Can't Get You Out of My Head 1x2

1. Have you ever been to a labour exchange?

2. You know, the last time I went there,

3. I was paid my money by a Sikh.

4. A Sikh, sitting there with his turban and a bangle

5. on his hand.

6. Now, I was three years with the Indian army in India.

7. I was three years in India in civilian life.

8. Erm, I got on well with Sikhs, Hindus,

9. the whole lot of them.

10. But to walk into a British labour exchange

11. and find you're being paid out your money by a Sikh...

12. These are the people, that in my small way, I helped train

13. and educate...

14. .. erm... To go into labour exchange is not

15. a very edifying experience at all.

16. You know, you change into your old clothes to go

17. to the labour exchange, you know?

18. But you've got to go.

19. Edgar Mittelholzer had come to England in the 1950s

20. from British Guiana.

21. But he had become a best-selling novelist.

22. What Mittelholzer wrote about was violence...

23. .. the violence and the racism that had been at the heart

24. of the European empires.

25. Mittelholzer believed that it still haunted the minds

26. of those who had ruled the empires.

27. One of his most famous stories, My Bones and My Flute,

28. is about a group of colonialists who travel up a river

29. into the jungle in Guyana.

30. They're searching for the remains of a giant slave rebellion

31. in the past, guided by an old manuscript.

32. But anyone who reads the manuscript starts to hear the distant sound

33. of a flute...

34. .. and they change.

35. They become possessed by something that is reaching out

36. from the jungle and working its way into their minds.

37. It is the anger and the fear of the slave owner who put

38. down the rebellion.

39. And it will not let them escape.

40. And Mittelholzer himself became angry with England.

41. He saw it as a decaying, corrupted country.

42. I feel we've reached the stage, you know, when we have become

43. so soft, you know, so effete, in other words,

44. so effete, that we feel that, well, even criminals...

45. .. erm, must be mollycoddled.

46. And you feel so strongly that you are prepared to go

47. as far as to say that... Yes. .. there are human beings

48. who should be categorised as vermin.

49. As vermin, exactly, quite.

50. Anyone who is guilty of violence on the human person and property,

51. should be considered as human vermin, and eradicated.

52. I know it's a rather, it's a violent thing to advocate,

53. but I can't see any other cure to the crime problem.

54. Every evening, he sat with his wife in his house in Surrey,

55. listening to the music of Wagner.

56. Until one night, Mittelholzer walked up the hill by his house,

57. poured paraffin over himself...

58. .. and set himself alight.

59. He burned to death.

60. The anger and the fear had reached out to the colonised too.

61. In 1966, engineers monitoring Chinese television

62. from a mountain in Hong Kong, began to realise that something unusual

63. was happening in Beijing.

64. China was sealed off from the rest of the world.

65. But what they saw were hundreds of thousands of people streaming

66. in from other cities and the countryside.

67. By August 11th, 1.5 million people had assembled

68. in Tiananmen Square.

69. Most of them were students or schoolchildren.

70. Then, Mao Zedong appeared on the balcony above them.

71. Mao Zedong and his wife, Jiang Qing, had unleashed

72. a new force in China.

73. These were what Mao called, "The little devils of youth."

74. He told them that they were going to save the revolution.

75. Their job was to go and seek out the demons and the monsters

76. who were corrupting the revolution.

77. "No-one should be safe," he said, "They should all be torn

78. "down and smashed to pulp."

79. The new revolutionaries gave themselves a name,

80. the Red Guards.

81. Jiang Qing now had great power.

82. She saw herself as equal to Mao.

83. But she was convinced that the threat to the revolution

84. also came from inside people's minds.

85. She knew that even though China had gone through a revolution,

86. little had changed inside the heads of millions of the people -

87. including those in power.

88. They still believed in a rigid hierarchy.

89. She had been scorned as a woman

90. by the other revolutionaries around Mao.

91. They had done anything they could to stop her.

92. Jiang Qing had rewritten old Chinese operas into epic melodramas

93. about the need to challenge and destroy the old order.

94. All the old figures of authority were banished.

95. Instead, the ordinary people, including women,

96. took centre stage.

97. They were performed to millions of young Red Guards,

98. and in talks before the performances,

99. Jiang Qing told the audience how what they were about to watch

100. were heroes awakening

101. and realising that they could take control.

102. Till today, I still vividly remember the first time

103. I saw the revolutionary play.

104. I was about 14 or 13 years old...

105. .. and there was a rush of emotion, of identity.

106. I was so excited.

107. Suddenly...

108. I saw those plays after Jiang Qing's talk that night.

109. And suddenly what she was saying made sense to me,

110. that there was a fundamental difference

111. between the revolutionary art and the traditional art.

112. There was something in the play

113. about the working-class emotions and working-class world outlook,

114. and just the flamboyance of the working-class figure

115. on stage, moved me.

116. That is my society. That's my life.

117. That's the people I see. That's the people I live with.

118. And they're on stage.

119. Mao and Jiang Qing suspended all schools and universities,

120. which released 120 million students,

121. who were then sent out to find and destroy

122. the demons that were hiding among those in authority.

123. Our teachers were often paraded through the streets,

124. and we made them chant, "I'm a demon, I'm a devil.

125. "I deserve to die."

126. That's the song, and they had to sing it.

127. And they all sang.

128. Whoever didn't, got beaten up - some very badly.

129. We used our belts to whip them.

130. Some people used sticks.

131. And the mother of this teacher was pushed over a bridge

132. and fell to her death.

133. Horst Mahler had been born in what was now East Germany.

134. His father had been a fervent Nazi and an anti-Semite.

135. In 1945,

136. his family fled across Germany from the approaching Red Army.

137. Then his father committed suicide.

138. Mahler grew up in West Berlin,

139. and everything was buried.

140. Bitte, alle aussteigen.

141. In 1964, Mahler joined a new group called the APO -

142. the Extra-Parliamentary Opposition.

143. They knew that many of those in charge of the country

144. had been senior members of the Nazi Party.

145. But no-one talked about it.

146. They wanted to expose the Nazi crimes of those in charge...

147. .. and challenge their control of the country.

148. There was the memory knocking at the door,

149. and we asked our parents and our grandfathers,

150. "What did you do all this time?

151. "Did you resist or had you been a little Nazi?

152. "Or had you been an opportunist?"

153. And...

154. .. this discussion was blocked by the elder generation.

155. And so it became hostile.

156. The student movement was astonished by the violent reaction

157. of the German government.

158. And Horst Mahler and other radicals began to think that the problem

159. was far deeper than just individual Nazis.

160. That maybe the whole Nazi system had also survived...

161. .. and was hiding behind the facade of modern capitalism.

162. They argued that the very system of industrial rationality

163. and bureaucratic control that had made the Nazi state

164. so efficient, had simply mutated.

165. It had been taken up by the victors -

166. above all by America -

167. and was now being used to run the new global capitalism

168. and the multinational corporations

169. that were ruthlessly exploiting what was called the Third World.

170. Anything that stood in the system's way was bombed or burnt...

171. .. with weapons created by the same rational industrial techniques

172. that made the mass-consumer goods.

173. But the people in the West couldn't see this,

174. because they have been led into a dream world

175. that used mass consumerism and sexualized imagery

176. to entrance and distract everyone.

177. Und zauberhaft schon.

178. Die randlosen Strumpfhosen...

179. In reality, it was an iron cage

180. designed to look like an open and free welfare state -

181. a full state of peace that was built really on horror and war.

182. We were convinced that our situation here,

183. the welfare state...

184. ..is only possible - and a result -

185. - by the exploitation of the Third World.

186. And we said we must disturb this peace,

187. this false peace in our country

188. in order to show the responsibility of us,

189. that it is our task to implement sabotage

190. in the centres of imperialism.

191. Hey, black power.

192. What's the reaction to your arrest, Mr Brown?

193. Of course, racist America has done it again.

194. But that's not going to end the burning in Detroit, brother,

195. because we built the country up and we'll burn it down,

196. honkies and all.

197. Mr Brown, did you tell them to burn down that school?

198. Be serious, I ain't got to tell black folks what to burn.

199. Did you tell them to shoot Lady Bird?

200. Did I tell them to burn down Detroit?

201. Did I tell America to bring black people here?

202. Did you tell them to shoot at Lady Bird?

203. I say, if they give me a gun and tell me to shoot my enemy,

204. I might shoot you.

205. Where have you been since the other night, Mr Brown? OK, let's go.

206. Oh, well.

207. Nonviolence is OK,

208. but you get nowhere with nonviolence.

209. I like violence.

210. Malcolm X started but didn't finish.

211. Malcolm X said, you know, the idea.

212. He rooted it in the minds of many blacks.

213. He really started the ball rolling.

214. You feel that violence is necessary in order to get rid of...

215. .. what you would call the oppression?

216. It wouldn't get rid of it.

217. But it will open, you know, some of whiteys eyes to say,

218. "Well, you know, we're not joking.

219. "We really mean what we say."

220. Do you find yourself really hating white people?

221. Hm, yes.

222. Some people hold grudges, and I do.

223. Look how they treat...

224. How many floors did my great-grandmother scrub, you know?

225. How many babies did she take care of that weren't hers?

226. You know, stuff like that.

227. And I'm just one of those people that holds things.

228. Alice Faye Williams had been born in North Carolina.

229. She had run away from home when she was young

230. because she was frightened of her violent father,

231. and she came to New York when she was 15.

232. She managed to get a place to study at the School of Performing Arts.

233. Then, one day, on 125th Street in Harlem,

234. she listened to a speech by Bobby Seale,

235. one of the leaders of the Black Panthers.

236. The Black Panthers believed that the only way to stop racism

237. in America was for black people to get power.

238. Simply changing the law was not enough.

239. The anger and the fear remained hidden away

240. in millions of people's minds.

241. The solution was Black Power,

242. and the first person to articulate this

243. was Stokely Carmichael

244. on a civil rights march in Mississippi

245. on one day when the more moderate Martin Luther King was absent.

246. So I just made a speech building up to it,

247. building up, building up, building up,

248. showing that it wasn't a question of morality.

249. It wasn't a question of being good or bad.

250. It was simply a question of power,

251. and the way black people had no power,

252. and we had to have some power.

253. Only type of power we could have is Black Power.

254. Black Power.

255. We want Black Power.

256. We want Black Power.

257. We want Black Power. Black Power!

258. We want Black Power. We want Black Power.

259. We want Black Power. Black Power!

260. We want Black Power. Black Power!

261. That's right, that's what we want, Black Power.

262. They responded immediately, in a healthy manner.

263. Dr King came back the next day,

264. but it was too late then.

265. Black Power had been established.

266. Alice Williams decided to join the Black Panthers.

267. She became a member of a new chapter that had been set up in Harlem,

268. and she changed her name to Afeni Shakur.

269. She later explained what the Panthers meant for her.

270. "For the first time," she said, "there was now something I could do

271. "with all this aggression and all this fear inside me.

272. "The Panther Party at that time took my rage

273. "and channelled it against THEM,

274. "instead of against us.

275. "They educated my mind and gave me direction.

276. "And with that direction came hope."

277. We want justice! We want justice!

278. There's a line in there, now. Fucking get her out of here.

279. I'm trying.

280. Watch out behind you now.

281. You men! He's trying to...

282. See anybody?

283. Oh, there were...

284. I saw in the precinct a number of men and women

285. being brought in.

286. I had contact with some of the women

287. when we were in the precinct,

288. and they were also beaten.

289. Some had black eyes, some had swollen lips and so forth.

290. And from what most of them said, they were just walking

291. along the street and most of them were pushed or hit with a club.

292. And when they protested the fact that they were being hit

293. for nothing, then they were beaten and arrested.

294. We teach children that the policeman is a friend.

295. In Harlem, however - although I know that there are policemen

296. who are friendly and kind and decent and fair -

297. this type of policeman is a rare thing.

298. Eh?

299. You don't scare me, mate.

300. I do shows in aid of people like you.

301. Michael de Freitas had been a gangster.

302. He had worked as an enforcer

303. for the notorious slum landlord Peter Rachman.

304. But now he wanted to be a revolutionary.

305. Then, one day, he met

306. the American black leader Malcolm X,

307. who was on a tour of England.

308. They began to travel around the country together.

309. When they arrived in Birmingham, the hotel receptionist thought

310. that Michael de Freitas was Malcolm X's brother,

311. and he called him Michael X.

312. De Freitas decided that, in the future,

313. this was going to be his revolutionary name

314. and he was going to lead a revolution in Britain.

315. Michael X soon became famous.

316. I would hate to be described as a politician

317. because they are all such liars and thieves.

318. If I'm going to deal in the realms of that type of public relations,

319. I'd rather think of myself in terms of being a statesman,

320. which is an art that this country has long since forgotten,

321. like we have no statesmen today.

322. I'm probably the only one in the country.

323. Unfortunately, we find that the people of pale pigmentation

324. are people who are so barbaric - like, for instance, right now,

325. this country, which is run by those type of people,

326. have got more weapons of destruction

327. to create... to destroy the entire world.

328. And they are so savage, they are building even more.

329. You see, the British are such a strange people.

330. Many of Michael X's supporters were the young white radicals

331. who had moved into Notting Hill,

332. into the very houses that he and the gangster Peter Rachman

333. had run ten years before.

334. Because Michael was an outsider, the white radicals believed

335. that he could see the system for what it really was.

336. Like all revolutionaries before them,

337. they had tried to appeal to the white working class

338. and get them to rise up against the system.

339. But no-one seemed to be interested.

340. And what we've been talking

341. about here today is the problem of racialism

342. and the problem of the attack by the government

343. and by the employers on working people's conditions.

344. The radicals decided that this was because the ordinary people

345. had been brainwashed by the media and by consumerism

346. and turned into what their theory called one-dimensional creatures.

347. Which meant that they were the wrong kind of person

348. to start a revolution with.

349. Their whole mind is, you know, like a cabbage. They're suppressed,

350. they can't do exactly what they want,

351. they haven't got any freedom,

352. they haven't got any freedom to do exactly what they want

353. under the system. I mean, we certainly do. What is freedom?

354. Well, being able to express yourself in whichever way you feel is right.

355. But I think it's not only the system that's wrong.

356. I think it's the people that's wrong.

357. Would you be interested in working every night for me?

358. Um... Yes, possibly every night, yes.

359. Fine. Well, you know, if you do us well, we'll get the band to play it.

360. Anything in particular you'd like us to play?

361. Anything at all. Anything at all?

362. Would you? Yeah, if you'd like to come...

363. But one evening, after making a speech in Reading,

364. Michael X was arrested...

365. .. and he was sent to prison for ten months

366. for inciting racial hatred.

367. The MP Enoch Powell had also made a speech at the same time,

368. violently attacking immigrants.

369. He wasn't charged and he carried on being an MP...

370. .. which Michael X said rather proved his point

371. about the racism underlying the country.

372. YELLING, GUNSHOTS

373. I'm telling you! Don't make me come walking...

374. Certainly no-one is going to tell you not to think

375. what you honestly believe, but I think maybe...

376. .. maybe you should re-examine

377. a little bit the things that you believe, huh?

378. Think about it.

379. In the Cold War, the very idea of the individual

380. and how the individual self worked had become political,

381. because it was what defined the United States

382. against the collective ideology of Russia.

383. I think maybe...

384. .. maybe you should re-examine a little bit

385. the things that you believe, huh?

386. What concerned many psychologists, though,

387. was that the Second World War had revealed how frightening

388. and deceptive human beings could be.

389. Particularly in Nazi Germany,

390. where ordinary people, who had apparently been good citizens,

391. had indulged in the most terrible horrors.

392. And psychologists started to examine what really went on

393. inside people's minds,

394. trying to find ways of bypassing

395. the conscious explanations that humans gave,

396. because those explanations could be deceptive.

397. They wanted to find a way of getting directly

398. at what was going on inside the brain.

399. One of the key figures was a psychologist called

400. Dr Eckhard Hess.

401. He had begun his career recording and analysing

402. animal behaviour on film.

403. Now he did the same with human beings.

404. Dr Hess had discovered that the pupils in the eyes

405. of individuals reacted dramatically

406. when they were shown different kinds of images.

407. The changes had nothing to do with the changes in the light -

408. they came from within the human being.

409. And Dr Hess believed that they gave you a way of seeing

410. the hidden emotional responses that were going on inside the mind.

411. Feelings that the individual might not want to tell you about...

412. .. or even be aware of.

413. You were looking directly at the brain.

414. Really, since the...

415. .. the eye is very, very intimately a part of the brain,

416. embryologically and anatomically,

417. it is almost the same as though they were a piece of the brain

418. sticking out, behaving,

419. and all the world is there to be able to see it.

420. And if that's so, what ought to be reflected or mirrored

421. in the eye...

422. ..is really the behaviour of the brain.

423. Jiang Qing was now the most powerful woman in the world.

424. She was in charge of giant cohorts of Red Guards

425. that she'd guided and told who to attack and destroy.

426. High-up members of the Communist Party were seized

427. and paraded in front of tens of thousands of screaming people

428. and forced to confess to thought crimes

429. against the revolution.

430. If they didn't, they were beaten and killed.

431. But in reality, Jiang Qing had lost control.

432. The revolution had never really changed the structure of power

433. in China,

434. and what she and Mao Zedong had unleashed was a vast anger

435. and resentment against the elites that was now bursting out

436. and overwhelming the country.

437. In Beijing, there were mass killings,

438. with bodies being thrown down wells

439. or intercommunal burial pits.

440. In Shanghai, hundreds of those targeted by the Red Guards

441. committed suicide.

442. But Jiang Qing had become famous

443. in the West.

444. A feminist writer from America, called Roxane Witke,

445. came to Beijing to interview her.

446. But as she talked to Jiang Qing, Witke began to realise

447. that something else was also going on,

448. that Jiang Qing was using her new power

449. to avenge herself and all those who had dismissed her

450. or patronised her in the past.

451. Jiang Qing also had a demon inside her.

452. One of the main themes of her life was avenging herself against men

453. who wronged her - politically, mainly -

454. when she was in her 20s.

455. And she did not strike back against them

456. until the time of the Cultural Revolution,

457. some 20 years later.

458. They still had refused to give her access to the masses

459. and to allow her to work.

460. And she finally destroyed them.

461. How?

462. They were removed from their posts,

463. they were humiliated before the people,

464. placards were put over their chests,

465. they were dragged before the masses.

466. They were humiliated. They were destroyed.

467. Jiang Qing also turned on everyone who, in Shanghai in the 1930s,

468. had held her film career back.

469. Studio heads, directors

470. and journalists were dismissed and beaten up.

471. But the worst was saved for the film star Li Lili.

472. They had starred together in Bloodshed On Wolf Mountain.

473. Jiang Qing had always believed

474. that Li Lili had deliberately upstaged her.

475. Now, Li Lili and her husband were seized by Red Guards.

476. Jiang Qing ordered them to be tortured.

477. Li Lili survived...

478. .. but her husband couldn't bear it,

479. and he committed suicide.

480. We have warned every person in the world

481. not to visit Palestine

482. because Palestine is not a tourist attraction.

483. It's a battlefield,

484. and it is our land.

485. Anybody who'll get killed or injured in Palestine

486. would be carrying his own responsibility.

487. Horst Mahler and a group of other German revolutionaries

488. secretly went to a Palestinian training camp in Jordan.

489. They had decided to train in urban guerrilla warfare.

490. But things didn't go well from the very start.

491. One of the leaders of the group, Andreas Baader,

492. insisted on having mixed sleeping quarters.

493. Then the female members of the group started to sunbathe on the roof.

494. The commander of the camp told them to stop.

495. Overhead!

496. Baader argued with him.

497. The anti-imperialist struggle and sexual emancipation, he said,

498. must go hand in hand.

499. The commander refused.

500. Baader put it more bluntly.

501. "Fucking and shooting," he said, "are the same thing."

502. Then Horst Mahler found that the fedayeen fighters

503. in the camp had brought in pictures of Hitler.

504. They pointed at them and said, "Good man,"

505. because he had killed the Jews.

506. "That was very hard for us," Mahler later said,

507. "because we had a feeling of guilt about the Jews.

508. "We were very upset."

509. In the end, the Germans went on strike because they weren't

510. being given enough bullets each day to shoot with.

511. So the commander stormed their house and threw them out.

512. They came back to West Germany,

513. helped by the East German Stasi,

514. who saw it as a way of destabilising the West.

515. And the revolutionaries set out to use their training

516. to force the West German state to reveal its true fascist face.

517. Afeni Shakur was now a full-time member

518. of the Black Panther chapter in New York.

519. She was certain that the only solution in America

520. was violent uprising.

521. She spent her time writing poems calling for revolution.

522. But the problem was that she and many of the others

523. in her cell didn't know what to do to make this happen.

524. They watched enviously as other Black Panthers on the West Coast

525. fought running battles with the police and the military.

526. All we have to say is, all power to the people,

527. and you can jail a revolutionary

528. but you sure can't jail a revolution.

529. Baby, you're gonna have some dealing to do,

530. cos niggers ain't gonna stop until they either get freedom

531. or destroy everything that they run across.

532. The question of who to attack in New York

533. got more and more complicated.

534. Some of the Panthers argued that they should target the ruthless

535. landlords who made them live in rotting apartments,

536. and the bankers who refused to lend blacks money

537. so they could never escape from the slums.

538. These, they said, were the agents of imperialist control.

539. But in New York,

540. the majority of landlords and bankers were Jewish.

541. And we are being exploited by people who are not...

542. ..do not live in our colonies, you see, or in our communities,

543. who come into our communities and exploit us every day, you see,

544. and they take the money back to their communities.

545. So this is like a colonial imperialism

546. in all content, you see.

547. And the people who exploit us in our immediate communities,

548. particularly in New York City, are Zionist Jews.

549. Afeni Shakur's group came up with a plan.

550. They were going to plant bombs

551. in big department stores like Macy's...

552. .. and they would also bomb the Bronx Botanical Gardens

553. and attack local police stations.

554. But as they developed the plan, Afeni Shakur began to worry.

555. She didn't want to kill civilians...

556. .. and she felt they were being bullied into it

557. by one of their group.

558. He was one of the founder members of the cell,

559. whose revolutionary name was Yedwa Sudan.

560. And Afeni Shakur started to be suspicious.

561. She wondered if he might really be an undercover policeman.

562. Shakur told another member of the group about her suspicions,

563. who then went and confronted Yedwa Sudan.

564. Sudan immediately pulled out a gun,

565. fired two bullets into the table in front of him and denied it.

566. He said that Afeni Shakur

567. was just being a typical emotional woman.

568. And the group believed him, not her.

569. When Michael X came out of jail,

570. he found that the world had completely changed,

571. but not in the way he had hoped.

572. The middle-class radicals who, only a year before,

573. had been his most fervent supporters,

574. suddenly didn't want to know him any more.

575. In Notting Hill, no-one talked of violent revolution

576. or of bringing down the corrupt power structure.

577. Instead, a new group had turned up.

578. They looked like young radicals,

579. but they had a rather different agenda.

580. Hundreds of student volunteers from all over the country

581. had come to do a massive survey

582. of everyone who lived in Notting Hill.

583. It was the beginning of what was called community action.

584. They were going to use the data to create neighbourhood centres,

585. which they said would be a different way of empowering the local people.

586. Parts of Notting Hill are closed off

587. from the general mainstream of society,

588. treated differently from society,

589. sometimes treated as a social dustbin,

590. sometimes treated as a ghetto.

591. Hello.

592. Now, I think you've got...?

593. We've got the lighting, we pay for it ourself.

594. And you pay for it yourself? Yes, and the heating.

595. Cleaning. This doesn't really apply to you, this applies to

596. other people...

597. ..in other sorts of rented accommodations.

598. We do that ourselves. You do that yourself? Yes.

599. Also room service doesn't really apply either, I imagine.

600. No.

601. But soon, many of the local black residents who were involved

602. with the project resigned...

603. .. because power seemed to remain firmly with the white professionals.

604. And we go in, in an orderly fashion

605. and no damage to the property at all, please.

606. Well, what made me resign is because I don't think

607. that enough local people

608. were being involved, is it?

609. And by local people, I mean West Indians.

610. Students can't do much.

611. They're relegated to a role

612. of just getting information.

613. Isn't that worthwhile?

614. Well, I suppose it's worthwhile,

615. but it depends on how the information

616. will be used afterwards.

617. The aim of Black Power had been that people would organise

618. themselves so they could stand up against those who ruled them.

619. Michael X realised that what was happening now in Notting Hill

620. was the opposite.

621. People were being treated as subjects,

622. to be counted and measured...

623. .. and managed.

624. He became increasingly cynical about the liberals' real intentions.

625. These places always have fantastic space.

626. Oh, this is a tremendous place if you've got the money.

627. If you want to have a party or something. A party, yeah.

628. A few years ago, you were reported to have said

629. that whites who claim to help you

630. are out to kill you.

631. Do you, um, still believe that?

632. Yes.

633. I'm thinking, when I said that, I was referring to people

634. who are described as white liberals.

635. They are some of the most vicious

636. people I find in this country,

637. for the simple reason... Anywhere, not just in this country.

638. Because they're the kind of people who come to black neighbourhoods,

639. ostensibly to help black people.

640. Michael X had come to believe that the talk of revolution

641. had just been empty rhetoric that disguised something else.

642. The new groups might look like radicals

643. and dance to black music,

644. but really they were the children of the colonialists

645. who had run the Empire.

646. And they had no intention of giving up their power.

647. That old system of power was simply mutating,

648. morphing into a new form

649. that camouflaged itself in radicalism...

650. .. but still would manage and control.

651. Michael X was an ambitious man

652. who had badly wanted political power.

653. I don't see anything to be terrified about, about powerful black people.

654. I'm a pretty powerful black man.

655. I'm the most powerful black man in Europe.

656. But now he saw that he was never going to get it.

657. So he decided that he, too, would revert

658. to the old forms of power that he knew well -

659. extortion and violence.

660. He set up a new organisation called the Black House.

661. It deliberately excluded whites.

662. He still talked of violent revolution,

663. but really it was a front for taking over drug-dealing

664. in parts of London.

665. He also persuaded John Lennon and Yoko Ono, who had shaved

666. off their hair, to donate it and a large amount of money

667. to the Black House.

668. Michael X took the money and pocketed it for himself.

669. Michael was putting every single cent he could get in his own pocket.

670. He didn't care about black people.

671. What did they think of him in the end, when it failed?

672. Well, they thought he was just a cheap con man.

673. They... They...

674. .. lost faith in Michael

675. in the end,

676. but he was just playing his games, you know.

677. And why do you think he did that?

678. Because Michael doesn't

679. believe in Black Power.

680. Michael is just on a power trip

681. for, you know, for his own benefit.

682. Michael doesn't like black people

683. because Michael is half white.

684. In a short time, I'm going to ask you

685. to put your face up against that face piece and look in this box

686. while I ask you to solve some multiplication problems

687. in your head.

688. The problems will be relatively simple.

689. They'll give be given to you verbally,

690. and I will ask you to give me the answer verbally back.

691. Give me only the answer. Once you have given me the answer,

692. dismiss the problem from your mind and we'll go on to a next one.

693. Many psychologists had begun to take Dr Hess's experiments

694. with the pupils of the eye further.

695. They were fascinated by the idea that there might be other forces

696. inside the mind that people themselves weren't aware of.

697. One of them was a young psychologist studying

698. in America, called Daniel Kahneman.

699. His fascination with the complexity of the mind had come

700. from a moment of terror when he was a child,

701. living in Nazi-occupied France during the Second World War.

702. One day, he had been stopped by an SS officer.

703. Kahneman was a Jew,

704. and the SS was in charge of sending people to the death camps.

705. He was convinced that he was about to be sent away to be killed.

706. But the SS man picked him up, kissed him

707. and showed him pictures of his own son in Germany.

708. Kahneman decided that the human mind was very strange

709. and full of contradictory impulses.

710. 17 times 19.

711. Now, he, along with other psychologists

712. inspired by Dr Hess, studied the pupils in people's eyes

713. as they gave them all kinds of problems to solve

714. while distracting them with music and noise.

715. 223.

716. They were trying to probe further into the human brain,

717. to see how it responded to the world outside

718. in ways that the individual wasn't aware of.

719. But as Kahneman and the others watched the individuals

720. in their laboratories, isolated from the society outside,

721. they were led down a very strange path,

722. that in the age when the individual self was going to become

723. the central focus, from politics through to consumerism,

724. the scientists were going to come to the conclusion

725. that maybe the conscious self wasn't fully in control of what humans did.

726. 35 years later, Kahneman was going to be given the Nobel Prize

727. for a theory that began with his work in the 1960s.

728. He would come to believe that what we think of as the self

729. is really just a small part of something else

730. hidden inside our brains - a much larger part of the brain

731. that actually experiences the world outside.

732. But that experience makes no sense -

733. it is just an ongoing, chaotic rush of biochemical data

734. that flashes up and fades away.

735. And what humans think of as their self

736. is actually an accessory that tries to make sense

737. of this chaotic mass of incoming data.

738. But, to do that, it has to simplify

739. and turn that data into stories that are sometimes so simplified

740. that they bear little relationship to the reality outside.

741. It gives people the feeling that they are in control,

742. but that is just a comforting illusion.

743. Kahneman's theory was going to have far-reaching influence

744. beyond psychology.

745. Because the implication of what he was saying

746. was that you could never change people's behaviour

747. by appealing to them rationally.

748. And, in a strange way,

749. Kahneman was saying the same thing as the left-wing revolutionaries.

750. Human beings did live in a simplified dream world.

751. But what he was saying

752. was that there was nothing you could do about that.

753. And in an age of individualism,

754. when you could no longer order people about,

755. the only solution was to keep them in that dream world

756. and to make sure the dream world was safe and happy.

757. The idea of appealing to them rationally

758. and changing the world...

759. .. was pointless.

760. By now, China was in a state of almost civil war.

761. Different groups of armed Red Guards were fighting running battles

762. with each other in all the major cities.

763. But Jiang Qing still believed

764. that real power was almost within her grasp.

765. She had destroyed the one man who was seen as Mao's successor,

766. Liu Shaoqi.

767. Red Guards took Liu from his house,

768. and he was beaten up and imprisoned.

769. Everyone, including children,

770. were told that he, too, was a demon.

771. Then suddenly, Mao turned on Jiang Qing.

772. At a public meeting of those in charge

773. of the Cultural Revolution, he told her,

774. "You are someone who has grandiose aims

775. "but puny abilities,

776. "great ambition, but little talent."

777. Jiang Qing realised that she was being dropped.

778. In her operas, Jiang Qing had gone back into China's past.

779. Her aim had been to rework them, to express a new kind of revolution.

780. But, in reality, she had reawakened a dark and poisonous violence

781. that had lurked under the surface of China for hundreds of years.

782. It was driven by a resentment of the rigid hierarchies

783. that the revolution had not really changed.

784. Mao had not given her or anyone else guidance about what to do

785. with the fury that she had summoned up.

786. And now she knew why.

787. He had simply been using her - and the violence that she created -

788. as a way of destroying all opposition to him.

789. He had no other vision of how to solve the old divisions

790. and resentments in China.

791. His only aim had been to get rid of all his rivals in the party.

792. Jiang Qing had been betrayed yet again.

793. The members of the Red Army Faction were now planting bombs

794. and robbing banks all across West Germany.

795. They announced that they had now become Maoists,

796. followers of Mao Zedong,

797. and they were going to awaken the popular masses.

798. The government were desperate to capture them,

799. and they turned to a man who said he knew how to find them.

800. He was called Horst Herold.

801. He was the head of a tiny federal crime investigation unit.

802. It had no real power,

803. because any national police system was prohibited by law

804. to stop Nazism from ever re-emerging.

805. But Herold insisted that the only way

806. to catch the terrorists hidden in the cities

807. was to reintroduce control from the centre.

808. His solution was to use a computer,

809. because there was no law to stop that.

810. Working day and night inside a protected complex,

811. Herold created a giant computer network

812. that monitored the movements of millions of people.

813. He also fed into the computer vast amounts of data,

814. not just about the terrorists themselves,

815. but others who, in his words, represented a danger -

816. individuals the data showed might become terrorists in the future.

817. From all this, Herold created what he called logical sequences -

818. patterns drawn from the data

819. that predicted where the terrorists might be hiding in the cities.

820. What he had invented was a new rational bureaucracy,

821. working from the centre, in which information was control.

822. It was the start of mass electronic surveillance.

823. And it caught the terrorists.

824. But Horst Herold was not just an unthinking technocrat.

825. By studying all the data, he had, he believed, come to understand

826. that the terrorists were just a tiny part of something much bigger

827. that was happening all across the world -

828. something that those in power did not yet comprehend.

829. And, in 1973, he made an extraordinary speech

830. that laid out the world that he saw coming.

831. The violence and the horror that the terrorists created, he said,

832. did not just happen because of something evil or sick

833. inside their heads.

834. It was a reaction to the new system of power

835. that was rising up across the world.

836. It was the system that the radicals had identified in the 1960s -

837. the new global networks of multinational corporations

838. and international finance

839. that they believed were ruthlessly exploiting the world.

840. If you want to get rid of the terrorism, Herold said,

841. there are two alternatives.

842. You either use political power

843. to change and reform that global system.

844. Or you decide to systematically control the people,

845. and their anger and their discontent.

846. But, to do that, you would have to create surveillance networks

847. like the one he had built, but on a global scale.

848. In Notting Hill, all the politics had gone.

849. The counterculture had transformed completely

850. into a new kind of consumerism, with self-expression at its heart.

851. Michael X left London in disgust and he went back to Trinidad.

852. He moved into a large house hidden away in the suburbs.

853. He said that he was going to set up a new radical organisation

854. called the University of the Alternative,

855. but it was clear that he was in a manic state of mind

856. and increasingly paranoid.

857. Then, one night, the compound burned down,

858. and Michael X disappeared.

859. The police found a hidden grave in the garden.

860. In it was the body of one of Michael X's last disciples,

861. Gale Benson, the daughter of a conservative MP.

862. She had discovered that Michael X's real plan was to grow marijuana

863. and export it to the United States,

864. so he had ordered a group of his men to kill her.

865. He told one of them, Steve Yeates,

866. that she was an undercover agent from the CIA.

867. She was seized from behind and stabbed several times

868. across the body with a knife.

869. She was struggling very violently.

870. And Steve Yeates, who wasn't even supposed to be part

871. of this particular operation, became impatient.

872. He grabbed a cutlass,

873. which in these parts is a long knife used for cutting sugar cane,

874. and plunged it straight into her neck.

875. Well, that was the fatal blow.

876. The men then piled stones on top of her

877. and filled in the rest of the grave.

878. Sometime later, Malik phoned the house to see what the situation was,

879. and Steve Yeates simply told him, "The tree is planted."

880. Michael X fled to Guyana.

881. He then headed south, away from the towns,

882. down a small trail, past mining camps.

883. His aim was to get to the river

884. and take a boat upriver into the jungle,

885. where he would be safe.

886. It was the same jungle that Edgar Mittelholzer had described

887. in his story about the ghosts from the colonial past.

888. But there was one person who was about to show that,

889. even in the growing mood of paranoia and defeat,

890. an individual who believed in the idea of revolution

891. could take on the power of the state and defeat it.

892. One morning, armed police stormed into Afeni Shakur's apartment

893. and arrested her.

894. All the other members of her cell were also arrested.

895. They were charged with what the government said

896. was a giant plan to destroy "those elements of society,

897. "which the defendants call the power structure".

898. It included attacking police stations

899. and planning to bomb five large department stores

900. and the Bronx Botanical Gardens.

901. They became known as the Panther 21.

902. Their trial was held in a state of paranoia

903. about further attacks by the Panthers.

904. But it also caused a sensation

905. when it was revealed that three of the founding members of the group

906. had been undercover police officers.

907. What was stranger was that some of those officers

908. seemed to have been unaware that

909. there were other undercover agents in the cell.

910. They were also the most active members of the group.

911. "We had to organise everything,"

912. one of the undercover agents explained at the trial,

913. because everyone else in the group was off doing

914. what they called "their own shit".

915. The prosecution claimed that the group had been inspired

916. by violent revolutionary propaganda,

917. and in particular by the film The Battle Of Algiers,

918. made about the Algerian struggle against French colonialism.

919. They showed the film in the court.

920. Unlike all the other Panthers,

921. Afeni Shakur chose to defend herself,

922. and at the end of the trial,

923. she cross-examined the leading undercover agent.

924. He was the man she had suspected from the start,

925. Yedwa Sudan.

926. His real name was Ralph White.

927. A journalist who was in the courtroom

928. wrote a book that described what happened.

929. She started by getting White to admit

930. that, really, most of the inspiration for the plots

931. came from the undercover agents.

932. Not only had they continually pushed for the violence

933. and suggested the targets,

934. but they had also arranged to buy the dynamite

935. off yet another undercover agent.

936. They had also arranged for the cars to transport the dynamite.

937. That, really, the plot to attack America

938. had been created and driven by the American authorities.

939. But then Afeni Shakur went further.

940. She talked to White in the courtroom not as a police officer,

941. but as a comrade that she had spent 18 months with,

942. and asked him about the activism

943. that they had done together in the community.

944. He said that he thought what they had done

945. was "powerful, inspiring and," he said, "beautiful".

946. She asked if he had misrepresented the Panthers to his police bosses.

947. He said yes.

948. She asked if he had betrayed the community.

949. He said yes.

950. When the jury was sent out,

951. they talked for 40 minutes, came back

952. and acquitted all the defendants.

953. It was a powerful example

954. of how an individual could challenge those in power...

955. .. and win.

956. But, at the same time, the revelations at the trial

957. of how the Panthers had been penetrated and manipulated

958. fed the growing paranoia that was tearing the radical movement apart.

959. Violent by Tupac

960. All four - Jiang Qing, Afeni Shakur,

961. Michael X and the German revolutionaries

962. had all set out to try and confront their societies

963. and change the structure of power.

964. But all of them, in different ways, had unleashed violence

965. that was lurking underneath those societies.

966. The roots of that violence lay back in the past,

967. in anger and resentment against those in power

968. who had made their different countries rich and powerful,

969. but to do that had ruthlessly exploited others...

970. .. and had kept much of the spoils for themselves.

971. The violence had burst out in different ways

972. across whole societies, among groups,

973. and inside the revolutionaries' own heads.

974. But all of them became overwhelmed by the paranoia and suspicion

975. and the horror that resulted.

976. And all of them had failed in their aims.

977. Now, those in charge of the societies

978. wanted to get rid of that violence, to wipe it and hide it away.

979. And, in Germany, the revolutionaries were going to help them do it.

980. In 1976, two of the remaining German revolutionaries

981. helped Palestinians hijack an Air France plane.

982. They flew it to Entebbe, in Uganda.

983. What happened next shocked the world.

984. The terrorists took the hostages into the departure hall.

985. Then they began to separate the Israeli passengers

986. from the non-Israelis.

987. The Israelis were the ones who would be executed

988. if the plane was stormed.

989. To the other radicals, watching from inside prisons in Germany,

990. who dreamed of revolution,

991. it seemed as if those dreams had now led them

992. to behave exactly as the Nazis had done.

993. Was it frightening when you realised that that was happening?

994. Yeah, of course. Awfully frightening.

995. This... One of the main points in the development -

996. the awareness that we are from the same...

997. .. stuff as the fascists were.

998. We understood something,

999. we understood that fascism

1000. is a component in all of us.

1001. But we don't know how to handle this contradiction.

1002. We don't have any way to live with this evil part in ourselves.

1003. The Israelis mounted a rescue at Entebbe.

1004. The hostages were saved, but the terrorists were killed.

1005. But the Germans' behaviour in the hijack

1006. had an incredibly powerful effect on radicals and liberals

1007. all across the West.

1008. Three years before, the man who had been chasing the terrorists,

1009. Horst Herold, had argued that the violence

1010. did not just come from inside them...

1011. .. that they were reacting

1012. to something that was happening in the world.

1013. But now the revolutionaries and many of their supporters

1014. began to argue that maybe the violence was not in the system,

1015. it was inside them.

1016. A year later, a group of their supporters captured

1017. and killed a leading industrialist called Hanns Martin Schleyer.

1018. He had also been a leading Nazi in the war.

1019. At the same time,

1020. three of the leading revolutionaries killed themselves in prison.

1021. In an extraordinary moment, on one day in October 1977,

1022. two funerals were held in the same city, Stuttgart.

1023. One was for the revolutionaries.

1024. Hundreds of their supporters flooded into the cemetery,

1025. watched by 1,000 armed police.

1026. The other was for Hanns Martin Schleyer.

1027. The leaders of the industrial and financial establishment

1028. came together at a church in the centre of the city.

1029. It was a moment that dramatically symbolised what had happened.

1030. The industrialists and the bankers had come not just to mourn Schleyer,

1031. but to bury any idea of radical change in Germany.

1032. And, for the radicals, it was the moment after all the violence

1033. and all the failures when pessimism finally took hold.

1034. It said this is what all radical attempts to change the world

1035. inevitably lead to.

1036. And in the growing age of the individual,

1037. it led to the conclusion that the fault is inside you,

1038. the individual,

1039. not in society.

1040. Those who had wanted to change the world now began to turn inwards.

1041. This distrust was going to be reinforced

1042. by the growing influence of the psychologists

1043. who said that human beings were really irrational

1044. and lived in a dream world.

1045. Out of that was going to come the modern system of power

1046. in which psychology would join with economics and with finance

1047. to make sure that that dream world was managed.

1048. It would be a wonderful world to live in.

1049. But its weakness will be that, at its root,

1050. was a pessimism about human beings

1051. and whether they should ever be allowed any control.

1052. While outside the dream world,

1053. the things that the revolutionaries had wanted to change so much -

1054. the inequalities, the racism and the exploitation -

1055. would all remain untouched

1056. and would continue to grow, unnoticed.

1057. But some of the revolutionaries saw what was happening and adjusted.

1058. Eldridge Cleaver, who had been one of the leading Black Panthers,

1059. set up his own fashion company.

1060. He designed what he called revolutionary trousers.

1061. They had a flap at the front,

1062. which he said would liberate the penis.

1063. While his fellow revolutionary, Bobby Seale,

1064. became a celebrity chef.

1065. Featuring the founding chairman

1066. of the Black Panther Party

1067. and griller extraordinaire, Bobby Seale!

1068. But one revolutionary was still not going to give up.

1069. Jiang Qing now joined with three others

1070. who had run the Cultural Revolution.

1071. They were determined to seize power when Mao died.

1072. They were known as the Gang of Four.

1073. And Michael X never made it to the river.

1074. He was captured and brought back to stand trial in Trinidad.

1075. He was found guilty of murder...

1076. .. and hanged.

1077. And, in the future, the violence and the anger would be played out

1078. in the artificial world of culture.

1079. It would be the images and the words of revolution.

1080. But, in reality, nothing ever really changed.

1081. And what was forgotten in this new age,

1082. including by the psychologists

1083. who were exploring the self by drilling ever deeper,

1084. was that what you are and what you feel

1085. comes not just from inside you

1086. but from where you are in the power structure,

1087. because that flows through you, too.

1088. When you see an individual white boy,

1089. you're not afraid of that individual white boy.

1090. What you are afraid of is the power that he represents,

1091. because behind him stands the local police force,

1092. the state militia, the Army, the Navy, the Air Force...

1093. When you see an African, there is no power behind him.

1094. There is no-one speaking for his interests.

1095. There is no-one to protect him.

1096. The guerrilla studies.

1097. The guerrilla studies, he doesn't rest.

1098. He studies and keeps his mouth shut.

1099. Study, children, study!