1968-2018: 50 Years On Time to Change the Paradigm

In 2018 There will be many stories marking the 50th anniversary of events from 1968.
1968 year of defeat, assassination, riots and treason in America.
There were near revolutions in France and Czechoslovakia. An early demonstration of the violence which would consume much of Latin America over the next quarter century in Mexico City.
We still live with the cosmic echo of those events.
It is good to remember 1968 via news media but what lessons people who didn’t live through these cataclysms will learn. In this FRDH podcast, Michael Goldfarb looks back at one of the most dramatic years since the end of World War 2. He describes living through a paradigm shift and asks if it’s time to find a new one. The paradigm has shifted on the economy, and, God knows, on standards of mainstream political leadership in the Anglo-American world.
But has the paradigm shifted on modes of political activism? Are people to tied up with the past?

In 2018 There will be many stories marking the 50th anniversary of events from 1968.
1968 year of defeat, assassination, riots and treason in America.
There were near revolutions in France and Czechoslovakia. An early demonstration of the violence which would consume much of Latin America over the next quarter century in Mexico City.
We still live with the cosmic echo of those events.
It is good to remember 1968 via news media but what lessons people who didn’t live through these cataclysms will learn. In this FRDH podcast, Michael Goldfarb looks back at one of the most dramatic years since the end of World War 2. He describes living through a paradigm shift and asks if it’s time to find a new one. The paradigm has shifted on the economy, and, God knows, on standards of mainstream political leadership in the Anglo-American world.
But has the paradigm shifted on modes of political activism? Are people to tied up with the past?

Bosnia, Mladic: the Price of Justice

The fact that we are in a new historical epoch was underscored recently in the response to the news that Robert Mugabe and Ratko Mladic, two men who ruined their countries and caused the deaths of thousands, got their comeuppance. 20 years ago this would have been enormous, front page a-segment news. it would have been the topic of gleeful conversation among the well-informed and politically aware. But In this era of Trump and harassment and Brexit, hardly a ripple. It’s ancient history.

The Bosnian War, was a fascist temper tantrum that destroyed one of the most beautiful countries in Europe. FRDH podcast host Michael Goldfarb, covered that conflict and returned to Sarajevo on the fifth anniversary of the Dayton Agreement to make a radio documentary on how the country was recovering. In this FRDH podcast he uses archive tape from that documentary to illustrate the difficulty of bringing justice to the families of the dead. Mladic’s conviction 22 years after ordering the genocide at Srebrenica is not quite justice in full measure.

There is no place of greater safety for civilians and soldiers wounded in today’s wars. In 2016 alone there was nearly one attack every day on a hospital in a conflict zone.
The most infamous attack came in 2015, when the United States bombed an MSF hospital in Kunduz, Afghanistan.
Why? Are we seeing the end of the rules that governed warfare and provision of safe spaces for those caught in the crossfire? The origins of the Red Cross and humanitarian law go back to the middle of the 19th Century, to the battle of Solferino in 1859. The French Army under Napoleon III faced off against the Austrian Army led by Emperor Franz Joseph 1st. The politics behind the battle related to Italian independence but the battle is famous for much more.

300,000 men met on the field of battle near Solferino a small town between Milan and Verona. After nine hours of combat nearly five thousand were dead and more than 22,000 were wounded, many lying where they fell receiving no medical treatment.

A Swiss observer of the carnage, Henri Dunant, organized local people to bring some kind of relief to the stricken soldiers. Dunant, a man of private wealth, self-published a book about his experiences, it was the first step in the lobbying that would create the Red Cross in 1863 and the First Geneva Convention or the Amelioration of the Condition of the Wounded in Armies in the Field, the following year.

War today is different. Emperors no longer command armies into battle in great open spaces. Conflict is everywhere and involves everyone unlucky enough to be nearby.
In WW1 for every 10 soldiers killed 1 civilian died. Today that is reversed. For every soldier killed 10 civilians die.

Bolshevik Revolution 100th Anniversary Thoughts

The Bolshevik Revolution is to political change, what nuclear weapons are to warfare: the ultimate deterrent.
The question on this 100th anniversary of the Bolshevik Revolution is what happens to a society when you take violent overthrow of the government by the governed as a last resort out of the equation. How does it affect a society’s ability to respond to the inevitable changes wrought by the passage of time?
Economic, political, social pressure’s build up as decades pass. These pressures weaken and deform the political system, certainly it deforms the politicians who work in that system. What happens then?
To paraphrase Langston Hughes, do Generations of dreams deferred, dry up like raisins in the Sun, or fester like sores … or do they explode?
Is it even possible to hold off the explosion?
The overwhelming violence in which the Soviet Union was born and its ultimate failure, has obscured our ability to think about revolution clearly.
It is wrong to judge revolutions by whether they succeed or fail. Virtually all revolutions fail. Either they fail literally and are reversed by forces of reaction or they fail metaphorically by compromising their lofty goals. The fairest way to assess the impact of a revolution is by the fact that it happened at all. Revolutions represent tectonic shifts in society, terrible rupturings that create decisive breaks with the past.
Michael Goldfarb asks Does the Bolshevik Revolution mean there will never be another revolution in a major country like the US?

The Bolshevik Revolution is to political change, what nuclear weapons are to warfare: the ultimate deterrent.
The question on this 100th anniversary of the Bolshevik Revolution is what happens to a society when you take violent overthrow of the government by the governed as a last resort out of the equation. How does it affect a society’s ability to respond to the inevitable changes wrought by the passage of time?
Economic, political, social pressure’s build up as decades pass. These pressures weaken and deform the political system, certainly it deforms the politicians who work in that system. What happens then?
To paraphrase Langston Hughes, do Generations of dreams deferred, dry up like raisins in the Sun, or fester like sores … or do they explode?
Is it even possible to hold off the explosion?
The overwhelming violence in which the Soviet Union was born and its ultimate failure, has obscured our ability to think about revolution clearly.
It is wrong to judge revolutions by whether they succeed or fail. Virtually all revolutions fail. Either they fail literally and are reversed by forces of reaction or they fail metaphorically by compromising their lofty goals. The fairest way to assess the impact of a revolution is by the fact that it happened at all. Revolutions represent tectonic shifts in society, terrible rupturings that create decisive breaks with the past.
Michael Goldfarb asks Does the Bolshevik Revolution mean there will never be another revolution in a major country like the US?

How Media Obscures Our Understanding of History

Media obscures history. Not intentionally, but the effect of looking at images without a deeper understanding of the context in which the images were created will keep the viewer from knowledge of an historical event. In this FRDH podcast, host Michael Goldfarb looks at how this lack of full understanding is hampering efforts to create a coherent political strategy to oppose President Trump.
He explores the seminal research into how media obscures not just history but also other aspects of life by thinkers like:
George Gerbner: http://web.asc.upenn.edu/gerbner/Asset.aspx?assetID=2597
https://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/1997/05/the-man-who-counts-the-killings/376850/
& Neil Postman: https://quote.ucsd.edu/childhood/files/2013/05/postman-amusing.pdf
He also writes about the television programs that shaped the Vietnam generation, like Beulah: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sQ2l_KTDcHU
This essay on how media obscures our undertanding of history is inspired by Ken Burns series “The Vietnam War.” Goldfarb asks, Why American society today feels like it is coming apart at the seams because when watching Burns documentary you realize there is no comparison between the objective reality of the Vietnam era and now.
The reality then: half a million troops in combat deployment, riots in American cities every summer with hundreds killed, major political assassinations as a regular feature of national life.
Reality today: a sense of panic that is comparable to the Vietnam era but not based in anything like the same scale of trauma.

Media obscures history. Not intentionally, but the effect of looking at images without a deeper understanding of the context in which the images were created will keep the viewer from knowledge of an historical event. In this FRDH podcast, host Michael Goldfarb looks at how this lack of full understanding is hampering efforts to create a coherent political strategy to oppose President Trump.
He explores the seminal research into how media obscures not just history but also other aspects of life by thinkers like:
George Gerbner: http://web.asc.upenn.edu/gerbner/Asset.aspx?assetID=2597
https://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/1997/05/the-man-who-counts-the-killings/376850/
& Neil Postman: https://quote.ucsd.edu/childhood/files/2013/05/postman-amusing.pdf
He also writes about the television programs that shaped the Vietnam generation, like Beulah: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sQ2l_KTDcHU
This essay on how media obscures our undertanding of history is inspired by Ken Burns series “The Vietnam War.” Goldfarb asks, Why American society today feels like it is coming apart at the seams because when watching Burns documentary you realize there is no comparison between the objective reality of the Vietnam era and now.
The reality then: half a million troops in combat deployment, riots in American cities every summer with hundreds killed, major political assassinations as a regular feature of national life.
Reality today: a sense of panic that is comparable to the Vietnam era but not based in anything like the same scale of trauma.