Can't Get You Out of My Head

Have you ever been to a labour exchange?

You know, the last time I went there,

I was paid my money by a Sikh.

A Sikh, sitting there with his turban and a bangle

on his hand.

Now, I was three years with the Indian army in India.

I was three years in India in civilian life.

Erm, I got on well with Sikhs, Hindus,

the whole lot of them.

But to walk into a British labour exchange

and find you're being paid out your money by a Sikh...

These are the people, that in my small way, I helped train

and educate...

..erm... To go into labour exchange is not

a very edifying experience at all.

You know, you change into your old clothes to go

to the labour exchange, you know?

But you've got to go.

Edgar Mittelholzer had come to England in the 1950s

from British Guiana.

But he had become a best-selling novelist.

What Mittelholzer wrote about was violence...

..the violence and the racism that had been at the heart

of the European empires.

Mittelholzer believed that it still haunted the minds

of those who had ruled the empires.

One of his most famous stories, My Bones and My Flute,

is about a group of colonialists who travel up a river

into the jungle in Guyana.

They're searching for the remains of a giant slave rebellion

in the past, guided by an old manuscript.

But anyone who reads the manuscript starts to hear the distant sound

of a flute...

..and they change.

They become possessed by something that is reaching out

from the jungle and working its way into their minds.

It is the anger and the fear of the slave owner who put

down the rebellion.

And it will not let them escape.

And Mittelholzer himself became angry with England.

He saw it as a decaying, corrupted country.

I feel we've reached the stage, you know, when we have become

so soft, you know, so effete, in other words,

so effete, that we feel that, well, even criminals...

..erm, must be mollycoddled.

And you feel so strongly that you are prepared to go

as far as to say that... Yes. ..there are human beings

who should be categorised as vermin.

As vermin, exactly, quite.

Anyone who is guilty of violence on the human person and property,

should be considered as human vermin, and eradicated.

I know it's a rather, it's a violent thing to advocate,

but I can't see any other cure to the crime problem.

Every evening, he sat with his wife in his house in Surrey,

listening to the music of Wagner.

Until one night, Mittelholzer walked up the hill by his house,

poured paraffin over himself...

..and set himself alight.

He burned to death.

The anger and the fear had reached out to the colonised too.

In 1966, engineers monitoring Chinese television

from a mountain in Hong Kong, began to realise that something unusual

was happening in Beijing.

China was sealed off from the rest of the world.

But what they saw were hundreds of thousands of people streaming

in from other cities and the countryside.

By August 11th, 1.5 million people had assembled

in Tiananmen Square.

Most of them were students or schoolchildren.

Then, Mao Zedong appeared on the balcony above them.

SINGING AND CHANTING

Mao Zedong and his wife, Jiang Qing, had unleashed

a new force in China.

These were what Mao called, "The little devils of youth."

He told them that they were going to save the revolution.

Their job was to go and seek out the demons and the monsters

who were corrupting the revolution.

"No-one should be safe," he said, "They should all be torn

"down and smashed to pulp."

The new revolutionaries gave themselves a name,

the Red Guards.

Jiang Qing now had great power.

She saw herself as equal to Mao.

But she was convinced that the threat to the revolution

also came from inside people's minds.

She knew that even though China had gone through a revolution,

little had changed inside the heads of millions of the people -

including those in power.

They still believed in a rigid hierarchy.

She had been scorned as a woman

by the other revolutionaries around Mao.

They had done anything they could to stop her.

Jiang Qing had rewritten old Chinese operas into epic melodramas

about the need to challenge and destroy the old order.

All the old figures of authority were banished.

Instead, the ordinary people, including women,

took centre stage.

They were performed to millions of young Red Guards,

and in talks before the performances,

Jiang Qing told the audience how what they were about to watch

were heroes awakening

and realising that they could take control.

MUSIC PLAYS

Till today, I still vividly remember the first time

I saw the revolutionary play.

I was about 14 or 13 years old...

..and there was a rush of emotion, of identity.

I was so excited.

Suddenly...

I saw those plays after Jiang Qing's talk that night.

And suddenly what she was saying made sense to me,

that there was a fundamental difference

between the revolutionary art and the traditional art.

There was something in the play

about the working-class emotions and working-class world outlook,

and just the flamboyance of the working-class figure

on stage, moved me.

That is my society. That's my life.

That's the people I see. That's the people I live with.

And they're on stage.

Mao and Jiang Qing suspended all schools and universities,

which released 120 million students,

who were then sent out to find and destroy

the demons that were hiding among those in authority.

Our teachers were often paraded through the streets,

and we made them chant, "I'm a demon, I'm a devil.

"I deserve to die."

That's the song, and they had to sing it.

And they all sang.

Whoever didn't, got beaten up - some very badly.

We used our belts to whip them.

Some people used sticks.

And the mother of this teacher was pushed over a bridge

and fell to her death.

SINGING

Horst Mahler had been born in what was now East Germany.

His father had been a fervent Nazi and an anti-Semite.

In 1945,

his family fled across Germany from the approaching Red Army.

Then his father committed suicide.

Mahler grew up in West Berlin,

and everything was buried.

Bitte, alle aussteigen.

In 1964, Mahler joined a new group called the APO -

the Extra-Parliamentary Opposition.

They knew that many of those in charge of the country

had been senior members of the Nazi Party.

But no-one talked about it.

They wanted to expose the Nazi crimes of those in charge...

CHANTING

..and challenge their control of the country.

There was the memory knocking at the door,

and we asked our parents and our grandfathers,

"What did you do all this time?

"Did you resist or had you been a little Nazi?

"Or had you been an opportunist?"

And... HE CLEARS HIS THROAT

..this discussion was blocked by the elder generation.

And so it became hostile.

SHOUTING

The student movement was astonished by the violent reaction

of the German government.

And Horst Mahler and other radicals began to think that the problem

was far deeper than just individual Nazis.

That maybe the whole Nazi system had also survived...

..and was hiding behind the facade of modern capitalism.

They argued that the very system of industrial rationality

and bureaucratic control that had made the Nazi state

so efficient, had simply mutated.

It had been taken up by the victors -

above all by America -

and was now being used to run the new global capitalism

and the multinational corporations

that were ruthlessly exploiting what was called the Third World.

Anything that stood in the system's way was bombed or burnt...

..with weapons created by the same rational industrial techniques

that made the mass-consumer goods.

But the people in the West couldn't see this,

because they have been led into a dream world

that used mass consumerism and sexualized imagery

to entrance and distract everyone.

Und zauberhaft schon.

Die randlosen Strumpfhosen...

In reality, it was an iron cage

designed to look like an open and free welfare state -

a full state of peace that was built really on horror and war.

We were convinced that our situation here,

the welfare state...

..is only possible - and a result -

- by the exploitation of the Third World.

And we said we must disturb this peace,

this false peace in our country

in order to show the responsibility of us,

that it is our task to implement sabotage

in the centres of imperialism.

Hey, black power.

What's the reaction to your arrest, Mr Brown?

Of course, racist America has done it again.

But that's not going to end the burning in Detroit, brother,

because we built the country up and we'll burn it down,