The Shape of the Table

Loosely based on the Velvet Revolution in Czechoslovakia, The Shape of the Table by David Edgar is set in a fictional Communist country in 1989 as the system collapses. First performed at the National Theatre in London in 1990, it was broadcast as a radio play on BBC Radio 4 as part of their 1989 season.

http://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/b00nrx62

We start with protests on the streets as party and government officials meet to decide how to handle the next wave of protests: let peaceful protest go ahead, send in the thugs to beat them up, give the thugs live ammunition, call upon their fraternal neighbours to put down the street protests.

No option is to everyones liking. Riffraff and hooligans cannot be allowed to take to the streets, beating up the protesters will be picked up by the BBC, likewise shooting them down and it is possible the thugs will not obey orders, calling upon fraternal neighbours is no longer an option as they have made it clear they will not intervene.

It all goes badly wrong, bloody clashes with peaceful protesters, calls for investigations and reform. Party and government officials meet again. First Secretary says he cannot push through the reforms. This is agreed, and without realising it he has backed himself into a corner and is forced to resign.

A dissident writer is brought out of prison and cast as a go-between. Although the government and party has brought forward what for them is radical reform, the people on the street are demanding more, those for whom power is slipping away cannot keep up.

The play ends with the former First Secretary now in prison and facing charges of treason, corruption and misuse of office, telling the reformists that they are no different to him, that in a few years time the people will look over the barbed wire and will not be able to tell the difference.

Has anything changed?

The alternatives played out as the people took to the streets were played out in Iran this summer. The authorities chose repression and bludgeoned the people into submission, or at least cleared them off the streets, all played out to a world audience on twitter and facebook.

http://www.indymedia.org.uk/en/2009/07/434151.html?c=on

Neda became the face of the Iranian revolution. Slaughtered by the state, an innocent victim, in the wrong place, at the wrong time.

http://paulocoelhoblog.com/2009/06/23/iran-by-neda/
http://paulocoelhoblog.com/2009/06/26/the-doctor/

Twenty years ago, China chose the third option, the media was cleared off the streets, the People’s Liberation Army rolled into Tiananmen Square and pro-democracy demonstrators were massacred.

https://keithpp.wordpress.com/2009/10/23/eyewitness-account-of-tiananmen-square/

In Chicago in 1968, riot police clubbed protesters at the Democrat Party Convention.

A decade ago in Seattle the police attacked protesters on the streets.

Last summer, police brutally attacked Climate Camp protesters at Kingsnorth Power Station in Kent.

At G20 in London earlier this year, police were heavy handed resulting in one man killed. Eight months after his death, mystery still surrounds the death of Ian Tomlinson, an innocent man who just happened to be in the wrong place at the wrong time. A candlelit vigil will be held in his memory on 1 December 2009 outside the Royal Exchange by Threadneedle Street.

http://www.iantomlinsonfamilycampaign.org.uk/

At Climate Camp this summer on Blackheath Common, the police changed tack, a softly-softly approach was taken.

COP15 climate change talks in Copenhagen next month will be a measure of how far democracy has travelled. If Seattle was the coming-out party, Copenhagen is the coming of age. A diverse group of activists will converge on Copenhagen with one single demand, cutting of carbon emissions. One demand, many solutions. The aim at Copenhagen will not be as was successfully achieved at Seattle to shut down the proceedings but to open them up. As with the fall of the Berlin Wall, change will come from below, not be imposed from above. World leaders would be wise to listen.

http://www.commondreams.org/view/2009/11/13

When world leaders meet they travel to the venue in armoured vehicles, hide behind 12-foot high razor wire barricades, police club the people on the street. Terrorism is used as the flimsiest of excuses to authorise repression and lock people away.

Former Eastern Bloc countries who threw off the shackles of Communism are now under the EU yoke, they wanted freedom, to be sovereign countries, they have a long way yet to travel.

At the end of Animal Farm by George Orwell we have the pigs sitting down to dinner with men from outside. Animals looking in from outside look from man to pig and from pig to man and they cannot see the difference.

The Wall may have fallen in 1989, Communism may have collapsed, but we do not as yet have democracy. Politicians are puppets with global corporations pulling the strings.

Also see

1989 Day by Day

The day the wall came down

A sense of the masses – a manifesto for the new revolution

Civil disobedience

The day the wall came down

Past and present walls by Latuff

Hope for other walls

Monday 9 November 2009 we commemorated a very special day. It was the day twenty years ago that the Berlin Wall came down.

http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/world/europe/8349742.stm
http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/in_depth/europe/2009/1989_europes_revolution/default.stm

If we look back to that day, no one expected to happen what happened that day. Hundreds, if not thousands, of East Berliners walked past the Stasi and not a single shot was fired. People power had triumphed.

It had started earlier in Hungary. A section of the Iron Curtain was opened up and those who were imprisoned in the East were able to travel freely to the West. It was not only Hungarians who took advantage of this tearing down of the Iron Curtain. East Germans travelled to Hungary to travel from East to West. The Russians could have intervened but they did not. Mikhail Gorbachev had already told the Hungarian Prime Minister Miklos Nemeth he would not intervene.

The prison of Eastern Europe was open, the people were free.

What is amazing is that this was all achieved without a single shot being fired. In Germany the people could have turned on the hated Stasi, Germans could have attacked the Russian troops, the Russian troops could have fired on the Germans. Everyone kept their cool.

http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/world/europe/7961732.stm

The one exception was Romania where it ended in a bloodbath

We owe a deep debt of gratitude to Mikhail Gorbachev. There was a great deal of trust between the major players at the time, George Bush, Maggie Thatcher.

Why did it all then go wrong? The West, instead of treating Russia as a friend and partner, took advantage of what they saw as a weakness, billions of roubles were looted out of the country, a Wild West Capitalism took the place of Communism. Former Yugoslavia violently fell apart, old scores that had been smouldering beneath the service for decades were settled.

A new spectre now roams the land, the new Fascism of radical Islam. Palestine remains occupied. A religious fundamentalist is the illegitimate president of Iran, determined to get his hands on nuclear weapons. Another illegitimate leader reigns in Afghanistan, in reality Mayor of Kabul as his writ extends no further, kept in power by the blood of US and British soldiers who have not the faintest idea what they are doing there, neither does their political masters, other than maybe safeguarding oil pipeline routes. Nicosia remains a divided city, a Green Line separates the northern half of Cyprus from the free southern half, the north occupied by Turkey.

http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/in_depth/world/2009/walls_around_the_world/default.stm

1989 saw a glimmer of democracy in China, until it was crushed in the Tiananmen Square Massacre on 4 June 1989.

https://keithpp.wordpress.com/2009/10/23/eyewitness-account-of-tiananmen-square/

Tibet is still occupies by the Chinese.

Twenty years on from the fall of the Berlin Wall, the people of Iran took to the streets to demand the overthrow of the illegitimate regime, only to be brutally crushed, symbolised in the death of Neda.

http://paulocoelhoblog.com/2009/06/23/iran-by-neda/
http://paulocoelhoblog.com/2009/06/26/the-doctor/

Twenty years ago we saw a glimmer of freedom. A freedom that has been crushed, not by the tyranny of Communism, but by the tyranny of the market place.