1921 -- USSR: Kronstadt falls to the Bolshevik military assault under the direction of Beloved & Respected Comrade Leader Trotsky, who boasted he would "shoot them like pigeons". There is a great slaughter when the island is taken. To the end of his life he continued defending his actions, as Kenneth Rexroth notes, in a dispute with Victor Serge he continued dispensing Bolshevik lies. 1948 -- Cyberpunk author William Gibson lives, Conway, South Carolina. Gibson left the US for Canada when he was 19 to avoid the draft for the Vietnam War. The cyberpunks are Vietnam era, as +punks;, & identify with grunts vs. officers. Cyberpunk is a kind of sf sub-genre; its works are set in a computer-driven, high-tech near-future & feature low-life protagonists interacting in hard-boiled detective type plots. 1968 -- England: In London, at the largest Vietnam antiwar march in Britain to date, 25,000 people attempt to storm the American Embassy at Grosvenor Square. US apparently refuses to recognize their passports. Ninety-one police casualties. 1968 -- US: Yippies announce at a press conference they will sponsor a "Festival of Life" in Chicago during the upcoming Democratic Convention. 1871 -- France: Paris Commune begins. Starts as resistance to occupying German troops & betrayal by big bourgeois. 1,000 women successfully blockade cannons. The Commune is the first real experiment in worker self-management, occurring with the sympathetic cooperation of the petty bourgeoisie. "The Commune was the biggest festival of the 19th century..." --- Debord, Kotanyi & Vaneigem, "Theses on the Paris Commune", March 18, 1962. http://www.bopsecrets.org/SI/Pariscommune.htm http://flag.blackened.net/revolt/talks/paris.html 1894 -- Egypt: The newspaper, Al-Hilal, reports the arrest of a Greek worker in Alexandria for distributing "anarchist leaflets". The leaflets call for workers to celebrate the anniversary of the Paris Commune. 1918 -- US: Mexican anarchist Ricardo Flores Magsn is arrested for the final time on March 18, 1918 under the Espionage Act. Ricardo died in prison under highly suspicious circumstances, supposedly of a "heart attack," but at the hands of prison guards, according to Chicano inmates who rioted & killed his principal "murderer," (Gsmez Quiqones, pp. 68-69). 1918 -- US: Dr. Ben Reitman begins his six-month prison sentence in Cleveland for his Jan. 1917 conviction for distributing birth control information. Just one of many visits to jail he endures over the years for practising "free speech" in America. http://www.infoshop.org/texts/no_regrets.html 1937 -- Spain: Battles in Guadalajara (March 8 through 18) end in victory for the Republican forces (the International Brigades & a division controlled by the anarchist Cipriano Mera). http://recollectionbooks.com/bleed/sinners/MeraCipriano.htm 1947 -- Mikhael Guerdjikov (1877-1947) dies. Bulgarian militant involved in the Macedonian liberation movement, & editor numerous papers. His burial was the last gathering of Bulgarian anarchists for many years. http://www.eskimo.com/~recall/bleed/sinners/MikhaelGuerdjikov.htm 1953 -- US: In response to an investigation by Beloved & Respected Comrade Leader Senator Joseph McCarthy, the State Department barred from its overseas information libraries the works of all authors whose loyalty to the US was "suspect." Books by such writers as Franklin P. Adams, John Dewey, Edna Ferber, Dashiell Hammett, Theodore White, Edmund Wilson, & even Beloved & Respected comrade Leader Secretary Dulles' own cousin Foster were thus withdrawn; some were publicly burned. 1959 -- US: On or about March 18, 1959, Big Table, Incorporated, Chicago, Illinois, the Mailer in this proceeding, deposited for mailing in the Chicago Post Office several hundred copies of its publication Big Table 1. The issue was seized by the post office as being unsuitable. http://www.poetrycenter.org/usps.htm 1970 -- US: F***?: Country Joe McDonald is convicted for obscenity & find $500 for leading a crowd in his infamous Fish Cheer ("Gimmie an F..!") at a concert in Massachusetts. http://www.countryjoe.com/ 1972 -- US: Congressional study announces that the income gap in the US between the richest 20% & the poorest 20% has doubled in the past 20 years (since 1952).
