He is charged with hindering the American war effort with his ideas, & imprisoned in the federal penitentiary of Leavenworth, causing outrage at the time among both Mexicans & even US liberals.

Ricardo Flores Magon 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," (Gómez Quiñones, pp. 68-69).

Ten years after the student riots & their massacre in 1968 & five years after the appearance of Gómez Quiñones' influential book in 1978, Carlos Cortez produced his linocut of Ricardo Flores Magón which commemorates this rehabilitated figure (he now has a city named after him) both in Mexico & among Chicanos.

http://www.artscope.net/VAREVIEWS/cortez1299.html
http://struggle.ws/mexico/history.html

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
http://www.findagrave.com/pictures/8792.html

Today the victorious Bolsheviks are celebrating the anniversary of the Paris Commune of 1871.

Trotsky & Zinoviev, without shame, denounce Thiers & Gallifet for the slaughter of the Paris rebels.

From the Paris Commune to the Kronstadt Rebellion

They shall rise up heroes, there will be many,
None will prevail against them at last.
They go saying each: "I am one of many";
Their hands empty save for history.
They die at bridges, bridge gates, & drawbridges.

Remember now there were others before;
The sepulchres are full at ford & bridgehead.
There will be children with flowers there,
And lambs & golden-eyed lions there,
And people remembering in the future.

— excerpt, Kenneth Rexroth, (1936)
Originally titled "March 18, 1871-1921"

From Paul Avrich's Kronstadt 1921 (p. 213):

The next morning [after the final crushing of Kronstadt], March 18, the Petrograd newspapers carried banner headlines commemorating the fiftieth anniversary of the Paris Commune. Bands played military tunes & Communists paraded in the streets, singing the "Internationale."

"Its strains," noted Emma Goldman, "once jubilant to my ears, now sounded like a funeral dirge for humanity's flaming hope."

Alexander Berkman made a bitter entry in his diary:

"The victors are celebrating the anniversary of the Commune of 1871. Trotsky & Zinoviev denounce Thiers & Gallifet for the slaughter of the Paris rebels."

The Berkman quote is from The Bolshevik Myth, p. 303. A fuller passage from it is in Avrich's The Anarchists in the Russian Revolution, p. 163alt: Cronstadt

This event had world wide response. Even Adolph Hitler sent a telegram of condolences. At least two books have been written about it. New London is on Texass highway 42 between Kilgore & Henderson. A museum located directly across the highway from the site honors the victims.

— Bleedster Jim R

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.

See also tomorrow when the fun continues.

At the same time the Mailer filed application on Post Office Department Form No. 3501 for second-class mailing privileges for its publication. The postmaster at Chicago entertained doubt as to the mailability of the publication ... The Director of the Postal Services Division referred the copy of the publication to the General Counsel April 30, 1959, with a request for the legal opinion of the latter official as to its mailability.

The notice of hearing specified that the hearing was to be held on June 4, 1959, in Washington, D.C.

http://www.poetrycenter.org/about/perspectives/usps.html

1965 -- Outer Space: First space float, by Alexi Leonov of USSR. First human to "walk" in space when he spent ten minutes outside his Voskhod II spacecraft.



1965 -- Rolling Stones Mick Jagger, Keith Richards & Bill Wyman arrested for "insulting behavior" in London — for urinating on the wall of the Francis Garage, a gas station where they sought use of the men's room; when the owner refused, & told them to go, they went.

"In the early hours of March 18 the Five were rolling along San Francisco's Bayshore Freeway in a borrowed station wagon with eleven other friends of the Berkeley White Panthers, doin' their usual thing, when the forces of Legitimate Violence tried to run them off the skyway.

"The pigs busted the Five for speeding, drunk driving, overloading a station wagon, possession of marijuana & other dangerous drugs, contributing to the delinquency of, fucking, & otherwise violating minors & resisting arrest."

Text from the Fifth Estate, April 1969,
http://makemyday.free.fr/mc5insf.htm
http://makemyday.free.fr/mc5timeline.htm

With mail service virtually paralyzed in New York, Detroit, & Philadelphia, President Dick'M Nixon declares a state of national emergency & assigns military units to New York City post offices. The stand-off culminates in two weeks.

[Sources]

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/



1970 -- US: Trying to reclaim music from the (quote) "filthy, capitalist" record companies, a radical Madison newspaper called "Kaleidoscope" releases a bootleg album.

Features Beatles cuts excluded from the album "Get Back" & Bob Dylan's "Isle of Wight" concert. Sells for three dollars, & all profits go to a local activist bail fund. The cover features a photo of John Sinclair, who founded the White Panthers & is doing 10-years for handing two joints to an undercover agent.

http://www.beatlesagain.com/btsgtppr.html

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).


1976 -- Italy: Police brutally attack students at the University of Padua where they have been holding a sit-in; five wounded by bullets.


1976 -- US: New trial ordered for Rubin "Hurricane" Carter & John Artis (for '67 triple murder N.J.).



1986 -- US: William F. Buckley Jr. suggests in the NY Times that everyone found to have AIDS "should be tattooed in the upper forearm to protect common-needle users, & on the buttocks, to prevent the victimization of other homosexuals.

This really gets me hot!"

http://www.tattoos.com/gallery/gal01.htm



1990 -- East Germany: First free elections in its 41-year history.



1990 -- US: A Tampa little leaguer, dies, after being struck by a pitch.

BleedMeister's Nummer One son has been clearly instructed not to be beaned by baseballs.

Buncha Flakes? On March 16, 2002 his team's practice is cut short due to snow.

Where's GlobalWarming when you need it?

1994 -- Nirvana leader Kurt Cobain has 4 guns & 25 boxes of ammo confiscated after his wife, Courtney Love, calls police fearing he would commit suicide. He does in about three weeks. http://recollectionbooks.com/siml/images/Images/statshot_3623.gif



1996 -- The Sex Pistols announce they are reuniting for a 20th anniversary tour. The world yawns.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sex_Pistols
http://www.geocities.com/CapitolHill/7412/punklinx.html

A handy color-coded guide is provided here, developed by the Office of Homeland Security, to help you quickly & easily determine just how far the government wants you to bend over.

Now available in a Mall Near You: the New Rightwing Christan program of One Market Under God: Extreme Capitalism, Market Populism, & the End of Economic Democracy.

Buy or Die. Save a sinking economy. Privatization plus deregulation plus globalization plus turbo-capitalism plus never ending war equals prosperity.

Practice democracy & you too can become a card carrying enemy of the future.

Click on the image below to visit James Koehnline's "Terror Threat Index Illustrated".

http://www.shaftagents.com/rogues.htm
http://multinationalmonitor.org/mm2000/00december/enemies.html


2004 -- Nummer One Son flies to Italy for Spring Quarter in Florence before wandering around Europe for two months this summer (Germany, France, Spain, Greece). Rotten Bum...hasn't even turned 18 yet. One of his parents is quite envious.


2006 -- March 18 | San Francisco, Bay Area Anarchist Book Fair.


2006 -- France: Youth riots in the streets of Paris, cop cars burn, bricks fly.