The Role of Exiled Spanish Anarchists in the 1968 Near Revolution in France

The Angry Brigade: The Spectacular Rise and Fall of Britain’s Urban Guerilla Group

PM Press (2008)

Film Review

The film traces the role played by anarchists exiled from Spain during the Franco dictatorship in inspiring anarchist movements in Germany, France, Switzerland, Italy, Turkey, Netherlands and the UK. It primarily focuses on the Black Cross, an international group providing material and psychological support for anarchist prisoners; the French First of May Group; and Britain’s Angry Brigade.

For me, the most interesting part of the film is the role of the First of May group in instigating the mass insurrection (and near revolution) that occurred in France in 1968.

The only serious inaccuracy in the film relates to the identification of German’s Beider Meinhoff gang as an organic First of May anarchist group. It’s now recognized as a Gladio operation heavily infiltrated (and possibly run) by CIA operatives. See The Secret CIA Program to Control Europe

 

 

The Sanitized Version of the 1968 Global Revolt

1968 Global Revolt – Summer of Love, Summer of Conflict

DW (2018)

Film Review

Part 2 focuses mainly on 1976-68, starting with ongoing anti-Vietnam War protests that took place in 1967 in Rome, Paris, Sao Paulo, Tokyo, Berlin, Sidney, Melbourne and many other cities.

In addition to student uprisings across the US in 1967, 150 American cities and towns experienced inner city riots as African Americans protested substandard housing, mass unemployment and police brutality.

This contrasted starkly with the 1967 Summer of Love in the Haight Ashbury district of San Francisco. This movement focused less on protesting than on drug and sexual experimentation. The film quotes a social scientist who maintains the Haight “love-in” came directly of of “suburban” (ie upper middle class) culture. The filmmakers make no mention of the role the CIA played in disseminating LSD to California youth in an effort to derail the student antiwar movement (see How the CIA Used LSD to Destroy the New Left)

This episode devotes major attention to the 9 million-strong student/worker protest in France that brought France to a standstill for two weeks in 1968.

The most disappointing segment of this film is an appearance of leftist-turned-neocon (and likely CIA asset) David Horowitz to discredit anti-Vietnam War activists who promoted Vietnam’s right of self-determination in its independence struggle. According to Horowitz, this position “disregarded” the desires of the South Vietnamese.

Like many of Horowitz’s sound bites, this statement is both misleading and factually inaccurate. One of the main reasons the US lost the Vietnam War is that the vast majority of South Vietnamese civilians opposed the US military occupation and supported the Vietcong (the South Vietnamese guerilla army that fought alongside North Vietnamese troops). See What You Never Learned in School About the Vietnam War

 

1965-75: The Decade that Nearly Dismantled Capitalism?

Global Revolt – Part 1 The Wave

DW (2018)

Film Review

This is a four-part documentary series, based on archival video footage, of a global uprising that took place between 1965-75. Although the uprising began with student protests opposing the Vietnam war, disgruntled workers and farmers joined in with students in France, Italy, Chile and Brazil and Japan. The main weakness of this series is the absence of a unifying thread. Although the historical film footage is superb, the scattershot approach and the misidentification of various Operation Gladio programs (as genuine leftist movements) makes it impossible for the viewer to draw any real conclusions.

Part 1 mainly focuses on the US anti-Vietnam War movement. However it also briefly examines the youth uprisings that occurred in the UK, Italy, Germany and Japan, as well as the first international conference of the Non-Aligned Movement* in Havana in 1963.

For me, the most interesting part of the film was the International War Crimes Tribunal Jean Paul Sartre and Bertrand Russell organized in 1967 to investigate US war crimes in Vietnam.

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*Operation Gladio is the code name for a CIA/NATO backed paramilitary network that carried out thousands of false flag terrorist operations in Cold War Europe. The goal of these operations was to justify repressive government legislation against grassroots anti-capitalist organizers. It was exposed in a 1992 BBC documentary:

**The Non-Aligned Movement is an organization of sovereign countries that refuse to ally themselves with or against any of the major power blocs (US, Russia, China).