Today in Labor History August 22, 1917: Italian police opened fire on protesters against the hunger caused by World War I. Most of the protesters were women. The next day, workers declared a General Strike. On the 24th, a state of siege was declared, but the strike continued until the 26th. Police violence during the strike resulted in the deaths of 60 people.
Today in Labor History August 21, 1920: Ongoing violence by coal operators and their paid goons in the southern coalfields of West Virginia led to a three-hour gun battle between striking miners and guards that left six dead. 500 Federal troops were sent in not only to quell the fighting, but to ensure that scabs were able to get to and from the mines. A General Strike was threatened if the troops did not cease their strikebreaking activities. This was just 3 months after the Matewan Massacre, in which the miners drove out the seemingly invincible Baldwin-Felts private police force, with the help of their ally, Sheriff Sid Hatfield. 1 year later, Sheriff Hatfield was gunned down on the steps of the courthouse by surviving members of the Baldwin-Felts Agency. News spread and miners began arming themselves, leading to the Battle of Blair Mountain, the largest armed insurrection since the Civil War and the largest labor uprising in U.S. history. Over 100 people were killed in the 5-day battle, including 3 army soldiers and up to 20 Baldwin-Felts detectives. Nearly 1,000 people were arrested. 1 million rounds were fired. And the government dropped bombs from aircraft on the miners, only the second time in history that the government bombed its own citizens (the first being the pogrom against African American residents of Tulsa, during the so-called Tulsa Riots).
The Battle of Blair Mountain is depicted in Storming Heaven (Denise Giardina, 1987), Blair Mountain (Jonathan Lynn, 2006), and Carla Rising (Topper Sherwood, 2015). And the Matewan Massacre is brilliantly portrayed in John Sayles’s film, “Matewan.”
Today in Labor History August 19, 1916: Strikebreakers attacked and beat picketing IWW strikers in Everett, Washington. The police refused to intervene, claiming it was federal jurisdiction. However, when the strikers retaliated, they arrested the strikers. Vigilante attacks on IWW picketers and speakers escalated and continued for months. In October, vigilantes forced many of the strikers to run a gauntlet, violently beating them in the process. The brutality culminated in the Everett massacre on November 5, when Wobblies (IWW members) sailed over from Seattle to support the strikers. The sheriff called out to them as they docked, “Who is your leader?” And the Wobblies yelled back, “We all are!” The sheriff told them they couldn’t dock. One of the Wobblies said, “Like hell we can’t!” And then a mob of over 200 vigilantes opened fire on them. As a result, seven died and 50 were wounded. John Dos Passos portrays these events in his USA Trilogy.
Today in Labor History August 16, 2012: South African police fatally shot 34 miners and wounded 78 in the Marikana massacre, during a 6-week wildcat strike at the Lonmin platinum mine in North West province. It was the most lethal attack by South African security forces against civilians since the 1976 Soweto uprising in 1976 and has been compared to the 1960 Sharpeville massacre.
Today in Labor History August 16, 1819: Police attacked unemployed workers demonstrating in St. Peter's Field, Manchester, England. When the cavalry charged, at least 18 people died and over 600 were injured. The event became know as the Peterloo Massacre, named for the Battle of Waterloo, where many of the massacre victims had fought just four years earlier. Following the Napoleonic Wars there was an acute economic slump, terrible unemployment and crop failures, all worsened by the Corn Laws, which kept bread prices high. Only 11% of adult males had the vote. Radical reformers tried to mobilize the masses to force the government to back down. The movement was particularly strong in the north-west, where the Manchester Patriotic Union organized the mass rally for Peter’s Field. As soon as the meeting began, local magistrates tried to arrest working class radical, Henry Hunt, and several others. Hunt inspired the Chartist movement, which came shortly after Peterloo.
John Lees, who later died from wounds he received at the massacre, had been present at the Battle of Waterloo. Before his death, he said that he had never been in such danger as at Peterloo: "At Waterloo there was man to man but there it was downright murder." In the wake of the massacre, the government passed the Six Acts, to suppress any further attempts at radical reform. The event also led indirectly to the founding of the Manchester Guardian newspaper.
Percy Bysshe Shelley wrote about the massacre in his poem, “The Masque of Anarchy.” The authorities censored it until 1832, ten years after his death. Mike Leigh’s 2018 film Peterloo is an excellent portrayal of the massacre, and the events leading up to it. Many writers have written novels about Peterloo, including the relatively recent “Song of Peterloo,” by Carolyn O'Brien, and “All the People,” Jeff Kaye. However, perhaps the most important is Isabella Banks's 1876 novel, “The Manchester Man,” since she was there when it happened and included testimonies from people who were involved.
Today in Labor History August 14, 1850: A squatters' riot occurred in Sacramento, California. At the time, Sacramento was an unincorporated territory. Many people had moved to the region for the gold rush, resulting in land speculation and skyrocketing rents. The squatters vowed to defend their claims by force and created their own militia, consisting of dozens of men. The property owners called in the regional militia, with over 500 men. 2 squatters and 3 militiamen died in the battles, as well as 2 bystanders.
Today in Labor History August 12, 1952: The Soviet authorities murdered 13 prominent Jewish intellectuals and writers in the Night of the Murdered Poets. All were members of the Jewish Anti-Fascist Committee, which fought for the USSR against Nazi Germany. They were falsely accused of espionage and treason, and then imprisoned, tortured, and isolated for three years before being formally charged.
Today in Labor History August 10, 2012: The Marikana massacre began near Rustenburg, South Africa. 47 people. including thirty-four miners, were killed by the South African Police Service ) during a six-week wildcat strike at the Lonmin platinum mine at Marikana. It was the most lethal use of force by South African security forces against civilians since the Soweto uprising in 1976 and has been compared to the 1960 Sharpeville massacre.
Today in Labor History August 3, 1959: Portugal's state police force, PIDE, fired upon striking dock workers in Bissau, Portuguese Guinea, killing over 50 people, during the Pidjiguiti massacre. The government blamed the revolutionaries from the African Party for the Independence of Guinea and Cape Verde (PAIGC). The event caused PAIGC to give up their nonviolent campaign and engage in the Guinea-Bissau War of Independence.
Today in Labor History July 31, 1968: Students protested the Olympics in Mexico City. They occupied schools and began a General Strike. Cops violently attacked them. The violence culminated with the Tlatelolco massacre, October 2. As a result, the cops slaughtered 350-400 people, using snipers. They arrested and tortured over 1,300.
Alejandro Jodorowsky dramatized the massacre in his amazing film, “The Holy Mountain” (1973). In it, he showed birds, fruits, vegetables and other things falling and being ripped out of the wounds of the dying students. The late author, Roberto Bolaño, recounted the massacre in his novel “Amulet” (1999). He also retells the story in his novel, “The Savage Detectives.”
Today we review ‘20 Days in #Mariupol , #Moscow is struck overnight, and we visit a Ukrainian refugee center in #Poland.
It’s the screaming that gets me.
As a former #U.S. #Army combat medic, the blood and gore doesn’t affect me very much nowadays. I trained for that, studied it, and feel as comfortable as one can get, really, in its presence.
Today in Labor History July 26, 1877: Federal troops killed 15-30 workers at the "Battle of the Viaduct," Chicago, during the Great Upheaval (AKA Great Train Strike). During the battle, U.S. troops and police attacked about 5,000 workers at Halsted & 16th Street in Chicago. A judge later found the police guilty of preventing the workers from exercising their right to freedom of speech and assembly.
The Great Upheaval was a national strike wave involving major uprisings in Martinsburg, WV, Baltimore, Pittsburgh, Saint Louis, San Francisco, Boston, Reading, PA, New York and many other cities. I write about it in my historical “Great Upheaval Trilogy.” My first book, “Anywhere But Schuylkill,” takes place in the years immediately preceding the Great Upheaval and will hopefully be out by the end of this year. Book II, “Red Hot Summer in the Smoky City,” my current WIP, takes place in Pittsburgh, at the height of the Great Upheaval.
Today in Labor History July 22, 1892: Anarchist Alexander Berkman tried to assassinate industrialist Henry Clay Frick in retaliation for the 9 miners killed by Pinkerton thugs on July 6, during the Homestead Steel Strike. Frick was the manager of Homestead Steel and had hired the Pinkertons to protect the factory and the scab workers he hired to replace those who were on strike. Berkman, and his lover, Emma Goldman, planned the assassination hoping it would arouse the working class to rise up and overthrow capitalism. Berkman failed in the assassination attempt and went to prison for 14 years. He wrote a book about his experience called, “Prison Memoirs of an Anarchist” (1912). He also wrote “The Bolshevik Myth” (1925) and “The ABC of Communist Anarchism” (1929).
Today in Labor History July 18, 1934: “The American Mercury” accepted Emma Goldman's article, "Communism: Bolshevist & Anarchist, A Comparison.” However, it was not until a year later that it was published, in a truncated form, as "There is No Communism in Russia."
Goldman had been deported by the U.S. in 1919, during the Palmer raids, and sent to Russia, where she lived with her comrade, Alexander Berkman, for several years. She was initially supportive of the Bolsheviks, until Trotsky brutally crushed the Kronstadt rebellion, in 1921, slaughtering over 1,000 sailors and then executing over a thousand more. After this, she left the USSR and, in 1923, published a book about her experiences, “My Disillusionment in Russia.”
H.L. Menken founded “The American Mercury,” in 1924, and published radical writers throughout the 1920s and ‘30s. A change of ownership in the 1940s led to a shift to the far right, including virulently antisemitic articles.
Today in Labor History July 11, 1947: Eight black prisoners were killed in Brunswick, Georgia, during the Anguilla Prison Massacre, for refusing to work in a snake infested swamp without boots. The New York Times reported it as a failed prison escape. However, a handwritten note, by one of the survivors, describing what really happened, reached the NAACP. After refusing to dig ditches, barefoot, among poisonous snakes, they were driven back to camp where, the warden, drunk and angry, opened fire on them with a submachine gun. No one was ever convicted of their murder.
If you liked Biden's foreign policy so far, you're gonna love it now that he's nominated serial human rights criminal Elliot Abrams for the U.S. Advisory Commission on Public Diplomacy.
Abrams's criminal record is so vile that even CNN points out his role in leading the Iran-Contra operation and supporting US-backed genocidal massacres in Latin America
Over the past months, the #LakotaLaw team has spent many hours in #Nevada at Peehee Mu'Huh — #ThackerPass — where construction has begun on a mine to exploit the largest known lithium deposit on #TurtleIsland.
Find out more about the Indigenous-led #resistance, the total disregard by both government and mining interests for an historic #massacre site with great biological #diversity and sensitivity, and the police raid on and dismantling of the #OxSam prayer camp.
Today in Labor History June 28, 1956: 100,000 workers struck in Poznañ, Poland, shouting "Bread & Freedom. The protests were violently suppressed, with at least 67 workers killed. The government sent in tanks and 10,000 soldiers. The next day, another 70 would be killed, 700 would be arrested, and hundreds more would be wounded.
Today in Labor History June 23, 1848: Workers rose up in Paris. The rebellion lasted until the 26th. They were rebelling against plans to close the National Workshops created by the Second Republic to provide work and income for the unemployed. The National Guard killed up to 10,000 people. They deported another 4,000 to Algeria. This was after the Revolution of February, 1848, which overthrew King Louis Philippe and established the Second Republic.
Today in Labor History June 16, 1869: In the small mining town of Ricamarie, France, troops opened fire on miners who were protesting the arrest of 40 workers. As a result, troops killed 14 people, including a 17-month-old girl in her mother’s arms. Furthermore, they wounded 60 others, including 10 children. This strike, and another in Aubin, along with the Paris Commune, were major inspirations for Emile Zola’s seminal work, “Germinal,” and the reason he chose to focus on revolutionary worker actions.
Today in Labor History June 15, 1913: U.S. troops finally ended the Moro Uprising (1899-1913) in the Philippines, with the extermination of 500 men, women and children. The Moros (Muslims of Mindinao, Jolo and Sulu) had refused to submit to American colonization after resisting the Spanish for 400 years. The rebellion was part of the Philippine-American War, which claimed over 4,000 U.S. lives, and as many as 250,000 Filipinos. After the Uprising of 1899-1913, More liberation groups continued to struggle against Japanese occupation, and against the Filipino government.
Today in Labor History June 4, 1939: The U.S. blocked the MS St. Louis from landing in Florida. The ship carried 963 Jewish refugees who were fleeing the Nazis. Canada also refused. As a result, the ship was forced back to Europe. Over 200 of its passengers ultimately died in Nazi concentration camps. The ordeal is also known as the Voyage of the Damned. It has been depicted in numerous books, including Julian Barnes’s novel, A History of the World in 10 ½ Chapters (1989); Bodie and Brock Thoene's novel Munich Signature (1991); and Leonardo Padura's novel Herejes (2013). Cordell Hull, who was Secretary of State at the time, and who led the fight to turn the refugees away, won the Nobel Peace Prize in 1944. It was one of the worst Nobel prizes ever awarded (along with Henry Kissinger (1973), who facilitated bloody dictatorships in Chile and Argentina, genocides in Bangladesh and East Timor, and carpet bombing of Cambodia. Or Elihu Root (1912), the U.S. Secretary of War who oversaw the brutal repression of the Filipino independence movement. And let’s not forget Shimon Peres, Yitzak Rabin and Yasser Arafat (1994), who jointly won the Nobel Peace Prize despite their histories of human rights abuses. Or Aung San Suu Kyi (1991). Or Mikhail Gorbachev (1990), who sent tanks into the Baltic republics less than a year after winning his “peace” prize, killing numerous civilians. Or Barack Obama (2009), who began assassinating civilians with his drones and arresting more immigrants than his predecessor, George W. Bush, not long after winning his Nobel. Or Woodrow Wilson (1919), an outright racist and apologist for slavery, who sent troops to occupy Nicaragua and the Dominican Republic, and to “intervene” in Cuba, Honduras and Panama, and who oversaw the Palmer raids that led to over 10,000 arrests and over 500 deportations of union leaders, peace activists, socialists and anarchists. Or Menachem Begin (1978), who four years after receiving his “peace” prize launched the bloody invasion of Lebanon, and who refused to fire Ariel Sharon, even after the Kahan Commission found Sharon culpable for the Sabra and Shatila massacre.
“If it had not been for the accident of my birth, I would have been an anti-Semite.”
-Henry Kissinger
He may be a German Jew who fled the Nazis, but he has allied himself with the same forces who cheered Hitler on, who enabled him, who have encouraged and supported Hitler-imitators throughout the world.
>1million dead from U.S. bombs, napalm & pesticides in Vietnam, Cambodia, Laos during his tenure as Secretary of State (along with 30,000 mostly working-class U.S. citizens)
*Torture & murder of tens of thousands of Chileans under Pinochet, after the Kissinger-U.S. supported overthrow of Allende
*Operation Condor, to hunt down & slaughter revolutionaries throughout Latin America
*Indonesian invasion of East Timor & genocide (1975), which killed up to 300,000
*Military slaughter & genocide in Bangladesh (1971) which killed up to 3 million people
*Support for dictatorships in Spain, Portugal, Greece, S Arabia, Iran.
*Support for right-wing insurgencies in Africa
Today in Writing History May 27, 1894: Author Dashiell Hammett was born. From the age of 21-23, he worked as a Pinkerton detective and then joined the army. But he developed tuberculosis and was discharged shortly after joining. In 1920, he moved to Spokane, again to work for the Pinkertons. There, he served as a strikebreaker in the Anaconda miners’ strike. However, when the Pinkertons enlisted him to assassinate Native American IWW organizer Frank Little, he refused, and quit the agency. His first stories were published in the early 1920s. And his 1929 novel, “Red Harvest,” was inspired by the Anaconda Road massacre, a 1920 labor dispute in the mining town of Butte, Montana, when company guards fired on striking IWW miners, killing one and injuring 16 others. Vigilantes also lynched Frank Little. André Gide called the book “the last word in atrocity, cynicism, and horror." However, Hammett was most famous for The Maltese Falcon (1930) and The Thin Man (1934). Both were later made into films. In 1937, he supported the Anti-Nazi League and the Western Writers Congress. He also donated to the Abraham Lincoln Brigade, fighting the fascists in Spain. He was a socialist and served as president of the Communist-sponsored Civil Rights Congress of New York. In 1953, he was subpoenaed by McCarthy’s anti-Communist witch hunt. And again, in 1955, he was celled to testify bout his role in the Civil Rights Congress. He was also convicted in absentia in 1932 of battery and attempted rape. He died in 1961, of lung cancer.
AEW: FIGHT FOR THE FALLEN! DISCUSSION THREAD 08/16/23
💥💥 IT’S WEDNESDAY, YOU KNOW WHAT THAT MEANS! 💥💥...