Brendan Campisi > Recent Status Updates

The same force that impelled the plebeian assault on the Bastille in 1789 drove the Mexican peasantry to capture the numerous Bastilles of the Porfirian haciendas. In the oral tradition of many peasant soldiers of the revolutionary armies, the revolution itself appeared as a series of hacienda seizures rather than an overthrow of the central state power.

The office workers in Camagüey, mainly women, were the first to receive the news as they would have to administer the cuts. They immediately walked out on strike. Some went down to the depot and the workshop, where their action was swiftly joined by the drivers and engineers. others produced leaflets and posters and took to the streets of Camagüey in an impromptu demonstration, which received considerable support...

New ideas came from the cities. A phrase, a slogan: “Al-ard li man yaflahuha! (Land to those who work it!) ” Land meant—who could tell?—the end of the endless wait to die. The peasants were going to rise . . .

In early 1949 Prime Minister 'Abd al-Hadi reportedly said that half of the [Muslim] Brothers sent by the Society's leadership to spy on the communist organizations were ultimately recruited into those organizations.

M. T. Audsley, the British labor attaché, noted approvingly that the Misr Company "neatly timed the introduction of the improved wage scales to coincide with a ruthless police clean-up of the communist elements." As a result of these measures, the company was able to secure the victory of its candidates in the elections for the new union executive board.

In All Pride We Are Workers:
We are the Egyptian workers, we are the brave
A thousand salutes to you, oh Egypt, mother of all

Workers are the secret of the beauty of cities
Heroes guard the secrets of the crafts

We are the builders of your pyramids, oh sphinx
Workers, all of us your servants, as we all know

We are the builders of the Pharaohs' fleets
And all that is beautiful in this world

A member of the British cabinet noted in London that "I cannot get it out of my head that the Tudeh Party, although admittedly a revolutionary party, may be the party of the future which is going to look after the interests of the working man in Persia."

Historians later argued that the dynasty survived because of the Iranian "mystique" for kingship. If any such sentiment existed in 1941-1943, the shah was unaware of it. On the contrary, he was much more aware of the immediate need to retain active control over the military.

By the end of the [19th] century, Western visitors considered xenophobia and religious fanaticism to be ingrained aspects of popular culture in Iran. In fact, they were mostly recent and ironic byproducts of the Western impact on Iran.

Orsolina la Rossa, another witch tried by the Modenese Inquisition in 1539, was well aware of this. To the judge who wished to know why so many men and women flocked to the diabolical gatherings and could not seem to overcome this vice, she replied: 'It is because of the carnal pleasure they take with the devil, both men and women, and for no other reason.

The ability to heal bewitched individuals, in particular, was considered a probable indication of witchcraft. 'Who knows how to heal knows how to destroy,' categorically affirmed a woman who was called to testify in a trial held before the Modenese Inquisition in 1499.

It provided an outlet for collective aspirations and fears - the terror of famine, hopes for a good harvest, thoughts about the afterlife, forlorn longing for the dead, anxiety over their otherworldly fate...Where we might have expected to encounter the individual in his (presumed) non-historic immediacy, we find instead the force of the community's traditions, the hopes and needs tied to the life of society.

Those who believe the contrary remain unconsciously bound to the
view taken by those long-ago judges, ecclesiastical or secular, who
asked themselves before all else whether the accused had participated
*physically* in the diabolical gatherings. Even if the sabbat had been a
purely mental phenomenon (and this cannot be proved) its importance
for the historian would not be diminished.

Rosalind Delmar went to her first women’s meeting in 1968: “A male trade unionist came in and started telling us what to do. We told him to go away, no one was going to listen to him. There had always been a tendency on the student left to defer to industrial workers because they were felt to be more strategically important than anyone else—certainly more than women. I was very impressed with what we had done.”

Living under Nazi occupation during 1939–45 imposed intolerable decisions on Europe’s citizens, in ways becoming ever more brutalized and atrocious the further to the east one looks...Political decisions were simultaneously elevated and compromised—reduced on the one hand to the most basic issues of everyday survival and infused with the most complex and momentous ethical meanings on the other.

For the poet Alexander Blok, the [October] revolution was “to remake everything. To organize things so that everything should be new, so that our false, filthy, boring, hideous life should become a just, pure, merry, and beautiful life.”

I stood across the street from the Wobbly hall and I watched the whole damn thing happen [the Centralia massacre]. And something cold and hard and sick began forming in me, from that day on, about this country.

The Party came first. Always. And because *did* come first we often forgot how poor we were. That was another thing I used to think about a lot. Imagine being as poor as we were, and *not* having the Party. Imagine being that poor with *nothing* to explain your poverty to you, nothing to give it some meaning, to help you get through the days and years because you could believe it wouldn't always be this way.