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This episode is brought to you by Redfin. You're listening to a podcast, which means you're probably multitasking, maybe even scrolling home listings on Redfin, saving homes without expecting to get them. But Redfin isn't just built for endless browsing. It's built to help you find and own a home with agents who close twice as many deals. When you find the one, you've got a real shot at getting it. Get started@redfin.com own the dream no one goes to Hank's for spreadsheets. They go for a darn good pizza. Lately, though, the shop's been quiet, so Hank decides to bring back the $1 slice. He asks Copilot in Microsoft Excel to look at his sales and costs and help him see if he can afford it. Copilot shows Hank where the money's going and which little extras make the dollar slice work. Now Hank has a line out the door. Hank makes the pizza copy. Copilot handles the spreadsheets. Learn more@m365copilot.com work Maya Angelou once said, I can be changed by what happens to me, but I refuse to be reduced by it. James Baldwin said, not everything that is faced can be changed, but nothing can be changed until it is faced. Nelson Mandela said, it always seems impossible until it's done. And Seneca, the Roman Stoic philosopher, said, I judge you, unfortunate because you have never lived through misfortune. You have passed through life without an opponent. No one can ever know what you are capable of. Not even you. There is something that happens when people are afraid, when power gets more concentrated, when institutions bend, when they crush what is underneath them, when the news is a daily gut punch and you genuinely don't know what's coming next or if it's going to get better. People start to believe that joy is irresponsible, that celebration is avoidance, that if you're laughing, you're not paying attention enough. That resistance, real resistance, has to be grim, work without joy and without rest. It has to look like suffering in order for it to count. And that is also a lie that empires tell. And today, hopefully, I will prove it to you. Because history shows us over and over, in civilizations and centuries and contexts that have absolutely nothing to do with each other. That when the walls start to close in, when occupation arrives, when the machine grinds its gears and starts asking you for your papers, something remarkable happens. People start to sing. They throw dinner parties in tombs, they plant gardens in the rubble. They start underground newspapers. They hold jazz in basements and form children's choirs, ghettos, and jangling key rings in the middle of occupied squares. They gather. They insist on beauty and art. They refuse to perform the death that the system is already rehearsing for them. This is not naivety, and it's not passivity either. This is one of the most radical acts in the entire political playbook. And today I felt like we need a little bit of hope core about what it means to be joyful in resistance, and not just as a way of keeping our mental health, but as an integral part of what resistance looks like. Welcome to Flipping Tables. I'm Monty Mader. You probably know me from Instagram. Today we are going to talk about the joy of resistance through several stories throughout history, from 73 BCE to 1977, about people who stood in the face of the terrible and decided to sing welcome to Flipping Tables. Well, hello and welcome back, everyone. I hope that in spite of everything, everyone is doing quite well. I don't really have any announcements today. I just wanted to say a thank you to Patreon supporters who have made this episode possible. Take a look at your poll. This week we're going to start polling some different topics. Patreon users are going to start choosing a topic a month, and so take a look for that. For July, you'll be picking an episode. And I just. I've been getting a lot of messages lately of people feeling really burnout. What do I do? How do I. How do I manage this? How do I live my life and take care of my responsibilities or take care of my children and also pay attention to what's happening around me? And so I wrote this episode because, honestly, I needed the inspiration too. Things have been really stressful with the move and with travel and my regular workload. And then my upstairs H Vac went out, so that's fun. And I felt like we needed to remember that humans never stay down for very long. Jameela Jamil said a comment a while ago on a podcast where she said, if. If women, we're going to submit, if that was natural for us, we would have done it already. We wouldn't get up and keep fighting and keep fighting and keep pushing back. But I think that's true of humanity as a whole. When humanity has been crushed underneath the weight of empire, it has always continued to fight back because that's not the natural state for us. So we are going on a journey today from 73 BCE Rome to 1977, Buenos Aires. Ten stories across 2,000 years. And each one is, I hope, is A case study in what happens when human beings refuse to let the system of oppression colonize their spirit. They can take your land and your money, but they can't rip you from who you are. Some of these stories end triumphantly, and some of them do end badly. Right, because these stories don't always end the way that we want them to in the movies. And I felt it was important to include those two, because in every single one, the joy was real, the community was real, and what those people built together outlasted the empires that tried to crush them. Even if they didn't win in the moment, they won in the end. They were the pathway to win in the end. In at least two of these examples, again, are stories of people who knew exactly what was coming for them. They had the information, they looked at impossible odds and chose the joy and chose the resistance anyway. And I think that might be the most important thing to understand is that moment of, no matter how this plays out, I know who I am. I'm going to choose who I am, and I'm going to do the next right thing with joy. I'm not here to tell you that joy is magic and it's going to save you and it's going to turn everything around and everything's going to be sunshine and rainbows. That's a greeting card from Hallmark, and I'm not a greeting card author. But what I am here to show you is documented, historical evidence that joy has always been structural to resistance. This functions as part of the infrastructure for communities that are under siege or marginalized. This is what builds networks and keeps identity alive, gives people a reason to come back next week, gives people a reason to fight again. And we're going to dig into that. And again, I think of Dan Savage's comment about the AIDS epidemic where he said, we buried our friends in the morning, we protested in the afternoon, and we danced at night because it was the dance that we were fighting for. I hope that you enjoy this. I had a really fun time building this for us, and I hope that this brings you a little bit of joy. Again, thank you so much as well for the reviews and the comments that have been coming in recently. If this episode does encourage you, send it to someone that you think may also need that encouragement. And as a reminder, the part three of the series, how did we get the Bible? We're going through every single book of the Bible in one of our studies is coming up on the 24th. You can go to montymater.com and get all the information on those series patreon.com Monty Mater if you want to watch the first two episodes, it's been really, really exciting. All right, so let's dive into part one. We're gonna. We're gonna go way back into the first century bce so everyone knows you're probably familiar with the end of the Spartacus story. This is. This happens from 73 to 71 BCE. The 6,000 crucifixions along the Appian Way, bodies stretching 130 miles from Capua to Rome. The Romans lining the road so that every traveler, merchant, soldier, slave would see what happened to people who had the audacity to want to be free. That image is burned into Western cultural consciousness for more than 2,000 years. But what we don't talk enough about enough is not what happened at the end of the Spartacus resistance, but what happened in the middle, in the two years in between. So let's back up to the context, because the context always matters. And I believe I might have said CE earlier. This is BCE so in 73 BCE, the Roman Republic is at the absolute height of its power that just. It is just thriving, killing it. They are controlling the entire world. It's also at the absolute height of its dependence on enslaved human beings. By the late Republic, historians estimate that enslaved people made up somewhere between 25 and 40% of the population of Italy. They worked in the mines of Sardinia, the agricultural estates of Sicily, and. And the households of Roman aristocrats, the gladiatorial schools. Rome was not just a civilization that just so happened to use slave labor. It would not have existed without it. Sound familiar? The historian Moses Moses I. Finley documented this in what's called the ancient economy, and it remains foundational. Spartacus was a Thracian from the region that is now roughly Bulgaria and northern Greece. He had served in Roman auxiliary military before being enslaved, which means he understood how the Romans fought, how they organized, and where their weaknesses were. He was eventually sold to Ignatius Cornelius Lentulus Batius, which is a hell of a name, who ran a gladiatorial training school, Aludis, in Capua in Southern Italy. In 73 BCE, approximately 78 gladiators escaped from that school using kitchen implements as weapons, not swords. They. They literally were using spits and cleavers to get free, and that was what was available. That's what they used. Plutarch gives us the number 78 in his life of Crassus Apian in his Civil wars corroborates the basic outline they made for Mount Vesuvius. The volcano, and they set up camp on its slopes. So the, this is kind of the irony in this. The first piece of irony in this story is that the mountain that would bury Pompeii in 79 CE became, for this brief moment, a sanctuary. And then, of course, the people came. Enslaved agricultural workers from the vast Roman estates of Compania walked away and joined them. Word spread along the way, as it always spreads in communities that if nothing else, person to person, in the dark, in whispers. Within weeks, Spartacus had thousands of fighters. Apian and Plutarch both describe what eventually became a movement of between 70,000, 20,000 people. He had an army. The peak force is estimated at 120,000 people. So here's what we need to understand about the two years that everyone skips to get to those crucifixions that were the end of the Spartacus resistance. Spartan rebels made deliberate, principal choices. And it's remarkable, for its time, they refused to accumulate gold and silver as plunder. When they raided Roman estates and farms, they took food, weapons, pack animals. That's it. What they seized was distributed equally among the resistors. It was a policy decision made by people who had lived their entire lives within a system designed to extract their labor for someone else's wealth. And they were doing something deliberately different. They refused to be polluted by wealth. Instead, they said, we want to be free, we want to survive. We're going to distribute this equally. We're going to take care of people. These systems have always worked. It's just typically people that want to profit the most. Who tell you that distribution and fairness don't work. They worship their gods openly for the first time in years. Spartacus was accompanied by Thracian woman, his partner, possibly a priestess of Dionysus or Dionysus, whom Plutarch describes as having prophetic gifts and keeping a snake that would coil around her. So whether or not you want to take prophecy at face value, what matters is that the community of people who had been forbidden their religious and cultural practices were now practicing them openly in defiance of Rome on the side of a volcano. They defeated four separate Roman military commanders in succession in secession. Gaius Claudius Klaber. His troops were routed when Spartacus people repelled down cliffs of Vesuvius on improvised ropes made from wild vines, a tactical maneuver that Romans had not anticipated. It looks like an action film if you picture it in your mind. They routed Publius variant Verinius. Verinius. There we go. Defeated his camp, taken his horse, captured Na Malnius and Lucius Cousin both failed Cassinius was killed in action. Each victory was a celebration. Each morning they woke up free, was a party for them. There were real arguments inside the movement, of course. Crixus, a Gaul, one of Spartacus's co commanders, wanted to stay in southern Italy and keep raiding. Spartacus reportedly wanted to march north, cross the Alps, let the people return to their homelands. The movement was split. Crixus fashion was destroyed at Mount Garganimus in 72 BCE by consular forces under Publicola and Clodianus. There's so many names in here. Crixus was killed. Plutarch says Spartacus honored him with funeral games, forcing Roman prisoners to fight in the gladiatorial style, style they had imposed on him as a tribute to Crixus, which is kind of a chilling gesture and often a sad little note of when we get free. Often those same people then turn and pass that abuse on to others. The main force kept marching. They traversed the entire length of Italy, from the TOE up to the Alps, fighting and winning. They reportedly reached the Alps and then turned back. Plutarch suggests the fighters refused to leave Italy. Many wanted to stay and keep fighting, keep living free. They turned south again. They tried to cross to Sicily with the help of Cilician pirates who had promised them ships. The pirates took payment and sailed away because they're pirates. And of course, this betrayal was the beginning of the end. Marcus Licinius Crassus, the wealthiest man in Rome and the man who had once said no one could be considered truly rich unless he could field his own army, and who absolutely could field his own army, was assigned to finish them. He did something none of the previous commanders had done. He used decimation on his own retreating troops. He killed every 10th man. His cruelty towards his own soldiers is part of the historical record. Again, Plutarch and Apian both report this. He then built a wall, a kind of a ditch and fence spanning the entire toe of Italy, approximately 40 miles, to contain them in weeks. And this was subjugation. The final battle was in Lusania, near the seiler river in 71 BCE before it, Spartacus's horse was brought to him, killed it. Plutarch records this as well. Spartacus says that if he had won, he would have Roman horses in plenty. If he lost, he would need no horse at all. He then went into battle on foot with his soldiers, trying to reach Crassus personally. He was surrounded and killed. His body was never found. Six thousand survivors were crucified. Crassus lined every mile of the Apian way from Capua to Rome with a cross. Pompey arrived late from Spain, caught some escaping fighters in the north and wrote to the Senate claiming he had ended the war. I mean, because of course he did. This is the first of our it didn't work out examples. The immediate political project failed. Rome endured for another five centuries. And for two years, somewhere between 70,000 and 120,000 people who had been categorized by Roman law as property lived free. And even for two years they had the joy of being free to make their own decisions, to worship how they saw fit to distribute wealth equally, to care for each other. And within this two year period that ended so gruesomely, but gave other movements of resistance to Rome hope. They held festivals, they won battles, they argued about what to do next. They did those arguments and those festivals as free people, many of them free for the very first time in their lives. The Roman state was so genuinely terrified of what they represented. It needed 6,000 visible corpses on 130 miles of road to do it, to intimidate people. They were so afraid of what when a human decides they will not be subjugated, what that looks like in mass, that they had to go so far to make sure it didn't happen again. That is the symptom of a terrified empire. Doesn't it sound familiar? Making spectacle, making an example of the brutality of the response is always proportional to how real the threat was. Karl Marx, writing in a letter to Engels in 1861 called Spartacus, quote, the most splendid fellow in the whole of ancient history. He had spent years thinking about enslaved labor and modes of production. And this is who he landed on. Because Spartacus represented what freedom looks like when you decide that you will be free at all costs. And then we jump Forward into the first century 64 to 313 CE and we're going to talk about the Agape feast in the joy of the catacombs. If you are living in the Roman Empire, your religious practice has been declared illegal. The punishment for practicing it is death. Again, often public and theatrical. We just covered this with Spartacus. Maximally painful deaths again be made an example of just for worshiping how you want to worship. You have watched community members thrown to lions, set on fire in Nero's gardens as human torches, executed in the amphitheater as Entertainment for 50,000 people. What do you do on a Friday night living in a situation like that? If you're an early Christian in the first three centuries, the what I consider the early church, the real church, what you do is you have dinner, you have a big one with your entire community in a tomb. The Agape Fest, from the Greek agape, meaning love or unconditional, unconditional charitable love, was a communal meal that formed the beating heart of the early Christian community. It is distinct from the Eucharist. That's totally separate. What we know from primary sources is that these meals were central to how early Christians understood themselves and kept their community alive, while for more than two centuries of intermittent, brutal persecution. Remember that the early Christians, it was extremely egalitarian. Women were leaders, preachers, teachers, church planners. They took care of each other. The wealthy would come into Christianity, would sell everything they owned, and they would do what? Distribute to everyone as he had need. They would take care of their poor, they would take care of their sick, they would take care of their community. Even in the face of persecution. That's what the true Christian church looked like. Of course. Paul of Tarsus described these gatherings critically because they were becoming chaotic. In his first letter to the Corinthians, chapter 11, written about 55 CE, he's frustrated because some people are eating and drinking too much before others arrive. Wealthy members are apparently eating the good food and getting in the wine before the enslaved members and the day laborers can get there after work. Paul's correction is, hey, this is an egalitarian moment. This is for a celebration together. This is for community. And again, it was getting a little messy in practice, and so he was trying to correct that. The Didache, the teaching of the 12 apostles, is one of the oldest surviving Christian texts dated by most scholars to approximately 100 CE, making it very comparable with, say, the Gospel of John. It gives specific practical instructions for how to conduct the communal meal, the life of the community. It reads in places like a founding charter for an underground mutual aid organization, because that's what it was. Tutulian, the North African theologian and lawyer, writing around 175,1 197 CE in Carthage, describes the agape, a fest in his Apologeticus, which is the formal legal defense of Christianity. We address address to Roman magistrates. He writes, quote, we sup together, and with prayer we begin. We eat what suffices. So we just eat just enough. We drink as much befits those who are temperate. We discourse as those who know what the Lord hears them. After manual ablution and bringing of the lights, when it is each is asked to stand up and sing, we close the banquet with prayer. Now, to Tulian, for all of his faults, one of them being a raging misogynist who was critical in bringing down the egalitarian system in Christianity and removing women from power. Was correct in this. And we do have, because of his writings, many of the history, historical pieces of the early church. He's writing this to counter accusations that Christians were conducting cannibalistic rituals and orgies at their secret gatherings. How familiar does that sound? You know, there's a child pedophile ring in a pizza restaurant in the basement. Anything that's secretive, people like, oh, they're doing something terrible, which sometimes they are. Epstein files. But in this case, it was the Christians were being accused of holding these kind of satanic rituals. Sound familiar? Common slander based on misunderstood reports about eating the blood and body of Christ, which, you know, at least in that sense, people are like, wait, you're eating who? His defense is remarkable. We're just eating dinner together. We're singing, we're praying, we're taking care of the poor. Why is this threatening? The answer, of course, is that the community that is organized, joyful, and it's also, there's mutual aid so people can get what they need. You can't impoverish them into submission when their community takes care of them, is always threatening to a system that requires rugged individualism and isolation. Now, this is where we get into kind of my favorite part of this. Where were these gatherings happening during the early periods in Rome? They were happening in the catacombs. Rome's catacombs are extraordinary. There's approximately 170km of underground tunnels cut into soft volcanic rock beneath the city, containing between 500,000 and 750,000 burials, Christian, Jewish, and pagan. They were not primarily hiding places. Obviously, they were burial complexes, but they were also became safe gathering spaces. Romans had a tradition called the refrigerium, a memorial banquet that was held at a graveside. What Christians did was they adapted this practice. They gathered at the tombs of martyrs to share communal meals in memory and honor of that martyr. The catacomb walls, which are some of the oldest surviving Christian artwork in the world, are covered with paintings of fish and loaves and communal tables of the Agape Feast itself. Joy is literally depicted on the walls of the tombs. Bread and wine and friends underground. As often, many times they were there honoring someone who had just passed someone who had just been killed, someone who had just sacrificed for what they believed in. And we get an outsider view on these communities from a remarkable primary source, Pliny the Younger. And if you've followed me on Instagram for a while, you've heard me talk about Pliny The Younger writing to the emperor Trajan around 112 CE for guidance on what to do with the Christians in his province. He describes them as people who, quote, assemble before daylight and address a form of prayer to Christ as a God and then disperse to their daily lives, gathering again later to share a meal. But a meal of ordinary and harmless character. Pliny finds them baffling. He interrogated some under torture, could find no actual crime. The meal was just a meal. They're just having a meal. And he's confused by them. He's like, what? Why are you, why are you like this? The prayer was just a prayer. The Roman state was spending legal and military energy trying to stop it it. And again, the biggest threat is mutual aid. The biggest threat is communities of care. Because when the empire can't crush you into utter subjugation and dependence on it, then they can't control you quite as well. The most intimate document we have from this period is called the Passion of the Saints Perpetua and Felicitus. It's written approximately 203 CE in Carthage. Perpetua was a young noble woman, 22 years old, nursing an infant. She was arrested for her Christian faith during the persecutions under Emperor Septimus Severus. And what makes this extraordinary is that the prison diary section is believed to be written in her own words, making it one of the oldest surviving texts authored by a named Christian woman. She describes imprisonment, the darkness, the heat, the overcrowding, the grief. She describes nursing her baby in prison. She writes about her father coming repeatedly weeping, begging her to recant and save her life. She describes visions and describes a transformation in her experience of the prison itself, writing that after one vision, the prison appeared to me as a spacious place and I was more comfortable there than I had been. She found inside this impossible situation something that functioned like peace. Perpetua would be killed in the arena in Carthage on 3-7-203 CE during the game celebrating Emperor get his birthday. I want you to see what's happening in these underground communities. It's this shared meal, shared purpose, shared music in the dark that sustained people through things that should not have been sustainable. These things, these feasts, these brief little moments of joy, kept networks alive through 250 years of persecution, through Nero, Domitian, Decius, through Diocletian's great persecution of 303 to 311. Until Constantine would issue the Edict of Milan in 313 and change the political calculus entirely. The catacombs are the earliest underground venue circuit. The Agape Feast is the first mutual aid potluck. It's these moments that we can replicate in our communities. And one of the things that, as we go through these stories, I hope you see one of the things that will bring you so much joy and hope in these moments of just crushing, crushing fear and pain and loss. And where do we go next? Will things ever get better? Is spend time with people in real time. Technology has this way of convincing us that we're connected while it continues to isolate us. Sit with people at a real dinner without your phones. Go to a concert. Put your phone down. I found myself doing this last night. I went to see Evanescence and Spirit Box. I wanted to see Evanescence since I was sneaking Evanescence and listening to it in high school. And I wasn't supposed to be like. And I found myself wanting to pull my phone out all the time. I'm like, put your goddamn phone away. You know, wait for whatever song you really want. Get 30 seconds of a clip. Put your phone away. Find time to plug into real people, because real people are what gives us hope. Number three, let's go to March 18th to March 28th, 1871. La Commune de Paris. 72 days of the future. So this one, we're going to have a little bit of context. France had just lost a war. Badly. The Franco Prussian War ended in January of 1871 with France humiliated. Prussia besieged Paris for four months. The city nearly starved. And then the French government signed a peace agreement that ceded Alsace Lorraine to the new German Empire and agreed to pay an indemnity of 5 billion francs plus German occupation of Paris while the money was arranged. And my family. I included this story in part because my family on my dad's side is from Alsace Lorraine. So we're French or we're German, depending on what period of history you want to talk about. The working people of Paris who had fought, starved and bled, and watched their children die through that siege were outraged. Of course they did. The conservative government had retreated to Versailles, of course, safe in their little suburbs. They're not in the city. They're not in pain. So we're not going to deal with it. We're just going to leave the poor to starve. You shouldn't have been born poor. The National Guard, largely composed of Parisian workers, still had their cannons on the hill. Those cannons had been purchased by Parisian citizens during the siege. They were not the government's property. They were the people's property. Theorists decided to take the people's cannons on March 18, 1871. Government troops were sent to Montmartre before dawn. Women. The women of Montmartre, many of them were already awake for their day's work, placed themselves between the soldiers and the guns. You're not taking our weapons. General Lecomte ordered his men to fire. His soldiers looked at the women and children in front of them and refused. They turned around and arrested Lecomte instead. The government had lost its ability to project force within sight, within Paris. Within days, Thiers and his government had fully evacuated to Versailles. Paris, a city of nearly 2 million people, was on its own. So what did they do with the 72 days they were free? 72 days. They abolished the death penalty. They separated church and state. They closed religious schools, open free secular ones, so that everyone could go to school, no matter their belief. They remitted rents and mortgage payments that had accumulated during the four month siege. They enacted a maximum salary cap for Commune officials. That means capping the salary that your politicians can make. No elected or appointed official could earn more than 6,000 francs a year, the same as a skilled worker. You will earn the same as the people you represent, so that you represent them correctly. The Commune's leadership had to live as the people they served live. Can we please do that now? I would love that. Age limits, term limits, salary caps. You have to. I think that politicians. This is just my 2 cents for Congress especially. You should have to get paid the median salary of the district you represent or the state you represent. Oh, boy. Wouldn't policy change then? They gave all foreign residents full civil rights, regardless of nationality, which is radical for any government. In 1871, they freed all political prisoners. They planned to hand abandoned workshops back to the workers cooperatives who could operate them. They burned down the guillotine publicly in the Place Voltaire, with a crowd gathered to watch it go. And they threw parties. Can you imagine? This is what people who want to be free do. They live, they let live. They take care of their community and they celebrate in the middle. This is in the middle of a siege, with the Versailles government massing troops on the outskirts. They're coming back. The future is catastrophically uncertain. They know this. These the Parisians were holding free concerts at the Tulare's Palace. The Paris Opera, one of the great temples of the kind of the upper elite culture, opened its doors to performances accessible to everyone. There was street theater, political clubs. That meant nightly and deconsecrated churches, the buildings turned over to the public for debate. Women organized with stunning speed and effectiveness, because they always do. Women are at the core of all major revolutionary movements. They are always the ones doing the invisible labor and not getting the credit for it. It the Women's Union for the Defense of Paris and the Welfare of the Wounded was led by Elizabeth Dmitriev, a 20 year old Russian immigrant, a contact of Karl Marx, a woman who had never led anything before the Commune and who organized with something that would be an example for people in generations to come. 20 years old and she steps to the plate and says, I'm gonna get it done. Luis Michelle Lavers Rouge the Red Virgin she was a school teacher, anarchist and a poet who had been one of the radical voices in Paris before the Commune became one of its most. And she became one of the most visible figures during it. This woman, she ran ambulances, she fought at the barricades, she organized education for working class girls, she nursed the wounded, she recruited fighters. When she was arrested after the Commune fell, the court asked why she had taken up arms and she replied, quote, if you have any vengeance to exercise, take it against me. I am not a coward, I am wholly responsible. Since it seems that every heart which beats for liberty has only the right to a small lump of lead, I demand my share. Because don't let anyone tell you that women have not always been fighters. Oh, women can't fight. Women can't. Yes, they can. They have throughout history. On May 16th of 1871, 12 days before the Commune would end, they pulled down the Vendome Column. The column had been cast from bronze of cannons captured from Napoleon's enemies, topped with a statue of Napoleon himself. He had to get a little booster to make himself taller. The painter Gustave Courbet had helped organize the action. Thousands watched it fall. CHEERING it was both a celebration and this statement of wealth will not be governed by the symbols of imperial conquest. On May 21, Versailles troops entered Paris through an unguarded gate. And the next seven days was called the Bloody Week. It's one of the most documented mass killings of the 19th century European history. Versailles troops move through the city block by block. Barricades. Barricades were fought street by street. Women fought alongside the men. And this has been prior to the Agricultural revolution and the rise of patriarchal religions, especially Abrahamic religions. Communities were very egalitarian. And when you are impoverished, impoverished women have always worked outside the home and they have always fought when it came down to it. But in early societies, when it came to defense of the tribe or hunting, women did it just as often as the men. If you were young and you were capable, that's what you did, and that's what the women did. Here. They stood at the barricades and they fought. The Communards set fire to buildings as they retreated. And there are still historiographical arguments about who burned exactly what. Historian John Merriman, in the Massacre the Life and Death of the Paris Commune of 1871, estimates that 10,000 to 15,000 people were killed that week. Other historians sometimes put that figure higher. 40,000 were arrested. Thousands were deported to New Caledonia, a French penal colony in the Pacific. The last barricade would fall on May 28, 1871. They had 72 days of this radical transformation. Joy we're getting rid of the death penalty. We're holding our leaders accountable. We are pulling down these symbols of oppression. It didn't take them long, right? They did all that in 72 days. A little over two months, then slaughter. And yet again. Karl Marx would write about this the civil war in France within days of the Commune's fall, calling it the political form at last discovered under which to work out economic emancipation of labor. It became foundational to socialist theory worldwide. Vladimir Lenin would keep a photo of the Communards on the wall. Luis Michelle was deported to New Caledonia, where she learned the indigenous Canuck language, supported the kanak uprising of 1878. She was not done. She was, oh, yeah, you're going to send me over here. I'll get them to rise up too. And she returned to France in 1880 to keep agitating until her death in 1905. I love her. I need to do a solo episode on her. The free secular school system the Commune began was France formally enacted that school in 1882 under the Third Republic. That crushed them. The future arrived in Paris for 72 days in 1871, and it was shot in the street. But it changed the course of the nation, the French Revolution and everything that happened after. Even, even the French and their attitude now the French will not be crossed. When the government does something they don't like, when it infringes on their quality of life, they stop working immediately. They stop work, they strike until the government gets its together. I love the French for that. They do not take. And that groundwork was laid by this Commune. And a lot of these I know you're like, wait, that's the second time you've heard Karl Marx. The reason that I mentioned Karl Marx and the rise of socialist theory is because Karl Marx was really the first person to wrestle with this issue. I don't necessarily agree with his outcome, but he was trying to figure out how do we remove oppression of those on the bottom? And so he was really the first person that started to really detail these arguments. To detail is there a path forward? Is there a different system that we can build? And now France has free education because of what the Communards did. They said, nope, we're not going to have religious schools for the elite. We're going to have secular schools for everyone. And let's go all the way to 1919 across the pond, all the way to Harlem. But before I do that, let's take Our 1st of 2 Mid Show Sponsor breaks. If you'd like these episodes ad free as well as bonus content or to support my work, you can subscribe@patreon.com montemater this episode is brought to you by Google Chrome. You think you know a browser, but Gemini and Chrome, that's new. It can help you with practically anything on the web, like restoring a vintage motorcycle from a 50 page restoration block. Or finally break down that long article you've had open for weeks. Gemini and Chrome is here for it, ready to make anything online make sense. There's no place like Chrome. Check responses. Setup required. Compatibility and availability various. 18. Your call has been forwarded to voicemail. Hi, this is Zoe Deutch and Nick Robinson. Our brand new movie Voicemails for Isabel is all about those little moments that feel like the universe is looking out, feeling homesick. Then your sister calls, hearing that perfect song exactly when you need it. Please stay. Sometimes life rigs things in our favor, like learning about your new favorite rom com voicemails for Isabelle, now playing only on Netflix. On June 26, Supergirl arrives in theaters. Let's go. Your powers are gonna tick in now. That's very impressive. Get ready for a movie event unlike any other. Superman sees the good in everyone. And I see the truth. Get your tickets now for the most fun crypto and fresh movie of the summer. What are you going to do something stupid now? It's a party. DC Supergirl only in theaters June 26th. Get tickets now. Rate APG 13 and may be inappropriate for children under 13. Okay, class, let's begin. Psst. Love your boots. I just sold a pair like that on ebay. Oh, really? I actually, yeah, it took like two seconds to list and they sold almost immediately. I've been selling everything lately. Some chunky boots, a faux fur coat I never wore, and a vintage chair that. That was more of an expensive clothing rack. You know, I actually bought these on ebay. Wait, are you Kitty sell stuff From Brooklyn. Okay. Quiet please. Find what you love, sell what you don't. EBay Things People Love the Harlem Renaissance World War I ended in November of 1918. Approximately 380,000 black Americans had served in the U.S. military. The 369th Infantry Regiment, the Harlem Hell Fighters, great name. Spent one hundred and ninety one consecutive days on the front lines in France, longer than any other American unit in the war. They were the first Allied regiment to reach the Rhine River. Every member received the Croix de Guerre from the French government. They were by any standard heroes. But they came home to Jim Crow. The summer of 1919. James Weldon Johnson named it the Red Summer saw race riots or massacres and massacres in 26American cities. In Elaine, Arkansas, black sharecroppers attempting to form a union were massacred by white mobs led by federal troops. Estimates range from 100 to more than 200 men killed. In Chicago, a 17 year old named Eugene Williams drowned in Lake Michigan after white men threw rocks at him when he accidentally drifted across an informal racial boundary in the water. The riot that followed killed 38 people, injured more than 500. In Washington D.C. white soldiers and sailors attacked black neighborhoods for three days. Two years later, in May and June of 1921, and we've talked about this before. Tulsa, Oklahoma, the Greenwood District. Black Wall street was one of the most prosperous black communities in America with its own hotels, hospitals, law offices and newspapers. Was destroyed by white mobs in a coordinated attack. Historians estimate between 1 and 300 people killed the entire region. Neighborhood decimated. Approximately 10,000 were left homeless. 35 blocks were burned to the ground. The Ku Klux Klan had between 3 and 6 million members in the 1920s. Not just in the South. Everywhere. Significant clan chapters in Indiana, Oregon, Colorado, Ohio. Members included governors, senators, mayors and police chiefs. Here in Tennessee, we still have Klan members serving in the state legislature. In 1925, KKK March in Washington D.C. drew between 35,000 and 60,000 marchers down Pennsylvania Avenue. This is the world that the Harlem Renaissance occurs in. The Great Migration had brought hundreds of thousands of black Americans northward. Approximately 1.6 million people between 1910 and 1940 fleeing the terror of the south and seeking industrial jobs and at least some modicum of safety. Let's not be fooled that the north was not rac. Absolutely were. It was better conditions most of the time. New York, Chicago, Detroit, Philadelphia, all received enormous numbers. Harlem in upper Manhattan, one of my favorite neighborhoods in Manhattan, became the capital of black cultural life in America. And what emerged from that concentration of people, history Grief, brilliance, loss and determination was one of the great explosions of artistic and intellectual output in American history. Langston Hughes was 19 years old when his poem the Negro Speaks of Rivers was published by in the W.E.B. du Bois NAACP journal, the Crisis in 1921. In 1926, he published I Too, which ends, I too am America. Not asking, not petitioning, not begging, stating and claiming, I too am America. You can't take that from me. In 1926, America with the Klan at 6 million members, Langston Hughes was writing the future into existence in his poetry. Zora Neale Hurston, anthropologist, folklorist, novelist, and one of the most important American writers of the 20th century, collected black folklore across the American south and Caribbean and published Their Eyes Were watching God in 1937. She wrote, quote, sometimes I feel discriminated against, but it doesn't make me angry. It merely astonishes me. How can any deny themselves the pleasure of my company? It's beyond me. I just. I love that energy. I want that, like, embroidered on a pillow or a T shirt or something. Duke Ellington brought his orchestra to the Cotton Club in 1927. Bessie Smith, called the Empress of the Blues by her contemporaries, was selling records by the hundreds of thousands. Louis Armstrong was recording the Hot 5 and Hot 7 sessions that would permanently alter the history of music. Ma Rainey was singing about women, desire, freedom, bodily freedom, with a voice that. I mean that when I tell you that sounds like a spiritual phenomenon, her voice. And then they had the rent parties. And I'm going to explain this because you may have never heard of this before. Harlem landlords, many of them, of course, were white. They were charging black tenants more than they charged white tenants for comparable apartments or worse, because black residents had fewer housing options due to segregation. Again, we cannot not, we can't say the north wasn't racist, that there wasn't the effects of Jim Crow. There was still. So it made rent a crisis. So what did the people do? They literally turned this into a community event. And when I tell you I love black people so much, they are. They are the most incredible humans and community that we are blessed to have. So what they did for this community event, they printed a card that says, come one, come all. A social whirl at address. Saturday night music by whoever admission, 25 cents. You moved your furniture to the walls. You brought in a piano player. A young Thomas Fats Waller played rent parties early in his career. This is actually how he built his name. Every quarter paid was money that would go towards that person's rent. They would throw a party. The whole community would come, pay a quarter, dance to get that rent paid. So freaking cool. It was financial survival. That looked like from the outside, like a party, because it was also a party. They were like, you can't crush our community. We're not going to let you. We're going to dance and sing in your face. Alan Locke edited the New Negro an interpretation in 1925, the anthology that served as the movement's manifesto. He wrote that something had happened, quote, beyond the watch and the guard of statistics in black American life. He was right. Joy turned into art. It turned into cultural identity. It turned into a collective power. And it doesn't show up in the statistics. I mean, how many of us have. You've. This is the first time you've ever heard of a rent party. You know, here in the States, with the housing crisis, we might be getting ready to do the same. Name. James Weldon Johnson, a poet, diplomat, NAACP executive director, and one of the great intellectual architects of the movement, wrote in black Manhattan in 1930 that the Harlem Renaissance gave African Americans the capacity to compel the world to see them, not just tolerate them, but to see them in the fullness of human genius and beauty and complexity that they are. And the Harlem Renaissance didn't end cleanly like the Depression hit Harlem hard as it hit everywhere, but it permanently changed the terms of what was possible to claim, even in the face of oppression and segregation. In Jim Crow, the civil rights movement drew on its cultural vocabulary, its confidence, its joy, its music, its evidence that black America was not a problem to be managed, but its own beautiful civilization in its own right. You can trace a direct line from Langston Hughes writing I too am America in 1926 to the Montgomery Bus Boycott in 1955. Life. The song was written before they ever marched. Part five. You guys ready? We're, like, halfway through. Back across the pond we go. 1940 to 1943, the Danish exception. Every country occupied by Nazi Germany had collaborators. At most had significant numbers of people who handed over their Jewish neighbors, sometimes for money, sometimes for their own safety, sometimes because they actually believed the ideology. We see this everywhere. And I've. I've said multiple times in the course of the last year and a half, half. If you have ever wondered what you would do during slavery or World War II or the Civil Rights act, would you give in and cave out of fear? Would you help your neighbor? Whatever it is that you think you would do, you're doing it now. You're doing it right now. Are you Protecting people, are you protecting yourself? That tells you right there what you would be doing at those times. Denmark is a statistical outlier. It is the only country in Nazi occupied western Europe where the Jewish community survived virtually intact. 1 of of approximately 7,800Danish Jews, about 7,000 were evacuated to safety. Of those who were arrested and deported, fewer than 60 died. In France, approximately 77000 Jews were deported and about 2500 survived deportation. That's a big difference and there's a reason that that happened. On April 9th of 1940, German troops crossed the Danish border at 4:15 in the morning. By 6:00am The Danish government had received an ultimatum. Capitulate or we will bombard you. You. The Danish military fought for approximately six hours before the government accepted the terms. This was a rational decision. The it's really. The country is geographically indefensible. The warmark had just demonstrated its capabilities in Poland and Norway. They knew that they couldn't defend it. They couldn't like the, the Danish government knew. We can't, we can't stand up to these people. King Christian x, who was 70 years old at the start of occupation. God, talk about a, a end of life situation. Continued his daily horseback rides through Copenhagen without a German military escort. Just the King on a horse riding through his occupied capital city every morning unguarded, he was refusing to be invisible, absent or diminished. Danes lined the street to see him and it was this beautiful act of defiance. There's a famous story that when Nazis ordered Danish Jews to wear yellow stars, King Christian announced he would wear one too and so would all the Danes. It's a beautiful story, but it's probably apocryphal meaning symbolic, mythical legend. There is no documented evidence that the King made that statement. And the critical fact is that the Nazis never actually implemented the yellow star requirement in Denmark because of the Danish government throughout the occupation. And I bring that part of the story up because if you read this in other forums, like if you want to know more about this story, if you come across that this, this seems to be a folk story story that doesn't have a lot of documentation. But what is documented is Danish humor sustained and systematic as a form of cultural resistance made a difference. Underground newspapers with satirical cartoons of Hitler. The Frit Danmark Free Danmark started publication in 1942. Jazz clubs continued playing despite Nazi designations of jazz as degenerate Jewish negro music. This sounds, I can hear some people currently in this juncture they would say this about like hip hop or literally anything that's fun Danes called it hot music to avoid the label while everyone, German officers included, knew exactly what it was. It was kind of this public wink like it's hot music. The critical moment came in September of 1943. Werner Best ordered the arrest and deportation of Danish Jews. Timed for the night of October 1st through the 2nd, the eve of Rosh Hashanah, when Jewish families would be gathered together in their homes and synagogues. He was calculating maximum efficiency planet when they're celebrating a holiday. George Ferdinand Duckwitz was a German, a maritime attache and the German mission in Copenhagen. He had spent years in Denmark before the war as a trade representative and knew the country really well. On September 28th of 1943 he learned of Best deportation order and made a choice. He went to Hans Hetoft, a Danish Social Democratic leader and told him what was coming. So he betrayed the Germans and let them know what was coming up. Within 48 hours, virtually the entire Danish Jewish community had been warned. Rabbi Marcus Melcoy stood at the pulpit of the Great Synagogue in Copenhagen on Friday morning, September 29, two days before the planned deportation, and told the congregation, do not go home after services. Go to your non Jewish neighbors. Tell everyone you know, go into hiding right now. And what happened next, which we have documented from diaries, letters, testimonials, is all been collected. Ordinary Danes hid people in their homes, their hospitals, their churches, their offices. Fishermen began rowing families across the Orison Strait to neutral Sweden in their fishing boats at night in October. Some charged for the passage. Not a small number of people were able to pay and some charged nothing. They just did it to save them. Some smuggled children in compartments under the fish. Some gave sleeping medicine to infants to keep them quiet. Doctors registered patients under false names. Taxi drivers drove to the coast without asking questions. Priests announced from the pulpits in direct defiance of German authorities that their churches were open to the Jews seeking refuge. Refuge. Over approximately two weeks in October of 1943, roughly 7,000 Danish Jews were evacuated to Sweden. The Danes got them out, said no, not here you're not. They got them out. That's almost all of them. And again, Of Denmark's approximately 7, 800 Jewish residents, only about 481 were arrested and deported. Primarily to Bohemia, not Auschwitz. Then the Danish government did something extraordinary. They kept pressuring the German authorities about the welfare of those deportees. They sent food packages, they wrote letters, they demanded lists, they made political noise at the highest levels. 52 Danish Jews would die out of 7, 800. And this is something. When we've talked a Lot about the ICE facilities and, and the abuse that's going on in these detention centers. Showing up and demanding accountability, saying, where is this person you arrested? What happened to this person? Where did they go? What are the conditions that actually works. It protects people. It's when they get forgotten that those horrific things happen. And the, the Danes were not allowing it to happen. They're like, we're not going to forget our people. We're going to let you know that. We know that we're paying attention. The humor and the rescue were the same muscle. They refused to perform the contempt that the occupiers required. They refused to treat Jewish neighbors as categorically different as the system was demanding from them. And that is what produced both the jazz clubs and the boats. Cultures that maintain their own dignity tend to extend it. It's not a guarantee, but it is a pattern. April 19, 1943. Let's pop over to the Warsaw Ghetto. The Warsaw Ghetto was established in October of 1940. The Nazi occupation authority sealed approximately 400,000 Jews, the largest Jewish community in Europe outside of the Soviet Union, into an area of 3.4 square kilometers, that is 1.3 square miles, a neighborhood designed to hold maybe 30,000 people. People died of starvation in the streets from the first winter. The official German ration for Jews inside The ghetto was 184 calories a day, one tenth of what is needed for basic survival. By the time mass deportations to Treblinka began In July of 1942, approximately 90,000 had already died inside the ghetto walls of starvation, disease and cold. By September of 1942, approximately 265,000 Warsaw Jews had been transported to Treblinka and murdered. The people remaining in the ghetto knew what was happening. They knew where the transports went. They knew about Treblinka. Emmanuel Ringelblum was a historian and community organizers inside the ghetto who understood with clarity what was happening. He organized a secret documentation project named Sabbath Joy. The name is heartbreaking, but a rotating team of historians, writers, teachers, rabbis, social workers and ordinary people collected testimony, documents, statistics, cultural materials, and firsthand accounts of what the Nazis were doing. And they buried it. They knew it was going to happen to them, but they did not want the story to be forgotten. They wanted the truth to be known. They found milk cans and tin boxes wrapped and buried in the earth underneath the Ghetto, addressed to the future. Someone will find it. Someone has to know. Two of the three burial caches were recovered after the war. Samuel Casau's, who will Write our history is a Definitive account. The archive is also now a UNESCO World Heritage document. They knew what was going to happen to them, but they wanted the story to come out anyway. The Jewish Combat Organization was formed In July of 1942, immediately after the deportations began. And its commander Mordecai and a woman Suits was 23 years old. Young, young people standing up and saying I'm going to do everything I can in the face of this. They organized approximately 200 to 500 fighters, depending on histories. The numbers vary. Some of these, it's really hard to document exact numbers. They had obtained some pistols, rifles, grenades, Molotov cocktails, mostly through bribed and sympathetic contacts in the Polish underground. They were facing a very well armed and trained SS force with tanks and flamethrowers. They knew this. They were not planning a military victory. They knew that that wasn't going to happen. Adel Weitz wrote to Yitzhak Zuckerman, his colleague, who is outside the ghetto working to bring in weapons. In April of 1943 he said, quote, the dream of my life has come true. I've lived to see Jewish defense in the Ghetto in all of its greatness and glory. He wrote that again knowing what was coming. On April 19th of 1943, the first night of Passover, the 14th of Nisan in the Hebrew calendar that year, the Passover cedar is the cultural ritual of the Jewish year. A ceremonial meal commemorating the exodus from Egypt. If you grew up on Bible stories, you you recognize this from slavery to freedom. It is a central obligation is telling the story. It's the central tradition of this the Haggadah, the text read at Siddur commands. In every generation, each person is obligated to see themselves as if they personally left Egypt. On the night of April 18 into April 19, families inside the Warsaw Ghetto sat down to the Siddharth in bunkers, in hidden basements, whatever space they could find, with whatever food they could manage to preserve. They said blessing. They ate with bitter herbs and symbolized the bitterness of slavery. They asked four questions, asked the four questions part of the night tradition. And then so why is this different from any other night? They they as close as they can approximate. The festival at 3am on April 19, SS Gruppenfuhrer Ferdinand von Salmon Frankenig because wow names led German forces into the ghetto to conduct what was planned as the final deportation and liquidation. It was going to be a three day operation. He expected no significant resistance and he was met with gunfire. For the first time in the history of the German occupation of Poland, Jewish fighters opened Fire on German forces and drove them back. SS troops retreated from the ghetto. An officer reported to Berlin that operation had encountered a well organized defense from a well supplied enemy. Von Salmon Franken Egg was replaced the same day by SS Groupenfuhrer Jurgen Stroop, who was given orders to liquidate the ghetto. With all necessary measure. The uprising would last 28 days longer than Poland's conventional military defense against the German invasion had lasted in 1939. This ragtag group of Jewish resistance lasted longer than the Polish military had. A group of several hundred people with pistols and homemade grenades inside a burning neighborhood held on longer than the Polish army. Stroop burned the ghetto block by block, building by building. He submitted daily reports to Heinrich Himmler. Precise, of course, bureaucratic. Documenting how many buildings were set ablaze. Were doing such a good job being the worst people ever. His final report, which was submitted on May 16th of 1943 was titled There is no longer a Jewish residential district in Warsaw. Saw he had bound it in leather and illustrated it with photographs. Nice, nice. Like you know those old like binders used to bring in. It had the. The film that you put over your paper and then you slide the binder on it just like to make it prettier. Mordecai Anelweitz was killed on May 8th of 1943 in the underground bunker at 18 Mila street when the Germans flooded it with poison gas. He was 24 years old. He had led a cedar 19 days before for. And again, this is a story not about winning the military engagement. It's really a story about a 23 year old and several hundred people who looked at death and said if this is how it ends, then it will end with us as fighters, as free people who held our sacred service the night before we started to fight back. It's. It's central. You know, the Exodus story is. Is central to it. It's the deepest possible form of joyous resistance is not necessarily outward celebration, but the insistence on your own humanity, on your own. My life has great value and I'm amazed by these stories about how young people can rise to the occasion, step up to the plate and do some of the most masterful things in history. And before we get to our last three stories, I want to take our second of two mid show sponsor breaks. Thank you for being here with me this far again. If this episode encourages you even in its unhappy endings, please consider sending it to a friend. I think we all need a little bit of an uplift right now. Now, Ryan Reynolds here from Mint Mobile I don't know if you knew this, but anyone can get the same premium wireless for 15amonth plan that I've been enjoying. It's not just for celebrities. So do like I did and have one of your assistant's assistants switch you to Mint Mobile today. I'm told it's super easy to do@mintmobile.com Switch upfront payment of $45 for 3 month plan equivalent to $15 per month Required intro rate first 3 months only then full price plan options available. Taxes and fees, extra fee full terms@mintmobile.com fort in 1973 there was Chile in 1966 and Chile 1966 was one of the most extraordinary experiments in cultural democracy happening anywhere on the planet. Let's start with Violeta Para because you cannot understand what followed without her story. First. She was a Chilean folklorist, born in 1917, died in 1967. Visual artist and singer who was largely responsible for the movement that would become the Nueva Concierge, the New Song. She traveled through Chile's rural communities for years, collecting traditional music from farmers, fishermen and miners, documenting songs that were being erased by commercial radio culture. She brought this music back to the cities and wrote her own songs in the same tradition, with a little. A little political teeth, little rage against the machine if you will. She also represented Chile at the international folk festivals and one of the was one of the first Latin American artists to have a solo exhibition at the Louvre in 1964. I want to just brief little Sidebar side quest Artists if you're listening, if you're an actor or a painter or a singer or a poet or an author, you are so important to the resistance. Art is a critical piece of every single movement that has changed the world. So if you are feeling down about yourself or like you're not doing enough, make the most heart filled art that you have ever made in your life. That is what changes things. That's what gives people hope. Art is critical in all of these resistance. Art and resistance are are married together. And when you look through all these stories, there's you find paintings, there's always song, there's stories that people tell people dance. If you are an artist, understand that you are a key component to the future. Anyways, Violeta's song Gracias Ala Vida thanks to Life, written in 1966, was one of the most covered songs in Latin American history. Joan Baez recorded it. Mercedes Sosa made it a continental anthem. It is the song of radical gratitude for the eyes that see, for sound for the Alphabet, for the word that says mother, for the word that says friend. Violeta Para wrote it while battling severe depression. She would end up taking her own life in February of 1967. The song is inseparable from the sorrow surrounding it and is still one of the most beautiful things ever committed to a recording. That's sometimes the paradox of resistance art is it holds a light and the dark at the same time without needing to resolve the contradiction. The movement she seeded flourished after her death. Victor Hara, September 28, 1932 to September 16, 1973, was a theater director, musician, singer and university professor. He was a member of the Communist Party of Chile who believed completely in Salvador Allende's Via Chilena, the Chilean Road, a democratic, peaceful path to socialism through elections and institutional changes. Allende was a president elect of Chile on September 4th of 1970, the first democratically elected Marxist head of state anywhere in the world. The Nixon administration was immediately and deeply hostile. Declassified CIA documents now publicly available that were declassified in stages from the 1990s and released more comprehensively in 2000 show that the CIA ran a covert operation designated FUBELT, authorized by the National Security Advisor, Henry Kissinger to undermine the Allende government from the moment he won the election. Kissinger reportedly said In September of 1970, I don't see why we need to stand by and watch a country go communist due to the irresponsibility of its own people. Another little America's like, no, no, we're gonna come in and save you. It's not for our own benefit. Like, Allende hasn't even done anything yet. He hasn't applied, he hasn't done anything, he hasn't moved forward. He hasn't changed anything. He's just been elected and he's the first, first democratically elected leader. And the US is immediately like, nope, socialist, communist again, as a reminder. Socialism, communism, not the same thing. Let's make sure we keep those separate. Under Allende, Nueva Cancion flourished. State radio played at concerts, were enormous community events. Hara performed events at universities, factory worker meetings, in rural communities. His songs were about land reform, indigenous rights, the dignity of the poor. They're also just beautiful. The music reached people because it was gorgeous, not only because it was politically correct. People danced to it, they sang while working. It was joy in the service of a vision. Then September 11, 1973, happened. Pinochet's coup. General Augusto Pinochet, with CIA backing, of course. And coordination. And coordination documented in declassified records collected by journalist Peter Kornbla in the Pinochet files overthrew the Allende government in a military couple fighter jets bombed the Palacio de la Moneda, the presidential palace. Allende died inside. A 2007 forensic investigation exhuming and analyzing his remains determined his death was consistent with suicide by gunshot. Democracy in Chile died that morning. Victor Hara was arrested the same day in the State Technical University in Santiago. He's a professor, mind you, but he's now being arrested. So the. The us, in conjunction with this general, like we're going to come save you, we murder the leader, the first democratically elected leader, and then democracy in the country dies. And then the professor who is promoting this beautiful music of democracy and the future also gets arrested. That sounds. That sounds totally super free and democratic. You know it does. He was taken with thousands of other political prisoners to the Chile Stadium, which became the principal. Principal detention center and torture center in Santiago. Right. See, it's getting better already. What happened inside that stadium is documented through survivor testimonies, subsequent court proceedings, and the account of his wife, Joan Hara, a British dancer who he met in 1961, in her memoir, Victor the Unfinished Song, that was published in 1983. Guards beat his hands till they were broken. Guards taunted him, saying, play guitar now. He wrote a poem in the stadium under those conditions, with whatever he could write on, with his hands being as. As bruised and broken as they were. He called it Estadio Chile, the Chile Stadium. He passed handwritten copies to fellow prisoners. The poem begins with, there are 5,000 of us here in the small part of the city. We are 5,000. I wonder how many we are in all in the cities and in the whole country. He was killed. Honor. Around September 16, 1973, his body was found in a ditch on the outskirts of Santiago. He had been shot 44 times. Joan Hara identified his body at the city morgue. She smuggled the final poem out of the country. She spent years in exile in London. She returned to Chile after the transition back to democracy and dedicated her life to documentation, memory and justice. In 2023, 50 years after his murder, eight former Chilean military officers were finally convicted in Chilean courts for the kidnapping and murder of Victor Hara. The conviction took 50 years. Pinochet banned his music for 17 years. It was kept alive by exile communities by underground cassette tapes passed hand to hand by international solidarity concerts, by people who risked their safety to make the songs survived. The ban on Hara's music could not be more complete proof of how threatening it was. You don't ban a dead men's songs for 17 years if those songs still aren't working. The Chile Stadium in Santiago is officially renamed the Victor Hara Stadium in 2003. The poem he wrote inside it that they tried to prevent him from writing is inscribed on the walls. El Doraco y viver in PAs. The right to live in peace has been sung at human rights protests in Hong Kong, in Iran, in Chile. In 2019, during the student uprisings that eventually produced a new constitutional referendum. The person who wrote it passed, didn't survive. The song is everywhere. And so many of those stories, it's, it's a, it's an unfortunate pattern of someone getting democratically elected and the US just not liking them for whatever reason and then deciding we're going to go fix it and we install a dictator who arrests protesters and bans music and, and murders people. We should maybe stop doing that. If, if, if the US getting involved militarily or in coups brought peace, then specifically Southwest Asia, the Middle east would be the most peaceful location in the world. Maybe we should mind our business sometimes, just sometimes, you know. Now this story has two different timeline sections. A little bit. The Singing Revolution in Estonia in 1869 in Tartu, Estonia, then part of the Russian Empire, the first Estonia Song festival was held on a outside the city. Approximately 845 singers from across the country gathered and sang traditional songs together. The Russian imperial authorities were skeptical, but they didn't prohibit it. They thought it was just folk culture, like just ah, let the quaint little people celebrate. They didn't understand what they were actually looking at. What they were looking at was the infrastructure of a revolution that would take 120 years. The song festival tradition became fixed institution. Every five years in a normal cycle, tens of thousands of singers from every village, town, city, plus hundreds and thousands of spectators would come together. The songs were folk songs, national hymns, traditional choral compositions. Literally the genetic memory of three small nations encoded in music. When the tradition spread to Latvia and Lithuania, it became a shared cultural heartbeat of the entire Baltic coast. When the Soviet Union illegally annexed Estonia, latvia and Lithuania 1940 through the secret protocol of the Molotov Ribbentrop Pact that divided Eastern Europe between Nazi Germany and Stalin, approximately 35000 Estonians were deported to Siberia in a single week in June of 1941. The Baltic nations were subjected to Russia vacation which is forced collectivization, mass deportations and systematic cultural erasure. Speaking your native language in official context became risky. Teaching your own history was illegal. And the Soviets like couldn't quite figure out what to do. With these song festivals, they tried to co opt them. They added Soviet songs that required repertoire, demanded Russian language performance, manage the content through party committees. The festivals continued, altered and controlled and monitored by the kgb. But they kept going. What the Soviet state underestimated was that 300000 Estonians singing together year after year were maintaining their language, their memory, their identity and their community. In June of 1987, in Tar 2, approximately 2000 people gathered spontaneously and sang prohibited songs. KGB agents were present and took notes. No arrests were made. Arresting 2000 people for singing was a PR problem. Hens Valk, an Estonian artist and journalist, wrote an article in the newspaper SERP in June of 1988, after a wave of massive outdoor concerts where people had begun singing national songs openly for the first time in decades. He used the phrase singing revolution to describe what was happening. And it stuck. It was the right phrase. August of 1988, the Talon Song Festival grounds. No one had officially organized a political gathering. People just showed, showed up. Approximately 300000 Estonians in a country of 1.5 million people, that's one in five. Gathered spontaneously over five nights and sang My Homeland, My Happiness, My Joy, which is the Estonian national anthem that they had been banned from singing for nearly five decades. They sang it under the open sky in full view of the kgb, who didn't know what to do with a political act that looked like choir rehearsal. It's pretty genius. Latvia and Lithuania were doing the same thing simultaneously. Folk songs, national hymn, outdoor concerts that were declarations of independence in progress. On August 23rd of 1989, the 50th anniversary of the Molotov ribbon trope packed the agreement that it handed the Baltic nations to Stalin. 2 million people across all three countries. These are teeny tiny little countries formed. A human chain stretched 675 km from Talon Thuriga to Villis, Vilnius. Sorry, it was called the Baltic Way Day. They held hands and they sang. 2 million people, 3 countries, 675 kilometers of linked hands singing. The Soviet Union then sent tanks toward Vilnius in January of 1991, targeting the national TV tower. Civilians gathered around the tower with their bodies, no weapons. They still sang while Soviet armored vehicles drove toward them. 14 people were killed and they stood there. And anyway, the Soviet troops did not take the tower. Estonia formally restored its independence on August 20th of 1991. Latvia on August 21st. Lithuania had declared independence earlier, on March 11th of 1990. An international recondition came in September of 1991. The Soviet Union would officially dissolve in December of 1991. If you want to watch a documentary on this, there is a documentary called the Singing Revolution. It was released in 2006, directed by James and Maureen Castle. Tustin captures the story in footage. I highly recommend it. It's really inspiring. Here's what stays with me. The Song Festival was created in 1869 as a way of cultural expression under imperial occupation. It survived, it was compressed, compromised, managed, monitored through 50 years of Soviet occupation. But it became their mechanism of liberation, their mechanism of unity. They kept the song alive and that song would eventually come back to France. Read them. I'm so excited. I teared up a little bit. Parts of that I really did. November 17 to December 29, 1989 the Velvet Revolution Theater kids, this one's for you. The Velvet Revolution gets its name from Rita Klimova, a woman who would become the first post communist Czechoslovak ambassador to the United States. She used the word velvet to describe a revolution that improbably produced no deaths during the revolution itself. It took 42 days from the first protest to A playwright in the presidency. Vaclav Haval, born October 5th of 1936, died on December 18th of 2011, was not a politician. He was not a military strategist. He was a playwright, Specifically an absurdist playwright influenced by Kafka and Beck Beckett, who wrote plays critiquing totalitarianism through humor and surreal internal logic of bureaucratic System Systems. His 1963 play the Garden Party satirized the empty ritual language of Soviet ideology, which, if you've ever read like any Soviet memos or listen to the titles of their old organizations and agencies, it's preposterous. The language that they used. His 1965 play the Memorandum is about a fictional administrative language called the Tip Day, designed to eliminate ambiguity and succeeding only in achieving total absurdity. Absurdity. He was writing about his government while pretending to write about something else. After the Soviet invasion, crust Alexander Dubeck's Prague Spring reform in movement in August of 1968, crushing a socialism that had tried to put human face on itself. Havel's plays were banned. He was blacklisted, of course. He worked for years in a brewery. He continued writing essays. In 1978, he wrote the Power of the Powerless, a 23, 000 word essay that became one of the foundational texts of Eastern European dissident thought. Thought. His central argument. The real power of authoritarian systems lies not in primarily violence, but in making everyone complicit in the daily performance of ideology, which is brilliant. A greengrocer puts a sign on his window that says workers of the world unite. Not because he believes it, but because not putting it up would be noticed. The system survives on everyone performing their role in the performance. And this is with any type of totalitarian government, fascism, communism, anytime. These extreme regimes rely on. On adherence to ideology. The system survives as long as people play their role. Because if you don't, you're in danger. This essay would circulate across Czechoslovakia and through Eastern Europe. Polish Solidarity activists read it. Czech students would read it. It was contraband, and it was also irrefutable. Charter 77 in January of 1977 was the formalization of that refusal. A human rights declaration founded by Havel and signed by 243 people initially. Eventually it eventually would get 1900 signatures. Signatures would like. People who signed this would lose their jobs. Their children were denied university admission. They were surveilled, they were harassed, they were imprisoned. Havel himself would serve four years in prison between 1979 and 1983 for disagreeing. And then remember, Marta Kubasova was the pop singer enormously popular in the 1960s, who recorded Prayer for Marta in 19688 a song that became the unofficial anthem of the Prague Spring after the Soviet invasion. And the quote, normalization, which just means a systematic purge and political restructuring. Kubasova refused to sign declarations supporting the new regime. So she was also blacklisted for 21 years. She did not perform publicly. She worked in a Factory. She signed Charter 77. And then she waited. November 17th of sev. 1789, 1989. A student marched to commemorate the 50th anniversary of November 17th, 1939, the day Nazi authorities arrested nine Czech student leaders, executed them and closed Czech universities as punishment for anti occupation protests. Always be wary of the people who demonize education and demonize students who protest. There's a pattern. Among those beaten were international journalists, which mattered. The rumor also spread then. This is the historical detail that most people don't know. That the student named Martin Schmid had been killed by police. He had not been killed, actually. That was the rumor. He was actually alive. He appeared on television days later to prove it. But the rumors spreading on November 17th and 18th accelerated moral outrage. The next day, students went on strike and theater companies. Hovel's world. So this is the world that Hovel comes from. The world of people who spent two decades staging the truth kind of sideways in metaphors and humor, did something remarkable. They opened their stages as political meeting halls, Actors stood before audiences and reported the news from the protests. Theater infrastructure became the revolution's orc organized organizational infrastructure because the people who ran it had spent 20 years building spaces where the truth could be spoken obliquely. And they knew exactly how to use those spaces. Civic Forum, Havel's new civic organization, was founded on November 19, within 48 hours of the beating on the Rondi Trida from a theater basement. And here was the tactic they use. And again, you look through these stories and people are so creative and genius and I love it. So the tactic they use was the jingling of keys. Keys. Protesters would begin shaking their key rings. Hundreds and thousands of people in the square jangling their keys. The sound meant, your time is up, go home, we're changing the locks. In a countries that had produced Kafka, the most famous work is about a man who could never find the right key to the right door. The revolution was literally the sound of keys. And it's beautifully ironic, it's beautifully humorous, but also incredibly strong. And then November 24, Alexander Dubke, the reform leader of the Prague Spring, who had spent 21 years in political exile, appeared on the balcony of the Melon Trich publishing house overlooking the square. The crowd's response shook the building. Marta Kubasova then appeared on the same balcony. She had not performed publicly in 21 years. She sang Prayer for Marta. 300,000 people in the square. Square sang and wept with her. 21 years of silence. One song. 300000 people weeping in a square. The song and the theaters were open. November 27, there was a two hour general strike. Approximately 75% of the Czechoslovak workforce participated. And by December 10, a government of national understanding was sworn in. For the first time since 1948. Communists were in the minority. December 29, the Federal assembly elected Vaclav Havel president of Czechoslovak. The same parliament that had maintained the communist system elected a playwright who had spent four years in prison for signing a piece of paper about human rights. 42 days. Timothy Garten Ash, the British historian who was physically present in Prague during the revolution, who sat in those theater basements and the square, watched it happen, published the magic lantern in 1990. It remains the best eyewitness account. He describes how after the revolutions succeeded. Havel told him, in Poland it took 10 years, in Hungary it took 10 months, in East Germany 10 weeks. Perhaps in Czechoslovakia it will take 10 days, it took 42. But still, Havel served as president until 2003. He died in 2011 and he remains as far as I can see the only head of state in modern history who was also an actively producing playwright. When he wrote speeches, he revised them the way he revised plays. He thought about the language. He thought about what it means to say what you mean in public. Public. And he spent his whole adult life practicing that. And I would highly recommend, if you're interested in this story, the. The Magic Lantern is. Is a really, really good read. All right, here's my last story. We're going to go back to South America. 1977. Until now, the mothers of Plaza de Mayo, Argentina. 1976. Military junta under General Jorge Rafael Videla seized power on March 24 and coup. The US government was aware of the coup in advance and did not act to prevent it, though declassified State Department cables released in stages through the 90s and 2000s, so similar to the same cables with in Chile where we were actually supporting a coup, show that Secretary of State Henry Kissinger met with Argentine Foreign Minister Cesar Augusto Gucetti in June of 1976 and assured him that the U.S. government hoped the new junta would be able to, quote, restore normal political life. Quickly and explicitly declined to criticize the violence, though there doesn't seem to be any actual coordination or support in this instance. What followed was the Guerra Susia, the Dirty War, a systemic state terrorism campaign against leftists, union organizers, student activists, journalists, priests, human rights workers, and anyone the junta designated as subversive. Sound familiar? Again, the US is being like, I, I hope you succeed. I hope you put in a reasonable government. We support you. Like we're not going to support you in person, but like we're here for you in spirit, thoughts and prayers. And then what follows is the. The people that the Henry Kissinger is like, yep, we're on your side. Go, go, you guys. Attacks who? Leftists, union organizers, student activists, journalists, priests, human rights workers, and anyone that they decided was subversive. People were abducted. They were taken from their homes at night, from their workplaces, on the street by plainclothes intelligence and military units. They were taken to approximately 30, 340 clandestine detention centers across Argentina where they were tortured and killed. Many were loaded unconscious onto military aircraft and thrown into the Rio de la Plata or the South Atlantic. That's fun. They were called the Vuelos de la Muerte, the Death Flights. Navy officer Adolfo Sklengo confessed to participating in these flights in a 1995 interview with journalist Horatio Verbitsky, later published as the Flight Confessions of an Argentine Dirty Warrior. The CONADEP Commission, the Commission Nacional so La Desparacion de Personas, Argentina's Truth Commission, documented 8,960 disappearances in its 1984 report. Report NUNCA Mass never again. Human rights organizations, including the mothers themselves, estimate the actual number that disappeared at 30,000. We may never have a final accounting similar to many other truth commissions like South Africa's. We will probably never have the real numbers. But the story here is that In April of 1977, a group of mothers began going to government offices looking for information about their missing children. They went to police stations, the Interior Ministry, the military courts, Catholic Church, whose leadership under Archbishop Adolfo Tortolo had largely blessed the junta's mission. Again, the church is like, sure, buddy, go ahead, attack these leftists and union workers who want workers rights and these, these gosh darn students that protest and. And sure, go ahead. It's crazy. It's again, when you look through history, always look at who's a tar, who's targeting dissenters with violence, who's targeting people that advocate for labor rights and human rights. But especially look out for the people who target universities. They'll call them bastions of indoctrination, leftist ideology. No, they're bastions of thought. And when you can think, authoritarianism and totalitarianism doesn't really work work. But especially when they target student protesters and act like those students are the problem. It is a almost copy paste. It doesn't matter if it's fascism, communism, any kind of authoritarianism or totalitarianism, religious totalitarianism. They always target educational systems and students. On April 30, 1977, these. So these mothers go to every office they can find to try to find their missing kids. The doors get slammed in their faces. They. They weren't given anything, no information whatsoever. On April 30th of 1977, 14 women gathered in the Plaza de Mayo, the main public square in Buen Arees, directly in front of the Casa Rosada, which is the presidential palace. They were there because they had run out of anywhere else to go. And they started walking, literally walking in circles around the central obelisk of the plaza. Because gathering was illegal under the Hunt's public order statutes. But walking was not considered gathering, bothering. So they walked and then they came back the next day and the next Thursday after that. Every Thursday they would walk and walk and walk so they wouldn't get arrested for loitering. Loitering is a way, by the way, to. To penalize poor people or to reduce people from talking and meeting and collaborating and building community. They Wore white head scarves, panuelos blancos made originally from diapers. Because they're looking for their kids. Kids white for their children. They began stitching the names of the disappeared onto the fabric. They called themselves the Madres de Plaza de Mayo. The Junta called them Las Locas de la Plaza, the Crazy Women of the Plaza. Because when women are doing something and demanding accountability, what do they call you? Crazy witch. And those are the four they're going to go for. They called them lunatics. These people are crazy. When a system can't argue with what you're doing, or a person can't argue with what you're doing, or they can't arrest you for it. In the case of a system system, they question your mental state. Well, you're just insane, tedious. Obviously they were mothers asking where their children were. I can't. I think the state's response was insane. What happened next shows in a special type of ruthlessness, Asuchena Villaflor de Vicente, one of the founding 14, organized and recruited and planned strategy. On December 10th of 1977, eight months after she started walking, she was disappeared, abducted by the regime she had organized against. So were two French nuns, Leone Duquette and Alice de Bord Dumont, who had begun meeting with mothers and assisting them. All three were ultimately victims of a death flight. Their bodies, weighted with concrete, were submerged in the Rio de la Plata. They were identified through DNA analysis decades later, ESW remains were identified in 2005. Even with those disappearances, the mothers continued to walk. The next Thursday and the Thursday after that, they broke open the first human rights trials against the junta's leadership, which began in 1985 and resulted in the convictions of of the Videla and other commanders on crimes against humanity. They pressured, sued, organized and refused to stop. When subsequent governments passed amnesty laws in the late 1980s to try to close the books, Argentina's Supreme Court struck down those amnesty laws in 2003, largely because of sustained civil society pressure. The mothers had helped build the Grandmothers of the Plaza de Mayo. Abuelas de la Plaza de Mayo split off a separate organization focused on a specific horse horror. Children born to disappeared mothers while in captivity had been taken and given to military families or regime sympathize. Sympathizers raised under false identities, told they were orphans or adopted. They just trafficked these kids that were born to these mothers in captivity. And it again, it makes me think of what's going on with ice. We've got a bunch of teenage girls that are getting pregnant while in Detention. They're being raped by ICE officers. Move to Texas so they don't have to provide abortion. Sectioned off from the rest of the community. And we have no idea where those babies are going. None. We have no idea where those babies are. We have no idea what is happening to the babies born to mothers in detention. This is happening here, right now. The Abuelas built a DNA database in partnership with geneticists from around the world. The National Genetic Data bank, established in 1987. One of the first forensic DNA DNA investigation system systems in history. Identification system, sorry. And they began finding these stolen grandchildren. As of recent counts, they have identified 136 restituted grandchildren. Some of these people are in their 40s and 50s. Learning who they actually are and who killed their parents. In 2004, the Navy Mechanics school, the Escuela de Mechanical de la Armand Ramada, the largest clandestine detention and torture center in Argentina, was converted into a museum of memory and human rights. The conversion was announced by President Nestor Kirchner On March 24th of 2004, the 28th anniversary of the coup. Largely due to sustained advocacy by the mothers and the grandmothers. It opened in 2007. Asochena Villaflores, remains identified through DNA. In 2005 were interred at the Plaza de Mayo itself. The square where she walked. Where she was last seen. Where her companeras walked after she was taken. Taken. She was buried. Where she resisted. These women were ordinary people. Housewives, moms. These women had never been political organizers. They had no legal standing, no political power, no protection, no financial resources. They wore white head scarves made from the diapers of the children they were trying to find. And every Thursday afternoon they showed up and they walked. They walked together in public, week after week, when the regime wanted them isolated, silent and dead. Dead. Joy. Community that in person meeting. A hug, a song, a dance. Defiance as community. The refusal to grieve alone, to laugh with another woman in the midst of your grief. The insistence that their love for their children was not going to be administered out of existence by a government that preferred they disappear to. They changed the political reality of their country. And they're a model for human rights movements worldwide. And they still walk. They still walk. 73 BCE until now, every example we looked at today, the communal meals and the catacombs, the rent parties in Harlem, the song festivals, the free concerts, the Passover cedar, their infrastructure. They're not reward. It's not escapism. You're not being naive. You're not putting your head in the sand. It Maintained networks. It preserved identities, humanity, hope. It keeps identity intact in systems that try to erase it. How much of what we hear right now about what men and women should or shouldn't do is about homogenizing us into copy and paste of each other? How boring is that? Joy is not what you do after the Resistance. It's part of how the Resistance survives. The communities that kept cultural life, kept the songs, the dinners, the gatherings, were the same communities that networks were intact when the moment to act directly arrived. The reason those military resistances throughout history have worked was because of the communities and the networks that existed. Denmark in 1943 evacuated 7,000 people in two weeks because of communal culture. So what. What do. What do you do with this? And again, these are ordinary people. They're moms and artists and laborers and playwrights. You find your people and you show up not only to the protest, to the dinner, to the concert, to the thing that's beautiful, to the community that you built. In quieter times, the first takeaway from this is that joy is the infrastructure. Not the tape, not the decoration. Takeaway two is that culture outlasts force. The Nazis banned jazz. Victor. Victor Hara's music was banned for 17 years. The Soviets spent 50 years trying to neutralize the Estonian Song festival. Rome lined 130 miles of road with crosses to make sure everybody was afraid of afraid. None of it worked. The songs live. We remember them. The names survive. The documents buried in milk cans under a burning ghetto is now a world Heritage site, a history that we have. Empires invest so heavily in cultural erasure precisely because they understand culture is harder to kill than people. Who we are is harder to kill than our human body is. The names and the songs and the rituals carry the memory of what resistance looks like. It gives hope for the future. Future. So what do you do with this takeaway? Culture outlast force. You make things, you record things, you document what's happening. I had a few people message me not too long ago, and they're like, well, I'm. I'm disabled. I. I can't go to protests. I don't know how to help. Journal. Journal. Write what you see, what you hear, what you experience. Write it down. Takeaway number three. The brutality of the response is a measure of the throat threat. The Paris Commune lasted 72 days. The government's response killed somewhere between 10 and 15,000 people. Spartacus's revolt lasted two years. Rome lined 130 miles of road. The Warsaw ghetto fighters held a neighborhood for 28 days. The SS burned the entire District to the ground. The violence of the response is not evidence of the futility of resistance. It is evidence of how threatening the resistance actually is. Systems that feel genuinely secure do not respond with mass slaves slaughter. They do not respond with stripping you of your rights. They do not respond with with assassinations. They do not respond with control systems that feel secure. Don't ban a dead man's songs for 17 years. So what do we do? We don't mistake cruelty of leaders for strength. A government that responds to mothers walking in circles with abduction and death flights is not a government that feels in control. A government that won't take accountability for sending the wrong man to seot in El Salvador is not a secur government. It is an insecure one. Disproportionate responses reveal fear. Takeaway number four the failure stories the stories that didn't end the way the movies end still changed history. Yeah, Spartacus was crucified. The Paris Commune ended massacred. Victor Hara was shot 44 times. But Spartacus influenced 2000 years of labor theory and revolutionary thought. The Paris Commune gave the socialist movement its political vocabulary and organize the framework. The reason that Europe has democratic socialist government now, where people have health care and education and quality of life and paid vacation and paid family leave is in large part because of the Paris Commune. What we call failure is often specific outcome of a much longer story. The people who were there could not see what their action would eventually become, but they did it anyway. And they gave something better to their kids. Kids, don't forget the Lakota proverb that we do not inherit the world from our parents. We borrow it from our children. So what do we do with that? Well, we don't wait for guaranteed outcome outcomes. We don't let the possibility of losing losing stop us from doing what's the right thing. We may not get to see what the future looks like, but I will. I will tell you what the future will look like. And it may not be in my lifetime. We will have in this country country health care and education and equality and equity and female leadership. It will happen. Maybe not in my lifetime, but I'm going to fight for it anyway. And the last takeaway is this. Ordinary people made this history. Fishermen rode families across a cold strait in the dark to take them to Sweden. Mothers sewed names on their diapers and walked in circles. Students jangled keys in a public square and a singer stepped onto a balcony. After 21 years of enforced silence, a 23 year old historian buried documents in milk cans. None of them were armies or governments or had special training or institutional power. They had community, they had culture. They had courage and the simple willingness to show up together in their full humanity. This is the scale at which ordinary people can change history when they act together. And what we do with this is we're not waiting for someone extraordinary to arrive and lead. There will be leaders, right? There will be leaders to rally behind, behind. But we don't wait for them to get there. We are all ordinary people doing what ordinary people have always done. And all that means is we show up, we sing. It may mean walking in circles. It may mean documenting what's happening around us. They rode across the straight in the dark and they set a table the night before the battle. And I'm not going to end by telling you it's easy. Crazy. Some of the people died for what they did. Some of the people died before they saw what it would mean. They didn't see freedom. Some are still walking on Thursday afternoons. The world is still complicated and dangerous. And America especially feels more uncertain than it ever has in my lifetime. But we can be honest about where we are and still sing and eat together, throw parties. Maybe we'll start organizing rent parties here in the US for the cost of living. We have the opportunity when we see what we really are, where we really are, we can build a better future. We can build a better future. We have been indoctrinated so much in this country to radical individualism, bootstraps mentality. Americans for the first time get the opportunity to see what community can do. And I would challenge you to flip the table around rugged individualism, around your tax dollars giving you something back, around governments changing, around equity, quality of life. Challenge your thoughts. You may circle back to that thought and say, you know what? I still believe the same thing I believed before. But now you're certain. Thank you for spending this time with me today. I know this episode was on the longer side and in the show notes, I'm also going to give some book recommendations. If there are some of these stories you'd like to read more about, some that gave you hope, please share this with someone you think might need that hope. And as always, keep flipping tables. Sam.