When Mario Savio said in his famous speech in 1964 about putting "your bodies upon the gears and upon the wheels, upon the levers, upon all the apparatus, and you've got to make it stop. And you've got to indicate to the people who run it, to the people who own it, that unless you're free, the machine will be prevented from working at all," he was talking about what a group of leftists actually did 54 years earlier.
On the morning of July 13, 1854, the American sloop-of-war USS Cyane fired nearly 200 cannonballs at the defenseless and unarmed town of San Juan del Norte, Nicaragua. When their supply of cannonballs neared exhaustion, Captain George N. Hollins dispatched a group of sailors to burn anything in the town that was still standing.
Everyone in America knows about the Wright Brothers and their famous flight on December 17, 1903. It was majestic and a milestone in human history.
However, it wasn't the first airship.
308 years ago mankind made his first tentative steps into space, and the hero of this story is named Bartolomeu Lourenço de Gusmão.
Somewhere between the F-16 patrols, the attack chopper flyover, the armed forces chorus singing the Star Spangled Banner, and the call from the Commander in Chief after the Super Bowl ends, we will hear plenty of banter concerning "field generals", "aerial attacks" and "blitzes" among other things.
It's almost enough to make one wonder where the military ends and the football game starts.
Wikileaks has provided us with a question worthy of an answer.
On August 14, 1947, three men met for drinks at a cafe in American-occupied Memmingen, Germany.
One of them was Kurt Merck, a former officer in the Nazi Germany military intelligence agency Abwehr. He was now on the payroll of American intelligence.
"Workers, do not be deceived: this is the final struggle, that of parasitism against labour, exploitation against production.
"The Commune was a turning-point of decisive importance. It stands at the threshold of the modern age of imperialism. The conditions methods and aims of the proletarian revolutionary movement in the age of imperialism were, so to speak, grandly foreshadowed in it."
- V. Lenin
"To Arms! Citizens, to arms! It is a choice now, as you know, between conquering or falling into the merciless hands of the reactionaries and clericals of Versasilles, or those scoundrels who deliberately delivered up France to the Prussians and are making us pay the ransom of their treachery!
On July 28, 1870, the 200,000-strong Army of the Rhine marching out of Paris to war were sent off by huge, patriotic, cheering crowds. Republicans who opposed the war were accused of having sold out to Prussia. Jules Valles, a journalist and socialist who dared to question the war, was nearly torn apart by a mob chanting "To Berlin! To Berlin!"
The French armies were so confident of victory that they were only given maps of Germany.
