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During the early 1970s life on Native American reservations was difficult, poor and often violent. The Pine Ridge reservation in South Dakota was one of the worst examples of this life and one of the poorest places in America. The few opportunities for work were controlled by the elected tribal chief Richard Wilson who held onto power by giving work to family members and friends, usually mixed-blood relatives, and selling land to outside cattle concerns.

Full-blood Lakotas were increasingly marginalized on the reservation and as tension grew an investigation was instigated to examine Wilson's tactics but the chief was able to use his influence to alter the report and the votes by the council. Wilson and his supporters knew the action would probably result in violence and so they fortified the administration buildings with machine guns and other weapons.

The Native American activist group AIM and other anti-Wilson forces realized it would be impossible to take-down Wilson and therefore decided to make a stand at Wounded Knee, hoping the incident would arouse public support. The American government immediately surrounded the small town with a huge force that included armored personnel carriers, helicopters, machine guns more then a hundred-thousand rounds of ammunition.

For three months there was a tense stand-off with the two sides often trading fire which resulted in the death of two Native Americans and the severe wounding of one Federal Marshall. Many sources claim that during that time that Wilson's forces secretly fired on both sides, hoping to create a violent battle that would force the government to assault the town. A cease-fire was finally brokered by assistant attorney general Harlington Wood Jr of the Justice Department that allowed the occupiers to leave without further bloodshed.

In 1917 America was succumbing to the first Red Scare as labor unrest increased across the country due to bad working conditions and often violent government repression of any left-leaning groups. This fear was stoked by the Russian revolution and a series of anarchist and Galleanist bombings across Europe and the United States. In response Congress passed the Espionage and Seditious Acts which criminalized any act or speech against the military draft or that could be seen as disloyal.

More anarchist bombs exploded in 1919, one of which nearly injured the United States Attorney General Alexander Mitchell Palmer. Palmer was already an outspoken critic of any leftist group and with President Woodrow Wilson's backing created a bureau inside the Justice Department headed by J. Edgar Hoover to investigate Americans. By October of that same year the bureau had amassed 150,000 names that they used in a series of publicized raids. In December Palmer forced 249 American's and immigrants of Russian origin on board a ship which then sailed for the Soviet Union.

When January of 1920 came Palmer had had more then 10,000 people arrested. This did not satisfy Palmer who declared that communist forces would stage a violent revolution in America on May 1st. No revolution came and Palmer would be later criticized in a report by the ACLU that resulted in him being called before Congress to answer questions. The final blow arrived in June when a judge ordered the discharge of 20 persons detained in the raids. American's would see mass arrests again in the second World War with Executive Order 9066 and again with the PATRIOT Act.

On August 30th, 1983 Korean Airlines flight 007 departed John Kennedy Airport in New York with a planned destination of Seoul, South Korea. The flight plan called for it to pass seventeen miles south of the Soviet Kamchatka coast, however due to a series of complicated technical issues the plane was allowed to deviate from it's course.

When flight 007 flew over Kamchatka it was flying into a historically tense area. The American Navy had staged FleetEx months before and several Soviet military officials had been dismissed for allowing the Navy to fly their aircraft across the Kurile islands without being intercepted or shot down. Neither did it help that a Soviet missile test was scheduled for that day and an American reconnaissance aircraft was flying in the area.

Four Mig-23 fighters were launched to intercept the flight but suffered from radar and command problems in being vectored to the 747 and ran out of fuel first. When the Korean flight entered Soviet airspace for the second time four more fighters were scrambled and were able to intercept it this time. Since the civilian aircraft had already gone through Soviet airspace once the order was given to destroy it over neutral waters.

When one of the Soviet aircraft finally caught up with the Korean flight, it fired a volley of machine-gun rounds as a warning but since none of the rounds were tracers the Boeing pilots failed to see them. A minute later the civilian pilots, unaware of being fired upon and having received permission from Tokyo controllers to ascend in order to conserve fuel, began to climb which in turn reduced its airspeed. The Soviet pilots and ground control considered this an attempt to evade and the pilots were given permission to destroy the aircraft.

Two missiles were fired at the Korean airliner which damaged it badly enough so that it crashed, killing everyone aboard. The shooting would not be acknowledged by the Soviets for another six days, initially hoping that no one would be able to prove what happened. This attempt utterly failed when the United States government released a huge amount of intelligence data to the public.

The fallout from the shootdown was intense and further exacerbated when joint American, Korean and Japanese rescue efforts were deliberately antagonized by Soviet naval forces which included attempted rammings, fake lights, false flags, cutting moorings, removing sensors and sending bombers with nuclear-tipped missiles to threaten ships. When it was all over, Reagan called the Soviet Union the 'Evil Empire' and the rest of the world agreed.

In May 1940 it took Germany a mere thirty days to beat France and force it to sign an armistice. Part of the armistice documents declared that French naval forces would not be used or assist the Germans or Italians as part of a war effort. However the British were wary of allowing the French fleet to remain at liberty because it would give the Germans overwhelming superiority at sea and allow them to starve England of supplies. Winston Churchill ordered that all French naval ships either join the British forces or be neutralized as part of Operation Catapult.

The largest contingent of French ships was stationed at Mers-el-Kébir in French Algeria. Force H under command of James Sommerville was sent to commandeer or sink the French ships and when they arrived they sent an ultimatum to General Gensoul. However the French refused to surrender their ships to the English and when a flight of British aircraft laid magnetic mines to prevent the French vessels from leaving French fighters intercepted and shot one down, killing the crew. The next day the British ships opened fire and after more then a day of broadsides and pursuits three French ships were sunk, four damaged and over a thousand sailors were killed.

The attack caused immediate repercussions and Sommerville himself believed it to have been a grave political mistake. It proved to many though that the British were determined and ended discussions of England negotiating an armistice with Germany. Some people would later claim the action was unnecessary as the Germans had neither the intention or men available to utilize the French fleet. However, documents by the Vichy government that came to light after the war proved that the French were all too willing to collaborate with the Nazis and Hitler had already abrogated several treaties he had signed, something Stalin would learn three years after this event.

Russia rarely benefited from its feudal rulers but when Tsar Feodor Ivanovich died without leaving a clear heir things deteriorated and the country was plunged into a period of uprisings, civil strife and violence. Perhaps the strangest episode during this time was the appearance of a man claiming to be Dimitriy Ioannovich who was thought to have died years before either during a seizure or had been assassinated depending on who was asked.

The new Dimitriy arrived in Moscow around 1600 and fled almost immediately when Tsar Boris Gudonoc, already infamous for being paranoid of challenges to his throne, ordered him seized. Dimitriy ran to the Rutheran family house of the Wisniowieckis where the princes supported him as a way of gaining a foothold in Russian politics. Before long Dimitriy had gained tacit backing from the Polish King as well as support from other Polish nobles and had even converted to Roman Catholicism to gain favor with the Jesuits.

Eventually Dimitriy rode into Russia with an army 3,500 strong which was bolstered further by enemies of the Tsar. The army fared well during its first engagement but was badly routed in the second. Fortunately for Dimitriy his cause was saved when Tsar Boris died of an illness and he was able to ride into Moscow soon after and assume the throne.

Once Dimitriy was Tsar he had almost the entire Gudonov family slaughtered and signed an alliance with the Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth which had helped him. He also ordered some political reforms and began gearing up for a war with the Ottoman empire. However the Tsar made a crucial mis-step when he married Marina Mniszech for she did not convert to Orthodox Christianity which enraged much of the populace.

Neither was Dimitriy helped by the Polish Commonwealth forces still occupying Moscow who often indulged in preying on the public. Two weeks after the marriage a group of Boyars lead an angry crowed into the Kremlin where they shot Dimitriy to death. The pretender's corpse was burned and his body was fired out of a cannon towards Poland. He had ruled for barely ten months.

Part of the 'The Seventies were Bleak' series.



After Watergate, Vietnam and innumerable other scandals people instinctively knew the government lied to them. The film Capricorn One proposed one of the biggest lies of all, born of political necessity when a failure during a rocket launch dooms the Mars mission and creates an ever expanding web of lies.

Part of the 'The Seventies were Bleak' series.



News anchor Howard Beale is given his termination notice due to poor ratings and that night, while live, announces that he will kill himself on air in two weeks time. What follows is a dark, absurd and viewed from today unpleasantly prescient story of how the business exploits the man to boost ratings and follows him into the very depths of how the corporate media works.

Part of the 'The Seventies were Bleak' series.



A little seen movie that took the general plot of The Manchurian Candidate by Richard Condon and refashions it into a more direct, more grim and more unsettling piece. It follows Warren Beatty as a reporter who is dragged into an investigation of a strange corporate power that is changing the face of America one assassination at a time.

Part of the 'The Seventies were Bleak' series.



The plot of two reporters trying to help a worker at a nuclear power plant uncover serious faults at the facility did not seem like a blockbuster on paper. However, twelve days after the movie was released the Three Mile Island nuclear plant suffered a serious leak and the movie became a massive hit that all too accurately showed how government, media and corporations would react to such an event.

Part of the 'The Seventies were Bleak' series.



Robert Redford stars as a CIA analyst codenamed 'Condor' who is caught up in a vicious power struggle within the Agency. Condor is lied to and betrayed by almost everyone at the CIA and has to dodge assassins while struggling to find out why seven of his co-workers were murdered. The answer turns out to be something that will be grimly familiar to current audiences.

In 1985 and Jean Michael Jarre was invited by the Houston Grand Opera in Texas to play a concert celebrating the city's 150th anniversary. At the time Houston was awash in oil money and had a lot to go around for a lavish event. Houston was also the site of NASA which was celebrating its 25th anniversary and asked Jarre to incorporate the theme into his event. Jarre wrote a full score for the concert charting Houston's growth from a rural town to sprawling metropolis and its place in the space program. Part of the concert was to feature a satellite uplink with the Space Shuttle Orbiter with Ronald McNair who was to play a jazz accompaniment.

On January 28th, 1986 McNair died when the Space Shuttle Challenger exploded one-minute thirteen seconds into the flight, killing all seven crew members.

Jarre nearly canceled the concert but was persuaded to go ahead. The concert would feature 2,000 projectors, a massive amount of fireworks and a huge number of lasers and spotlights. The performance took place outside and brought Interstate 45 to a stop as more than an estimated 1,000,000 million came to watch the show.