 30: 1946: verdicts of the Nuremberg trials announced
Oct 6:
1973: Yom Kippur war: as with the 6-Day and the 2024 Gaza war, when another
party, especially one vastly more powerful than you, sets out to destroy you,
there are only two options: yield or resist
Oct 7:
1783: Freedom granted to slaves who fought during the Revolutionary War
Oct 9:
1975: Andrei Sakharov
won the Nobel Peace Prize
Oct 13:
1635: Roger Williams banned in Boston
for the crime of preaching religious tolerance
Oct 15:
1965: first Vietnam draft card burned; [his name was David Miller; what happened to him is here]
Oct 18: 1945:
German war crimes tribunal convened in Berlin, convened jointly by Stalin, who had committed about twenty-five million war crimes of his own, and still was; by the British and other former colonial powers, with their four hundred year histories of slavery, continental anschluss, civilisational destruction; and by Uncle Sam, who had dropped his atom bomb on Hiroshima on Aug 6: we need to see all these historical events in their broader, their fuller perspective
Oct 21: 1945: Madame Eugénie Tell Éboué, became the first
woman of African descent to be elected to the French National Assembly in
Paris; as with Macon Bolling Allen and Chaim Weizman, the name is less important than the fact that it happened, though you will find all three on the Individuals list
also: 1967: Vietnam protestors stormed the Pentagon
Oct 23:
1958: Pasternak’s Nobel Prize; (what else is "Dr Zhivago" but an act of protest against the Robespierrisation of the Kerensky Revolution? and the Soviet government’s response to his Nobel Prize confirms it?)
Nov 7:
1944: Hannah Szenes executed, on the Individuals list for being a role-model of someone prepared
to put their life on the line for a cause they believe in, in her case the future of two nations, the Jewish and the Hungarian; but on this list too because, at least in modern Israel, she has become another Esther, another psychological symbol, another statue of the mind
Nov 10: Tearing down the Berlin Wall
Nov 12: more Blue-Stockings
Nov 17:
1989: Czechoslovak "Velvet Revolution"
Nov 19:
1863: "Gettysburg Address" delivered by Abraham
Lincoln (read it here)
Nov 28: the page of the Dissenters in
Bunhill Fields (and Friedrich Engels,
though he was in the rather more bourgeois Primrose Hill)
Dec 1: 1955: the Rosa Parks incident, but don't forget Claudette
Colvin
December 2: 1859: John Brown
hanged; see his listing on the Individuals page for my comments on this
Dec 5: The Montgomery bus boycott: first
Claudette Colvin, then Rosa Parks, then... enough is enough. It
worked too!
Dec 7: Madame Butterfly's revenge (goes
with Sept 11)
Dec 9: Launch of "La Fronde" by
Marguerite Durand
Dec 11:
1983: Greenham Common protests
Dec 22: The overthrow of Ceausescu; I haven't included all the
revolutions, because a lot of them were led by people just as bad as those they
overthrew, or even worse; but on this occasion...
Dec 29: 1989: Václav Havel became president of Czechoslovakia and, separately but on the same blog-page, the Czech Republic: first liberate your country from the conqueror-oppressor, then re-establish the borders so that each of the native-nations has its full liberty: someone should explain that to the leadership of Greater England
And
where do I place this on the calendar, given that the precise days are not
known? From the Qin page of The China Timeline:
209 BCE: July: Dazexiang Uprising: Military
officers Chen Sheng and Wu Guang began a rebellion for fear of being executed
after failing to arrive at their posts...
December:
Dazexiang Uprising: Chen Sheng and Wu Guang were assassinated by their own
men...
I have to confess that I do rather like that
July-December couplet, and shall consider placing the two men on my GER page; but the anonymous “perpetrators” are
definitely added with honour and pride to this list of those who stood up to such unconscionable bullying
*
and now click here to read about the Individuals listed on this page
