WFHB Bloomington Community Radio
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Our opening song is “The Day After the Revolution” by Pulp…The Revolution begins and ends with you. Today we highlight four past programs on Revolution. This is our Fund Drive Show. Please support Interchange: call us at 812.323.1200 or make a secure online pledge. Thanks!
SEGMENT ONE: France (The Terror and the Revolution)
Our first Revolution is the paradigm for all others it seems: the French Revolution, which lasted for about ten years, 1789 to 1799. We’ll focus on the Fall of Robespierre and the counter-revolution which gave the world Napoleon Bonaparte. Our guest, live in the studio, was Indiana University Professor Rebecca Spang whose latest book is Stuff and Money in the Time of the French Revolution, published by Harvard University Press.
SEGMENT TWO: Haiti (Confronting Black Jacobins)
Our next clip is from our show with Gerald Horne about the Haitian Revolution and his book Confronting Black Jacobins. We begin with Jefferson’s ”Cannibals of the terrible Republic” and the fear of Africans “on the March.” Horne makes explicit the links from hierarchies of color born in the French “Black Code” on Haiti, that traveled to New Orleans and South Carolina, to the police murders of black citizens in the present-day United States. Gerald Horne’s new book, out from Monthly Review Press, is The Apocalypse of Settler Colonialism: The Roots of Slavery, White Supremacy, and Capitalism in 17th Century North America and the Caribbean.
SEGMENT THREE: Cuba (José Martí: The Whole Revolution)
Cubans and Americans share one explicit defining characteristic…the absolute belief in their exceptionalism. This exceptionalism is marked out in the historical narrative that each constructs, often out of the same material. It was the example of labor and suffrage movements in the US that inspired Cuba’s most iconic figure José Martí to fight against Spanish colonial oppression to secure self-determination and to form a nation committed to racial and social justice. Our guest is Susan Babbitt and our focus is on Martí’s rejection of Liberal Philosophy and Individualism. Jose Martí, the philosopher of revolution and Cuban nationalism…what can it mean to build a nation, to become a people out of the ashes of hundreds of years of slavery? Martí’s dreams were stolen by the United States until 1959 and the successful revolution of Fidel Castro. For this so-called “thumb in the eye” of the US which had been using Cuba as a playground for the corrupt and corrupting master class…the US would starve Cuba through sanctions for the next 50 plus years.
SEGMENT FOUR: Russia (The Revolution Betrayed)
We close tonight with the Russian Revolution of 1917 and the man who literally wrote the book on it. We know it in the translation of Max Eastman (and I’ll suggest here that this might be as much due to Eastman’s Russian wife Elena Krylenko–but as I am no historian and am acting irresponsibly). The show we’re hearing is “The Revolution Betrayed” and our guest was Paul Le Blanc, a prolific author whose book on the Revolution and what followed is called October Song.
PITCH BREAK MUSIC
“Blame it on the Boers” by Johnny Dyani. We used several Dyani compositions in the show about the play My Children, My Africa, by South African Playwright Athol Fugard (The Stones of Reason). Who out there listening can say who the Boers are? Welcome to World History…”Boer” is the Dutch and Afrikaans noun for “farmer”. But In South Africa it denotes the descendants of the Dutch-speaking settlers of the eastern Cape frontier in Southern Africa during the 18th and much of the 19th century. For a long time the Dutch East India Company controlled this area, but it was eventually taken over by the United Kingdom and incorporated into the British Empire…in other words, here are the seeds of Apartheid rule in South Africa.
MUSIC
“The Day After the Revolution” by Pulp
“Blame It On the Boers” by Johnny Dyani
“The Revolution Starts Now” by Steve Earle
CREDITS
Producer & Host: Doug Storm
Executive Producer: Wes Martin
Special thanks to Jennifer Brooks
