Transcribing the Past

   Link https://youtu.be/UC9PEkbC6Y8 Hello and welcome to the Witness podcast from the BBC World Service with me Alex Last. And today using recordings from the BCC archive we go back 100 years to November 1918, when in the final weeks of World War One Germany was on the point of collapse and facing revolution. Archival Witness One: The whole life of the country was becoming grimmer, it was getting very difficult. The war was lasting too long and Germany didn’t have much chance of winning it because conditions within the country were getting so very difficult and there was a general feeling that the war as a whole had to stop. This feeling was spreading very fast among the civilian population and I saw that the war would have to end soon. That was the feeling shared by most of the soldiers I met in those days, they were fed up with the whole thing and they wanted to go home badly. Alex Last: After four years of war by late 1918 the situation in G...

  It happened again, a few days ago the murder of George Floyd by police officer Derek Chauvin (though at least one other officer just stood there and watched it happen) in Minneapolis in the state of Minnesota appalled many. This is not a rare occurrence, immediately after the news became well known the families of many other victims of police murder -the majority of them African Americans- in the recent past came forward to share their accounts too. This time however, the people of the Twin Cities had had enough and massive street demonstrations erupted which the police met with even more violence. Only this time the police over estimated their ability to beat and intimidate the population, they quickly lost control and by nightfall they had lost a precinct which burned into the night. Solidarity protests have broken out across the United States, many of which are also being met with military style violence from the police and in some cases elements of the national guard a...

  Original article in Esperanto is taken from Mondmilito Eugene Adam (Lanti) and the disappointment of the leftists. The literature about George Orwell (1903-1950) the author of the fable Animal Farm and the novel Nineteen Eighty Four is abundant. Firstly thanks to the biography of Bernard Crick (1970) we know that he had contacts with left wing Esperantists. Of particular note is the links between his aunt Nellie Limousin (1870-1950) and Eugene Adam (1879-1947) who under the name Lanti became the founder of the Sennacieca Asocio Tutmonda World Anti National Association (SAT). However, just a little over thirty years after Orwell's death a statement was published (since then often quoted) that suggests Lanti's early influence on Orwell's thinking. According to an interview from 1983 with Lucien Bannier, cofounder of SAT, Lanti and Orwell sharply disputed over how to judge the Soviet Union. There was Aunt Nellie, Lanti's life partner (since 1934), who also worked for S...

  Link https://youtu.be/-XrU9Pdbc54 The French Army Mutiny Of 1917 Transcript Hello and thank you for downloading Witness from the BBC World Service with me Alex Last. And as part of our centenary series on the First World War, using archived recordings we go back to the spring of 1917 when the French army was rocked by mutiny. Edward Spears: The thing that astonishes me is that the French army didn’t mutiny a long time before 1917. They had had absolutely appalling losses, due largely you know to mistakes and to mistaken theories. Alex Last: General Edward Louis Spears was in 1917 the head of the British military mission to the French Government. Edward Spears: At the beginning of the war in August 1914 I myself had seen the French army attacking German positions and machine guns with bands playing and officers in white gloves leading them in. they went on suffering terrible losses, still they endured displaying qualities of stoicism and stay...

  IPE and the Personal lives of the International Brigades In February 1937 Berl Kurtz (1907-1942) a Romanian living in Paris decided to travel to Spain to join the International Brigades. which fought on the side of the Spanish Republic and against international Fascism. That was he felt, his duty as a revolutionary and a communist and possible even as an Esperantist as well. But as a retailer he could not wait to sell off his stock, because France had just announced that it would soon close the border. More importantly, he left home without telling his wife, as she probably would not support his decision. He was one of 35,000 idealists who volunteered to take part in the Spanish war. People from over 50 different nations, many of them linked to the communist parties.  The largest number of them were French and the majority of them came from Paris. Except for some veterans of the First World War, generally they had no military experience. For this reason more than 15,000 of t...