7 October 1944 | Jewish prisoners of the Sonderkommando at the German Nazi camp Auschwitz II-Birkenau organized a revolt. They set crematorium IV on fire, causing serious damage, as well as attacked the SS men in the vicinity. 1/5
Today in Labor History January 19, 1812: Luddites torched Oatlands Mill in Yorkshire, England. In order to avoid losing their jobs to machines, Luddites destroyed equipment in protest. Their movement was named for Ned Ludd, a fictional weaver who supposedly smashed knitting frames after being whipped by his boss. Luddite rebellions continued from 1811-1816, until the military quashed their uprising.
Chant no more your old rhymes about bold Robin Hood
His feats I but little admire
I will sing the Achievements of General Ludd
Now the Hero of Nottinghamshire.
The sentiment for this poem comes from the fact that Robin Hood was a paternalistic hero, a displaced aristocrat who stole from his class brethren and gave to the poor; whereas Ned Ludd represented the autonomy and self-sufficiency of the working class.
Today in Labor History August 14, 1791: Dutty Boukman led a Vodou ceremony with enslaved people from Saint Domingue plantations that led to the start of the Haitian Revolution, the largest slave uprising since the Spartacist revolt against the Romam empire. Boukman was born in Senegambia. His name, Boukman, came from the English “Book Man,” because he not only knew how to read, but taught other enslaved people how to read. He, and priestess Cécile Fatiman, had led a series of meetings with enslaved people prior to August 14 to organized and plan for the uprising. Boukman was killed by French troops a few months into the revolution. Trinidadian Marxist writer C. L. R. James wrote the best book on the Haitian Revolution: “The Black Jacobins,” (1938). Also, be sure to check out the wonderful music of the contemporary Haitian pop group, Boukman Eksperyans, named for the Haitian revolutionary, Dutty Boukman. A fictionalized version of Boukman plays the title character in Guy Endore's novel “Babouk,” an anti-capitalist parable about the Haitian Revolution.
Today in Labor History October 7, 1944: Uprising at Birkenau extermination camp (associated with Auschwitz). Jewish Sonderkommando, mostly from Greece and Hungary, attacked the SS with stones and hammers, killing three of them, and set crematorium IV on fire and threw their Oberkapo into a furnace. Sonderkommando were Jewish prisoners who were forced by the Nazis, on threat of their own deaths, to dispose of gas chamber victims). After escaping, the rebels reached Rajsko, where they hid in the granary, but the SS pursued and killed them by setting the granary on fire. By the time the rebellion at crematorium IV had been suppressed, 212 members of the Sonderkommando were still alive and 451 had been killed.
19 April 1943 | Groups of Jews in the Warsaw Ghetto began the uprising against the Germans. It lasted 27 days. Today we remember the heroism and sacrifice of people who chose to resist against impossible odd to die in dignity & save the human spirit.
'The full history of Atlantic slavery is scarcely taught in the US or the UK, and so it’s not surprising that few people in either country know much about Tacky’s revolt. Until recently, however, I didn’t realise that Jamaicans don’t know this history much better. I had assumed that in a country with a Black majority population, which had emerged from one of the most brutal slave societies in human history, basic education would have offered a much better understanding of slavery and its legacies than the one I had received in the US. I was wrong.
'While no one in Jamaica denies the importance of slavery’s history, little is known about antislavery uprisings. I asked my friend Sutopa, a high school teacher in Massachusetts who grew up in Jamaica, what she had learned about slavery and slave revolt in primary school. She paused and pursed her lips, then shook her head and smiled ruefully: “Almost nothing.”'
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 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 29, 1786: Shays' Rebellion began in Massachusetts. It was an armed uprising of farmers and tradesmen in response to a debt crisis among the citizenry and in opposition to the state government's increased efforts to collect taxes both on individuals and their trades. Revolutionary War veteran Daniel Shays led four thousand rebels (called Shaysites) in a protest against economic and civil rights injustices. They marched on the federal Armory in Springfield an unsuccessful attempt to seize its weaponry and overthrow the government. The Federal Government, still young and weak, was unable to finance sufficient troops to put down the rebellion. Consequently, it was the Massachusetts State Militia that ultimately quashed the uprising, over 5 months later. Despite the duration and violence of the uprising, only 9 people died.
Today in Labor History September 19, 1676: Rebels burned Jamestown to the ground during Bacon's Rebellion. This armed insurrection against the rule of Governor William Berkeley was the first class uprising in North America and one of the driving forces for the creation of racial identities. During the uprising, thousands of indentured white Europeans united with free, indentured and enslaved blacks to demand rights and privileges they were being denied. They took up arms and drove Berkeley from Jamestown. The unification of poor blacks and whites scared the hell out of the ruling class. Consequently, they realized they needed to sow divisions between the poor, so they would fight among each other rather than unify in another uprising against the rich. This led to a hardening of the color lines and the development of the ideas of race and racial superiority.
Today in Labor History October 21, 1894: French anarchists incited a revolt on the penal colony of Île Saint-Joseph, in the Salvation Islands of French Guiana, which included the infamous Devil’s Island. The revolt was a response to the guards killing an anarchist prisoner. The uprising was quickly put down, with the guards slaughtering several anarchists, and torturing many more, some of whom later died from their wounds. Captain Alfred Dreyfus was held there (1895-98) after his wrongful, antisemitic conviction for treason. Charles Delescluze, libertarian socialist and future leader of the Paris Commune, was sent there in 1853. Clément Duval, a member of the Panther of Batignolles anarchist gang of robbers, spent 14 years on Devil’s Island, making 20 escape attempts. In 1901, he succeeded and fled to New York, where lived until his death at the age of 85. The first political prisoners brought to Guiana were Jacobins, in 1794. Numerous slave rebellions also occurred in the colony, until slavery was finally abolished, in the wake of the 1848 French Revolution. The novel and film “Papillon” takes place there, as does Joseph Conrad's short story “An Anarchist” (1906). Delescluze, who was killed on the barricades during the Commune, wrote an account of his imprisonment in Guiana, “De Paris à Cayenne, Journal d'un transporté.” And Duval wrote about it in his 1929 memoir, “Outrage: An Anarchist Memoir of the Penal Colony.” Guiana is the only continental South American territory to remain a European colony into the 21st century.
Today in Labor History October 22, 1956: Hungarian workers refused to obey their managers, calling instead for workers' self-management. The next day, the Hungarian Revolution began against the authoritarian government and subservience to the Soviet Union. The uprising last 12 days, before being crushed by Soviet Tanks. Up to 3,000 workers and revolutionaries were killed. 13,000 were wounded. 200,000 were exiled. Hundreds of Hungarian and Soviet troops also died putting down the uprising.
Today in Labor History January 18, 1943: The first uprising of Jews began in the Warsaw Ghetto, marking the start of the Warsaw Ghetto Uprising. In the summer of 1942, over a quarter million Jews were deported from the ghetto to Treblinka and murdered. In response, the remaining Jews began building bunkers and smuggling weapons and explosives into the ghetto. On January 18, 1943, when the Nazis began their second deportation of the Jews, the armed insurgency began. They fought with whatever they could smuggle into the ghetto: handguns, gasoline bottles and a few other weapons. They inflicted enough casualties on the Nazis that the deportation was halted within a few days. Only 5,000 Jews were removed, instead of the 8,000 planned. They knew from the start that the uprising was doomed. Most of the Jewish fighters did not expect to survive. Rather, they saw their resistance as a battle for their honor and a protest against the world's silence. Marek Edelman, one of the few survivors, said their inspiration to fight was "not to allow the Germans alone to pick the time and place of our deaths."
Today, in honor of Black History Month, we remember Nat Turner, who led the only effective, sustained slave revolt in U.S. history (in 1831). They killed over 50 people, mostly whites, but the authorities put down the rebellion after a few days. Turner survived in hiding for several months. The militia and racist mobs, in turn, slaughtered up to 120 free and enslaved black people, and the state executed another 56, and severely punished dozens of non-slaves in the frenzy that followed the uprising. Turner’s revolt set off a new wave of oppressive legislation by whites, prohibiting the education, movement and assembly of enslaved and free blacks, alike.
#France admits it’s lost control of parts of #NewCaledonia, the world’s third-largest producer of critical EV metal nickel
The French government is moving to regain full control of the Pacific territory of New Caledonia, High Commissioner Louis Le Franc said, as extra security forces arrive in the archipelago to end a week of violent protests by pro-independence groups.
Le Franc said new security deployments, after French President Emmanuel Macron’s government declared a state of emergency, would help reassert control following violence that left behind burned cars, torched stores and improvised barricades along roads.
PS. It's truly disgusting to see them refer to a country only based on their export./Farhad
Six More Months in the Movement to Defend the Forest
2023-12-12 via #CrimeThinc
"Escalating Repression: #RICO and the Furtherance of the Conspiracy
"With the benefit of hindsight, it is clear that the 'tactics of organized criminals' language Governor Kemp used on July 2 was not just boilerplate copy drafted by an intern, nor was the August 2 press conference simply propaganda to assure backers that the state could still protect their investments. These phrases and statements were shaping operations, carefully crafted interventions designed to position the government for their next operation: the blanket criminalization of the entire movement.
"On August 29, the Attorney General of #Georgia, Christopher M. Carr, filed an indictment with the Fulton County Superior Court, bringing charges against 61 people under Georgia’s version of the Rackeeter-Influenced Corrupt Organizations (RICO) Act O.C.G.A. § 16-14-4. The indictment became public on September 5. The document, which is over 100 pages long and very poorly written, claims that the 'conspiracy' (which it names 'Defend the Atlanta Forest') was 'founded' on May 25, 2020—the day that #MinneapolisPolice officers murdered #GeorgeFloyd, precipitating a nationwide #uprising.
"This was a serious escalation. It did not catch everyone by surprise: the #AtlantaSolidarityFund has been braced for such charges since February. The authorities and their extreme-right proxies had been demanding a full-scale crackdown on the movement for over a year, spreading a conspiracy theory that the movement was a mafia controlled by a shadowy and well-connected group (a narrative some activists also reproduced, apparently with no sense of irony). According to one version of this conspiracy theory, circulated by far-right trolls, the Network for Stronger Communities (a Georgia-based nonprofit organization) operates a number of financial enterprises, including the Atlanta Solidarity Fund, that coordinate acts of terrorism in order to accumulate wealth and influence. Of the 61 accused, three were members of the Atlanta Solidarity Fund. The 42 people already facing #DomesticTerrorism charges were also indicted, as well as a number of other people whose connection to the movement was unclear. The indictment alleged that some people had committed acts in 'overt furtherance of the conspiracy' such as buying #GlueSticks for #SignMaking. UK is using similar tactics, arresting people for just having [#Superglue or #BikeLocks in their possession.]
"The RICO indictment was not a legal procedure but a political act. It was not a judicial intervention to suppress criminal activity but a government measure to crush what the text describes as '#anarchism,' '#collectivism,' '#SocialSolidarity,' '#MutualAid.”
"It is not simply 61 people who are on trial. By dating the case to the murder of George Floyd, the prosecution showed that their real target was the entire population of millions that participated in the consequent revolt. This is not an unusual court case, but a new chapter in the fight between those who seek to preserve the hierarchies of a structurally white supremacist society and those fighting to destroy it root and branch. The indictment does not present a list of crimes. It describes the contours and values of a rival society emerging within the movement to stop Cop City, aspiring to reinvent the world according to a different logic.
"The Fulton County Judge assigned to the RICO case immediately recused himself. Until then, judges had not recused themselves from cases related to the movement even when they possessed obvious ties to the Atlanta Police Foundation."
Today in Labor History August 1, 1921: Sheriff Sid Hatfield and Ed Chambers were murdered by Baldwin-Felts private cops. They did it in retaliation for Hatfield’s role in the Matewan labor battle in 1920, when two Felts family thugs were killed by Hatfield and his deputies, who had sided with the coal miners. The private cops executed Hatfield and Chambers on the Welch County courthouse steps in front of their wives. This led to the Battle of Blair Mountain, where 20,000 coal miners marched to the anti-union stronghold Logan County to overthrow Sheriff Dan Chaffin, the coal company tyrant who murdered miners with impunity. The Battle of Blair Mountain started in September 1921. The armed miners battled 3,000 cops, private cops and vigilantes, who were backed by the coal bosses. It was the largest labor uprising in U.S. history, and the largest armed insurrection since the Civil War. The president of the U.S. eventually sent in 27,000 national guards. Over 1 million rounds were fired. Up to 100 miners were killed, along with 10-30 Baldwin-Felts detectives and 3 national guards. They even dropped bombs on the miners from planes, the second time in history that the U.S. bombed its own citizens (the first being the pogrom again black residents of Tulsa, earlier that same year).
Today in Labor History January 9, 1905: Russia’s “Bloody Sunday” occurred, with soldiers of the Imperial Guard opening fire on unarmed protesters as they marched toward the Winter Palace. They killed as many as 234 people and injured up to 800. They also arrested nearly 7,300 people. The people were demanding better working conditions and pay, an end to the Russo-Japanese War and universal suffrage. Bolsheviks and Mensheviks opposed the march because it lacked revolutionary demands. The public was so outraged by the massacre that uprisings broke out in Moscow, Warsaw, Riga, Vilna and other parts of the empire. Over 400,000 participated in a General Strike. Protests and uprisings continued for months. The backlash was horrific. The authorities killed 15,000 peasants and sent 45,000 into exile. Another 20,000 were seriously injured. Shostakovich’s 11th Symphony is subtitled “The Year 1905.” Maxim Gorky’s novel, “The Life of a Useless Man,” depicts Bloody Sunday.
#France declared a state of emergency on the Pacific island of #NewCaledonia after clashes broke out between authorities and pro-independence protesters. At least four people have already been killed. Three of whom were Indigenous people, and the fourth was a French gendarme.
Protesters have been seen carrying heavy firearms, with reports of live rounds being fired at police.
Multiple buildings have been set on fire, and several supermarkets have been looted. White French residents have also formed armed groups to confront the Indigenous protesters.
Under the state of emergency, French authorities have imposed a curfew, banned #TikTok, closed schools, and placed restrictions on movement.
They have also deployed an additional 500 police officers, adding to the 1,800 police and gendarmes already on the island.
Protests erupted after French President Emmanuel #Macron introduced plans to reform New Caledonia’s electoral system, which would grant more French residents in the territory voting rights. Protesters believe this would unfavorably shift political representation in the country. The Pacific archipelago, home to the Indigenous #Kanak people, is rich in minerals and has been under French control since 1853.
Today in Labor History January 29, 1834: Chesapeake and Ohio Canal workers rioted. President Jackson sent in troops to quell the unrest. It was the first time the government used troops to suppress a domestic labor dispute. Workers rebelled because of deadly working conditions and low pay. George Washington had designed the canal project. He intended it to facilitate transportation of goods from the Chesapeake Bay to the Ohio River Valley. Construction teams were made up mostly of Irish, German, Dutch and black workers. They toiled long hours for low wages in dangerous conditions. From this, and similar projects of the era, came the line: “the banks of the canals are lined with the bones of dead Irishmen.” Also from this project came the poem:
Ten thousand Micks,
They swung their picks,
To build the new canal.
But the choleray
Was stronger ‘n they
And twice it killed ‘em all.
Today in Labor History March 5, 1965: A Leftist uprising against British colonialism erupted in Bahrain, known as the March Intifada. The uprising began after the Bahrain Petroleum Company laid off hundreds of workers at on March 5, 1965. Students at Manama High School, the only high school in Bahrain, went out into the streets to protest the lay-offs. Several people died in the clashes between protesters and police. The authorities quickly suppressed the uprising. However, as news of the crackdown spread, protests erupted throughout the country, creating a nationwide uprising which lasted for a month.
Today in Labor History March 11, 1858: The Great Indian Mutiny, also known as the Sepoy Rebellion, ended with massacres by the British. 6,000 British troops died in the fighting. However, at least 800,000 Indians died in the fighting and from the famines and epidemics that resulted.
Today in Labor History, October 30, 1831: Nat Turner was arrested after leading the bloodiest slave rebellion in United States history. The rebels killed between 55 and 65 White people, but the uprising was suppressed within a few days. The militia and racist mobs, in turn, slaughtered up to 120 free and enslaved black people, and the state executed another 56. Turner managed to evade capture and survived in hiding for over 30 days, before he, too, was tried and executed.