Stories of resistance and protest from around the world

The History Hour

BBC

History, Society & Culture, Personal Journals

4.4 • 879 Ratings

🗓️ 19 September 2020

⏱️ 50 minutes

🔗️ Recording | iTunes | RSS

🧾️ Download transcript

Summary

Max Pearson brings you a roundup of this week’s Witness History stories of resistance from the last 70 years. From the early days of opposition to President Alexander Lukashenko in Belarus, through the Mau Mau uprising in Kenya, a photographer's memories of the 1989 demonstrations in China, an iconic civil rights story from the USA, to Argentina and the women who are still demonstrating in the hope of discovering what became of their children under military rule.

Photo: a lone protestor, who became known as Tank Man, in Tiananmen Square in China in June 1989. Credit: Stuart Franklin/Magnum.

Transcript

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0:00.0	Hello and welcome to the History Hour podcast from the BBC World Service with me Max Pearson, the past brought to life by those who were there.
0:07.5	This week, protest and resistance as we look back at demonstrations and demonstrators who have shaped the world.
0:14.4	We'll hear from the mothers of the Plathade de Mayo,
0:16.8	who stood up to dictatorship in 1970s Argentina.
0:19.9	As soon as we all gathered there, the soldiers arrived.
0:23.2	But we refused to move on, and so they pushed us with the rifles.
0:27.2	Plus the Maumau's resistance to British rule in Kenya,
0:30.2	Tiananmen Square and the famous Tank Man image,
0:33.0	and one of the key moments in America's civil rights movement.
0:36.0	It's the best feeling I've ever had in my life.
0:38.0	The thought that there's a kind of freedom I have now that I've never had before.
0:44.4	That's all coming up later in the podcast.
0:46.4	The theme for this week was partly prompted by recent events in Belarus,
0:50.5	where tens of thousands of demonstrators have been on the streets of the capital Minsk,
0:54.9	calling for an end to the 26-year rule of the authoritarian President Alexander Lukashenko.
1:00.5	So that's where we'll start in Biller Us, but this being the history hour, we're going back in time to the 1990s,
1:06.0	which saw the early days of the anti-Lukeshenko movement.
1:10.0	Alex Last has been speaking to one dissident involved in those first protests.
1:14.0	It was very the moment.
1:25.0	It was the momentum.
1:26.0	We were just doing it.
1:28.0	In the beginning it's always a small group,
	...

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