Demand the Impossible - a TL

Demand the Impossible​
A Timeline of the World Revolution

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...For these reasons, the size and speed of the revolt against French state capitalism was entirely unexpected - even by those who had made a living predicting the imminent collapse of the system. Yet it was that unprecedented speed that saved the movement. A moment of hesitation, a moment in which the Gaullist authorities were permitted to show a strong face to the nation, might have sunk it all. The “forces of order” would have been able to follow the centuries-old formula of reaction - giving them an immediate upper hand over the revolutionaries, who were taking an entirely new path. If not for the provocations of May 24th, it is entirely possible that the revolution of 1968 would have been delayed for years, simply due to the challenge of taking a step beyond the past's limits.
Extract from A Short History of the Revolution by Roger Gregoire and Fredy Perlman, Venceremos Press, Paris, 1975.

Be reasonable; demand the impossible.
Street graffiti, May 1968

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I don't think anyone's tried to do this before - and that might be because it's presque ASB. But I'll try my best to be reasonable and attempt the impossible. Feel free to correct me if I start to slide from the implausible into fantasy-land.
 
Update I

Our aim was to see Debray in his cell so as to reassure ourselves that he was alive and to make him feel that he was not alone. I asked Colonel Teran whether I could go in and photograph Debray. Surely, I pleaded, it is in your interests to let the world see that he is alive and permitted to receive visitors. The Colonel said that this was too important a matter for him to decide, but he would make the request known to higher authorities. Teran knew about the escape, of course, but at this moment the Bolivians still believed Debray and the others had not left the country and had merely rejoined the surviving guerrillas. For this reason, they hoped they would be able to scoop them up again and return them to custody with nobody any the wiser. (As a matter of fact, Debray and Bustos had already crossed the border into Chile. They knew that there was nothing else they could do for the guerrillas, and that the manhunt had only intensified. Roth was not with them - he had, sadly, been shot and killed during the jailbreak.) [1]

In the meantime, the Colonel advised us to be patient and invited me to accompany him on one of his missions to Lagunillas the following day. The very thought filled me with nausea, but there was no way out and I agreed with a fake enthusiasm.

My misgivings were rendered moot that night, however, when we discovered the police waiting for us at the hotel. […] I do not know how many times over these forty years I have found my mind drifting to what may have happened had Schoenman not behaved so badly and attracted the attention of the authorities. The Colonel never returned from Lagunillas. The official story stated that he was killed there in a traffic accident, but it is almost certain he was executed by the regime as a punishment for the jailbreak, and it is equally certain that if I accompanied him I would have met the same fate. As it was, we only suffered the discomfort of two nights in a Camiri jail and the embarrassment of returning to the Peace Foundation with empty notebooks, after the Bolivians sent us packing.

Extract from Storming the Beaches: A Memoir of the Hot Years by Tariq Ali, Verso Press, London, 2002.



13 August 1967, 1:22 PM EST
Guevara's French Comrade Discovered in Chile
By JAIME CHACON
Associated Press
SANTIAGO, CHILE (AP) – The French journalist and intellectual Régis Debray, who until recently was involved in Ernesto “Che” Guevara's revolutionary campaign in Bolivia, has been detained by Chilean authorities and is being held in the northern town of Iquique. Debray had crossed the Bolivian border on foot, and was accompanied by an Argentine painter, Ciro Bustos.

Debray and Bustos were previously believed to be prisoners of the Bolivian military in Camiri, having been arrested in May as foreign agitators. It appears that they have escaped, as no notice of their release has been given by the Bolivian government. There has been no sign of George Roth, the Anglo-Chilean photographer who was detained along with them.

A representative of the Chilean foreign ministry, who wished to remain anonymous, has claimed that the two men will “almost certainly” be swiftly deported to their home countries.

French public opinion has been adamantly behind Debray during his stay in Bolivian prison, and influential figures on the left and right – including President Charles de Gaulle – have campaigned for his release.

Bolivian governmental sources were unavailable for comment.



The man is a celebrity now that he is back from playing revolution in the jungle. The communist faggots turn out in their thousands to hear his stories about his supposed “heroic escape” and how he fled the Bolivian police with a bullet in his shoulder. It is a disgusting spectacle, but my fellow students are hanging onto his every word, each one of them getting a hard-on when he speaks. The plan now, apparently, is to get him to speak at the Sorbonne on Guevara's particular strain of Marxist bullshit, something called focalisme.
Sidos tells us that the time for confrontation is now. We do not need a French Lenin.

August 21, 1967 entry from the notorious far-right manuscript “The Diary of G.”

[1] And here be the PoD: the escape. In OTL, Debray and his companions remained in prison until the early 70s despite lobbying by the French government, and missed May 68 entirely.

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More soon, this is just a little taste.
 
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I completely forgot that I started this. Whipped up a little more; I'll start doing it seriously now.

Events of 1967

August 19: Régis Debray returns to Paris from Santiago, Chile.

August 30: Thurgood Marshall is confirmed as a US Supreme Court Justice.

September 3: Nguyen Van Thieu is elected President of South Vietnam.

September 4: US Marines launch Operation Swift in the Que Son Valley of Vietnam. The total death toll over the next four days is 490.

September 12: Régis Debray is denied permission to speak at the Sorbonne. He announces plans to host his lecture – which will examine Che Guevara’s foco theory of guerrilla warfare - in the Salle de la Mutualité instead.

September 13: A small student rally against the Sorbonne administration’s refusal to let Debray lecture there takes place. It disperses after a few hours.

September 18: The lecture on foco opens. Debray had planned for 2,000 attendees – four times that number show up, and not everyone can fit in the building. A large crowd, almost entirely composed of students, loiters outside.


The brawl on the night of September 18th was an instrumental moment in the alienation of the nationalist students of Occident and the FEN from the Gaullist establishment. The right-wing organizations had already clashed several times with the police during 1967 - in January several members of Occident were arrested for attacking Vietnam solidarity campaigners - and the heavy-handed police treatment of both sides of the "Battle of the Rue Saint-Victor" was part of this slow trend of escalating violence that culminated in the murder of Maurice Grimaud. After the fight at the foco lecture, the student organizations’ services d’ordre began arming themselves more heavily – especially those of the rightist groups.
Extract from Work, Family, Fatherland: Continuity in the French Far-Right from Pétain to Massu by Dr. Rupert Rowntree, Oxford University Press, 1989


September 19: In the early hours of the morning, the street brawl is broken up by the Paris police, and more than 100 people are arrested.

October 4: Che Guevara is captured by the Bolivian army.

October 21: March on the Pentagon.

October 26: USN pilot John McCain barely escapes an anti-aircraft missile while pulling out of a bombing run on the Yen Phu power plant in Hanoi. McCain lands back on the USS Forrestal unharmed.

October 27: Charles de Gaulle vetoes British entry into the European Economic Community.

November 9: First Saturn V rocket launched successfully.

November 12: During a meeting of the French Maoist student group, the Union des jeunesses communistes marxistes-lenininstes (UJC-ML), several younger members walk out, frustrated with the organization’s relatively pacifist approach and the lack of progress that they’ve made. Five of these splitters, enamored of Debray’s and Che’s theories about how an armed minority can inspire the population to rise up, form a group they call the Foci marxistes-leninistes francaises.

November 27: Magical Mystery Tour is released.

November 29: Robert McNamara resigns as US Secretary of Defense.

November 30: Eugene McCarthy announces his candidacy for the Democratic presidential nomination in 1968, running against the incumbent President Johnson on an antiwar platform.

December 9: Nicolae Ceaucescu becomes Chairman of the Romanian State Council.

December 17: Australian PM Harold Holt is rushed to the hospital and placed in intensive care after nearly drowning while swimming in the ocean.

December 19: At three in the morning, a large explosion takes place in a Paris telephone exchange. Nobody is injured, but several thousand dollars’ worth of damage is dealt. Two days later, Gaullist MPs’ cars are set on fire. A letter posted to the leading French newspapers – including the Communist Party newsletter, L’Humanité – claims the attacks on behalf of the “Guevarist partisans of the FMLF”.

December 22: All five members of the FMLF – unemployed Parisian youths - are arrested.
 
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