“The philosophers have only interpreted the world in various ways. The point, however, is to change it”, as written by Karl Marx.
Karl Marx transformed the history and evolution of humankind with a unique primary insight, simple to tell though it has many layers; we humans are self created beings, whose souls are artifacts of our civilization as historical and social constructions, interdependent with those of others, and if we change how we relate to each other as systems, narratives of identity, informing, motivating, and shaping forces, if we change the nature of our relationships, we also change the nature of humankind.
Are we not made of the stories we tell about ourselves, to ourselves and to each other?
Always there remains the struggle between the masks that others make for us, and those we make for ourselves.
This is the first revolution in which we all must fight; the struggle for self-ownership.
“The bourgeoisie has left remaining no other nexus between man and man than naked self- interest, than callous ‘cash payment’. It has drowned the most heavenly ecstasies of religious fervour, of chivalrous enthusiasm, of philistine sentimentalism, in the icy water of egotistical calculation.” So wrote Marx and Engels in The Communist Manifesto, which remains the most impactful revisioning of human relations, being, meaning, and values in the history of civilization.
Celebrate with me today the birthday of Karl Marx, who shaped from the Humanist tradition of the Enlightenment a toolkit for the realization of our potential humanity, of the limitless possibilities of becoming human, and of the liberation of humankind from systems of unequal power, from elite hegemonies of wealth, power, and privilege, from divisions and hierarchies of belonging and exclusionary otherness, from fascisms of blood, faith, and soil, and from the tyranny and carceral states of those who would enslave us.
An enduring legacy of Karl Marx is his instrumentalization of Socratic method as a tool of understanding unequal power as dialectical process, which can be generally applied in human sciences. This he demonstrated at length in the example of economics because he wanted to place it on a footing as science, much as Freud insisted on defining his new talking cure for madness as medical science to confer authority on it.
Marx helped me process two defining moments of my life, traumas which were transformational both to my identity and to my understanding of the human condition.
I first read his works as a teenager in the wake of a trip to Brazil the summer between eighth grade and high school in 1974, training with a friend as a sabre fencer for the Pan American Games, during which I became aware of the horrific gulf between social classes and races in the wealth disparity between my aristocratic hosts and the vast Black slums beyond their walls. At thirteen I had read Plato and Nietzsche, but never seen poverty or racism, though the brutal tyranny of a city under siege by its police had been enacted before me years earlier in the spectacle of Bloody Thursday in Berkeley, May 15 1969. This was the Defining Moment of my Awakening to the brokenness of the world and the lies and illusions of the gilded cage of my privilege.
My response to this first reading, like my second and third a part of reading through the entire Great Books of the Western World series and the guidebooks by Mortimer J. Adler which collect his famous course at the University of Chicago, was that Marx had reimagined sin as the profit motive in a myth of Exile and Return, in an allegorical fable in which the new Adamic Man would be restored to an Edenic state, being immediately captivated by the multitudes of Biblical symbolism which permeates Das Capital. In this interpretation I was influenced by my context of growing up in a Reformed Church community, where spoken English reflected that of the King James Bible whose rhythms shape my writing still, and the influence of Coleridge, Blake, and other Romantic Idealists and religious symbolism in medieval art through my mother, who was a scholar of both.
My second reading of Marx was eight years later as a university student after a culinary tour of the Mediterranean during the gap between junior and senior undergraduate years ended with the 1982 Israeli invasion of Lebanon and Siege of Beirut, and my exposure to the brutalities of war and Imperialist-Colonialist conquest as a nation fell to ruins around me. This was the Defining Moment of my calling, in which I was sworn to the Oath of the Resistance by Jean Genet.
During this second engagement with Marx, I laughed all the way through it; the first time I didn’t understand the literary references well enough to get the jokes. This time I saw his delightfully wicked Swiftian satire, and realized his true achievement; like Nicholaus of Cusa and Godel, Camus and Sartre, Beckett and Pinter, Marx demonstrates the limits of reason in an Absurd universe free of any meaning or value we ourselves do not create, and the madness of our historical attempts to control fate and nature including our own in a mad world, where security is an illusion, truths are ambiguous, ephemeral, and relational, and our fear has been weaponized globally by carceral states in service to power, the centralization of authority, and our enslavement and dehumanization. In this second unfolding of understanding I found guidance and allyship with fellow revolutionaries and scholars of Marxist thought and its praxis, as we waged liberation struggle against Apartheid in South Africa, American imperialism in Central America, and other theatres of Resistance to tyranny and oppression.
The third time I read Marx was over a decade after my baptism by fire in Beirut, this time as a counselor seeking to better understand and help my clients. I remain as I was then, a scholar of the intersection of literature, psychology, history, and philosophy, whose primary field is the origin of human evil and its consequences as violence, though of course I have been greatly changed by my life experience, and my understanding has changed with me.
My third reading of Marx coincides with my Defining Moment of understanding the Wagnerian ring of fear, power, and force from which evil, violence, and fascist tyranny arise, a Ring of Power which requires the renunciation of love to wield, and a pathology which can be healed by the redemptive power of love. Here Marx helps us to understand the dynamics of unequal power as a system of oppression, a model which can be applied generally to issues including those of gender, race, and class.
We often have difficulty envisioning a therapeutic model of finding balance and harmony in society rather than a coercive one; we may align ourselves on the side of freedom against tyranny and the force and control of the carceral state, but how can we abolish the police and throw open the gates of the prisons, abolish borders and the counterinsurgency model of policing which enforces white supremacist and patriarchal terror, renounce the social use of force and abandon violence and war, cast down law and order from their thrones and forge a civilization of liberty and chaos in its place?
Let me provide you with an example of what that might look like. On my return from adventures abroad, I took a job as a counselor in a program called Vision Quest run through a Native American tribe for court mandated youth, under the flags of the 9th and 10th Cavalry Buffalo Soldiers with the Army’s permission, and with gorgeous Union Army blues parade uniforms.
As described to me, I would lead a group of fifteen boys through the program from a three month impact or boot camp in Arizona near the historic Fort, then ride horses to Denver and Philadelphia, sleeping in a tipi as one of several such teams while they learned riding and parade horse drill, and finish the program on a tall ship in the Florida Keys teaching them to sail. They would earn their GED high school equivalency certificate, and graduates would have served their sentences and be provided with jobs and transitional supervised community based housing. There was no lockdown; just men learning to live together without violence.
This sounded like a grand adventure, and for most of my life if you told me something was going to be an adventure, or as Obi-Wan says in the first Star Wars film “some damn fool idealistic crusade”, I’d likely do it. It’s the part they leave out of the pitch you need to worry about with this kind of thing; what no one told me was that the clients were mainly violent felons with four or five year sentences that would eventually land them in adult prisons if they washed out, with issues like psychotic rage and often highly trained and indoctrinated gang soldiers, cult zealots, and fanatics of political terror as well. It turned out to be both much tougher and much more interesting than I thought it was going to be, and became my entry point into working as a counselor.
America at this time was caught up in a highly politicized racist hysteria over gangs and rising crime, whose emergence was to me clearly a consequence of the failures of capitalism as our civilization began to collapse from the inherent contradictions of our systems of unequal power. One reply to these conditions was to use greater force; the solution of stop and frisk policies, the school to prison pipeline whose design is to create prison bond labor and the re-enslavement of Black citizens, militarization of police, and the universalization of state terror as the counterinsurgency model of policing. This has two problems; it fails to address underlying causes of crime in wealth disparity, and it asks us to throw our children away.
They were some of the toughest and most unreachable boys in our nation, mainly Black and from the ghettos of Chicago and Philadelphia, with issues of abuse, abandonment, and addiction as consequences of structural and systemic inequalities and injustices, internalized oppression, and the legacy of slavery. And they were boys and future citizens our nation had thrown away.
We had a three percent recidivism rate from that program; 97% of our clients had no further contact with the law after completion. This amazing success with teenagers our society had pronounced violent and unreformable criminals began with an awareness that perpetrators are also victims, both and neither good nor evil, and was won by providing a constructive way for them to earn honor and membership; so far like many other programs based on military models of identity construction.
But it was the horses, wild mustangs given to each new client as their own personal mount who had to break and learn to ride them, that allowed them to forge the ability to bond with others, because you can trust a horse and it will never betray you. Teambuilding exercises did the rest, as in the military but without the purpose of violence.
So it was, with The Communist Manifesto in my saddlebag and dreaming with serenity between a former gang enforcer and extremist of Louis Farrakhan’s racial separatist Nation of Islam who had been shot six times in six different gunfights with other Black teenagers his ideology had classified as enemies and whose joy was to recite poetry from my copy of Rumi, and on the other side a former Jamaican Posse drug lord who had two million dollars in cash in his pockets when his reign of terror in Philly ended in betrayal and arrest and who had discovered a genius for choreography in adapting reggae to parade drill, that I had a primary insight and realization of the nature of violence as a disease of power, of addiction to power and of unequal power, which operates multigenerationally as epigenetic trauma and historical legacies of slavery and racism, and often a result of secret power.
Dehumanization is the end result of commodification; Jean Genet famously called the quest for wealth and power necrophilia for this reason. William S. Burroughs coined the term the Algebra of Need as a metaphor of Capitalism. And with his invention of the philosophy of Existentialism, Jean Paul Sartre explored the implications of Marx’s primary insights as a psychology of the consequences of unequal power relations and the mechanical failures of our civilization’s internal contradictions as alienation, falsification, commodification, internalized oppression, and the disfigurement and theft of the soul by hierarchies of elite wealth, power, and privilege and the hegemonic forces of those who would enslave us.
As a systemic and pervasive means of transforming persons into things, capitalism is an enabler which acts as a force multiplier for a host of evils, inequalities of racism and patriarchy, and divisions of exclusionary otherness, touching every aspect of our lives including our identity and social relations and confronting individuals with enormous and weaponized forces with which we must wrestle.
And our best response to these threats is solidarity in refusal to submit or be isolated by our modern pathology of disconnectedness, divided by otherness and identitarian categories of exclusion and privilege and by fascisms of blood, faith, and soil, and subjugated by authorized identities and the weaponization of overwhelming and generalized fear in service to power; to unite as a band of brothers, sisters, and others and to shelter and protect our humanity and viability through and with others as a United Humankind.
In our revolutionary struggle for our souls, for autonomy and self ownership, for liberty and our uniqueness as self created beings, and for the liberation of humankind, we are each other’s best resource of action.
We are not designed to survive alone, and it can be difficult to get people in crisis to reach out for help, and for our institutions of caregiving to find where help is needed before things spiral downwards into violence, nor can violence be cured with violence or state repression. But this is the great mission of our humanity; to unite across the boundaries of our differences in revolutionary struggle to become better.
Let us defy the malign forces that would divide and enslave us and consume our souls. So I say with Karl Marx, the great visionary of liberty and the limitless possibilities of becoming human; People of the world, unite; we have nothing to lose but our chains.
Today we remember the horrific repression and mass murder by police which numbers among the most brutal and senseless crimes of state terror in our nation’s history, but also the valiant resistance of students throughout America to a government which was and yet remains an unjust and violent perpetrator of crimes against humanity both at home and abroad.
The national student strike which the massacre unleashed was a turning point for American involvement in Vietnam, and remains a model for mass action today. Its primary lesson is simple; to unite everyone, from all classes and stratum of society, in action against an existential threat said threat must be universal as well as clear and direct. Such a universal mass protest now unfolds in the shadow of the Israel Genocide of the Palestinians and the echoes and reflections of the Kent State Massacre.
A parallel student movement for peace and divestiture now engulfs our nation and our world, a clarion call for solidarity with the oppressed in the genocide of the Palestinians and the deaths of thousands of children and civilians paid for by our taxes, as our government and the Trump regime abandon our ideas of universal human rights and the historic role of America as their guarantor state, and like the university peace movement to end the Vietnam War is met not with celebration of our rights of free speech and the co-ownership of the state by all of its citizens, not with a President who joins the protests as the champion of democracy and our universal human rights, but with police terror and repression of dissent.
Our leaders have betrayed us, and in the abandonment of our human rights and of our rights as citizens Biden and the Democratic Party handed the 2024 election to Trump and his criminal Party of Treason whose mission is the sabotage of democracy and its replacement by a theocratic tyranny of patriarchal and white supremacist terror. For if you sponsor and authorize genocide, I cannot vote for you, and I will fight you; and in this I am far from alone.
The Democratic Party is now considering offering us Kommandant Kamala once again, a committed Zionist and overseer of the carceral state who as California’s Prosecuting Attorney led the state campaign of re-enslavement of Black citizens as prison bond labor for trivial drug offences. If we are once again forced to choose between abandoning democracy and abandoning our universal human rights, the fascists win.
We are caught by the horns of a dilemma in this crucial first year of Vichy America, captured state of the Fourth Reich, with liberty or tyranny at stake not merely for our nation but for the whole of humankind and throughout the coming millennia. We must bring our dog to heel through Boycott, Divestiture, and Sanction of Israel until the genocide and the Occupation end, and with it the Netanyahu settler regime of ethnic cleansing and theocratic terror.
If we cannot, and choose instead to continue to ally and identify our nation with imperial conquest and dominion, theocratic sectarian state terror and tyranny, ethnic cleansing and genocide, and the sacrifice of others lives in service to our own power, those of us who remember what it means to be an American and a human being must resist the treasonous and criminal Trump regime By Any Means Necessary.
Sic Semper Tyrannis, friends, as the passage in the play Julius Caesar underlined by Nelson Mandela to authorize direct action against Apartheid teaches us.
Trump and Netanyahu planned the October 7 attack, using infiltration agents, deniable forces of settler militia, and blind or unwitting assets among Hamas and others, to create a casus belli for Israel’s Final Solution of the Palestinians and to drive a wedge between the progressive and collaborationist wings of the Democratic Party
I ask you now, all of us; don’t let complicity in genocide be the reason democracy falls in America and Israel. We must bring regime change to both our nations, and like the people of Vietnam leave the Palestinians to create themselves as they choose, with liberty and justice for all..
What lessons can we learn from the Kent State Massacre?
In the words of eyewitness Mike Alewitz writing in Counterpunch; “We were peacefully protesting the US invasion of Cambodia when the Ohio National Guard launched a teargas attack and then opened fire at us.
67 shots in 13 seconds left our campus strewn with dead and wounded. Four dead in Ohio – nine wounded, one paralyzed for life.
Ten days later, 75 Mississippi state police, armed with carbines, shotguns and submachine guns, fired 460 rounds into a dormitory at protesting students at Jackson State. The barrage left two dead and an unknown number of wounded.
And in between, rarely noted, was the largest black uprising in a southern city during the civil rights era.
On May 11, 1970, the black community in Augusta, Georgia rebelled, after the burned and tortured body of an incarcerated 16-year old retarded black youth was dumped by his jailers at a local hospital.
The rebellion left six African-American men dead – all shot in the back.
The invasion of Cambodia and killings at Kent sparked an unprecedented national student strike. Over 400 campuses were shut down and occupied by the students. Millions of people joined street demonstrations demanding an end to the war.
1970 marked a turning point in history as the majority of GIs came to recognize that Washington had knowingly sent them to die in a war that was unwinnable. Our movement became so powerful that, along with the determined resistance of the Vietnamese people, we forced the government to withdraw from Southeast Asia.
Ending the war, on the heels of the civil rights movement, was a tremendous victory for working people. The momentum gave rise to the rebirth of the women’s movement, the gay movement and other social movements that transformed the country.
Today we face an unprecedented medical, ecological, social and economic crisis. We cannot continue to pour trillions of dollars into an insatiable war machine while healthcare workers go begging for masks. While our schools and restaurants are closed. While millions are unemployed. While lines at food pantries stretch for miles.
The finances and resources of society must be changed to go towards healing our planet and ourselves. The memory of the martyrs of Kent and Jackson cries out for us to continue the struggle for which they gave their lives – to demand money for jobs and education, not for war; to put an end to all US wars and occupations and sanctions.”
As described by Steve Early in Jacobin; “In May 1970, 4 million students went on strike across the country, shutting down classes at hundreds of colleges, universities, and high schools and demanding an end to the Vietnam War. Fifty years later, their rebellion remains an inspiration, as radical student politics is back on the agenda.
Over the course of this unprecedented campus uprising, about two thousand students were arrested. After thirty buildings used by the Reserve Officers’ Training Corps (ROTC) were bombed or set on fire, heavily armed National Guards were deployed on twenty-one campuses in sixteen states.
On May 4, at Kent State University in Ohio, Guard members fresh from policing a Teamster wildcat strike shot and killed four students and wounded nine. Ten days later, Mississippi State Police opened fire on a women’s dormitory at Jackson State University, killing two more students”.
“The strike across campuses revealed the power of collective action. Born out of the shutdown, there was an explosion of activity by hundreds of thousands of students not previously engaged in anti-war activity, creating major political tremors across the country, including helping to curtail military intervention in Southeast Asia.”
“Nixon claimed to have a “secret plan” to bring peace to Vietnam and withdraw the five hundred thousand US troops still deployed there.
Once unveiled, Nixon’s plan turned out to be “Vietnamization” — shifting the combat burden to troops loyal to the US-backed government in Saigon, while conducting massive bombing of targets throughout Vietnam, Laos, and Cambodia. By April 30, 1970, the United States was sending ground troops into Cambodia as well.
Students at elite private institutions long associated with anti-war agitation were among the first to react. Protest strikes were quickly declared at Columbia, Princeton, Brandeis, and Yale, where many students had already voted to boycott class in support of the Black Panther Party, then on trial in New Haven.
Meanwhile, a Friday night riot outside student bars in downtown Kent, Ohio, was followed by the burning of a Kent State ROTC building over the weekend. Ohio governor James Rhodes ordered a thousand National Guard troops to occupy the campus and prevent rallies of any kind.
The Guard came geared with bayonets, tear gas grenades, shotguns, and M1s, a military rifle with long range and high velocity. Chasing a hostile but unarmed crowd of students across campus on May 4, one unit of weekend warriors suddenly wheeled and fired, killing four students.”
“The deaths of Jeffrey Miller, Allison Krause, Sandy Scheuer, and Bill Schroeder had a powerful impact on hundreds of thousands of students at Kent State and beyond.”
“The resulting calls for campus shutdowns came from every direction. Students at MIT tracked which schools were on strike for a National Strike Information Center operating at Brandeis nearby. Soon the list was ten feet long. Despite its initial association with militant protest, most strike activity was peaceful and legal. It consisted of student assemblies taking strike votes, and then further mass meetings, speeches and lectures, vigils and memorial services, plus endless informal “rapping” about politics and the war.
The strike brought together a wide range of undergraduates, faculty members, and administrators — despite their past disagreements about on-campus protest activity. Thirty-four college and university presidents sent an open letter to Nixon calling for a speedy end to the war. The strike also united students from private and public colleges and local public high schools in working-class communities. On May 8, in Philadelphia, students from many different backgrounds and neighborhoods marched from five different directions to Independence Hall, where a crowd of one hundred thousand gathered outside. City high school attendance that day dropped to 10 percent, according to the Philadelphia Inquirer.”
“In a Boston Globe interview on the thirtieth anniversary of this upsurge, Isserman argued that it was “the product of unique circumstances that, not surprisingly, provoked outrage from a generation of students already accustomed to protest and demonstration. It’s unlikely that we’ll ever see a movement quite like this again.”
“Yet over the past two decades, college and high-school students have walked out again, across the country, in highly visible and coordinated fashion. In March 2003, they poured out of 350 schools to protest the impending US invasion of Iraq. Fifteen years later, about 1 million students at 3,000 schools walked out to join a seventeen-minute vigil organized in response to the mass shooting at Parkland High School in Florida. And just last September, hundreds of thousands of students left school to join rallies and marches organized as part of a Global Climate Strike.
Universities and high schools are now experiencing a shutdown of their campuses, albeit of a very different kind. But when these institutions open back up, conditions will require a new set of political demands. A return to normal will not be good enough. When school is back in session, the history of a strike occurring after the shadow of death fell on campuses fifty years ago, thanks to Richard Nixon, may become more relevant to challenging “national policy”.
4 مايو 2025 ثمن السلام: ذكرى مذبحة ولاية كينت في ظل الإبادة الجماعية للفلسطينيين
إننا نتذكر اليوم القمع المروع والقتل الجماعي الذي ارتكبته الشرطة والذي يعد من بين أكثر جرائم إرهاب الدولة وحشية وحماقة في تاريخ أمتنا، ولكننا نتذكر أيضًا المقاومة الشجاعة للطلاب في جميع أنحاء أمريكا ضد الحكومة التي كانت ولا تزال مرتكبة ظالمة وعنيفة. الجرائم ضد الإنسانية في الداخل والخارج.
كان الإضراب الطلابي الوطني الذي أطلقته المذبحة بمثابة نقطة تحول في التدخل الأمريكي في فيتنام، ويظل نموذجًا للعمل الجماهيري حتى اليوم. الدرس الأساسي بسيط. لتوحيد الجميع، من جميع طبقات وطبقات المجتمع، في العمل ضد التهديد الوجودي، يجب أن يكون التهديد عالميًا وواضحًا ومباشرًا. إن مثل هذا الاحتجاج الجماهيري العالمي يتكشف الآن في ظل الإبادة الجماعية الإسرائيلية للفلسطينيين وأصداء وانعكاسات مذبحة ولاية كينت.
إن حركة طلابية موازية من أجل السلام وسحب الاستثمارات تجتاح الآن أمتنا وعالمنا، وهي دعوة واضحة للتضامن مع المضطهدين في الإبادة الجماعية للفلسطينيين ومقتل الآلاف من الأطفال والمدنيين الذين تدفع ثمنهم ضرائبنا، كما فعلت حكومتنا والإبادة الجماعية. يتخلى جو عن أفكارنا حول حقوق الإنسان العالمية والدور التاريخي لأمريكا كدولة ضامنة لها، ومثل حركة السلام الجامعية لإنهاء حرب فيتنام لا تقابل بالاحتفال بحقوقنا في حرية التعبير والملكية المشتركة للدولة من قبل الجميع. مواطنيها، ليس مع رئيس ينضم إلى الاحتجاجات باعتباره بطل الديمقراطية وحقوق الإنسان العالمية، ولكن مع إرهاب الشرطة وقمع المعارضة.
لقد خاننا قادتنا، وبالتخلي عن حقوقنا الإنسانية وحقوقنا كمواطنين، ربما يكون بايدن والحزب الديمقراطي قد سلموا الانتخابات المقبلة إلى ترامب والحزب الجمهوري الذي تتمثل مهمته في تخريب الديمقراطية واستبدالها بحكومة ثيوقراطية. طغيان الإرهاب الأبوي والعنصري الأبيض. لأنه إذا كنت ترعى وتأذن بالإبادة الجماعية، فلا أستطيع التصويت لك، وسوف أقاتلك؛ وفي هذا لست وحدي.
إننا نواجه معضلة في هذا العام الانتخابي الحاسم، حيث الحرية أو الاستبداد على المحك ليس فقط بالنسبة لأمتنا ولكن للبشرية جمعاء وعلى مدى آلاف السنين القادمة. يجب علينا أن نخضع كلبنا من خلال المقاطعة وسحب الاستثمارات وفرض العقوبات على إسرائيل حتى تنتهي الإبادة الجماعية والاحتلال، ومعها نظام نتنياهو الاستيطاني القائم على التطهير العرقي والإرهاب الثيوقراطي. إذا لم نتمكن من ذلك، واخترنا بدلاً من ذلك التحالف وتحديد هوية أمتنا مرة أخرى من خلال الغزو والسيطرة الإمبراطورية، وإرهاب الدولة والطغيان، وتضحيات الآخرين التي تعيش في خدمة قوتنا، فإن أولئك منا الذين يتذكرون ما يعنيه أن تكون دولة يجب على الأميركي والإنساني أن يرفضوا التصويت لبايدن، أرضاً يفوز ترامب بالرئاسة؛ هذا هو الدافع الحقيقي لتدبير إسرائيل لمأساة 7 أكتوبر، بهدف مزدوج مع خلق سبب للحرب من أجل الحل النهائي للفلسطينيين وغزو الشرق الأوسط.
أسألكم الآن جميعاً؛ لا تدع التواطؤ في الإبادة الجماعية يكون السبب وراء سقوط الديمقراطية في أمريكا.
Hebrew
4 במאי 2025 מחיר השלום: יום השנה לטבח במדינת קנט בצל רצח העם של הפלסטינים
היום אנו זוכרים את הדיכוי הנורא והרצח ההמוני על ידי המשטרה, שהם בין הפשעים האכזריים וחסרי ההיגיון של טרור המדינה בתולדות האומה שלנו, אבל גם את ההתנגדות האמיצה של סטודנטים ברחבי אמריקה לממשלה שהיתה ועדיין נותרה עבריין לא צודק ואלים של פשעים נגד האנושות הן בבית והן מחוצה לה.
שביתת הסטודנטים הלאומית שהטבח חולל הייתה נקודת מפנה למעורבות האמריקנית בווייטנאם, והיא נותרה מודל לפעולה המונית כיום. הלקח העיקרי שלה הוא פשוט; כדי לאחד את כולם, מכל המעמדות והשכבות של החברה, בפעולה נגד איום קיומי האיום האמור חייב להיות אוניברסלי וכן ברור וישיר. מחאה המונית אוניברסלית כזו מתרחשת כעת בצל רצח העם הישראלי של הפלסטינים וההדים וההרהורים של הטבח במדינת קנט.
תנועת סטודנטים מקבילה לשלום והסרה בולעת כעת את האומה שלנו ואת העולם שלנו, קריאה מובהקת לסולידריות עם המדוכאים ברצח העם של הפלסטינים ובמותם של אלפי ילדים ואזרחים המשולמים על ידי המסים שלנו, כממשלתנו ורצח העם. ג’ו נוטש את הרעיונות שלנו בדבר זכויות אדם אוניברסליות ותפקידה ההיסטורי של אמריקה כמדינה הערבית שלהם, וכמו תנועת השלום האוניברסיטאית לסיום מלחמת וייטנאם אינה זוכה לחגיגה של זכויות הביטוי שלנו והבעלות המשותפת על המדינה על ידי כולם של אזרחיה, לא עם נשיא שמצטרף להפגנות בתור אלוף הדמוקרטיה וזכויות האדם האוניברסליות שלנו, אלא עם טרור משטרתי ודיכוי התנגדות.
המנהיגים שלנו בגדו בנו, ובנטישת זכויות האדם שלנו וזכויותינו כאזרחים, ייתכן שבידן והמפלגה הדמוקרטית העבירו את הבחירות הבאות לטראמפ ולמפלגה הרפובליקנית שמשימתן היא חבלה בדמוקרטיה והחלפתה בתאוקרטיה. עריצות של טרור פטריארכלי ולבן. כי אם אתה נותן חסות ותאשר רצח עם, אני לא יכול להצביע עבורך, ואני אלחם בך; ובזה אני רחוק מלהיות לבד.
אנו נלכדים בקרנות של דילמה בשנת בחירות מכרעת זו, עם חירות או עריצות על כף המאזניים לא רק עבור האומה שלנו אלא עבור המין האנושי כולו ולאורך אלפי השנים הקרובות. עלינו להביא את הכלב שלנו לעקב באמצעות חרם, ביטול וסנקציה של ישראל עד לסיום רצח העם והכיבוש, ואיתו משטר המתנחלים נתניהו של טיהור אתני וטרור תיאוקרטי. אם איננו יכולים, ובמקום זאת בוחרים ליצור ברית ולזהות את האומה שלנו שוב עם כיבוש ושליטה אימפריאלית, טרור מדינה ועריצות, והקרבת חיים של אחרים בשירות לכוחנו, אלו מאיתנו שזוכרים מה זה אומר להיות אמריקאי ובן אנוש חייבים לסרב להצביע עבור ביידן, קרקע שטראמפ יזכה בנשיאות; זהו המניע האמיתי לתזמור של ישראל את הטרגדיה של 7 באוקטובר, במטרה כפולה עם יצירת קאזוס באלי לפתרון הסופי של הפלסטינים ולכיבוש המזרח התיכון.
אני שואל אתכם עכשיו, כולנו; אל תתנו לשותפות ברצח עם להיות הסיבה שהדמוקרטיה נופלת באמריקה.
We celebrate the glorious Resistance of the people of Chicago today remember the tragedy of their brutal police repression in the Haymarket Riot, which echoes throughout history and the world in countless horrifically parallel events today.
Herein unfold legacies of our history, repression and resistance, solidarity and class war, witness and remembrance, both those we must escape and those we must keep alive, and if we are very lucky they are not always the same.
As we unite in solidarity and mass action to challenge the theft of our liberty and our humanity, our rights of free speech and protest as citizens and as human beings, by the treasonous and criminal fascist tyranny and police terror of the Trump regime, let us remember our history and this moment.
Once again we are confronted with an example of Benjamin Franklin’s principle of unity and the costs of division, which he demonstrated so ably with his bundle of arrows, paraphrasing the founder of the Iroquois Confederacy Tadadaho Canasetoga the Peacemaker, “One arrow can easily be broken; many arrows together are unbreakable”.
As written by Jeff Schuhrke in Jacobin, in an article entitled Chicago Never Forgot the Haymarket Martyrs; “International Workers’ Day traces its roots to the 1886 Haymarket affair, when labor radicals in Chicago were unjustly executed. Ever since, reactionaries have tried to tarnish their legacy — and leftists have honored them as working-class martyrs.
On a visit to Chicago in 1988, Uruguayan journalist and historian Eduardo Galeano asked local friends to take him to Haymarket Square, the place forever associated with, as he put it, “the workers whom the whole world salutes every May 1st.” He was quickly disappointed by what he found. “No statue has been erected in memory of the martyrs of Chicago in the city of Chicago,” Galeano lamented a few years later. “Not a statue, not a monolith, not a bronze plaque. Nothing.”
In Uruguay, as around the globe, the Chicago anarchists executed in the 1880s while fighting for the eight-hour day have long been considered labor martyrs. But as Galeano’s fruitless search for a memorial demonstrates, in the United States — particularly in Chicago — the memory of the Haymarket martyrs has traditionally been suppressed, and the meaning of what happened to them has been contested for well over a century.
Reactionaries and those in power have typically presented the Haymarket affair as the quintessential story of “the thin blue line,” in which heroic police officers saved civilization from a lawless mob of terrorists. As recently as October 2020, in the wake of the George Floyd uprising, Chicago mayor Lori Lightfoot compared the current moment to the 1880s, when “people feared for their safety from groups of anarchists who routinely created chaos in the streets.”
But generations of Chicagoans — including many that voted out Lightfoot this year and elected progressive trade unionist Brandon Johnson — have rebuffed that narrative. They instead tell a story of exploited workers struggling for human dignity, having their lives deliberately destroyed, and yet meeting their fate with courage and thus inspiring a movement for working-class liberation.
While the epic of the Haymarket affair has rightly been told and retold countless times, the story of this battle over historical memory — and how it specifically played out in Chicago — remains relatively unknown.
The Martyrs
On May 1, 1886, hundreds of thousands of US workers went on strike and marched to demand the eight-hour workday — a day of action called by the Federation of Organized Trades and Labor Unions, the precursor to the American Federation of Labor. Thanks to radical labor organizers like Albert Parsons and August Spies, Chicago saw the biggest demonstrations of the day, which remained peaceful.
But two days later, police shot several striking workers at the city’s large McCormick Reaper Works as they scuffled with scabs. Witnessing this firsthand, a horrified Spies called for a rally to “denounce the latest atrocious act of the police.”
The next night, May 4, around 2,500 workers — most of them immigrants — gathered at Haymarket Square to listen to local anarchists deliver speeches from atop a wagon. Mayor Carter Harrison was in attendance and judged the gathering to be “tame.” As the rally wound down and the crowd dwindled to two hundred people, Harrison headed home, but not before telling the 175 police officers stationed a couple blocks away to stand down.
Ignoring the mayor’s instructions, the police marched toward the protesters and ordered them to disperse as the last speaker was wrapping up. That’s when a still-unknown assailant threw a homemade bomb into the phalanx of cops, which immediately exploded. Frantic, officers began shooting wildly, and some of the rally-goers allegedly shot back. In the end, seven police officers and at least three workers died. Officer Mathias Degan was killed by the eruption, but historians generally believe the other cops died after being hit by friendly fire from fellow officers.
The business press immediately labeled the incident “the Haymarket Riot” and demanded blood. Martial law was declared in the city. Chicago police ransacked union halls, radical newspapers, and private homes, arresting hundreds of anarchists, socialists, and labor activists without due process.
That summer, eight of the city’s most outspoken anarchists — Parsons, Spies, Adolph Fischer, George Engel, Louis Lingg, Samuel Fielden, Michael Schwab, and Oscar Neebe — were put on trial for the murder of the seven police officers. With no physical evidence directly tying the men to the bomb, they were instead tried for their revolutionary beliefs and found guilty.
The judge sentenced Neebe to fifteen years in prison, but the other seven were condemned to execution. Over the next year, Lucy Parsons, Albert’s wife and fellow anarchist, led an international campaign demanding clemency for the men, whom sympathizers began calling the Haymarket martyrs. Radicals, liberals, and trade unionists worldwide rushed to support the cause, viewing the trial as a sham and an attempt to crush the labor movement.
The Illinois governor commuted the sentences of two of the condemned men — Fielden and Schwab — to life in prison, but did nothing to spare the lives of the others. On the eve of the scheduled executions, Lingg died of an apparent suicide in his jail cell. Parsons, Spies, Fischer, and Engel were hanged together on November 11, 1887. They were buried in Waldheim Cemetery in the western suburb of Forest Park — no graveyard in the city was willing to accept their remains.
On May 1, 1890, invoking the memory of the Haymarket martyrs, workers in multiple countries staged strikes and demonstrations demanding the eight-hour day. From then on, May 1, or May Day, was International Workers’ Day.
But in Chicago, a struggle over the meaning and memory of the Haymarket affair exploded almost immediately — and has continued for over a century.
Two Monuments
In September 1887, six weeks before the execution of the convicted anarchists, a group of prominent Chicago-area businessmen launched a fundraising drive to build a monument honoring the police officers killed and wounded at the Haymarket affair. With the Chicago Tribune hyping the campaign, the group quickly raised $10,000 to erect a nine-foot-tall bronze statue of a cop with his arm outstretched and palm facing forward. An inscription on the pedestal read: “In the name of the People of Illinois, I command peace.”
The police monument, which was placed in Haymarket Square, sparked protest even before its official unveiling in May 1889. On May 3, 1889, a leaflet was placed on the new monument’s pedestal asking, “Have you ever given a thought to . . .the base murder of five of the real victims of the haymarket tragedy…?” The anonymously authored pamphlet continued: “The time will come for an ample justification of our comrades, but it is not quite yet. On the monument at the haymarket should be inscribed in letters of fire these words: ‘Erected to commemorate the strangling of free speech and the shame of an enslaved people!’”
Authorities shrugged off this “blatant anarchist screed,” as the Tribune called it, and moved forward with the police monument’s dedication ceremony on May 30, Memorial Day. Meanwhile, the widowed Lucy Parsons and her comrades established the Pioneer Aid and Support Association to solicit donations for the families of the Haymarket martyrs. The association also raised money for a monument at the site of the martyrs’ tomb — a response to the police statue in Haymarket Square.
After nearly six years, enough money had been collected for sculptor Albert Weinert to build the Haymarket Martyrs’ Monument: a statue of a hooded woman, representing Justice, protecting a fallen worker and placing a laurel wreath on his head. August Spies’s final words from the gallows are inscribed on the monument: “The day will come when our silence will be more powerful than the voices you are throttling today.”
On June 25, 1893, at a ceremony attended by eight thousand people, the monument was unveiled at the grave of the executed anarchists in Waldheim Cemetery. The following day, Illinois governor John Peter Altgeld — a prolabor Democrat elected the previous November — pardoned the Haymarket anarchists, freeing Fielden, Schwab, and Neebe while excoriating the trial and executions as a gross miscarriage of justice.
Altgeld’s pardon, along with his refusal to support the deployment of federal troops to crush the Pullman strike the following year, effectively ended his political career. He lost his reelection bid and never held public office again.
Remembering
In the decades following the Haymarket affair, as trade unionists and radicals around the world cemented the tradition of marking May 1 as International Workers’ Day, the Haymarket Martyrs’ Monument became a place of pilgrimage for leftists and labor activists.
Eugene Debs, who had led the 1894 Pullman strike and would later become the standard-bearer of the Socialist Party, paid a visit to Waldheim Cemetery in the late 1890s and penned an essay celebrating the Haymarket anarchists. Describing them as “the first martyrs in the cause of industrial freedom,” Debs wrote that he looked forward to the day “when the parks of Chicago shall be adorned with their statues.”
Around the same time, famed anarchist Emma Goldman also came to Chicago and paid her respects at the monument, which she called “the embodiment of the ideals for which the men had died.” At her request, Goldman was herself buried at Waldheim in a grave plot near the Haymarket anarchists after her death in 1940.
As for the police monument at Haymarket Square, after nearby property owners complained that it took up too much space, it was moved about a mile west to the intersection of Randolph Street and Ogden Avenue in 1900. Every year on May 4, the Veterans of the Haymarket Riot — an organization of surviving police officers from the night of the bomb — would gather for a memorial service in front of the statue and rededicate themselves to preserving “law and order.”
On May 4, 1927, a streetcar making the turn from Randolph to Ogden jumped the tracks and crashed into the monument’s pedestal, toppling the statue. The motorman claimed it was an accident caused by unresponsive air brakes, but legend has it he was later overheard saying he “was sick of seeing that policeman with his arm raised.” It is indeed a curious coincidence that the collision happened on the anniversary of the Haymarket incident. To avoid similar traffic accidents, the police statue was moved the following year to nearby Union Park, where it would remain mostly out of sight for the next three decades.
Describing them as ‘the first martyrs in the cause of industrial freedom,’ Debs wrote that he looked forward to the day ‘when the parks of Chicago shall be adorned with their statues.’
During the great labor upsurge of the 1930s, a new generation of working-class radicals — particularly the youthful Communist organizers of the Congress of Industrial Organizations (CIO) — embraced the legacy of the Haymarket martyrs. In early 1938, the CIO-affiliated, Communist-led Farm Equipment Workers Union (FE) successfully unionized International Harvester’s Tractor Works — the McCormick family–owned plant where August Spies witnessed police brutalizing strikers in 1886, prompting the fateful Haymarket rally.
In February 1941, around one thousand FE members rallying outside the tractor plant were addressed by none other than Lucy Parsons, who was now in her eighties and losing her eyesight. It would be one of Parsons’s last public appearances, as she tragically died in a house fire the following year. Her ashes were buried in Waldheim close to the grave of Albert and his comrades — a fitting resting place given that Lucy, more than any other individual, had kept the revolutionary spirit of the Haymarket martyrs alive through her more than fifty-year career as an agitator and organizer.
“Declaration of War”
As McCarthyite hysteria smothered the country, May Day went virtually unrecognized in Chicago and the broader United States for many years. The police monument was even refurbished and moved back to Haymarket Square in May 1958. The martyrs’ monument in Waldheim Cemetery was maintained only thanks to the efforts of Irving Abrams, a longtime Wobbly and the last member of the Pioneer Aid and Support Association.
In the late 1960s, Chicago was rocked by unrest reminiscent of the Haymarket affair, as the forces of “law and order” sought to quell social movements and silence radical agitators. Following Martin Luther King Jr’s assassination in 1968, young black residents rebelled against racial injustice, and Mayor Richard J. Daley infamously ordered police to “shoot to kill” suspected rioters. That summer, thousands of anti–Vietnam War activists converged in Chicago for the Democratic National Convention, only to be met with a bloody police crackdown that culminated in a conspiracy trial against protest leaders.
A local group of unionists — CIO veterans Leslie Orear, Bill Garvey, and Mollie Lieber West, along with University of Illinois Chicago labor historian Bill Adelman — believed it was a critical moment to resurrect the history and lessons of the Haymarket affair. On May 4, 1969, they organized a wreath-laying ceremony at Haymarket Square, emceed by renowned Chicago broadcaster and oral historian Studs Terkel. Connecting history with the present moment, they emphasized how the 1886 rally had been a protest against police brutality. The committee then incorporated as the Illinois Labor History Society (ILHS) and began pushing for a new, pro-worker memorial in Haymarket Square.
Five months later, on the night of October 6, the Haymarket police statue was blown to pieces when explosives were placed between its legs. The Weatherman faction of Students for a Democratic Society (SDS) took responsibility, blowing up the statue to inaugurate their weeklong “Days of Rage” demonstrations.
The leader of the Chicago Police Sergeants’ Association described the statue bombing as “a declaration of war between the police and the SDS and other anarchist groups,” and declared it was now a “kill or be killed” situation for cops. Only two months later, Chicago police, alongside the FBI, brutally murdered Illinois Black Panther Party chairman Fred Hampton and fellow Panther Mark Clark.
The cop statue was quickly rebuilt, but the Weathermen destroyed it a second time on October 5, 1970. After the statue was put up again, an exasperated Mayor Daley ordered round-the-clock police protection of the monument, costing the public an estimated $67,440 per year.
Orear, president of the recently formed ILHS, wrote to Daley recommending the city move the police monument to a different location. Swayed by the fiscal logic of the argument, the city relocated the statue in early 1972 from Haymarket Square for the last time. It was initially placed in the lobby of police headquarters for four years, then spent three decades in the courtyard of the police academy — where would-be vandals could not get to it.
Preservation
For years, Chicago officials rejected the ILHS’s appeal for a new monument or park in Haymarket Square. “It’s all a part of a deliberate amnesia,” Orear complained. “Our story is that Haymarket was a police riot — nobody did a damn thing till the police came. Their story is that [the incident] saved the city from anarchist terrorism.”
In May 1986, a coalition of artists, activists, unionists, teachers, historians, clergy, and other community members came together to commemorate the centennial of the Haymarket affair. Scores of public events were held around Chicago, including marches, rallies, art exhibits, poetry recitals, a dramatization of the Haymarket trial performed by members of Actors’ Equity, and musical performances by Pete Seeger, among others. Mayor Harold Washington gave his stamp of approval to the festivities by declaring May 1986 “Labor History Month.”
Finally, by the early 2000s, the city agreed to erect a new monument in Haymarket Square.
Made by artist Mary Brōgger, the Haymarket Memorial was dedicated in September 2004 — over 118 years after the bomb was thrown. Located at the exact spot where the speakers’ wagon stood on the night of May 4, 1886, the memorial is a rust-colored sculpture depicting a wagon with human shapes speaking atop it.
‘Over the years,’ a carefully worded plaque on the memorial’s base reads, ‘the site of the Haymarket bombing has become a powerful symbol for a diverse cross-section of people, ideals and movements.’
At the dedication ceremony, the presidents of both the Chicago Federation of Labor and Fraternal Order of Police gave speeches — and each was heckled by different crowd members with competing interpretations of the Haymarket affair. “Over the years,” a carefully worded plaque on the memorial’s base reads, “the site of the Haymarket bombing has become a powerful symbol for a diverse cross-section of people, ideals and movements.”
Despite the memorial’s intended ambiguity, it has been claimed by the labor movement and frequently serves as a rallying point for marches organized by leftist protesters of various stripes.
Not to be outdone, in June 2007, the Haymarket police statue was again refurbished, given a new pedestal, and moved to Chicago Police Headquarters on South Michigan Avenue. The rededication ceremony featured the great-granddaughter of Mathias Degan, the one officer historians agree was killed by the bomb.
Rebirth
In recent decades, Chicago’s growing working-class Latino community has embraced the Haymarket story, which is perhaps not surprising given the almost saintlike status of the Haymarket martyrs in Latin America’s labor movements.
On May Day 2006, up to four hundred thousand Latino workers marched in Chicago as part of the historic “Day Without Immigrants” demonstrations, some of them stopping to pay homage at the new memorial in Haymarket Square. A few weeks later, Eduardo Galeano returned to the Windy City during a book tour and discussed the significance of the Haymarket affair with some of the local unionists who had led the march.
Latino Chicagoans especially celebrate Lucy Parsons, who claimed Mexican ancestry. In 2017, a portion of Kedzie Avenue in the Logan Square neighborhood, near where Parsons resided for several years, was honorarily named “Lucy Gonzales Parsons Way” with support from socialist alderman Carlos Ramirez-Rosa. Fellow socialist Anthony Quezada, a newly elected Cook County commissioner, successfully introduced a resolution last month formally recognizing May 1 as International Workers’ Day and commemorating the lives of the Haymarket martyrs. And last year, young Latino artists with Yollocalli Arts Reach — the youth initiative of Chicago’s National Museum of Mexican Art — painted a new mural of the Haymarket martyrs on the exterior of Grace Elementary School in the city’s Little Village neighborhood. The mural is titled “Que La Libertad Nos Bese En Los Labios Siempre” (“May Freedom Kiss Us on the Lips Forever”).
“You have to swim in whatever pool there is and rebuild and rebuild,” said the ILHS’s Orear, who died in 2014 at the age of 103. “This is the story of American labor — defeat, starvation and rebirth.”
Chicago Never Forgot the Haymarket Martyrs, Jeff Schuhrke
On this thirty second World Press Freedom Day I call for the universal recognition of journalism as a sacred calling to pursue the truth which supersedes the rights of any state to authorize and enforce versions of it in service to power and identitarian politics, and for a United Humankind in solidarity as guarantors of each other’s universal rights, which include the Four Primary Duties of a Citizen; to Question Authority, Expose Authority, Mock Authority, and Challenge Authority, and to preserve the independence of the press and the transparency of all governments as institutions which must answer ultimately to their people.
Antisemitism as a charge used by the Trump regime is a fiction of state propaganda and thought control used in defense of enormous profits from military support of Israel in her mad imperial war of genocide and conquest of Palestine. And it is a pretext for the centralization of totalitarian power to authority, the subversion of democracy, the theft of our rights and of meaningful citizenship.
Freedom of the press and of information, the right to speak, write, teach, organize, research and publish in an environment of transparency of the state, along with rights of protest and strike, are instrumental to the agency of citizens and to the idea and meaningfulness of democracy.
Any power or authority held by a government of any form is granted by its citizens or has been appropriated from them unjustly, and it is the highest principle of natural law as articulated in our Declaration of Independence that we may seize and reclaim it at any time it is held without our participation and co-ownership, or used against our general interests.
True democracy as a free society of equals requires the four ideals of liberty, equality, truth, and justice, and one thing more; an engaged electorate of truth tellers and witnesses of history who will hold our representatives and the institutions of our government responsible for enacting our values
Like the role of a free press in the sacred calling to pursue the truth, the role of a citizen is to be a truth teller. Both serve Truth, and truth is necessary to the just balance of power between individuals which is the purpose of the state.
As I wrote in my post of August 16 2020, Democracy, the Right of Free Speech Versus the Crime of Hate Speech, and the Principle of Open Debate; To free ourselves of the ideas of other people; such is the essence of democracy. Conversely, the use of social force in marginalizing and silencing dissent is the definition of tyranny.
Much talk of late has employed the terms antisemitism and cancel culture to deflect and obscure the true issues involved with the disambiguation of free speech from hate speech and the role of open debate in a democracy; cancel culture is a figment used without sincerity to obfuscate loathsome acts of white supremacist and patriarchal sexual terror, incitement to violence and dehumanization.
Conversely, antifascist action in defense of equality and our universal human rights such as platform denial and forms of peer ostracism and boycott are part of the free market of ideas and have no relation to silencing and erasure used by authoritarian tyrannies of force and control to subjugate a population and repress dissent, as exemplified by the Chinese Communist Party’s arrest of newspaperman Jimmy Lai in their campaign against democracy and truth in Hong Kong, the gruesome butchery of Jamal Khashoggi by Saudi Arabia in their games of imperial dominion.
This list I must update today in 2025 to include the assassination of Palestinian witness of history Shireen Abu Aqleh by Israel in service to state terror and genocide, America’s loathsome vendetta against Julian Assange, the torture and murder of Viktoriia Roshchyna by Russia, the Trump regime’s aberrant and un-American campaign of repression of dissent in our universities embodied in the figure of Mahmoud Khalil, and countless others.
The state is embodied violence.
Against this we have only our loyalty to and solidarity with each other, our witness of history and the bond of our word, and our power of vision to reimagine and transform ourselves, our ways of being human with each other, and our future possibilities of becoming human.
But the values and issues which the phenomenon of repression of dissent raises are interesting, as they signpost the heart of what democracy means and our responsibility to others as well as our freedom from the ideas of others. Freedom from is as important as freedom to.
Democracy is reducible to a simple idea; the abandonment of social force and control in shaping others to our own image, in the authorization of identity, in our freedom of conscience, and from the establishment and policing of boundaries of the Forbidden.
The autonomy of individuals takes precedence over all rights of authority and the state, which exists only to secure those rights which we cannot secure for ourselves. The state protects us from the tyranny of other people’s ideas of virtue; and others from our own.
Any society or culture requires shared values and principles, agreements about things such as freedoms of and freedoms from, whether in systems of law and justice or as standards of courtesy. Democracy is unique in that it requires rights of free access to information and the sharing of it, and freedoms from surveillance, censorship, and lies disguised as truths, but also requires for its functioning the tradition of open debate founded with our civilization in the Forum of Athens.
Hate speech, which seeks to harm a class of persons, is the only exception to the right of free speech as parrhesia, the sacred calling to expose injustice, and the independence of journalism as a sacred calling to seek the truth, for hate speech dehumanizes others as a criminal theft of humanity, citizenship, and identity which violates our ideals of equality and liberty; hate speech is an act of tyranny and terror which is subversive to democracy as a free society of equals.
To make an idea about a kind of people is a hate crime and an act of violence.
I explored the implications of parrhesia and Foucault’s extension of this classical principle as truth telling in my post of May 27 2020, On Speaking Truth to Power as a Sacred Calling; I found myself responding with candor to a conversation today in which a friend, a fearless champion of the marginalized and the wretched of the earth, the powerless and the dispossessed, the silenced and the erased, expressed fear of retribution in calling out the police as an institution of racist state force and control, thereby illustrating the mechanism of silencing on which unjust authority depends.
Of course this was a preface for an act of Breaking the Silence; I did say they are my friend.
Here is the beginning of that conversation; “Today I’m going to do something stupid.
On my Facebook and Twitter feeds I am going to express a viewpoint that I have long held to myself. A viewpoint I believed, if ever made public, would kneecap my dreams of a political career and public service.
Today I realized my silence was just a vestige of my own internalized oppression and respectability politics, and f*** respectability. It has never, and will never, save us. So here goes: here’s why I am a #PoliceAbolitionist”
What followed was a brilliant and multivoiced discussion of the role of police violence in white supremacist terror, as an army of occupation whose purpose is to enforce inequality and elite hierarchies of exclusionary otherness and to subvert the institutions and values of democracy, and of the use of social force in a free society of equals. This is among the most important issues we face today and questions some of the inherent contradictions of our form of government, of which George Washington said, “Government is about force; only force.”
But this is only indirectly the subject on which I write today; far more primary and fundamental to the institution of a free press is the function of other people’s ideas of ourselves, of normality and respectability, in the silencing of dissent.
To our subjugation by authorized identities, I reply with the Wicked Witch; I will fuck respectability with you, and their little dog normality too.
Authorized identities and boundaries of the Forbidden are about power, and we must call out the instruments of unequal power as we see them. Foucault called this truthtelling, and it is a crucial part of seizure of power and ownership of identity; always there remains the struggle between the masks others make for us and those we make for ourselves.
Against state tyranny and terror, force and control, let us deploy parrhesia and the performance of our best selves as guerilla theatre. Go ahead; frighten the horses.
Often have I referred to this key performative role in democracy as the Jester of King Lear, whose enactments of mockery and satire, the exposure and deflation of the mighty as revolutionary seizures of power which reclaim that which we the people have lent them when it is used unjustly, are necessary to maintain the balance of interests in a society in which government is co-owned equally by its citizens and has as its overriding purpose the securement of the freedom and autonomy of individuals and of their universal human rights.
Without citizens who refuse to be silenced and controlled by authority, democracy becomes meaningless.
So with my arts of rhetoric and poetry as truthtelling, and with my praxis of democracy in my daily journal here at Torch of Liberty; to incite, provoke, and disturb.
For democracy requires a participatory electorate willing to speak truth to power.
To all those who defy and challenge unjust authority; I will stand with you, and I ask that all of us do the same.
As written by Kai Falkenberg in The Guardian, in an article entitled The US used to be the gold standard for press freedom. Not any more: The Trump administration is creating a chilling effect on independent reporting and public dissent; “This week is World Press Freedom Day. That used to be a time when we pointed fingers at governments that kept journalists from doing their jobs – places like Turkey, where reporters are imprisoned for libel, or Saudi Arabia, where government censorship is a part of daily life. From our privileged perch here in the US, we highlighted the struggle of journalists suffering under authoritarian rule. But this year, the ones suffocating aren’t halfway around the world – they’re right here at home.
In my 20 years as a media lawyer, I’ve always seen the United States as the gold standard for press freedom – a model admired by journalists around the world. But in just a few short months, the Trump administration has severely undermined those protections, creating a chilling effect on independent reporting and public dissent. Today, the White House is waging an increasingly hostile campaign against the press, pushing to control coverage in ways that go far beyond anything we saw during the president’s first term
Borrowing tactics from press-repressive regimes, the attacks have come from all sides – billion-dollar lawsuits, government investigations, blocked access and outright withdrawal of funding. All of it is unfolding at a time when public trust in the media is at an all-time low, emboldening juries to hand down record-breaking verdicts.
Trump has long used lawsuits to intimidate the press, but what has changed is the judicial landscape. He has appointed over a quarter of all active federal judges, and he has been strategic in making sure cases targeting the media end up in courtrooms that lean his way.
Take his $20bn lawsuit against CBS News, for example – a staggering figure tied to how 60 Minutes edited its interview with Kamala Harris. He claims the segment defrauded viewers in Texas under the state’s consumer protection laws. So why file in Texas? The case was brought in Amarillo, a district with just one judge – and yes, he’s a Trump appointee.
It’s a far-fetched, fantastical claim – yet CBS is reportedly considering a mediated settlement. Why back down from a case they could probably win? It’s a cold, calculated decision – one that others in Trump’s crosshairs have also made. Just weeks after his election, ABC News settled a defamation suit with him for $16m. It was a defensible case. But Disney, ABC’s parent company, knew any major business deal over the next four years would need the administration’s blessing. So they did the math: better to stay in the good graces of a president known for holding grudges than risk jeopardizing future profits.
It wasn’t just Trump they feared – it was the prospect of facing a Florida jury. After years of Trump branding legitimate investigative reporting as “fake news”, we now have a deeply polarized country where juries can be swayed by political rhetoric, posing real threats to the survival of major news outlets.
In a recent libel case against CNN, filed in a Florida district that overwhelmingly voted for Trump, the trial foreshadowed what his promised crackdown on the press would look like in his second term. The plaintiff’s argument echoed Trump’s relentless attacks on the press, urging jurors to punish the so-called “lamestream” media.
After an unfavorable ruling on liability, CNN ultimately decided to settle, afraid of what the jury might do. When the case ended, the jury forewoman revealed she would have pushed for $100m in damages had the trial continued. A verdict that large would have caused serious harm – and there was nothing in the case that justified it.
Beyond the risk of huge jury verdicts, several news organizations are now under government scrutiny. Comcast, Verizon and Disney are all facing FCC investigations over allegedly unlawful diversity, equity and inclusion practices. Companies like Yahoo and Gannett have already begun rolling back their diversity initiatives. Meanwhile, executive orders targeting law firms raise serious free speech concerns, sending a chilling message to attorneys who might otherwise support or work with the press.
That support has never been more essential. In a blatant attempt to shape media coverage, the White House banned Associated Press reporters from the press pool after the outlet refused to follow an executive order renaming the Gulf of Mexico. AP’s lawyers argued that punishing a news organization for not using government-approved language is unconstitutional viewpoint discrimination – and the judge, a Trump appointee, agreed. The court ordered the White House to reinstate AP’s access to the press pool and related events. Instead, the administration eliminated the spot reserved for wire services entirely and openly defied the court’s order. Now, the government plans to take the case to the supreme court. Fortunately, AP’s legal team is standing firm.
As AP’s chief White House reporter Zeke Miller testified, the government’s actions have already had a chilling effect on the press. Since the AP was banned, the tone of questions directed at the president has noticeably softened. Reporters also say that sources — not just in politics, but in science and other fields — are now more hesitant to speak publicly. Some outlets are already facing leak investigations, and with Attorney General Pam Bondi rescinding the Biden-era policy that discouraged subpoenas against journalists last Friday, even more legal pressure is expected. That includes the very real prospect of criminal prosecution.
The administration’s strategy of using funding as leverage is also having a serious effect on the media. It has pulled financial support from the US Agency for Global Media, which backs broadcasters such as Voice of America and Radio Free Asia – a move that undermines US efforts to promote democracy and fight disinformation abroad. After a congressional hearing last month, the administration is proposing to eliminate nearly all funding for the Corporation for Public Broadcasting, which supports NPR, PBS and local public media outlets. Such a loss could severely affect the sustainability of these essential sources of news and information.
All of this is happening at a time when longstanding legal protections for the press are under renewed attack. Opponents of media freedom are actively seeking to dismantle New York Times v Sullivan – the landmark supreme court decision that has safeguarded journalists for decades. That ruling established that public officials must prove “actual malice” to succeed in a libel suit, recognizing that the press needs breathing room to report freely, even if it sometimes gets things wrong. Under Sullivan, media outlets are only liable in cases brought by public figures if they knowingly publish false information or act with reckless disregard for the truth.
Now, that precedent is being directly challenged. Sarah Palin, who this week lost the retrial of her libel suit against the New York Times, has openly stated her intent to use the case as a vehicle to overturn Times v Sullivan. It’s unclear whether enough justices on the current court are prepared to go that far. Even if the decision stands, the legal landscape for journalists has become far less forgiving. With trust in the media at historic lows, judges are increasingly willing to let even the weakest defamation cases proceed – prolonging litigation, draining resources and placing a heavier burden on the press.
It takes real courage to keep holding power to account in the face of growing legal threats. But it’s more important than ever that we do – and that we draw strength from the example of journalists around the world who have been reporting under pressure far greater, and for far longer, than we have.”
As written by Annie Kelly in The Guardian, in an article entitled There is a war on journalists raging around the world: let their voices be heard; “There is a war on journalists raging across the world. Last year, the Committee to Protect Journalists (CPJ) recorded the highest number of media workers killed since it began collecting data three decades ago.
According to that data, at least 124 journalists and media workers were killed in 2024 – nearly two-thirds of them Palestinians killed by Israeli forces in Gaza and the West Bank.
Journalists were also killed while doing their jobs in Sudan, Pakistan, Mexico, Syria, Myanmar, Iraq and Haiti. Hundreds more were detained and imprisoned elsewhere, while others were harassed, assaulted and faced relentless threats and abuse online, as well as in their communities and places of work.
Attacks on press freedom and independent news outlets by governments and authoritarian regimes from Russia to Turkey to Belarus are also rising, along with the tsunami of misinformation that is being disseminated on social media and the internet.
In the US, Donald Trump labelled journalists the “enemies of the people” in his first term, and is now waging lawsuits against leading news organisations and ordering federal investigations against others.
Today, as we mark Unesco’s World Press Freedom Day, we are reporting on the vital fight to maintain a free and independent global media.
In my job as the editor of the Guardian’s Rights and Freedom series, I work closely with journalists across the world operating in increasingly fraught and frightening environments.
Where once a blue press vest offered some guarantee of protection, now many journalists in war zones say it feels like it puts a target on their backs.
In Afghanistan, where the free press has been all but dismantled, we work with female reporters who are in hiding, conducting their interviews in secret and living in daily terror of being discovered by the Taliban.
Just a few of the stories we have covered on attacks on press freedom in the past year include the attempted murder of an Iranian journalist in London, the incarceration of female journalists in Iran who reported on the death of Mahsa Amini, and the death of a Ukrainian reporter in Russian detention.
Often, I feel a deep sense of helplessness when I see how dangerous this job can be for some journalists, who demonstrate extraordinary bravery but find their jobs, their liberty and sometimes even their lives on the line for their reporting. Equally often, I am completely humbled by their passion and belief in journalism as a public service and as a force for positive change, something for which they are willing to risk everything.
So what can we do from our position of relative safety and security? When I ask reporters struggling under state repression, they tell me what they want is to be heard – and for media organisations such as the Guardian to help fight for press freedom by publishing their work and to keep shining a spotlight on the battle for a free press.
The Guardian’s ability to do this kind of work – and to remain free and independent – is due to the direct financial backing of our readers. If you believe in the importance of a free press, you can support our work by clicking here.
We would also encourage you to read and directly support the work of other independent news operations – locally and in countries where there is a direct threat to media groups.
At a time when press freedom is facing this barrage of attacks on many fronts, it has never been more important for journalists to be able to work freely and safely, and for the protections they are granted under international human rights laws to be respected and defended.”
As written by Antonio Zappulla in The Guardian, in an article entitled It is safe for me to write this article – and for you to read it. But globally, those rights are under grave threat: The act of labelling journalists ‘foreign agents’ is deliberately chilling. On World Press Freedom Day, be aware of the peril involved in seeking the truth; “Last month, Georgian president Mikheil Kavelashvili approved a new law inflicting criminal charges, including prison sentences and fines, on any organisation or individual who fails to comply with the country’s “foreign influence” bill.
The news didn’t trouble the front pages of the international press and went largely unnoticed, but it marks a significant inflection point in the decline of global press freedom.
The original bill, first adopted in May 2024, mandated all independent media and NGOs receiving over 20% of their funding from abroad to register as “acting in the interest of a foreign power”. The previous month, Kyrgyzstan had adopted an almost identical piece of legislation. In August, it was Venezuela’s turn. Turkey tabled a draft bill in October, before Paraguay signed its into action in November.
Over the span of just seven months, countries in eastern Europe, central Asia and South America were awash with these laws, all with the same basic premise – organisations and individuals receiving foreign funding must make themselves known to the government.
On the face of it, this seems like a justifiable measure to protect national security. Foreign interference is a very real threat for many countries, especially during election cycles. Just this year, a host of foreign actors waged mass disinformation campaigns on Germany’s elections, spreading false accusations that candidates for the far-right Alternative für Deutschland (AfD) were victims of election fraud.
But the devil is in the detail. And – as is so often the case with these laws – there very deliberately isn’t any.
Their power lies in vague, broad wording. Wording that can, and has been, easily weaponised to inflict legal penalties and crippling stigma to such an extent that it renders the work of anyone implicated effectively impossible. Especially journalists.
Take the archetypal example: Russia’s “foreign agent” law. Initially adopted in the aftermath of protests against Vladimir Putin’s return as Russian president in 2012, the law stipulates a “foreign agent” to be any individual or organisation that receives foreign funding and engages in “political activities”. Yet, the definition of political activities is so vague as to encompass absolutely anything that could influence public opinion, from hosting an educational event to simply printing opinion polls.
Once labelled as such, a journalist or newsroom would have to register with the justice ministry, submit regular reports on their activities, finances and interactions, facing fines and prison sentences if they so much as miss a deadline.
Their assets can be frozen, bank accounts closed and the donations or grants that once kept them afloat cut off. They are even barred from entering educational facilities such as schools, universities or kindergartens.
And then there’s the social stigma. This is baked into the very label itself – “foreign agent”. It is purposely couched in the rhetoric of espionage, designed to evoke memories for those old enough to remember the fate of citizens branded as such during Soviet-era purges: arrests, executions and gulags.
For many, the strain is too much to bear. At least 93 independent media outlets are known to have been forced into exile from Russia. In Belarus, which adopted its even harsher version of this law in 2023, the majority have left.
But even in exile they cannot escape the label. By law, they are required to include a disclaimer on all published materials, stating “this is the product of an organisation designated as a foreign agent”. Even so much as a personal Facebook post. This often deters audiences back home from reading their reporting, afraid of attracting increased state surveillance through association. The tag is such a visceral part of many Russian and Belarusian exiled journalists’ identity that some now print it on T-shirts or even tattoo it on their bodies.
The impact on future generations of budding journalists from these countries is also devastating, limiting their aspirations and ability to develop skills in an industry that is vilified, leaving a void in which there is no counter to state propaganda.
It would be naive to think this is a problem solely reserved for autocratic states, however. As disinformation campaigns and electoral interference become more prevalent, many democracies are also considering this type of legislation – Italy and the UK, to name two.
They have every right to do so. But it is vital that the finer details are fleshed out. As we have seen over recent years, a country that is democratic now can quickly backslide into authoritarianism. When this happens, autocratic leaders will take advantage of these loosely defined, albeit well-intentioned, laws to stamp out dissent.
There is some evidence to suggest that strategic domestic and international pressure campaigns – especially if tied to the continuance of foreign direct investment into those countries – may be effective in pushing back against foreign agent-style laws. Turkey’s draft 2024 bill, for example, has been subsequently withdrawn for the time being thanks to a coordinated effort from legal associations, human rights advocacy groups and media freedom organisations.
But in many countries the damage is already done. More than anything now, these journalists and newsrooms, whether in exile or staying home to fight on, need legal representation and guidance.
Since 2022, the Thomson Reuters Foundation has been supporting exiled independent newsrooms to set up their operations in new jurisdictions and to build their legal resilience to withstand these “lawfare” attacks.
For many, Georgia seemed like a natural place for them to initially reset. Russian nationals, for example, could travel freely to the country and the land border crossing made it practical to move quickly. Yet, this year, we have been devastated to find some of the first newsrooms we helped set up in exile there are being forced to flee once more.
Journalists are quite literally being chased across borders by foreign agent-style laws, hounded and harassed from one country to the next. These are profoundly worrying times, but we are scaling up our work. We can and will respond.”
As written last year by Jonathan Watts in The Guardian, in an article entitled Across the world, journalists are under threat for sharing the truth: Last year was the most dangerous to be a reporter since 2015. Without the courage of correspondents risking everything to report from conflict areas, we could be at risk of ‘zones of silence’ spreading around the world; “Conflict in Gaza, war in Ukraine, a battle over the global environment – the world is becoming an increasingly hostile place, particularly for frontline journalists.
Last year saw 99 killings of reporters, up 44% on 2022 and the highest toll since 2015.
Without the courage of correspondents to continue working in conflict areas, press organisations warn the world will start to see “zones of silence”, where the risks are so great that important stories go unreported.
Last year’s high toll was almost entirely due to Gaza, where a Guardian editorial noted “no war has killed so many journalists so quickly”.
The vast majority are Palestinian reporters who, according to the Committee to Protect Journalists, appear to have been targeted by Israeli forces. The Guardian was among more than 30 news organisations that signed an open letter expressing solidarity with journalists working in Gaza and calling for their protection and freedom to report.
This is much more than a matter of principle; solidarity is a matter of survival. Over the years, Guardian reporters have been kidnapped in Iraq and Afghanistan, beaten in Pakistan, expelled from Russia, and arrested in Egypt, Zimbabwe and China.
The search for the truth can come at a horrific cost.
Two years ago, a regular Guardian contributor, Dom Phillips, was murdered in the Brazilian Amazon, with the Brazilian Indigenous expert Bruno Pereira. On the first anniversary of the killings last year, the Guardian joined an international collaboration to amplify their work.
A group of Dom’s journalist friends, including myself, are also working on a crowdfunded project to finish the book that he was working on at the time of his death: How to Save the Amazon: Ask the People Who Know. It will be published next year.
Reporting on the war against nature might generate fewer headlines than Gaza or Ukraine, but it is also high risk with little legal protection. The number of environmental journalists being attacked or killed is rising and it continues to be one of the most dangerous fields of journalism after war reporting. Though the trend is accelerating, prosecutions remain dismally low, with very few cases leading to convictions.
Instead, the law appears to be increasingly used against journalists. One of the most disturbing trends in recent years has been the arrests or police harassment of journalists covering environmental protests. This has stirred outrage in the UK, the Netherlands, France, Spain, Canada, Australia, Azerbaijan, the US and China, which is consistently the biggest jailer of reporters.
But huge challenges remain for the media in general.
Throughout this week we will be marking Friday’s World Press Freedom Day with a series of articles about different threats posed to all types of reporters, from those working in exile and still facing threats from their home states, to environmental journalists facing up to violence and censorship as well as female journalists being targeted because of their sex. We want to use our platform to highlight the work they are doing, often in incredibly dangerous circumstances.
The risks may be growing, and the space to operate may be increasingly constrained, but we are more determined than ever to tell the stories of our age so that you, the readers, have the information to act as voters, citizens, consumers and participants in the web of life on Earth.”
Where can we look for a model free press, even one beset by catch and kill journalism as election interference, propaganda and falsification from every angle, hate speech disguised as free speech, and the erosion of truth and meaningful public debate? When most of our world is enslaved by tyrannies who enforce state power with brutal repression, there are few where one can mock a ruler and be met with humor and on equal terms by the ruler himself.
Here follows the speech of President Biden at the 2023 White House Correspondent’s Dinner; “Thank you. Thank you, thank you, thank you. Thank you, Steve, for that introduction. And a special thanks to the 42% of you who actually applauded.
I’m really excited to be here tonight with the only group of Americans with a lower approval rating than I have. That’s hard to say after what we just saw.
This is the first time a president attended this dinner in six years. It’s understandable. We had a horrible plague followed by two years of Covid.
Just imagine if my predecessor came to this dinner this year. Now, that would really have been a real coup if that occurred. A little tough, huh?
But I’m honored to be here at such an event with so much history.
As already referenced, the very first president to attend the White House Correspondents’ Dinner was Calvin Coolidge in 1924. I had just been elected to the United States Senate. And I reme — I remember telling him, “Cal, just be yourself. Get up there and speak from the heart. You’re going to be great, kid. You’re going to do it well.”
Of course, Jill is with me tonight. Jilly, how are you, kid? I think — I think she’s doing an incredible job as first lady. The first lady to continue working full-time, and she does as a professor.
She doesn’t pay much attention to the polls, though she did say the other day: Instead of introducing myself as Jill Biden’s husband, maybe I should introduce myself as her roommate.
I’ve attended this dinner many times, but this is my first time as president. And the organizers had — had it hard — made it pretty hard for me tonight. Although the good news is, if all goes well, I have a real shot at replacing James Corden.
It was great having him over at the White House the other day, just as he announced he’s leaving the show. A great performer is going out on top after eight years in the job. Sounds just about right to me.
And it’s tough to follow pros like James and Billy Eichner. Billy, where are you again? Do you — where is he?
Well, Billy, you’re famous for interviewing — your interviewing skills. Billy, you should know what you’re doing, pal. You know it, you know it well. And you should — I think — you should host “Meet the Press.” Maybe they’ll start to watch it again.
I’ve never had — never had to — I’ve never had to open — I’ll never be — I’ll never be invited to “Meet the Press” again. Anyway.
I’ve never had to open before Trevor Noah. Trevor is great. When I was elected, he did a show and he called me “America’s new dad.” Let me tell you something, pal: I’m flattered anybody would call me a “new” anything. You’re my guy.
And, folks, it’s been a tough few years for the country. That’s one reason why it’s great to be here again.
Everyone at the White House is so excited. I told my grandkids and Pete Buttigieg they could stay up late and watch this show tonight.
Tonight — tonight we come here and answer a very important question on everybody’s mind: Why in the hell are we still doing this?
I know there are — I know there are questions about whether we should gather here tonight because of Covid. Well, we’re here to show the country that we’re getting through this pandemic. Plus, everyone had to prove they were fully vaccinated and boosted.
So, if you’re at home watching this and you’re wondering how to do that, just contact your favorite Fox News reporter. They’re all here, vaccinated and boosted — all of them.
And, look, Fox — Fox News, I’m — I’m really sorry your preferred candidate lost the last election. To make it up to you, I’m happy to give my chief of staff to you all so he can tell Sean Hannity what to say every day.
In fact, Ron Klain is here at the CBS table, which hired Mick Mulvaney. Mick, on CBS? I was stunned. I figured he’d end up on “The Masked Singer” with Rudy.
Amazing hire, guys. Really quite amazing.
Look, I know this is a tough town. I came to office with an ambitious agenda, and I expected it to face stiff opposition in the Senate. I just hoped it would be from Republicans.
But I’m not worried about the midterms. I’m not worried about them. We may end up with more partisan gridlock, but I’m confident we can work it out during my remaining six years in the presidency.
And, folks, I’m not really here to roast the GOP. That’s not my style. Besides, there’s nothing I can say about the GOP that Kevin McCarthy hasn’t already put on tape.
And, you know, at the same — at the same time, a lot of people say the Republican Party is too extreme, too divisive, too controlled by one person. They say, “It’s not your father’s Republican Party.”
Ronald Reagan said, “Mr. Gorbachev, tear this wall down.” Today’s Republicans say, “Tear down Mickey Mouse’s house.” And pretty soon, they’ll be storming Cinderella’s castle, you can be sure of it.
But Republicans seem to support one fella — some guy named Brandon. He’s having a really good year, and I’m kind of happy for him.
Let me conclude with a serious word.
We live in serious times. We’re coming through a devastating pandemic, and we have to stay vigilant. I know Kamala wanted to be here, for example, and thankfully she’s doing well. You should all know she sends her best.
We’re in a time when what we so long have taken for granted is facing the gravest of threats. And I’m being deadly earnest.
Overseas, the liberal world order that laid the foundation for global peace, stability and prosperity since World War II is genuinely, seriously under assault.
And at home, a poison is running through our democracy of all — all of this taking place with disinformation massively on the rise, where the truth is buried by lies and the lies live on as truth.
What’s clear — and I mean this from the bottom of my heart — that you, the free press, matter more than you ever did in the last century. No, I really mean it.
I’ve always believed that good journalism holds up a mirror to ourselves, to reflect on the good, the bad and the true. Tonight, I want to congratulate the awardees and the scholarship winners who carry on that sacred tradition.
We’ve all seen the courage of the Ukrainian people because of the courage of American reporters in this room and your colleagues across the world, who are on the ground, taking their lives in their own hands.
We just — we just saw a heartbreaking video: Nine have been killed reporting from Kyiv — struck by a kamikaze drone strike after a shopping mall attack; shot in the neck while decounci- [sic] — while — while documenting Ukrainians fleeing; killed when Russian missiles hit the television tower in a residential neighborhood. One journalist from Radio Liberty just killed days ago.
So many of you telling the stories and taking the photos and recording the videos of what’s happening there, the unvarnished truth shown — showing the — the destruction and the devastation and, yes, the war crimes.
Tonight, we also honor the legacy of two historic reporters, and that is Alice Dunnigan and Ethel Payne. I’m glad you saw that tonight. I didn’t know you were doing that. These are the first Black women to be White House reporters, who shattered convention to cover a segregated nation.
We honor journalists killed, missing, imprisoned, detained and tortured; covering war, exposing corruption and holding leaders accountable.
We honor members of the press, both national and local, covering a once-in-a-century pandemic where we lost a million Americans, a generation reckoning on race and the existential threat of climate change.
The free press is not the enemy of the people — far from it. At your best, you’re guardians of the truth.
President Kennedy once said, and I quote, “Without debate, without criticism, no administration, no country can succeed, and no republic can survive.”
The First Amendment grants a free press extraordinary protection, but with it comes, as many of you know, a very heavy obligation: to seek the truth as best you can — not to inflame or entertain, but to illuminate and educate.
I know it’s tough. And I’m not being solicitous. The industry is changing significantly.
There’s incredible pressure on you all to deliver heat instead of shed light, because the technology is changing so much, the system is changing. But it matters. No kidding. It matters. The truth matters.
American democracy is not a reality show. It’s not a reality show. It’s reality itself. And the reality is that we are a great country.
Our future is bright. It’s not guaranteed, because democracy is never guaranteed. It has to be earned. It has to be defended. It has to be protected.
As you’ve heard me say many times: There’s not a damn thing this country can’t do when we stand united and do it together. And I know we can do anything we want to do that’s right.
I’ve been around a long time, as has been pointed out many times tonight. But I give you my word as a Biden: I’ve never been more optimistic about America than I am today. I really mean it.
At times of enormous change, it presents enormous opportunities. For despite all the crises, all the partisanship, all the shouting and the showmanship,
I really know this and you know it too: We are a great nation because we’re basically a good people.
And here in America, good journalism, good satire about our leaders, about our society is quintessentially an American thing. It demonstrates the power of our example.
And I, honest to God, believe it reveals our soul — the soul of our nation. And that’s what I’d like to toast tonight, if I may.
(The President offers a toast.)
To the journalists and their families, to the people and their elected representatives, to the United States of America.
And by the way, Madeleine Albright was right: We are the indispensable nation.
Ladies and gentlemen, I’m going to turn this over to Trevor now, strap myself into my seat.
And, Trevor, the really good news is: Now you get to roast the President of the United States and, unlike in Moscow, you won’t go to jail.
The podium is yours.”
As written by Margaret Sullivan in The Guardian, in an article entitled When journalists are persecuted, we all suffer; “Jodie Ginsberg remembers an important lesson from her decade as a Reuters foreign correspondent and bureau chief: there simply is no substitute for being at the scene.
“The first and most important source is what journalists see in front of them – their ability to give a firsthand, eyewitness account,” says Ginsberg, now the president of Committee to Protect Journalists, the non-profit advocacy organization based in New York City.
A memorable case in point was how two Associated Press journalists last year were able to tell what was happening on the ground in Mariupol, Ukraine. As a Russian siege largely destroyed the city, children’s bodies filled mass graves and shells demolished a maternity hospital, but Russian officials tried to deny it and called the horror stories nothing but fiction.
“The Russians said this was all a fake, but the AP journalists at the scene were able to say no, and tell the real story,” Ginsberg said. One of them, Yevgeny Maloletka, took an unforgettable photograph, seen on front pages around the world, of an injured pregnant woman being carried on a gurney from the bombed-out hospital by emergency workers; her baby was born dead and she died soon afterwards.
But with journalists threatened with harassment, danger and even imprisonment around the world, that crucial ability to report on the ground – to get the invaluable eyewitness account – has been sorely diminished.
The situation is dire; as democracy declines worldwide, there are more journalists in prison now than at any time since the CPJ began keeping track. The organization’s annual prison census showed 363 reporters in prison at the end of last year – an increase of 20% from the previous year, with the most journalists jailed in Iran, China, Myanmar, Turkey and Belarus.
This ugly trend means less on-the-ground reporting – not only by the imprisoned journalists but by many others who flee conflict zones or are forced to censor themselves in order to avoid the growing dangers.
When the Wall Street Journal reporter Evan Gershkovich was arrested in late March on false espionage charges in Russia – he remains imprisoned – many western journalists finally fled the country joining those who had left months earlier. The threats had simply become untenable.
“Evan’s arrest sends a powerful message to other journalists – that you may face something similar,” Ginsberg told me. “That has a chilling effect on reporting, which is the aim of the repressive governments doing this kind of harassment and imprisonment. It is meant to silence journalists.”
No longer is it just war correspondents who face extreme danger. These days, the dominance of authoritarian governments around the world make life hazardous for all kinds of journalists. Local and regional reporters around the world may bear the brunt most, partly because they don’t have the protection and legal resources of large news organizations.
In addition to the countries named above, Ginsberg said that Mexico, Haiti, Russia and parts of Latin and South America are particularly difficult places for journalists to do their work now.
Concerned people can help. They can show they care about journalism by subscribing to news organizations or donating to free-speech and press-rights organizations including CPJ, Pen America and Reporters Without Borders.
And perhaps most important of all, they can keep jailed journalists in mind, and keep their plight in the public consciousness. That goes for Austin Tice, a freelance journalist who went missing in Syria in 2012 and is believed to be a captive of the Syrian government. It goes for Gershkovich, of course, and for the hundreds of lesser known reporters who are threatened or jailed around the world.
It was encouraging to hear Joe Biden bring up Tice and Gershkovich at the White House correspondents’ dinner last weekend in Washington DC. He spoke of Evan’s “absolute courage”, and said US officials are working every day to bring him home.
“Our message is this,” Biden added. “Journalism is not a crime.”
Not only is journalism not a crime, it’s a necessity – one that’s becoming harder than ever to carry out with every passing month.
That’s not only terrible for those directly involved. It also hurts everyone who cares about the truth.”
As written last year by Oliver Holmes in The Guardian, in an article entitled Media freedom in dire state in record number of countries, report finds: World Press Freedom Index report warns disinformation and AI pose mounting threats to journalism; “Media freedom is in dire health in a record number of countries, according to the latest annual snapshot, which warns that disinformation, propaganda and artificial intelligence pose mounting threats to journalism.
The World Press Freedom Index revealed a shocking slide, with an unprecedented 31 countries deemed to be in a “very serious situation”, the lowest ranking in the report, up from 21 just two years ago.
Increased aggressiveness from autocratic governments – and some that are considered democratic – coupled with “massive disinformation or propaganda campaigns” has caused the situation to go from bad to worse, according to the list, released by the advocacy group Reporters Without Borders (RSF).
“There is more red on the RSF map this year than ever before, as authoritarian leaders become increasingly bold in their attempts to silence the press,” the RSF secretary general, Christophe Deloire, told the Guardian. “The international community needs to wake up to reality, and act together, decisively and fast, to reverse this dangerous trend.”
Wednesday marks the 30th anniversary of the first World Press Freedom Day, which was created to remind governments of their duty to uphold freedom of expression. However, the environment for journalism today is considered “bad” in seven out of 10 countries, and satisfactory in only three out of 10, according to RSF. The UN says 85% of people live in countries where media freedom has declined in the past five years.
The survey assesses the state of the media in 180 countries and territories, looking at the ability of journalists to publish news in the public interest without interference andwithout threats to their own safety.
It shows rapid technological advances are allowing governments and political actors to distort reality, and fake content is easier to publish than ever before.
“The difference is being blurred between true and false, real and artificial, facts and artifices, jeopardising the right to information,” the report said. “The unprecedented ability to tamper with content is being used to undermine those who embody quality journalism and weaken journalism itself.”
Artificial intelligence was “wreaking further havoc on the media world”, the report said, with AI tools “digesting content and regurgitating it in the form of syntheses that flout the principles of rigour and reliability”.
This is not just written AI content but visual, too. High-definition images that appear to show real people can be generated in seconds.
At the same time, governments are increasingly fighting a propaganda war. Russia, which already plummeted in the rankings last year after the invasion of Ukraine, dropped another nine places, as state media slavishly parrots the Kremlin line while opposition outlets are driven into exile. Last month, Moscow arrested the Wall Street Journal reporter Evan Gershkovich, the first US journalist detained in Russia on espionage charges since the end of the cold war.
Meanwhile, three countries: Tajikistan, India and Turkey, dropped from being in a “problematic situation” into the lowest category. India has been in particularly sharp decline, sinking 11 places to 161 after media takeovers by oligarchs close to Narendra Modi. The Indian press used to be seen as fairly progressive, but things changed radically after the Hindu nationalist prime minister took over. This year, the BBC was raided by the country’s financial crimes agency in a move widely condemned as an act of intimidation after a BBC documentary was critical of Modi.
In Turkey, the administration of the hardline president, Recep Tayyip Erdoğan, had stepped up its persecution of journalists in the run-up to elections scheduled for 14 May, RSF said. Turkey jails more journalists than any other democracy.
Some of the 2023 index’s biggest falls were in Africa. Until recently a regional model, Senegal fell 31 places, mainly because of criminal charges brought against two journalists, Pape Alé Niang and Pape Ndiaye. Tunisia fell 27 places as a result of President Kais Saied’s growing authoritarianism.
The Middle East is the world’s most dangerous region for journalists. But the Americas no longer have any country coloured green, meaning “good”, on the press freedom map. The US fell three places to 45th. The Asia Pacific region is dragged down by regimes hostile to reporters, such as Myanmar (173rd) and Afghanistan (152nd).
“We are witnessing worrying trends, but the big question is if these trends are a hiccup or a sign of a world going backwards,” said Guilherme Canela, the global lead on freedom of speech at Unesco. “Physical attacks, digital attacks, the economic situation, and regulatory tightening: we are facing a perfect storm.”
A separate Unesco report released on Wednesday said healthy freedom of expression helped many other fundamental rights to flourish.
Nordic countries have long topped the RSF rankings, and Norway stayed in first place in the press freedom index for the seventh year running. But a non-Nordic country was ranked second: Ireland. The Netherlands returned to the top 10, rising 22 places, following the 2021 murder of the crime reporter Peter R de Vries. The UK was listed at 26.
The western world’s media landscape remains mixed, according to RSF and other press freedom groups, with political and financial pressures. In the first quarter of this year, news media job cuts in the UK and North America ran at a rate of 1,000 jobs a month, a Press Gazette analysis found.
Last week, the New York-based Committee to Protect Journalists released a report warning against complacency in the EU, which has traditionally been considered among the world’s safest and freest places for journalists.
The group expressed concern about rising populism and illiberal governments such as in Hungary and Poland trampling on the rule of law, including press freedom. The Maltese journalist Daphne Caruana Galizia and the Slovakian journalist Ján Kuciak had been murdered in connection with their work.”
As written by Kelly Walls in The Guardian, in an article entitled Trust, diversity and independence: three key elements for a thriving press: Newspapers’ power is being eroded and disinformation is rife – but there is a way forward; “Our understanding of the world is driven by information. It feeds our ability to make informed decisions about our lives, our communities, the way we’re governed. This fundamental freedom, the power to be able to access reliable information, sits at the heart of a thriving democratic society.
But increasingly that power is being eroded. Indeed, some never had it to begin with. Press freedom is being threatened, compromised and denied in an increasing number of countries around the world.
In parallel, trust in news among the general public is declining. Financial pressures are multiplying. And for every technological advancement to counter disinformation, there is another that can more effectively spread it.
As the Nobel laureate Maria Ressa put it recently: “This is not a content problem, it isn’t a freedom of speech problem, it is a distribution problem. It is the fact that by design, lies are distributed faster and further than facts.”
Ahead of the 30th anniversary this week of World Press Freedom Day, it is becoming clearer than ever that three things have to happen to assure a future for media organisations.
The first is financial independence. The Media Development Investment Fund (MDIF) say that media can only be truly independent if there are no financial strings. They created Plūrālis for this reason, a blended funding model that combines philanthropic and commercial capital to make interventions when media are most vulnerable, acting as a shield against capture from governments or individuals who seek to compromise their editorial independence. “A new approach was needed and this was an experiment, but it really could be a model for the future,” their chief strategy officer, Patrice Schneider, said.
But beyond philanthropic grants and investment, ultimately media organisations strive to be self-sustaining. To that end, more are turning to membership and reader revenue models. In a world where so much information is available for free, to persuade a reader to voluntarily pay for news is tough. It relies on an exchange of value and trust.
In recent months, the Guardian Foundation team, in collaboration with our colleagues at the Guardian, have worked with the Kyiv Independent, Holod, Telex and +972, to exchange knowledge, skills and tactics. The hope is that if we can share with young, vibrant, independent startups what is working for others, they will flourish in parts of the world that desperately need them.
Zakhar Protsiuk, chief operating officer of the Kyiv Independent, said the mentorship “gave us practical advice that we could act on quickly. One tip resulted in an increase of more than 150% in reader support that week.”
They went on to achieve their goal of 10,000 members. At the recent International Journalism festival, editor-in-chief Olga Rudenko reflected on their broader journey over the last 18 months: “We just hope that other media can draw from our success and that this isn’t just something for us.” This is key: a community of independent media who are working together in solidarity, not competition.
The second vital factor is plurality of voice and agency. News organisations must include diverse perspectives and reporting by journalists from a broad range of backgrounds. If certain communities are excluded or misrepresented in the news coverage they see, then trust is lost. To combat this effectively, the barriers to entry and progression in the industry must be broken, alongside the recognition that more inclusive and representative news organisations create better journalism and engage the audiences they seek to serve in a more successful way.
The third crucial element is news literacy. If the long-term sustainability of news organisations relies, at least in part, on people willing to pay for it, then audiences who can seek out, value and trust those organisations must exist. A report by Impress, based on research by the universities of Leeds and Derby, found a link between lack of trust in journalism and low levels of news literacy among the UK population.
Without educating audiences to critically evaluate sources and discern reliable information, trust cannot be built. Without trust, news has no value, meaning readers won’t pay for it, news organisations won’t be viable and public access to fact-based journalism will decrease. With that, our ability to make informed decisions and hold power to account is weakened.
Thankfully, news and media literacy is gaining more support, being seen as a vital part of the journalism ecosystem and an underpinning of democracy.
So as World Press Freedom Day approaches, while we must recognise the very real threats, let’s also take a moment to look forward with some hope for a society in which people can find and use their power to participate, influence and act.”
My Writings On Truth Telling, Witness, Silence, Freedom of the Press and Journalism As A Sacred Calling In Pursuit of Truth
March 28 2025 Witness of the Martyr Hossam Shabat, and His Eulogy By Sharif Abdel Kouddous
August 12 2024 A Sacred Calling to Pursue the Truth: the Case of Salman Rushdie, Champion of Our Liberty In Writing As A Sacred Calling to Pursue the Truth
And to place the performance of Truth telling, remembrances, and the witness of history in political context as seizure of power and their roles in identity formation as mimesis, reimagination, and transformative rebirth, my writing on the figure of Loki the Trickster:
October 11 2024 Silenced Loki: a Figure and Symbol of Poetic Vision and Creativity as Rebellion Against Authority and Revolutionary Struggle
‘Numerous signs of torture’: a Ukrainian journalist’s detention and death in Russian prison: The Guardian, working with media partners, has tracked down first-hand accounts to reconstruct Viktoriia Roshchyna’s final months
Social injustice is the crack in the Liberty Bell; as we stand united in solidarity with our brothers and sisters throughout the world in our wonderfully diverse human family, with our essential workers who during the Pandemic, this particular one for now it seems held at bay but a threat which may return in new and terrible forms like the Black Death at any time, risked their own lives and those of their families to guarantee basic services to us all, and with our vulnerable populations who bear the true costs of what wealth and hegemony of power and privilege we may enjoy, let us always remember that among the causes and origins of our current problems is the failure of our political and economic systems to realize our founding value of equality.
What is the meaning of the Pandemic? Among other things it has exposed the faultlines of our civilization and the internal contradictions whose mechanical failures now threaten us all with civilizational collapse and extinction as consequences of capitalism and colonialism as systems of unequal power, and of control and dominion of nature as flawed coping strategies for our fear of her as uncontrollable, irrational, chaotic, and free; fear of the wildness of nature, and the wildness of ourselves.
For in this failure of our grasp to reach the limits of our vision we have allowed a failing capitalism to try and bring us down with it, to subvert democracy and the structural safeguards of our freedom embodied in our government as a free society of equals, and as our devastation of the environment creates pandemics and poisons our world to threaten our very lives.
When we will say, Enough! When will we reclaim our liberty and ownership of the public resources we have let slip away into the hands of those who would enslave us?
When we think of labor unions, of strikes and the right of workers to organize in defense of fair and safe work, we must think not only of our universal human rights and our duty of care for each other in solidarity, but also of the systems of oppression and unequal power in which such seizures of power become necessary and arise as imposed conditions of struggle. The event we celebrate today of over one hundred years ago, the Seattle General Strike, was such a victory, one which in large part founded organized labor.
From Cal Winslow writing in Jacobin comes an inspirational account of the Seattle General Strike of 1919 in the wake of the 1918 Flu Pandemic and conditions of austerity and worker exploitation much like those today. May we learn from the examples of history how better to meet the challenges of the future.
“The first major general strike in the United States coincided with the last major pandemic. Here’s the full story.
November 11, 1918. The war was finished. There were wild celebrations everywhere — everywhere, that is, in France, Britain, and the United States. Spontaneous demonstrations of relief and happiness erupted, and millions took to the streets of Paris, London, and New York.
In Seattle, the Star pronounced, “War is Over!” The city learned of the armistice on Sunday night, November 10; at once, people took to the streets. In the morning, the mayor was awakened to find the streets filled, his planned proclamation of a holiday irrelevant; his wish for a proper, orderly, patriotic manifestation was superseded.
Revelers celebrated not just the end of the war, but also what they thought to be the end of the so-called Spanish flu. Over the course of that day, makeshift bands appeared, with people banging garbage-can lids and lunch buckets, car horns blasting. Workers abandoned the shipyards, longshoremen quit the waterfront, and the city center was gridlocked. The city’s health authorities, too, were taken aback. There were no masks to be seen; social distancing was defiantly disregarded. They had their own plans in the works, perhaps with some recklessness, to withdraw their edicts, their restrictions on crowds and mandatory masking, and to triumphantly pronounce the influenza beaten.
Sailors, first carriers of the influenza and also its first victims, were ordered into the crowds to ensure that the celebration was official and properly patriotic. The November celebrations were also suggestive of a level of underlying discontent, a prelude to another war coming, to a return of “normalcy” in the nation’s most class-divided, strike-prone city — above all to the great “Seattle Strike.”
“The war to end all wars,” the papers repeated without a blush. Yet 10 million had been lost in the slaughter on the Western Front; millions more were maimed, emotionally as well as physically. In Central and Eastern Europe, there were vast swaths of devastation, the heart of the continent was in ruins, and there were new armies, this time of scavengers and homeless, creatures without hope. The Seattle Star featured a half-page, triumphant Jesus, captioned “Peace on Earth.” Then came the mindless boastings of victory, of “sacred unions,” “homes for heroes,” “democracy at full tilt.” “We won the war!”
The workers of Seattle, however, had never really supported this war, unless one reduced it to “supporting the troops,” the mantra in all wars. Still, they celebrated; especially if it meant an end to long hours, short pay, conscription; to “sedition” charges and “criminal syndicalism” laws; to the red squads, raids, and prison sentences. The killing — nearly 5 million Americans served in World War I, and 53,000 were killed in action — was not restricted to the trenches. On the home front, the influenza killed 675,000, and more than 1,500 deaths were recorded in Seattle.
The Flu Comes to Seattle
In the winter of 1918, much of the city — the schools, and most public places — was still reopening. It remained unclear if the epidemic was, in fact, finished, with a second spike just before Christmas. The heavy rains had begun. The first loggers were drifting back; they joined others — wandering, homeless men on the city’s mean streets, waiting for spring and work to resume. This was ordinary in Seattle in winter. Now, however, newcomers appeared, some still in uniform, wanting work. Some were sick. The Union Record, the city’s union-owned daily newspaper, reported that “peace” abroad was bringing hunger at home. One man, a union representative from the Metal Trades Council (MTC), told reporters that he had been approached “by 15 soldiers in one night, all for bed and board.”
It had taken time for the influenza to reach Seattle. This city of three hundred thousand, situated in the far northwestern corner of the nation, was two mountain ranges and several long days from Chicago by train; it was weeks from the East Coast by the Panama Canal, and still much longer around the Strait of Magellan. Seattle was, in this sense, isolated, yet by war’s end, it had become the center of trade with Asia, two days closer to Vladivostok than its rival to the south, San Francisco. It was the gateway to Alaska and its fisheries. Wheat from the great fields of the Palouse was shipped from its docks.
Seattle had become an imperial outpost. The Puget Sound country bristled with warship building and armed encampments. Camp Lewis, just south of Tacoma, was the largest such base in the West. Bremerton, across the bay, was home port for the navy’s North Pacific fleet. Sailors trained there; warships, meant for the Asian “theater,” were built in its yards. The real war, of course, was an ocean away in the other direction. In spite of this, Seattle’s shipyards — the city’s “basic industry” — produced more ships for the war (ninety in total, steel hulled) than any other shipyard in the country. The yards were “the life” of the city, “pulsing through every [other] industry, affecting all workers.” These yards employed some thirty five thousand men; fifteen thousand more worked in Tacoma’s shipyards.
The influenza, despite its name, originated not in Spain but in Kansas in 1917, settling in Camp Riley. It was well traveled by the following summer’s end. It had first spread eastward, moving from camp to camp, reaching Europe with the arriving American Expeditionary Forces. It swept across Europe, adding a new dimension of horror to the trenches of the Western Front. Then home again to the United States, it returned with soldiers and sailors, killing ferociously. Public health officers in Seattle certainly knew about it and expected it, yet, as elsewhere, they were caught off guard when it actually appeared. It came in late September, by way of infected sailors in Boston dispatched to Philadelphia, then with the 334 of these who set sail from Philadelphia for Puget Sound. On arrival, many were desperately ill.
“In the event the disease appears here,” announced Seattle’s commissioner of health, Dr J.S. McBride, on September 28, “and it is not unlikely that it will, we will endeavor to isolate the first cases and thus try to prevent it becoming an epidemic.” Isolation would begin with places of amusement, theaters, sporting events, restaurants, and saloons. It was also presented as an opportunity to shut down the city’s notorious Skid Row, with its flophouses, saloons, brothels, and various other places of unsavory amusement, including the headquarters of the Industrial Workers of the World (IWW, or Wobblies). Industry, however, would carry on, indeed be encouraged — the city’s “interests” were anxious to remain open, free of wartime restrictions, determined to reestablish the “open shop.”
McBride and his staff watched for the first signs of the influenza; these came initially in the Navy’s facilities in Bremerton, then in Camp Lewis with, suddenly, reports of hundreds of cases of a severe influenza. These, the authorities initially insisted, were simply the flu, though noting that, in some cases, this flu quickly became pneumonia. Bremerton reported fourteen deaths. Sailors were ordered to avoid large gatherings. Visitors were banned. Camp Lewis was placed under quarantine.
Still, in Seattle, McBride and staff looked in the wrong places, even when hundreds of cadets at the Naval Training Station at the University of Washington were reported to be suffering from a mild flu. For some reason, they saw the university as set apart. Their demesne was the city; McBride continued to pronounce Seattle influenza-free. Then, on October 4, one cadet was reported dead, hundreds more ill, and four hundred hospitalized. Precious time had been wasted. That night, two influenza cases were reported in the city — each resulting in death.
The next morning, McBride met with the mayor, Ole Hanson, a real estate broker; together they announced to the public that the influenza had found its way to Seattle. McBride ordered all private and public dances prohibited, declared that streetcars and theaters had to be well ventilated, and ordered police to strictly enforce the anti-spitting ordinance. He appealed to the public to practice a voluntary quarantine. Over the next days, however, closings were ordered — first church services, then places of entertainment, then the public schools.
The suddenness of the closures took the public by surprise and sparked some resistance. The superintendent of schools, Frank Cooper, believed them to be unwise: “I consider it more dangerous to have children running around the streets loose than to have them in school where they will be under strict medical supervision.” Crowds of people continued to congregate in the city’s theater district, large numbers of sailors mixing with them, despite police efforts to keep amusements closed. The police organized an “Influenza Squad” to enforce the orders, but results were mixed. Those who could began leaving the city, some to mountain retreats, others further afield. The writer Mary McCarthy’s parents evacuated to Chicago, where they each were stricken, dying before the year’s end, leaving their children orphans. McCarthy was returned to Seattle and put in the care of an aging aunt.
Seattle’s officials singled out the shipyards for attention, though more in keeping with wartime patriotism than with concern for the health of the workers. The yards, after all, far from healthy places, were well known as rough-and-tumble work sites where “men came out covered in soot and red paint, exhausted from wielding thundering riveting guns. Every day or so some unlucky shipyard worker would be carried out in the dead wagon.” Influenza added to this toll. Still, McBride wanted to keep these workers on the job. He believed he could, especially as many of these workers toiled outside, where they were thought to be less susceptible to the disease than other factory workers.
Nevertheless, he sought to inoculate the entire workforce with one of the sera that had been developed. “Let no question of money or men interfere with your work.” When requests came from others, he responded, “Seattle needs all the serum we can grow, and we will share with nobody until our shipyard workers and other citizens have been properly inoculated.” Workers were skeptical; war, the virus, and the brutality of work had produced widespread fatalism, a realism in the face of calamity in all quarters. The numbers of the sick and the dead rose, and by mid-October, four thousand cases had been reported; no evidence ever appeared to suggest the sera had been of use.
Hanson and McBride were stubbornly confident that isolation and closures would work. Hanson maintained to the end that the influenza was really just a form of the flu, a “grippe.” He believed that it would last no more than a week. They were wrong. In no large American city was the influenza contained quickly.
Within days, the flu reached all sections of Seattle, though “south of Yesler” and the Rainier Valley, home to Seattle’s slums and the cheap housing of the workers, suffered most. Frustrated, the authorities blamed a noncompliant public for the influenza’s persistence. They continued to work to see that the closure orders were widened and enforced. On October 28, McBride issued new orders, including mandatory wearing of flu masks. These were worn reluctantly; they came to be the symbols of Seattle besieged. Streetcar conductors were ordered to bar people not donning a face covering. Hanson told commuters that they had better find a mask and wear it, “or tomorrow morning they will walk to work.” In late October, however, the numbers of new cases of infection leveled off and then began to fall.
Strike Town
Seattle’s shipyard workers believed they had sacrificed unreasonably for the sake of the war. Their hours had been long, their work grueling. Hulet Wells, the onetime socialist president of the Seattle Central Labor Council (CLC), also president of the state’s Socialist Party, while awaiting sentencing for opposing conscription, found work at Skinner & Eddy, the largest of the yards. There he encountered a; “howling bedlam . . . a wilderness of strange machines, whirling belts and belching fires . . . The human ant heap boiled with all the specialists that fit into the modern shipyard. Everywhere there was deafening noise, boilers rang, planers screamed, long white-hot rods were smashed into bolt machines. Here was the angle-bending floor where black men beat a tattoo with heavy sledges, and here a steam hammer thumped its measured blows . . . [as well as] the wrenching scenes of the injured, the sirens of the ambulances, and the dying or dead being carted off into the chaos of the waterfront roadways.”
In 1917 and 1918, the city’s unions increasingly felt pressure from the federal government and its shipping board. The shipyard workers had worked with standards set nationally by labor boards in Washington, DC, even when believing themselves punished by these standards. It was indisputable that prices were higher on the West Coast — above all in Seattle — than in the East. The unions were especially intent on raising the wages of the unskilled and semiskilled, an immediate necessity in breaking down divisions in the shops. However, wage demands were repeatedly rejected. Seattle’s workers, inheritors of a decade of intense conflict, by the war’s end, believed themselves betrayed by the government. They had been lied to, they believed, by the president, the shipping board, and the city’s health officials. They were bitter, angry, and itching for a fight. They voted to strike in December. The January strike was inevitable.
The men walked out on the morning of January 21, 1919. There were women scattered through their ranks, as well as black workers, though they were few and their union status unclear. Virtually all the AFL’s international unions in these trades barred women and blacks. A. E. Miller, the chairman of the MTC, announced the strike “absolutely clean,” meaning that thirty-five thousand workers struck en masse, and none came to take their places. They showed “splendid solidarity and great enthusiasm,” undaunted by the winter rain. Tacoma and Aberdeen quickly followed. Speaking on behalf of the workers, John McKelvey defied the owners. The “shipyard millionaires have been getting all the credit for the ships we have built. Oh yes, they’re ship builders. If they think they can build ships let ’em go ahead and build them!”
The Union Record brought news of the strikers’ plight to its fifty thousand subscribers, supporting the strike without qualification. Next to its front-page lead on January 2, “45,000 Men Out in Sound Cities,” it ran an article titled, “Tremendous Profits Made by Seattle Shipbuilding Firms,” revealing the businesses’ costs, sales, and profits. The day’s editorial, “A Great Strike,” explained: “The whole question of wages is bound up in the tremendous increase in the cost of living in Seattle.”
The strike, however, was not just a symptom — real enough in itself — but an indication as well of deeper frustrations and dissatisfactions. The strike wave of the war years — “an epidemic of strikes” — was both national and international, inspired in part by syndicalism. Seattle was both a strike center and a radical center, a stronghold of working-class socialism; its unions’ commitment to workers’ control ran deep, and support for the Russian Revolution was widespread. Kate Sadler, the workers’ “Joan of Arc,” had led Seattle’s delegation to the Mooney conference. Crystal Eastman in the Liberator reported that Sadler led her city’s “wild ones,” who insisted on a general strike no later than May Day to free the framed San Francisco union man. “Russia Did It!” would be the lead of a leaflet penned by the young Harvey O’Connor (illustrated with a brawny worker and a fat capitalist in a coffin — twenty thousand were distributed).
At the same time, Seattle was filling up with unemployed, homeless, demobilized young men, and it was still not entirely free from the flu. In response, the MTC packed the Hippodrome with thousands to announce the formation of a “Soldiers, Sailors and Workers Council.” The meeting went forward despite the authorities, who surrounded the hall with military police. Thousands gathered in Tacoma as well, with Camp Lewis soldiers, no longer under quarantine, in attendance.
It was increasingly clear that unions did not know with whom they were to negotiate: the national board or the local employers. In either case, the employers refused to budge, as did the eastern board members, the shippers, and their allies in the national AFL unions. The MTC thus turned to Seattle’s Central Labor Council (CLC), the federation of 110 local unions — the organization that, in defiance of the AFL, was built from the bottom up, that championed industrial unions, supported sympathy strikes, cooperated with the IWW, and was led by socialists — with a request for the strike.
“The idea of a general strike swept the ranks of organized labor like a gale,” wrote O’Connor. On January 22, in an assembly of the CLC, in the Labor Temple, the metal workers made their case, requesting that Seattle’s workers join them in a general strike. The aim would be not only to win their demands but also to present a show of force in the face of the employers’ renewed open-shop campaign. They believed that the fate of the organized labor movement itself was at stake. Representatives of the city’s local trade unions and rank-and-file militants packed the Labor Temple. According to O’Connor, “Every reference to the general strike was cheered to the echo; the cautions of the conservatives . . . were hooted down” or interrupted by shouting, clapping, and singing.
The CLC proposed a referendum on the strike, which passed unanimously. The enthusiasm that evening brought with it high rhetoric, emotion, even tears. Then came a cornucopia of demands; appetites grew, delegates revealing their own grievances and aspirations, hopeful that these, too, might be addressed. The metal workers, however, insisted that the strike’s demands be limited to those of the shipyard workers already out — what they wanted was a “clean-cut demonstration of the economic power of organized labor.”
The meeting ended in an uproar when delegate Fred Nelson unfurled a banner showing a soldier and a sailor in uniform with a worker in overalls and the slogan “Together We Will Win.” This was followed by “a storm of applause which lasted several minutes,” abating only when delegate Ben King of the Painters, just returned from the Mooney Congress in Chicago, recounted “sleeping between soldiers and sailors and they are all with us.” The applause “broke out afresh.”
America’s First General Strike
On February 6, 1919, Seattle’s workers — all of them — struck. In doing so, they literally took control of the city. They brought the city to a halt — a strange silence settled on the normally bustling streets, and on the waterfront, where “nothing moved but the tide.” The CLC’s Union Record reported sixty-five thousand union members on strike. It was a general strike, the first of its kind in the United States. Perhaps as many as one hundred thousand working people participated — the strikers were joined by workers not in unions, unemployed workers, and family members. The city’s authorities were rendered powerless — there was indeed no power that could challenge the workers. There were soldiers in the city and many more at nearby Camp Lewis, not to mention thousands of newly enlisted armed deputies, but to unleash these on a peaceful city? The regular police were reduced to onlookers; the generals hesitated.
Rank-and-file workers, union by union, elected the strike leadership, a strike committee. The strike committee elected an executive committee. Meeting virtually nonstop, they ensured the health, welfare, and safety of the city. Garbage was collected, the hospitals were supplied, babies got milk, and the people were fed, including some thirty thousand a day at the strikers’ kitchens.
The streets were safe, rarely safer, patrolled by an unarmed labor guard of workers. It was reported that crime abated. Nevertheless, the rich, those who could not or would not escape to Portland or California, armed themselves. The Seattle Star asked, “Under which flag?” — the red, white, and blue, or the red. The mayor, Hanson, claimed the latter and warned that a revolution was underway. The AFL piled on, denouncing the strikers and sending emissaries by the hundreds. The general strike was not a revolution. It was a coordinated action in support of the city’s shipyard workers. Still, there had never been anything quite like it. The strikers left their jobs amid the great strike wave of the First World War years and an international crisis that was, in fact, revolutionary in some places — a crisis evolving in the shadow of revolution in Russia.
It was no wonder, then, that revolution was in the air — terrifying some, inspiring others. Then, too, no one knew for certain just how far this strike might go. The strike was simple and straightforward for many, a powerful statement of solidarity and nothing more. But others did indeed want more: all-out victory for the shipyard workers, for example. Some wanted much more, but surely no one could know, not on that cold February morning, not with any certainty, just what lay ahead. Hence the Union Record’s February 6 editorial, written by Anna Louise Strong: “ON THURSDAY AT 10 A.M. There will be many cheering and there will be some who fear. Both of these emotions are useful, but not too much of either. We are undertaking the most tremendous move ever made by LABOR in this country, a move which will lead — NO ONE KNOWS WHERE! We do not need hysteria. We need the iron march of labor.”
Seattle’s streets were quiet, and some thought this a problem. “Seattle Strikers Too Polite,” led the Appeal to Reason, the Midwestern Socialist newspaper. But this missed the point. The strikers feared provocation and had good reason to — it had been used time and again in the war against the Wobblies. Where the workers gathered, however, in the “feeding stations,” the union halls, the co-op markets, or the neighborhoods where workers and their families lived, it was another story.
The “feeding stations” were showcases of self-organization. They may have been authorized by the strike committees; on the ground, they depended on the creativity of ordinary people. Thousands of volunteers took on the strike’s tasks, including running the kitchens, organizing milk distribution, and policing the city. The process of handing out milk was elaborate. “The dairies supplied by the milk dealers were only eleven in number, [and] so located that it would have been impossible for the mothers of Seattle to secure milk unless they owned automobiles.” The milk wagon drivers therefore “chose 35 locations spaced throughout the city, secured the use of space in stores, and proceeded to set up neighborhood milk stations.” Strong asked if the kitchens ever gave away meals. “Lots of them,” was the response. “We don’t refuse anyone, union or non-union if they can’t pay.” The strike may well have been the only occasion, before or since, when no one in Seattle went hungry.
On Saturday night, the strikers held a dance, and as late as Monday, they organized massive strike rallies. In the Georgetown neighborhood, the crowd was so large that the building sank somewhat and had to be evacuated. The meeting reconvened, and with “great enthusiasm . . . it was decided to make the meetings a regular weekly event . . . it was unanimous that the strike should continue until a living wage had been obtained by the shipyard workers. . . . Many of those present expressed the opinion that the scope of the meetings should be enlarged to include the wives and daughters of the workers, and to make them real community gatherings for the discussion of questions in which all are concerned.”
In all these places, the strike was the topic. It was analyzed, criticized, extolled, and debated, and when the workers’ representatives packed the rowdy, emotion-filled strike committee meetings, they came prepared; they were making history, and they knew it. The general strike served notice that Seattle’s workers had become a class “for themselves” — class conscious and “there at the creation,” as the late historian E. P. Thompson put it. “Consciousness of class arises in the same way in different times and places, but never just the same way,” he wrote in The Making of the English Working Class.
Stopping Short
Alas, “The exhilaration from the marvelous display of solidarity experienced Thursday and Friday began to give way to apprehension,” wrote O’Connor. By the third day of the strike, they realized that the Seattle labor movement stood alone. The strike had not spread down the coast to California, nor was there support from across the nation. There was little, O’Connor observed, “to give aid and comfort, even verbally, to the labor movements of Seattle and Tacoma. Seattle, unfortunately, was all too unique in its militancy.” And, against them, the response of the authorities was unrelenting, especially the fearmongers. They frantically forecast a terrible future at hand: Bolshevism, anarchy.
Hanson, egged on by the papers, denounced the strike as “un-American” and refused to negotiate. The Post-Intelligencer observed: “The big fact that stands out from the temporary confusion of business is that Seattle, given a brief time for readjustment, would be well off, if not better than before, if the whole of its striking population [were] suddenly withdrawn from the city.” Hanson threatened martial law if the strike were not ended by 10 a.m. on Saturday. The “interests” in New York and Washington, DC, joined the chorus. The AFL denounced the strike, with the Teamsters Joint Council ordering the strikers back to work. There were telephone calls and telegrams, and a deluge of intimidation, threats, and vilification from the international offices.
The AFL censored the Central Labor Council and would later take credit for defeating its “strike.” Then the international officers arrived in person, threatening to rescind charters, seize union properties, and fire staff. Meanwhile, the shipyards in the East and California carried on as usual. The risk of the owners permanently shutting down the Seattle yards now seemed only too real — deliberative, political deindustrialization.
On Saturday, February 8, several unions returned, though this was by no means a stampede. The Executive Committee voted eleven to two to end the strike. They chose Jimmy Duncan, president of the CLC, not a delegate, to speak to the strike committee for them. He tried to convince those in attendance that continuing the walkout was futile. He failed. The strike committee, infuriated by Hanson’s threats and still committed to victory, overwhelmingly voted to continue the strike, as did the longshoremen and the Metal Trades unions. The divide increasingly became one between the rank and file, on the one hand, and the executive committee, on the other.
Then on Monday, with more unions yielding, Duncan returned to the strike committee. He recommended ending the strike on Tuesday at noon. He requested that those unions that had returned to their jobs come back out so that the strikers could return united; as they had left on Thursday, they would return on Tuesday. The shipyard strikers remained out one month longer.
A Class in Conflict
How is this strike to be assessed? Harvey O’Connor wrote, “For the majority of Seattle unions, there was no sense of defeat as the strike ended. They had demonstrated their solidarity with their brothers in the yards, and the memory of the great days when labor had shown its strength glowed in their minds.”
This sentiment was widely shared among Seattle’s workers. The CLC’s minutes are laden with messages of congratulations: the Metal Trades Council in Aberdeen commended Seattle’s workers “for the excellent conduct of the successful general strike [and urged] one big union and a 24-hour strike on May 1st to demonstrate our solidarity.” From the Astoria Central Labor Council came a communiqué “complimenting Organized Labor for the excellent conduct of the successful general strike.” Mine Workers Locals No. 2917, 1044, 1890, and 4309 sent resolutions “condemning the attitude of the ‘Star’ upon the strike and expressing willingness to lay down tools if conditions warrant.” The King County Pomona Grange pledged support by furnishing produce and finances to the strikers, while cash and expressions of solidarity came from local businesses.
Others concurred. The Socialists’ New York Call wrote:
Whatever may be said of the Seattle strike, it certainly is not a case of ‘blind striking,’ as the Journal of Commerce affirms. It has been calculated and prepared and is one of the finest examples of sacrifice and solidarity that workingmen have displayed in many years. It is a sympathetic strike participated in by workers who have no grievance of their own, at least none that they are raising at this time. They have walked out in support of another group of workers, with the view of aiding the latter to secure a speedy victory.
Max Eastman, editor of the Liberator, had visited Seattle that winter. What he may have contributed to the cause there, if anything, is not recorded. He did, however, record his evaluation: “The General Strike in this city of Seattle filled with hope and happiness the hearts of millions of people in all places of the earth. . . . You demonstrated the possibility of that loyal solidarity of the working class which is the sole remaining hope of liberty for mankind.”
The academic version of this story, which remains widely accepted, comes via the work of Robert L. Friedheim. “The first major general strike in the United States ended quietly at noon on February 11, 1919,” he wrote, adding without evidence, “Somewhat sheepishly, Seattle’s workers returned to their jobs in shops, factories, mills, hotels, warehouses and trolley barns. The strike had been a failure, and they all knew it. In the days ahead, they were to learn that it was worse than a failure — it was a disaster.” The CLC’s own strike committee, however, and to its great credit, commissioned a committee to produce a history of the strike. Anna Louise Strong at once penned her own findings:
The vast majority [of workers] struck to express their solidarity . . . and they succeeded beyond their expectations. They saw the labor movement come out almost as one man and tie up the industries of the city. They saw the Japanese and the IWW and many individual workers join in the strike, and they responded with a glow of appreciation. They saw garbage wagons and laundry wagons going along the streets marked “exempt by strike committee.” They saw the attention of the whole continent turned on the Seattle shipyards. They learned a great deal more than they expected to learn — more than anyone in Seattle knew before. They learned how a city is taken apart and put together again. They learned what it meant to supply milk to the babies of the city, to feed 30,000 people with a brand-new organization. They came close for the first time in their lives to the problems of management.
In the course of the strike’s five days, there had been no lockouts or significant dismissals. There had been no strikebreakers, no “replacement” workers needing protection. No mass arrests, thus no search for lawyers, no defense funds to build. There had been no violence — hence no funerals, no wakes, no widows with children to support. The leaders of the strike committee and the Central Labor Council worked to get the strike’s handful of victims — casualties were few — back to work. They remained quite capable of achieving this.
The fact was that the employers dared not test the workers, not in the short run. Seattle remained a union city. There was, of course, a sense of things getting back to normal, the exception being the waterfront, where the roller-coaster conflict continued. The shippers imposed the open shop, only to have this reversed in August. Now, at last, the ILA achieved job control and a single, alphabetical list. Seattle’s workers remained “strike prone,” among the most combative in the nation right into 1920–21. Wages remained relatively high in the city, as did the cost of living, leveling off but remaining above national averages through 1921.
Seattle’s workers had formed themselves as a class in conflict — in struggles that took place in the forests, on the waterfront, in cafés, and in laundries. They forged their class identity in the long, hard fight for industrial unions and the closed shop, and in the fight for workers’ power. At an early moment, the utopians of the Cooperative Commonwealth had taught socialism and attempted to practice what they preached. Later, the IWW and the Socialist Party fought for it, with the CLC, one step at a time, intent on implementing it.
The 1910s had been a decade of organizing, cooperating, and striking, the most basic weapons of working people in battles that were sometimes won and sometimes lost. Consciousness arose in the utopian colonies, in logging camps and mills, in free speech fights, and on the waterfront, in war and in dissent, in strikes of the “telephone girls,” waitresses, hotel maids, “lady barbers,” and laundry workers, in co-ops and in working-class neighborhoods.
Seattle’s workers transformed a world of war, of sickness, death, and grief, into a great celebration of the living, if only for five days. The general strike was, for Seattle’s workers, a giant step toward a future that might be theirs. This aspiration was surely valid in terms of their own experience. They insisted that their vision was by no means the “pie in the sky” of the preachers and the politicians. A better world was possible. It still is.”
Cal Winslow places the General Strike in the context of the birth of America’s labor movement in Seattle in his article in Jacobin entitled
Seattle, “the Soviet of Washington”; “Decades before Amazon dominated the city, Seattle was the fiery site of labor unrest, radical action — and the US’s only true general strike.
Seattle gleams under the grey skies that characterize its climate. Container ships from China wait in Elliott Bay to unload, while tour boats head out to Alaska’s shrinking glaciers. The Great Wheel towers over Pier 57, and there are tourists everywhere. Two gigantic sports arenas dominate the southern end of the waterfront, where in times past seamen brawled and the longshoremen struck the great ships — losing in 1916, winning at last in 1934. The football stadium is the prize of Microsoft co-founder Paul Allen, who obtained the public funding for its construction. The best seats in the house sell for more than $1,000 and the approaches are lined with upscale bistros and bars. Just south of Lake Union, Allen’s Vulcan real estate company is building a head-office complex for another tech firm, Amazon, complete with interlinked spherical glasshouses enclosing a miniature rainforest. Facebook and Google are also moving in. Powered by these new developments, the Emerald City has the fastest growing population of any major urban area in the US. The world’s two richest men, Jeff Bezos and Bill Gates, both reside here.
Seattle flourishes, then — it is an important place. But can we ask: what sort of place? A stage set, perhaps, for the new Gilded Age, in which corporate wealth and “vibrant” street life can distract the eye from all manner of social contradictions. Seattleites don’t mind the rain; in fact, they love the outdoors. However, public space is at a premium and access to its beaches severely restricted. Tech workers take great pride in Seattle’s high rating for “livability,” yet the cost of housing is rising even quicker than in the Bay Area and the traffic is often unbearable. Hundreds sleep on the street each night. Tent cities appear, reminiscent of the 1930s “Hooverville” shanty town erected in the mud flats south of the business district, and just as unwelcome to the authorities. Meanwhile elsewhere in the city, second homes abound.
Still, there are ghosts dwelling here: old memories — dimly held, to be sure. Here is Yesler Way, once better known as Skid Road because of the logs rolled downhill along its course to Henry Yesler’s sawmill on the shore. Nowadays a nondescript thoroughfare dotted with cafes frequented by tourists, including a branch of the city’s ubiquitous Starbucks chain, it used to heave with disreputable saloons, brothels, and flophouses, making Skid Road synonymous with any district where the down-and-out may gather: places that are rough, sometimes radical. The Industrial Workers of the World put down roots in this quarter among loggers, itinerant farm workers, and miners bound for the Yukon, as well as the shipyard workers who led the Seattle General Strike of February 6–10, 1919, the only true general strike in US history and the one occasion when American workers have actually taken over the running of a city — the sort of endeavor which earned this state, now given over to the billionaires of the new economy, the appellation “the Soviet of Washington.”
Pacific Hub
Seattle is situated on a vertical strip of land between Puget Sound — an “inland sea” off the northern Pacific — and the freshwater Lake Washington. Nonindigenous settlement began with the arrival of a couple of dozen migrants from Illinois in 1851, a few years after the Oregon Treaty fixed the border between the United States and British America at the 49th parallel. The incomers named the township after Chief Sealth of the area’s Duwamish and Suquamish tribes. Upon incorporation by the Washington Territorial legislature in 1869, the city had just two thousand inhabitants. This figure would swell to eighty thousand by the turn of the century. As places of note, Seattle and Tacoma, thirty miles to the south, were the warring creations of competing northern railroads. Two days closer than California to Vladivostok and Asian markets, Seattle became the main distribution hub for the northern Pacific Rim, usurping San Francisco’s former hegemony over the entire Pacific Slope. In addition to its command of Washington State’s forests and the great wheat belt of the Palouse steppe, Seattle also dominated the trade and fisheries of Alaska, whose economy was boosted by an influx of prospectors during the Klondike gold rush. Jobs in distributive and wholesale trades, as well as shipbuilding, attracted migrants fleeing slums, unemployment, and poverty in the East — blacklisted railroad workers, redundant miners, famished wheat farmers. When the mayor of Butte, the class battleground in Montana, visited Seattle in 1919 he recognized large numbers of ex-copper miners working in its shipyards. If Minnesota and neighbouring farm states appealed to the more prosperous Scandinavian immigrants, Swedes above all, western Washington with its extractive industries drew in the much poorer Norwegians and Finns, though core activists in the General Strike came from the British Isles.
The timber economy of Western Washington was dominated by the Weyerhaeuser Lumber Trust, which mounted a full-scale assault on the vast stands of ancient cedar, western hemlock, and Douglas fir forest. Timber from Washington State would buttress the copper mines of the West, underpin its railroad lines, and build its rapidly expanding cities, above all in California. The loggers toiled for twelve hours a day, seven days a week, and slept in company shacks. Conditions in the mills were neither easier nor safer: giant saws, deadly belts, horrific noise, dust, smoke and fire. When the heavy winter rains came, the lumberjacks wrapped up their bindlestiffs and fled to Skid Road. There they would remain, sinking into debt, until job sharks and lumbermen herded them back to the woods. They were despised by Seattle’s bourgeoisie as “timber beasts.”
The well-to-do lived away from Skid Road on the leafy boulevards of First and Capitol hills, along Magnolia Bluff and overlooking the lake in Madrona and Washington Park. They boasted a flourishing cultural life, including a fine university built in the French Renaissance style in Union Bay. The politicians and their newspapers might feud — what to do with the infamous Skid Road? — but Seattle was staunchly progressive: women’s suffrage, co-operatives, municipal ownership, growth. As it expanded from a low-lying base around Pioneer Square, the tops of surrounding hills were lopped off — “regraded” — for the benefit of developers. The neighboring town of Ballard was annexed in 1907 and the harbor municipalized four years later, a blow for the big railway and shipping interests struck on behalf of small manufacturers, minor shipping lines, and farmers anxious to force down rates. The new Port of Seattle developed some of the best waterfront facilities in the country, including the sort of moving gantry crane still used in container terminals today. The construction of a ship canal connecting Puget Sound with Lake Washington also commenced in these years.
In the 1890s, utopian land-settlement schemes in Seattle’s vicinity drew in idealists and free-thinkers. Harry Ault, Union Record editor, spent his teenage years in Equality Colony, Skagit County, in a family of disenchanted Populists. He recalled his mother feeding workers in Coxey’s Army of the unemployed as it passed through Cincinnati in 1894. In the 1910s, Seattle’s established working-class communities — Ballard, “South of Yesler,” and into Rainier Valley — were blighted by poor housing, threadbare amenities, and lack of access to the Sound, the green forests, or the great mountain ranges beyond — all that the city cherished, and still does. This rarely registered as a problem, however, among municipal reformers.
Manual labor was dangerous as well as poorly rewarded: wrote one labor activist at the time, “Every day or so some unlucky shipyard workers would be carried out in the dead wagon.” When the US Commission on Industrial Relations held hearings in the city in 1914, Wisconsin’s great labor specialist, John Commons, noted a “more bitter feeling between employers and employees than in any other city in the United States.” Seattle’s workers fought back against their oppressors as a class — and as a class, created a culture of their own: unions that were “clean,” not run by gangsters; a mass-circulation labor-owned newspaper, the Union Record — it became a daily in 1918, the only one of its kind; its circulation topped one hundred thousand in the aftermath of the strike. Socialist schools ran lectures indoors and out; IWW singing groups; community dances, and picnics. Milwaukee may have had its socialist congressman, Victor Berger; Los Angeles almost had a socialist mayor, Job Harriman; but Seattle’s socialists were working class and “Red.” Socialist Party leader Eugene Debs judged Washington State the “most advanced” and long suspected that it might be the first to achieve socialism. Electoral success proved elusive, but Washington claimed several thousand paid-up adherents, ranking second only to Oklahoma in the proportion of party members per head of population. The Left took control of the party in Seattle in 1912 after a protracted factional struggle. Proponents of industrial unionism, they were thorns in the side of national party officials who supported Samuel Gompers, conservative president of the craft-based American Federation of Labor. Seattle workers overwhelmingly supported the principle of industrial unions — and by implication, workers’ control. “I believe that 95 per cent of us agree that the workers should control industry,” wrote Ault. Still, most unions retained their affiliation to the AFL. Progressives were critical of craft divisions but thought the IWW impractical and wanted to remain in the “mainstream.” They looked to James Duncan, chair of the Seattle Central Labor Council, for leadership. A metal worker born in Fife, Scotland, clearly influenced by syndicalism, his compromise formula came to be known as “Duncanism.” The city’s labor movement was centralized around the SCLC, which coordinated rather than supplanted the craft unions to ensure that all contracts for crafts within a particular industry ran concurrently, allowing for bargaining as a unit. Though a consistent critic of the IWW which challenged the AFL from the left, Duncan nevertheless acknowledged it as “a pacesetter.” In this environment, social democracy and revolutionary unionism could intermingle. Seattle was an IWW no less than a Socialist Party stronghold, home to its western newspaper, the Industrial Worker, and scene of free-speech fights ending in mass arrests, beatings, and victories. “Two card” workers were commonplace: an AFL card for the job, an IWW card for the principle.
Class solidarity wasn’t all-embracing, however. As late as September 1917, the Daily Call reported that one of the issues in a meatpackers’ strike was the workers’ demand for a white cook. Alice Lord, talented organizer of the city’s women workers, above all its waitresses, was a committed exclusionist. The relatively few black workers in Seattle at this point, just 1 percent of the population, took what work they could, including as strikebreakers in the longshoremen’s strike of 1916. There were, however, signs of a shift in attitudes among the white majority. Seattle’s most popular street speaker, the socialist’s firebrand Kate Sadler, talked at black churches and was a scathing critic of exclusion and shop-floor segregation. The Union Record likewise insisted on the need “to break down racial barriers in the West.” Ault told a congressional hearing on Japanese immigration that he had “little patience with racial prejudice,” recalling his early childhood in segregated Kentucky.
Voyage of the Verona
The opening of the Panama Canal in August 1914 lifted West Coast trade, offsetting the recession which had hung over the States since the previous year. Seeking a share of the shipping companies’ profits, longshoremen struck on June 1, 1916 for a closed shop, higher wages, and a nine-hour day. Workers in San Francisco quickly settled, but Seattle and Tacoma stayed out. When Andrew Furuseth, head of the Sailors’ Union of the Pacific, defended the San Francisco leadership at an SCLC meeting in September, he was chased from the hall with shouts of “coward” and “quitter.” The strike shook Seattle. The Washington National Guard deployed along its harbor, which “resembled a battleground. Non-union men went uptown looking for fights. Union longshoremen beat up scabs on docks and ship. There were fist fights, knife fights, docks bombed, pier fires, shots fired and murders.” By the strike’s end on October 4 — Tacoma and a number of smaller locals held out longer — there were 850 scabs working the docks and the longshoremen had lost control of the waterfront. They returned to work under the open shop plus the “fink hall” which screened out the International Longshoremen’s Association and IWW.
The shingle weavers of Everett, the “City of Smokestacks” thirty miles to Seattle’s north, were engaged in their own desperate strike — victims of nothing short of a reign of terror. “At every stage the Everett police and the private lumber guards took the initiative in beating and shooting workers for speaking on their streets,” recalled Anna Louise Strong, who reported on the unrest for the New York Evening Post. On November 5, 1916, three hundred Wobblies embarked on the steamships Verona and Calista bound for the mill town. No one aboard expected a warm welcome from the authorities, but murder was not foreseen. On its arrival, the Verona was met with gunfire from lawmen and vigilantes. At least five workers were killed, all of them unarmed, and dozens injured. Two “citizen deputies” were also slain, although the fatal shots were fired from the shore, seventy-four people aboard the Verona were charged with murder. The Everett massacre was in some ways a Pacific Northwest Peterloo: an assault on free speech, fair play, and the very notion of “rights.” Disbelief, then anger, coursed through Seattle’s working-class districts. The IWW turned Everett into a cause célèbre, stumping the West on behalf of the accused. “These seventy-four men represent the migratory worker, the element that while necessary is ferociously exploited in this Western country,” declared IWW organizer Elizabeth Gurley Flynn at a dozen rallies. “They want the good things in life as much as any other member of the human race and they are organizing in the IWW to get them.” There was a sea change in popular opinion, a massive swing to the left. The SCLC persuaded Seattle lawyer George Vanderveer, “Attorney for the Damned,” to assist the Verona defendants. He secured their acquittal the following spring. The Daily Call reported that IWW membership had risen to twenty thousand and that the Wobblies now employed a dozen paid organizers — exaggerated figures, perhaps, but after the serious setback on the docks the IWW had undeniably gained fresh impetus.
The Wobblies took this forward momentum into the woods: a general strike involving some fifty thousand loggers and mill workers. “They breathe bad air in the camps. That ruins their lungs. They eat bad food. That ruins their stomachs. The foul conditions shorten their lives and make their short lives miserable,” lumber organizer James Thompson told the Industrial Commission during hearings in Seattle. The IWW had always idolized the itinerant workers of the West. They set out from Seattle to organize them and succeeded. Their demands were typically straightforward: an eight-hour day, no work on Sundays or public holidays, sanitary kitchens and satisfactory food, single spring beds with clean bedding, no workers under sixteen in the mills, no discrimination against IWW members. In July 2017, the IWW held a mass rally of 3,500 workers at Seattle’s Dreamland Rink. The meeting began with the singing of “Solidarity Forever.” Kate Sadler and IWW organizer J. T. “Red” Doran were the featured speakers.
The police, sheriffs, National Guard, and US Army responded to the strike with savage repression. The jails filled up; prisoners were beaten. Strike leader James Rowan and twenty IWW members were arrested in a single swoop in the city of Spokane. The federal government organized a rival organization, the Loyal Legion of Loggers and Lumbermen. As the strike spluttered, the Wobblies adjusted their tactics: a “strike on the job,” the loggers working their desired eight-hour shifts. The conclusion, in March 1918, was a sensation: the eight-hour day won and a long list of improvements in the camps. It was one of the IWW’s greatest accomplishments and a source of class pride well beyond the ranks of the IWW. Duncan drew the obvious moral: “the terribly effective force which takes the name of IWW … is largely made up of men who consider regular trade unionism ‘too slow.’” It was, he acknowledged, a “threat to the prestige of trade unionism on the Coast.”
Nevertheless, traditional unionism also thrived amid the industrial boom stoked by federal military procurement as Woodrow Wilson took the US into the First World War. “A red-letter year in the history of organized labour,” Duncan celebrated in July 1917. “A dozen new unions have been organized and all of the Seattle unions are flourishing.” He singled out the streetcar men whose membership had risen to 1,600; the telephone operators with nearly 1,100. Industrial action by the laundresses in particular had struck fear into Seattle’s respectable classes. Within a week, all the city’s major laundries had more or less closed down. Hotels and clubs began to run short of clean linen. The bourgeois Seattle Times fretted that the “family washtub would emerge from oblivion in thousands of Seattle homes.” The laundry workers took their case into the neighborhoods: a fair in Fremont, a parade in Rainier Valley. Stung by hostile public opinion, the employers rapidly capitulated. But if such triumphs deepened working-class consciousness, they brought down fierce repression, foretelling worse to come. William Preston, Jr, has revealed that “the lumber operators of the Northwest provided the initial impetus in the evolution of federal policy” — that is, the “Red Scare” and the Palmer raids. The workers’ movement in Seattle was strong, certainly, but not in Gramsci’s sense hegemonic. US entry into the European bloodbath in April 1917 turned dissent into treason. Gloves off, the federal government moved decisively against the IWW, indicting its top leadership. In Chicago, 101 members were tried and convicted of a range of alleged conspiracies. State vigilantism was visited upon Seattle, regarded as a center of both pro-German and pro-Bolshevik sentiment. The Bureau of Investigation in Washington, D.C. despised the city’s workers as “the scum of the earth” who recognized “no law and no authority save the policeman’s night stick or physical violence.” There were police raids, ransacked offices, mass arrests. Emil Herman, state secretary of the Socialist Party was charged with violations of the Espionage Act and imprisoned in the McNeil Island Federal Penitentiary. Hulet Wells, a former president of the SCLC, was sentenced to two years in federal prisons for passing out “No Conscription” handbills, along with Sam Sadler, one-time president of the longshoremen.
Feting the Shilka
In this extraordinarily tense atmosphere, the revolution came to Seattle on the Friday before Christmas, 1917. The Russian cargo vessel Shilka, red flags flying, steamed into Elliott Bay. Seattle’s socialists, its Wobblies, its dockers, metal workers, waitresses and shingle weavers, scrambled to the docks to greet the newcomers, as did naval officers and city police wary that the ship might contain Bolshevik gold, even perhaps munitions. In fact, the Shilka carried only beans and peas in its hold, and simply needed to refuel. But the arrival of a soviet of Russian sailors was momentous in itself. For the workers, its arrival greatly added to the festive mood. The sailors were fêted. There were testimonials, speeches and spontaneous singing — the “Marseillaise,” also the “Red Flag.” Hundreds of Seattleites jammed into the IWW Hall on Second Avenue where they greeted a young sailor, Danil Teraninoff, on stage with rapturous applause. “Never in Seattle has there been such a demonstration of revolutionary sentiment as at the moment the Russian fellow worker ascended the platform,” reported the socialist Daily Call. The visit of the Shilka sealed the extraordinary romance of Seattle’s working people with the October days, their passionate sympathy and solidarity with the revolution unparalleled in an American context. According to the late Philip Foner, “no labour body was a more consistent defender of the Russian revolution than the Seattle Central Labor Council.” Seattle delegates to AFL national conventions pressed for official recognition of the fledgling workers’ state, to no avail. The longshoremen intercepted railroad cars with loads labeled “sewing machines,” unearthing rifles and ammunition bound for Admiral Kolchak’s White armies on the Siberian front. The IWW resolved that they would “rather starve than receive wages for loading ships on a mission of murder.” The authorities, alarmed when not hysterical, “discovered,” among other things, Bolshevik conspiracies which trade unionists had every practical reason to deny. Until recently historians tended to accept these denials at face value, in so doing diminishing these remarkable events. On the contrary, the Russian Revolution was indeed a factor — a contradictory one, yes: inspiring the Left while terrifying the upper classes — in Seattle’s General Strike.
The political culture of Seattle in these years was shaped not only by its own tumultuous industrial-relations history but also by currents sweeping through working-class movements internationally. The Union Record published letters from Lenin including his “Letter to American Workers”; the Industrial Worker reported on a Labour socialist conference in Leeds where Ramsey MacDonald, flanked by Tom Mann, Sylvia Pankhurst, and Bertrand Russell, “hailed” the Russian Revolution. The new spirit of industrial radicalism spread far beyond its natural home in the IWW. Even where issues with management were “pure and simple,” bitter conflicts ensued. The AFL also felt the heat, its collaboration with employers and strict insistence on the sanctity of contracts, jurisdictional division by craft, and the authority of national officials rejected by growing numbers of workers.
The celebrations of 1917 were the prelude, then, to the great strikes of 1919. Seattle workers saw in the October Revolution their own image, the embodiment of what they were fighting for at home. “No single event,” wrote Duncan, “throughout the whole world today can, from the standpoint of workers everywhere, compare in importance with the successful piloting of the Russian Soviet Republic past the treacherous rocks of international capitalist greed and the determination of these plunderers to ruin what they cannot rule.” When two thousand longshoremen, overflowing their hall, celebrated the second anniversary of the Revolution on November 7, 1919, they rose in “tremendous cheering,” as the IWW’s J. T. Doran walked from the vestibule to the rostrum and began to speak. Doran, free on bail from the federal penitentiary in Atlanta, delivered, according to Magden, a rousing speech in which he described the workers’ revolution in Russia as “the most stupendous event since the fall of feudalism.”
Union City
By the end of the First World War, trade union membership in Seattle had quadrupled since 1915 to create, in effect, a closed-shop city. The General Strike would require no pickets, since there were no strikebreakers. Prejudice toward minorities eased, challenging management’s ever-ready divide-and-rule tactic. On the eve of the strike, Japanese unions appealed to the SCLC to join the strike committee and were accepted. “Even in the midst of strike excitement, let us stop for a moment to recognize the action of the Japanese barbers and restaurant workers who, through their own unions, voted to take part in the General Strike,” commented the Union Record. “The Japanese deserve the greater credit because they have been denied admission and affiliation with the rest of the labor movement and have joined the strike of their own initiative. We hope that this evidence of labor’s solidarity will have an influence on the relations between the two races in the future.” Black workers were accepted as full members of Seattle’s unions later the same year. The General Strike began with an appeal from the shipyard workers to the SCLC for support in a pay dispute following a period of wartime wage repression. There were thirty-five thousand shipyard workers in Seattle out of a total population of around three hundred thousand — fifteen thousand more in Tacoma. The industry fused together the two sectors of the local working class, the seasonal lumber and harvest workers and the city’s skilled trades, in a potent combination. Seattle had delivered more vessels to the Navy than any other port, even though its labor movement was strongly anti-war. Perhaps as many as one hundred thousand workers, including many unemployed, answered the General Strike Committee’s call. For the best part of a week, they fed the people, patrolled the streets, and celebrated workers’ power as a lived reality, until the combined weight of the forces ranged against them — the police and the special constables drafted in by Seattle’s belligerent mayor, Ole Hanson; the federal troops deployed by Secretary of War Newton Baker; the big newspapers; and the national leaders of the AFL and its affiliates — broke the striking unions’ resolve.
At the outset of the hostilities, Anna Louise Strong wrote that a Seattle walkout wouldn’t in itself greatly trouble the big commercial combines in the East. “But, the closing down of the capitalistically controlled industries of Seattle, while the workers organize to feed the people, to care for the babies and the sick, to preserve order — this will move them, for this looks too much like the taking over of power by the workers.” Stirred by the Everett case, Strong had taken a job as second-in-command at the Union Record. Probably an IWW member, she lived and worked in Socialist circles, also retaining acquaintances from her earlier life — including Russian émigrés, one a friend of Lenin’s. She organized much of the paper’s international coverage, notably a Russia department, and also wrote its editorials; as often as not she was the voice of the General Strike.
Against a remarkable backdrop of communist uprisings in Berlin, Vienna, and Budapest, red flags on the Clyde, and the hot summer in Turin, the Seattle strike fired the starting pistol for an extraordinary year of working-class rebellion in the States, the like of which has not been seen since: the Boston police strike; industry-wide action in steel, coal mining, and textiles. The subsequent era of working-class retreat began with the shattering of the IWW, the splintering and demise of the Socialist Party, and the employers’ counterrevolution — the American Plan. In Seattle itself, the Emergency Fleet Corporation cancelled orders for new vessels, forcing thousands of shipyard workers into redundancy, while the Waterfront Employers’ Association reintroduced the open shop. But labor radicalism didn’t die after 1919. The General Strike and IWW militancy lived on, if underground; also in the vivid recollections of old Wobblies and in the battles of young socialists in the 1930s. Along with an underlay of Scandinavian progressivism, this legacy laid the foundation for Washington’s Cooperative Commonwealth movement, which brought an alliance of CIO unions and progressive farmers to power in Olympia and elected the communist Hugh DeLacy to Congress. In governing circles, the strike wasn’t forgotten. It was in 1936 that FDR’s postmaster general, David Farley, would ironically raise a glass to “the forty-seven states and the Soviet of Washington,” a phrase later popularized in the writings of Mary McCarthy.”
As I wrote in my post of September 20 2023, Our Best, Last Hope For Democracy and the Survival of Humankind: Unions As A Model Of An Ideal Society and An Instrument Of Nonviolent Seizure Of Power; In what ways will such class struggles between capital and labor define our nation, democracy, and the fate of humankind?
In this moment we test and observe enormous forces of history in the crucible of America, this absurd experiment in which one human being is as good as any other, and of equal value as an inherent quality of our humanity.
What a revolutionary notion; and possibly the origin of all true revolution.
Among the vast systems of dehumanization we must wrestle with to achieve a free society of equals, privatization and theft of the commons has unleashed a death spiral of capitalism wherein all wealth accumulates at the top embodied in a few apex predators and oligarchs in an increasingly narrow hegemonic elite of wealth, power, and privilege, as those whose labor creates that wealth and power become nearer to true slaves under forces of falsification, commodification, and theft of the soul.
This is late stage capitalism, as it reaches the point of civilizational collapse, as we are witnessing now with the hollowing out of the middle class and the emergence of a mass precariat in the shadow of plutocratic extravagance and decadence.
So for the political and social threats we now face; and all of this dovetails horrifically with civilization as war on nature which of late has in fires and floods sent us signs of our impending doom and the existential threat of a dying earth and the extinction of our species.
Yet we have ready examples at hand of different paths we may take, we human beings, and of how we may choose to be human together.
Here I am thinking of the courageous and glorious history of organized labor and of the 1919 Seattle General Strike which shaped labor unions in America, which seeks to change the relationships between capitalist and labor classes.
We celebrate this day a festival in Red and Green; socialism as labor solidarity and class struggle, and ecology as stewardship of our world. What unites these two origins and purposes of May Day is the idea of interconnectedness, mutualism, and interdependence in the social and natural worlds, and of our duty of care for each other and our fragile ark of life on our journey together through the unimaginable vastness of the cosmos.
This day also finds our universities embattled by forces of repression of dissent, as a new generation finds its heart and its voice in solidarity with the people of Palestine against genocide, ethnic cleansing, and crimes against humanity paid for by our taxes and authorized by both Traitor Trump and Genocide Joe and the apparatus of state terror and tyranny they represent. We refuse to be made complicit by silence in the face of this historic abandonment of our universal human rights and the role of America as their guarantor throughout the world.
We have brought the war home. Now our universal human rights in the genocide of the Palestinians paid for by our taxes and our rights of dissent and co ownership of the state will be tested; has democracy become performative in America, or does it still stand and have meaning? This, friends, is the true reason the Netanyahu regime engineered October 7; to aide Trump in the subversion of democracy and to create a casus belli for the conquest of the Middle East and the Final Solution of the Palestinians.
The divestiture, peace, and Occupy movement and protests have gathered momentum as an unstoppable tide as did the Black Lives Matter wave of mass action, and to the tyrants of death and fascisms of blood, faith, and soil let us say with the Mockingbird; “If we burn, you burn with us.”
Mayday, Mayday, Mayday.
I think now of the iconic May Day speech of Jean Genet for the Black Panthers at a university under siege by authorities to whom the function of universities is as a success filter which enforces elite hegemonies of wealth, power, and privilege and authorizes hierarchies and identities of reified membership and exclusionary otherness in terms of race, class, and gender.
Sadly, in this nothing has changed, which can be read all too clearly in the police terror and repression of dissent at the peace protests and encampments for divestiture throughout our nation’s universities. The struggle between conservative and revolutionary forces in universities reflects that of all our institutions and systems of oppression; states and the wealthy who operate and fund them understand universities as a success filter and intend to enforce and control membership in elite hegemonies of wealth, power, and privilege as class war, white supremacist tyranny, and theocratic patriarchal sexual terror, while universities are at the same time a forge of questioning and organizing for a true free society of equals, for seizures of power as class struggle, for the constitution of a revolutionary intelligentsia able to lead an engaged citizen electorate, and for change and liberation struggle of all kinds.
For many years as a Forensics teacher and debate coach whose methods centered Socratic dialog, I taught my students that the uniqueness of our civilization founded in the deimos of the Forum of Athens and in the Trial of Socrates was that it is a self-questioning system which totally rejects authority as a source of truth. This I call the Primary Duties of a Citizen; Question Authority, Expose Authority, Mock Authority, and Challenge Authority. Long ago now, I would have said that this defines being an American, and no American would willfully collaborate in the deification of authority and the devaluation of truth and of questioning authority as a sacred calling in pursuit of truth.
Education comes from the Greek educatus; to bring forth, not to stuff facts in; we must choose between training and education. The great question for us now regarding education at all levels is whether it serves tyranny and obedience to authority or democracy and the questioning of ourselves and of the world.
As written by Jacqueline Frost in Social Text, in an article entitled Jean Genet’s May Day Speech, 1970: “Your Real Life Depends on the Black Panther Party”; “In Genet’s final call to action, he asks white intellectuals to follow the directives of the BPP, even if this means “desert[ing] your universities” in order to support Bobby Seale. In a time of recession, which promises to be even more hostile to radical intellectuals, this call to desertion is one among many of the experiments in political inheritance that Genet’s example conjures. His desire to “destroy all the habitual reasons for living in order to discover others,” as recounted in his Thief’s Journal, reminds us to promote mischief in our intellectual comportments, the kind that existentially threatens “good student”-type university meritocrats.
More pressing however, is the experiment that Genet’s May Day Speech generates in the form of a question, a question which we cannot but feel as our own today: how will the whites, through the elaboration of solidarity and the relinquishment of power, destroy racism and salvage love?”
As I wrote in my post of May 1 2023, Socialism is Compassion in Action: On Compassion as a Defining Quality of Humankind; What is human? Of the transgression of our boundaries I have often written; it remains the primary act of individuation and the creation of identity as a seizure of power from Authority and from the Forbidden, but what quality defines us and sets humankind apart from beasts, from the artificial intelligences of the transhuman, and from the future possibilities of posthuman species?
To this role as a defining human quality I nominate love as altruism, compassion, and empathy; the ability to bond and connect with others as extensions of ourselves, to feel the pain of others and respond to our common needs and frailties, mercy and charity, and the whole spectrum of our emotional awareness which shapes, informs, and motivates us and which we recognize as forms of love.
As Wagner teaches us in Der Ring des Nibelungen, only those who renounce love may wield the Ring of Fear, Power, and Force. Those who would enslave us and claim power over others as tyrants in the theft of our souls must first dehumanize themselves. Against such tyranny we have inherent powers of hope as refusal to submit which confers autonomy and of love as solidarity of action.
Love defines what is human. That which is without love is wholly other.
To be human is to share a continuity of being which is transpersonal; love makes us greater than ourselves. Through love we transcend the limits of the flags of our skin, and the divisions and hierarchies of elite belonging and exclusionary otherness.
How then may we describe the action of this value in social relations and in political context? Love is mutable and a fulcrum of change, a process of transformation and redemption, embracing contradictions and filled with resonances and echoes, is at once immanent in nature and transcendent as the rapture and terror of our awareness of the Infinite. It is also the way in which we experience our connection and interdependence with others; Socialism is compassion in action, and it is this praxis and function of our humanity which I call to your attention as we celebrate May Day.
As Christina Feldman writes in Lions Roar; “In Buddhist iconography, compassion is embodied in the bodhisattva Kuan Yin, who is said to manifest wherever beings need help. Engendering such compassion is not only good for others, says Christina Feldman, it is also good for us. By putting others first, we loosen the bonds of our self-fixation, and in doing so, inch closer to our own liberation.
Compassion is no stranger to any of us: we know what it feels like to be deeply moved by the pain and suffering of others. All people receive their own measure of sorrow and struggle in this life. Bodies age, health becomes fragile, minds can be beset by confusion and obsession, hearts are broken. We see many people asked to bear the unbearable—starvation, tragedy, and hardship beyond our imagining. Our loved ones experience illness, pain, and heartache, and we long to ease their burden.
The human story is a story of love, redemption, kindness, and generosity. It is also a story of violence, division, neglect, and cruelty. Faced with all of this, we can soften, reach out, and do all we can to ease suffering. Or we can choose to live with fear and denial—doing all we can to guard our hearts from being touched, afraid of drowning in this ocean of sorrow.
Again and again we are asked to learn one of life’s clearest lessons: that to run from suffering—to harden our hearts, to turn away from pain—is to deny life and to live in fear. So, as difficult as it is to open our hearts toward suffering, doing so is the most direct path to transformation and liberation.
To discover an awakened heart within ourselves, it is crucial not to idealize or romanticize compassion. Our compassion simply grows out of our willingness to meet pain rather than to flee from it.”
How can we respond to the suffering that is woven into the very fabric of life? How can we discover a heart that is truly liberated from fear, anger, and alienation? Is there a way to discover a depth of wisdom and compassion that can genuinely make a difference in this confused and destructive world?
We may be tempted to see compassion as a feeling, an emotional response we occasionally experience when we are touched by an encounter with acute pain. In these moments of openness, the layers of our defenses crumble; intuitively we feel an immediacy of response and we glimpse the power of nonseparation. Milarepa, a great Tibetan sage, expressed this when he said, “Just as I instinctively reach out to touch and heal a wound in my leg as part of my own body, so too I reach out to touch and heal the pain in another as part of this body.” Too often these moments of profound compassion fade, and once more we find ourselves protecting, defending, and distancing ourselves from pain. Yet they are powerful glimpses that encourage us to question whether compassion can be something more than an accident we stumble across.
No matter how hard we try, we can’t make ourselves feel compassionate. But we can incline our hearts toward compassion. In one of the stories in the early Buddhist literature, the ascetic Sumedha reflects on the vast inner journey required to discover unshakeable wisdom and compassion. He describes compassion as a tapestry woven of many threads: generosity, virtue, renunciation, wisdom, energy, patience, truthfulness, determination, loving-kindness, and equanimity. When we embody all of these in our lives, we develop the kind of compassion that has the power to heal suffering.
A few years ago, an elderly monk arrived in India after fleeing from prison in Tibet. Meeting with the Dalai Lama, he recounted the years he had been imprisoned, the hardship and beatings he had endured, the hunger and loneliness he had lived with, and the torture he had faced.
At one point the Dalai Lama asked him, “Was there ever a time you felt your life was truly in danger?”
The old monk answered, “In truth, the only time I truly felt at risk was when I felt in danger of losing compassion for my jailers.”
Hearing stories like this, we are often left feeling skeptical and bewildered. We may be tempted to idealize both those who are compassionate and the quality of compassion itself. We imagine these people as saints, possessed of powers inaccessible to us. Yet stories of great suffering are often stories of ordinary people who have found greatness of heart. To discover an awakened heart within ourselves, it is crucial not to idealize or romanticize compassion. Our compassion simply grows out of our willingness to meet pain rather than to flee from it.
We may never find ourselves in situations of such peril that our lives are endangered; yet anguish and pain are undeniable aspects of our lives. None of us can build walls around our hearts that are invulnerable to being breached by life. Facing the sorrow we meet in this life, we have a choice: Our hearts can close, our minds recoil, our bodies contract, and we can experience the heart that lives in a state of painful refusal. We can also dive deeply within ourselves to nurture the courage, balance, patience, and wisdom that enable us to care.
If we do so, we will find that compassion is not a state. It is a way of engaging with the fragile and unpredictable world. Its domain is not only the world of those you love and care for, but equally the world of those who threaten us, disturb us, and cause us harm. It is the world of the countless beings we never meet who are facing an unendurable life. The ultimate journey of a human being is to discover how much our hearts can encompass. Our capacity to cause suffering as well as to heal suffering live side by side within us. If we choose to develop the capacity to heal, which is the challenge of every human life, we will find our hearts can encompass a great deal, and we can learn to heal—rather than increase—the schisms that divide us from one another.
In the first century in northern India, probably in what is now part of Afghanistan, the Lotus Sutra was composed. One of the most powerful texts in the Buddhist tradition, it is a celebration of the liberated heart expressing itself in a powerful and boundless compassion, pervading all corners of the universe, relieving suffering wherever it finds it.
When the Lotus Sutra was translated into Chinese, Kuan Yin, the “one who hears the cries of the world,” emerged as an embodiment of compassion that has occupied a central place in Buddhist teaching and practice ever since. Over the centuries Kuan Yin has been portrayed in a variety of forms. At times she is depicted as a feminine presence, face serene, arms outstretched, and eyes open. At times she holds a willow branch, symbolizing her resilience—able to bend in the face of the most fierce storms without being broken. At other times she is portrayed with a thousand arms and hands, each with an open eye in its center, depicting her constant awareness of anguish and her all-embracing responsiveness. Sometimes she takes the form of a warrior armed with a multitude of weapons, embodying the fierce aspect of compassion committed to uprooting the causes of suffering. A protector and guardian, she is fully engaged with life.
To cultivate the willingness to listen deeply to sorrow wherever we meet it is to take the first step on the journey of compassion. Our capacity to listen follows on the heels of this willingness. We may make heroic efforts in our lives to shield ourselves from the anguish that can surround us and live within us, but in truth a life of avoidance and defense is one of anxiety and painful separation.
True compassion is not forged at a distance from pain but in its fires. We do not always have a solution for suffering. We cannot always fix pain. However, we can find the commitment to stay connected and to listen deeply. Compassion does not always demand heroic acts or great words. In the times of darkest distress, what is most deeply needed is the fearless presence of a person who can be wholeheartedly receptive.
It can seem to us that being aware and opening our hearts to sorrow makes us suffer more. It is true that awareness brings with it an increased sensitivity to our inner and outer worlds. Awareness opens our hearts and minds to a world of pain and distress that previously only glanced off the surface of consciousness, like a stone skipping across water. But awareness also teaches us to read between the lines and to see beneath the world of appearances. We begin to sense the loneliness, need, and fear in others that was previously invisible. Beneath words of anger, blame, and agitation we hear the fragility of another person’s heart. Awareness deepens because we hear more acutely the cries of the world. Each of those cries has written within it the plea to be received.
Awareness is born of intimacy. We can only fear and hate what we do not understand and what we perceive from a distance. We can only find compassion and freedom in intimacy. We can be afraid of intimacy with pain because we are afraid of helplessness; we fear that we don’t have the inner balance to embrace suffering without being overwhelmed. Yet each time we find the willingness to meet affliction, we discover we are not powerless. Awareness rescues us from helplessness, teaching us to be helpful through our kindness, patience, resilience, and courage. Awareness is the forerunner of understanding, and understanding is the prerequisite to bringing suffering to an end.
Shantideva, a deeply compassionate master who taught in India in the eighth century, said, “Whatever you are doing, be aware of the state of your mind. Accomplish good; this is the path of compassion.” How would our life be if we carried this commitment into all of our encounters? What if we asked ourselves what it is we are dedicated to when we meet a homeless person on the street, a child in tears, a person we have long struggled with, or someone who disappoints us? We cannot always change the heart or the life of another person, but we can always take care of the state of our own mind. Can we let go of our resistance, judgments, and fear? Can we listen wholeheartedly to understand another person’s world? Can we find the courage to remain present when we want to flee? Can we equally find the compassion to forgive our wish to disconnect? Compassion is a journey. Every step, every moment of cultivation, is a gesture of deep wisdom.”
“As the etymology of the word indicates, “compassion” is the ability to “feel with,” and that involves a leap of empathy and a willingness to go beyond the borders of our own experience and judgments. What would it mean to place myself in the heart of that begging child? What would it be like to never know if I will eat today, depending entirely on the handouts of strangers? Journeying beyond our familiar borders, our hearts can tremble; then, we have the possibility of accomplishing good.
Milarepa once said, “Long accustomed to contemplating compassion, I have forgotten all difference between self and other.” Genuine compassion is without boundaries or hierarchies. The smallest sorrow is as worthy of compassion as the greatest anguish. The heartache we experience in the face of betrayal asks as much for compassion as a person caught in the midst of tragedy. Those we love and those we disdain ask for compassion; those who are blameless and those who cause suffering are all enfolded in the tapestry of compassion. An old Zen monk once proclaimed, “O, that my monk’s robes were wide enough to gather up all of the suffering in this floating world.” Compassion is the liberated heart’s response to pain wherever it is met.
When we see those we love in pain, our compassion is instinctive. Our heart can be broken. It can also be broken open. We are most sorely tested when we are faced with a loved one’s pain that we cannot fix. We reach out to shield those we love from harm, but life continues to teach us that our power has limits. Wisdom tells us that to insist that impermanence and frailty should not touch those we love is to fall into the near enemy of compassion, which is attachment to result and the insistence that life must be other than it actually is.
Compassion means offering a refuge to those who have no refuge. The refuge is born of our willingness to bear what at times feels unbearable—to see a loved one suffer. The letting go of our insistence that those we love should not suffer is not a relinquishment of love but a release of illusion—the illusion that love can protect anyone from life’s natural rhythms. In the face of a loved one’s pain, we are asked to understand what it means to be steadfast and patient in the midst of our own fear. In our most intimate relationships, love and fear grow simultaneously. A compassionate heart knows this to be true and does not demand that fear disappear. It knows that only in the midst of fear can we begin to discover the fearlessness of compassion.
Some people, carrying long histories of a lack of self-worth or denial, find it most difficult to extend compassion toward themselves. Aware of the vastness of suffering in the world, they may feel it is self-indulgent to care for their aching body, their broken heart, or their confused mind. Yet this too is suffering, and genuine compassion makes no distinction between self and other. If we do not know how to embrace our own frailties and imperfections, how do we imagine we could find room in our heart for anyone else?
The Buddha once said that you could search the whole world and not find anyone more deserving of your love and compassion than yourself. Instead, too many people find themselves directing levels of harshness, demand, and judgment inward that they would never dream of directing toward another person, knowing the harm that would be incurred. They are willing to do to themselves what they would not do to others.
Anger can be the beginning of abandonment or the beginning of commitment to helping others.
In the pursuit of an idealized compassion, many people can neglect themselves. Compassion “listens to the cries of the world,” and we are part of that world. The path of compassion does not ask us to abandon ourselves on the altar of an idealized state of perfection. A path of healing makes no distinctions: within the sorrow of our own frustrations, disappointments, fears, and bitterness, we learn the lessons of patience, acceptance, generosity, and ultimately, compassion.
The deepest compassion is nurtured in the midst of the deepest suffering. Faced with the struggle of those we love or those who are blameless in this world, compassion arises instinctively. Faced with people who inflict pain upon others, we must dive deep within ourselves to find the steadfastness and understanding that enables us to remain open. Connecting with those who perpetrate harm is hard practice, yet compassion is somewhat shallow if it turns away those who—lost in ignorance, rage, and fear—harm others. The mountain of suffering in the world can never be lessened by adding yet more bitterness, resentment, rage, and blame to it.
Thich Nhat Hanh, the beloved Vietnamese teacher, said, “Anger and hatred are the materials from which hell is made.” It is not that the compassionate heart will never feel anger. Faced with the terrible injustice, oppression, and violence in our world, our hearts tremble not only with compassion but also with anger. A person without anger may be a person who has not been deeply touched by harmful acts that scar the lives of too many people. Anger can be the beginning of abandonment or the beginning of commitment to helping others.
We can be startled into wakefulness by exposure to suffering, and this wakefulness can become part of the fabric of our own rage, or part of the fabric of wise and compassionate action. If we align ourselves with hatred, we equally align ourselves with the perpetrators of harm. We can also align ourselves with a commitment to bringing to an end the causes of suffering. It is easy to forget the portrayal of Kuan Yin as an armed warrior, profoundly dedicated to protecting all beings, fearless and resolved to bring suffering to an end.
Rarely are words and acts of healing and reconciliation born of an agitated heart. One of the great arts in the cultivation of compassion is to ask if we can embrace anger without blame. Blame agitates our hearts, keeps them contracted, and ultimately leads to despair. To surrender blame is to maintain the discriminating wisdom that knows clearly what suffering is and what causes it. To surrender blame is to surrender the separation that makes compassion impossible.
Compassion is not a magical device that can instantly dispel all suffering. The path of compassion is altruistic but not idealistic. Walking this path we are not asked to lay down our life, find a solution for all of the struggles in this world, or immediately rescue all beings. We are asked to explore how we may transform our own hearts and minds in the moment. Can we understand the transparency of division and separation? Can we liberate our hearts from ill will, fear, and cruelty? Can we find the steadfastness, patience, generosity, and commitment not to abandon anyone or anything in this world? Can we learn how to listen deeply and discover the heart that trembles in the face of suffering?
The path of compassion is cultivated one step and one moment at a time. Each of those steps lessens the mountain of sorrow in the world.”
May Day remains an international celebration of the promise and triumph of socialism, labor organization, and mass action as a praxis or value in action of love, and it is this political and social context of revolutionary struggle that we think of it today throughout the world as a holiday for all humankind.
As written by Jonah Walters in Jacobin;’’ “The first May Day was celebrated in 1886, with a general strike of three hundred thousand workers at thirteen thousand businesses across the United States. It was a tremendous show of force for the American labor movement, which was among the most militant in the world.
Many of the striking workers — who numbered forty thousand in Chicago alone — rallied under the banners of anarchist and socialist organizations. Trade unionists from a variety of ethnic backgrounds — many of them recent immigrants — marched shoulder-to-shoulder, making a unified demand for the eight-hour day.
The movement to limit the workday posed a significant threat to American industrialists, who were accustomed to demanding much longer hours from their workers.
In the late nineteenth century, successive waves of immigration brought millions of immigrants to the United States, many of whom sought work in factories. Because unemployment was so high, employers could easily replace any worker who demanded better conditions or sufficient wages — so long as that worker acted alone. As individuals, workers were in no position to oppose the dehumanizing work their bosses expected of them.
But when workers acted together, they could exercise tremendous power over their employers and over society as a whole. Working-class radicals understood the unique power of collective action, fighting to ensure that the aggression of employers was often met by a groundswell of workers’ resistance.
For the last decades of the nineteenth century, industrial titans like Andrew Carnegie and George Pullman could get no peace. Periodic explosions of working-class activity provided a check on their power and prestige. But industrialists and their allies in government often responded with brutal force, quelling waves of worker militancy that demanded a fundamentally different kind of American prosperity, one in which the poor and downtrodden were included.
The movement for the eight-hour day was one such mass struggle. On May 1, 1886, workers all over the country took to the streets to demand a better life and a more just economy. The demonstrations lasted for days.
But this surge of working-class resistance ended in tragedy. In Chicago’s Haymarket Square, a police massacre claimed the lives of several workers after someone — likely a provocateur working for one of the city’s industrial barons — tossed a homemade bomb into the crowd. The Chicago authorities took the bombing as an opportunity to arrest and execute four of the movement’s most prominent leaders — including the anarchist and trade unionist August Spies.
It was a severe setback to the workers’ movement. But the repression wasn’t enough to douse the struggle for good. As August Spies said during his trial:
[I]f you think that by hanging us you can stamp out the labor movement — the movement from which the downtrodden millions, the millions who toil and live in want and misery, the wage slaves, expect salvation — if this is your opinion, then hang us! Here you will tread upon a spark, but here, and there and behind you, and in front of you, and everywhere the flames will blaze up. It is a subterranean fire. You cannot put it out. The ground is on fire upon which you stand.
These words would prove prophetic. The next May Day, and every May Day since, workers across the world took to the streets to contest the terms of capitalist prosperity and gesture toward a fundamentally different world — a world in which production is motivated not by profit, but by human need.
Today, the power of the American labor movement is at a low. Many of its most important gains — including the right to the eight-hour day — have been dismantled by the anti-labor neoliberal consensus. But May Day still looms as a lasting legacy of the international movement for working-class liberation.
Obviously, a great deal has changed since those explosive decades at the end of the nineteenth century. The defeats suffered by the American workers’ movement may seem so profound that it can be tempting to regard the militancy that once rattled tycoons and presidents alike as nothing more than a piece of history.
But we don’t have to gaze so far into the past for inspiring examples of struggle. Far more recent May Days provide glimpses at the transformative potential of worker movements.
Just ten years ago, in 2006, immigrant workers across the country stood up to restrictive immigration laws and abusive labor practices, organizing a massive movement of undocumented laborers that culminated in the so-called Great American Boycott (El Gran Paro Estadounidense). On May Day of that year, immigrant organizations and some labor unions came together to organize a one-day withdrawal of immigrant labor — dubbed “A Day Without Immigrants” — to demonstrate the essential role of immigrant workers in American industry.
Protests began in March and continued for eight weeks. The numbers are staggering — 100,000 marchers in Chicago kicked off the wave of demonstrations, followed by half a million marchers in Los Angeles a few weeks later, and then a coordinated day of action on April 10, which saw demonstrations in 102 cities across the country, including a march of between 350,000 and 500,000 protesters in Dallas.
By May Day, the movement had gained momentum, winning popular support all over the United States and around the world. On May 1 of that year, more than a million took to the streets in Los Angeles, joined by 700,000 marchers in Chicago, 200,000 in New York, 70,000 in Milwaukee, and thousands more in cities across the country. In solidarity with Latin American immigrants in the United States, labor unions around the world celebrated “Nothing Gringo Day,” a one-day boycott of all American products.
Ever since, May Day has been recognized as a day of solidarity with undocumented immigrants — a fitting reminder of May Day’s origins in a movement that saw native-born and immigrant workers standing together to defend their common interests.
And this year, May Day presents us with more opportunities to mobilize support around an American labor movement showing signs of revitalization. This May Day, workers and activists across the country will stand in solidarity with the almost forty thousand striking Verizon workers, whose intransigent managers have thus far refused to bargain with the union in good faith.
This May Day we follow in the footsteps of generations of labor radicals. These radicals saw in capitalism the horrors of an unjust economy, but dared to dream of something different — a reimagined economy in which the fruits of prosperity could be shared equally, among all people, in a just and democratic society.
Despite the setbacks of the labor movement — at home and worldwide — that dream is still living. The struggle continues.
Happy May Day. Take to the streets.”
Yet there are other ideas of May Day, though interrelated; the Red and the Green, which reawakens our interdependence with nature and echoes the primordial celebration of May Day as a rite of renewal and of spring.
As written by Paul Street in 2020 in Counterpunch; “The history of all hitherto existing society is the history of class struggles. Freeman and slave, patrician and plebeian, lord and serf, guild-master and journeyman, in a word, oppressor and oppressed, stood in constant opposition to one another, carried on an uninterrupted, now hidden, now open fight, a fight that each time ended, either in a revolutionary reconstitution of society at large, or in the common ruin of the contending classes.
If the United States were not plagued by Orwellian, capital-induced amnesia regarding its own labor and sociopolitical history, much of the nation would have recoiled in historical disgust when Donald Trump designated May First – May Day – as the date for the premature “re-opening of America.”
It’s terrible that Trump wants to send tens of millions of Americans back to work before COVID-19 has ceased to pose grave health risks within and beyond workplaces and shopping centers.
Red May Day
Unbeknownst to Trump (in all likelihood), picking May First as his target added rich historical insult to injury. May Day has been the real international and American Labor and Working-Class holiday ever since the great U.S. Eight Hour strikes and marches of May 1st, 1886. Headquartered in industrial Chicago, the Eight Hour Movement was dedicated to the notion that working people need and deserve enough leisure beyond the supervision of their capitalist bosses to enjoy balanced and healthy lives and to participate meaningfully in the nation’s much ballyhooed “democracy.” The Eight Hour struggle’s leaders were radical militants who shared young Karl Marx and Frederick Engels’ idea that the capitalist profits system would either between overthrown and replaced with socialism by the proletariat or give rise to the “common ruin” of all.
The 1886 struggle ended with the Haymarket bomb, a giant wave of anti-union repression, and the brutal execution of four top radical leaders – the Haymarket Martyrs. May 1st been labor and the Left’s special historical day – celebrated by workers, radicals, and laborites the world over – ever since. It ought to be understood as deeply offensive for Trump to try to please his fellow right-wing capitalists and his deluded white-nationalist minions by trying to order millions of people back into hazardous working conditions on that day of the year.
Green May Day
But that’s not all. May Day has different and older, “green” roots in a time-honored pagan celebration of nature’s beauty and fertility amid spring’s full flowering in northern temperate zones. Dating to ancient Rome, this naturalist May Day is rooted in the seasonal rhythms of Mother Earth and agriculture. It reached across the Atlantic with the European conquest of what became known as the Americas. It is a day of leisure, to be spent outdoors, dancing and wearing flowers and soaking up the wind and sun. While rooted in custom, it was an official holiday in the British Tudor monarchy by at least the early 16th century. (The bourgeois-revolutionary Puritan Parliaments of 1649-1660 suspended the holiday, which was reinstated with the restoration of Charles II.)
Red and Green Common Ground
It is not hard to imagine the ancient green May Day merging with the modern red and proletarian May Day. “Eight Hours for What We Will,” union banners proclaimed in 1886. “For what we will” included time out of doors, in the free-flowing presence of nature, beyond the dirty, dangerous and depressing mills, mines and factories of Dickensian and Gilded Age capitalism—and away from the rigid “time-work discipline” (a term coined by British historian E.P. Thompson) imposed by despotic employers in what Marx called “the hidden abode of production.” It was an era when many, perhaps most, wage-earners retained connections to pre-industrial and more communalist and rural ways of life.
The workers’ movements of 19th century North America drew on the rolling, recurrently immigration-fed tension between the more naturally embedded and pre-industrial agricultural and artisanal ways of life on one hand and the authoritarian, speeded-up and nonstop “jungle” (detailed by American author Upton Sinclair) of industrial capitalist “modernity” on the other.
One delicious connection is that the eight-hour-day struggle in Chicago was particularly focused on the city’s McCormick Harvesting Machine Co. plant, manufacturer of a farm technology that famously displaced millions of laborers from agricultural work while helping industrialize the North American and global countryside.
Consistent with this melding of the red and green May Days, “modern” capitalism assaulted nature and created the wage-dependent proletariat at one and the same time through the long enclosure of “the commons.” The commons are the vast swaths of land, stream and forest in which pre-capitalist people found sustenance, insulating them from having to rent out their labor power to capitalists to garner the money required to purchase life’s necessities as commodities. As the brilliant left historian Peter Linebaugh notes in his book “Stop Thief!” “A single term, ‘the commons,’ expresses, first, that which the working class lost when subsistence resources were taken away, and, second, the idealized visions of liberté, egalité, fraternité,”
Rooted in a vast human history that long predated the ascendancy of “the commodity with its individualism and privatization,” the commons, Linebaugh writes, “is antithetical to capital.” The Protestant radical group known as Diggers and others with roots in the village commons who opposed capital’s rise to supremacy understood that “expropriation leads to exploitation, the Haves and the Have Nots.”
The Diggers, the first modern communists, were led by Gerrard Winstanley. They sought to pre-empt the coming new soulless wage, money and commodity slavery of the capitalist order (the bourgeois regime that Marx and Engels would justly accuse of “resolv[ing] personal worth into exchange value”) by claiming earth as “a common treasury for all.” Writing as England was becoming the first fully capitalist nation where most of the adult working-age population toiled for wages, Winstanley and his followers practiced what Linebaugh calls “commoning,” the merging of “labor” and “natural resources” in the spirit of “all for one and one for all.”
“The Most Dangerous Criminal in Human History”
Trump has insulted the green May Day as well the related red and proletarian one. His ruthless shredding of environmental regulations, recently escalated under the cover of COVID-19, is a frontal assault on livable ecology. The fossil-fuel-mad president of the United States seems hellbent on the doing everything he can to turn the planet to turn the planet into a giant Greenhouse Gas Chamber. In the name of economic recovery, Trump has granted American corporations an “open license to pollute.” As CBS reported three weeks ago, “The Trump administration introduced a sweeping relaxation of environmental laws and fines during the coronavirus pandemic. According to new guidelines from the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA), companies will largely be exempt from consequences for polluting the air or water during the outbreak.”
Last week, Trump’s EPA announced that it would weaken controls on the release of mercury and other toxic metals from oil and coal-powered plants.
It’s with Trump’s frankly ecocidal agenda in mind above all that our leading intellectual, Noam Chomsky has recently and properly identified Trump as “the most dangerous criminal in human history” – as a person wielding the most powerful office in world history to bring about the end of an decent and organized human existence. Adolph Hitler’s goal, Chomsky notes, “was to rid the German-run world of Jews, Roma, homosexuals and other ‘deviants,’ along with tens of millions of Slav ‘Untermenschen.’ But [unlike Trump,] Hitler was not dedicated with fervor to destroying the prospects of organized human life on Earth in the not-distant future [along with millions of other species.”
Mayday! Mayday!
The 20th Century brought a third meaning to the phrase “Mayday.” I am referring to what a pilot says into his radio as her plane plummets to earth: “Mayday! Mayday! Mayday!”
It is environmental “Mayday” indeed for humanity under the command of capital and far-right authoritarian lunatics like Trump and Jair Bolsonaro these days. “Spaceship Earth” is on exterminist path that is rapidly accelerating, as the latest findings on melting Arctic ice cover, rising global temperature, ocean acidification, species die-offs. and looming permafrost release regularly tell us. The capitalogenic COVID-19 crisis – a consequence of capital’s relentless quest for accumulation and profit – is just one among many eco-exterminist symptoms, many worse than even a virulent pandemic in the ever-shortening “long term.”
If the current environmental trajectory is not significantly reversed (and one silver lining in the COVID-19 nightmare is the drastic reduction of carbon emissions and other forms of capitalist pollution), the left’s long-standing struggle for equality and democracy is reduced to a debate over how to more equitably share a poisoned pie. Who wants to “turn the world upside down” (Winstanley’s phrase) only to find out that it is a steaming pile of overheated toxic and pathogen-ridden waste?
If the Earth celebrated by the Green May Day is irreversibly poisoned in a capital-imposed environmental and epidemiological Mayday!, then the radical social justice and democracy sought by friends of the Red May Day becomes sadly beside the point. The “common ruin of the contending classes” will have trumped the “revolutionary reconstitution of society-at-large,” rendering it obsolete.
Postscript
Here is one of the smartest calls to action I have ever read – from Cooperation Jackson last March 31st: “A Call to Action: Toward a May 1st General Strike to End the COVID 19 Crisis and Create a New World.” Please read it and then act on its call:
“We must stop the worst most deadly version of this pandemic from becoming a reality, and we have to ensure that we never return to the society that enabled this pandemic to emerge and have the impact it is having in the first place. We must do everything that we can to create a new, just, equitable and ecologically regenerative economy. “
“The question is how? To fight back we have to use the greatest power we have at our disposal – our collective labor. We can shut the system down to break the power of the state and capitalist class. We must send a clear message that things cannot and will not go back to normal. In order to do this, we need to call for collective work and shopping stoppages, leading to a general strike that is centered around clear, comprehensive demands. We must make demands that will transform our broken and inequitable society, and build a new society run by and for us – the working class, poor, oppressed majority. “
Rosa Luxemburg explains the history of May Day; “he happy idea of using a proletarian holiday celebration as a means to attain the eight-hour day was first born in Australia. The workers there decided in 1856 to organize a day of complete stoppage together with meetings and entertainment as a demonstration in favor of the eight-hour day.
The day of this celebration was to be April 21. At first, the Australian workers intended this only for the year 1856. But this first celebration had such a strong effect on the proletarian masses of Australia, enlivening them and leading to new agitation, that it was decided to repeat the celebration every year.
In fact, what could give the workers greater courage and faith in their own strength than a mass work stoppage which they had decided themselves? What could give more courage to the eternal slaves of the factories and the workshops than the mustering of their own troops? Thus, the idea of a proletarian celebration was quickly accepted and, from Australia, began to spread to other countries until finally it had conquered the whole proletarian world.
The first to follow the example of the Australian workers were the Americans. In 1886 they decided that May 1 should be the day of universal work stoppage. On this day two hundred thousand of them left their work and demanded the eight-hour day. Later, police and legal harassment prevented the workers for many years from repeating this [size of] demonstration. However in 1888 they renewed their decision and decided that the next celebration would be May 1, 1890.
In the meanwhile, the workers’ movement in Europe had grown strong and animated. The most powerful expression of this movement occurred at the International Workers’ Congress in 1889. At this congress, attended by four hundred delegates, it was decided that the eight-hour day must be the first demand. Whereupon the delegate of the French unions, the worker Lavigne from Bordeaux, moved that this demand be expressed in all countries through a universal work stoppage. The delegate of the American workers called attention to the decision of his comrades to strike on May 1, 1890, and the congress decided on this date for the universal proletarian celebration.
In this case, as thirty years before in Australia, the workers really thought only of a one-time demonstration. The congress decided that the workers of all lands would demonstrate together for the eight-hour day on May 1, 1890. No one spoke of a repetition of the holiday for the next years.
Naturally no one could predict the lightning-like way in which this idea would succeed and how quickly it would be adopted by the working classes. However, it was enough to celebrate the May Day simply one time in order that everyone understand and feel that May Day must be a yearly and continuing institution.
The first of May demanded the introduction of the eight-hour day. But even after this goal was reached, May Day was not given up. As long as the struggle of the workers against the bourgeoisie and the ruling class continues, as long as all demands are not met, May Day will be the yearly expression of these demands.
And, when better days dawn, when the working class of the world has won its deliverance then too humanity will probably celebrate May Day in honor of the bitter struggles and the many sufferings of the past.”
Here is the historic 1923 May Day speech of Eugene V. Debs, with a preface by Shawn Gude, published in Jacobin; “In 1923, Eugene V. Debs wrote a powerful May Day address for the black socialist magazine the Messenger that called for “the emancipation of all races from the oppressive and degrading yoke of wage slavery.” We republish it here in full, for the first time since it appeared 100 years ago.
In the spring of 1923, the black socialist magazine the Messenger published a May Day greeting from leading US socialist Eugene V. Debs.
The Harlem-based magazine had gotten its start in 1917. Edited by two young radicals, A. Philip Randolph and Chandler Owen, it vehemently opposed World War I (both editors were briefly taken into police custody for polemicizing against the war) and relentlessly criticized the “Old Crowd” of moderate black leaders. In place of elite-led, accommodationist “racial uplift,” the Messenger proposed an unrelenting fight against Jim Crow, lynch law, and economic exploitation using the battering ram of mass organization.
Debs was an early friend of the Messenger, and he shared the magazine’s pro-labor, “New Negro” politics. Especially toward the end of his life (he died in 1926), Debs supported a militant struggle for racial equality as part of a broader struggle for worker emancipation. That socialist vision was on full display in his May Day remarks.
Racial domination had kept Africans Americans “in abject servitude beneath the iron heel of his exploiting master,” Debs declared. “But our black brother is beginning to awaken from his lethargy in spite of all the deadening influences that surround him . . . and he is coming to realize that his place is in the Socialist movement along with . . . the worker of every other race, creed and color.”
Jacobin is pleased to reprint Debs’s May Day remarks in full for the first time since they appeared in 1923.—Shawn Gude
“It is more than gratifying to me in looking over the current Messenger to note the high excellence of its contents as a literary periodical and as a propaganda publication. It is edited with marked ability and it contains a variety of matter that would do credit to any magazine in the land.
All my life I have been especially interested in the problem of the Negro race, and I have always had full sympathy with every effort put forth to encourage our colored fellow-workers to join the Socialist movement and to make common cause with all other workers in the international struggle for the overthrow of capitalist despotism and the emancipation of all races from the oppressive and degrading yoke of wage slavery.
Due to the ignorance, prejudice, and unreasoning hatred of the white race in relation to the Negro, the latter has fared cruelly indeed and he has had but little encouragement from the “superior” race to improve his economic, intellectual and moral condition, but on the contrary, almost everything has been done to discourage every tendency on the part of the Negro toward self-improvement and to keep him in abject servitude beneath the iron heel of his exploiting master.
But our black brother is beginning to awaken from his lethargy in spite of all the deadening influences that surround him; he has had his experience in the war and especially since the war, and he is coming to realize that his place is in the Socialist movement along with the white worker and the worker of every other race, creed and color, and the Messenger is doing its full share to spread the light in dark places and to arouse the Negro masses to the necessity of taking their place and doing their part in the great struggle that is to emancipate the workers of all races and all nations from the insufferable curse of industrial slavery and social degradation.
May Day is now dawning and its spirit prompts me to hail the Messenger as a herald of light and freedom.
On May Day the workers of the world celebrate the beginning of their international solidarity and register the high resolve to clasp hands all around the globe and to move forward in one solid phalanx toward the sunrise and the better day.
On that day we drink deeply at the fountain of proletarian inspiration; we know no nationality to the exclusion of any other, nor any creed, or any color, but we do know that we are all workers, that we are conscious of our interests and our power as a class, and we propose to develop and make use of that power in breaking our fetters and in rising from servitude to the mastery of the world.”
Police Clear Columbia Protest — Just As They Did On Same Day 56 Years Ago
On April 30, 1968, police flooded onto Columbia University’s campus to end a demonstration students had staged — a scene that was eerily repeated 56 years later.
I am voting for Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, whether or not she runs for the Presidency. Give us a President with heart, moral vision, and the courage to speak truth to power.
To Biden whom I endorsed in the last election in a televised speech and the Democratic Party of which I am an elected precinct captain; If you sponsor genocide or other crimes against humanity, I cannot vote for you, and I will fight you.
At the request of Saundra Raynor, a History of Labor and Class Struggle in America
May 2 2024 The Crack in the Liberty Bell: Social Injustice, Unequal Power, the 1918 Flu Pandemic, and the Birth of Organized Labor in the 1919 Seattle General Strike
July 16 2024 Party of Treason Show Day One: Theft of Public Wealth Through Deregulation, Privatization, and Austerity As the Neoliberal Order Collapses in the Death Spiral of Capitalism
September 20 2023 Our Best, Last Hope For Democracy and the Survival of Humankind: Unions As A Model Of An Ideal Society and An Instrument Of Nonviolent Seizure Of Power
On this night of the great fire festival of Beltane and of the amok time of Witches Night, in which we traditionally burned effigies of ourselves into which are summoned all of the negative qualities and things we would destroy and recreate in ourselves, or leave behind as we enter the future and explore new possibilities of becoming human free of our former limits and of colonization by authority, and of transgression of the boundaries of the Forbidden, let us embrace our monstrosity and say of this secret twin who knows no limits and is free as Prospero says of Caliban in Act V, Scene 1 of William Shakespeare ’s The Tempest; “This thing of darkness I acknowledge mine.”
Waelburga, whose name in Old High German which emerged from the unifying conquest of Charlemagne means Refuge of the Dead, a form of the Three Fates and weaver whose symbols as a fertility goddess are a priapic dog named the Nahrungshund or Nourishment Hound, and a bundle of grain, is chased for nine nights before the first of May by the Wild Hunt and offered sanctuary in a bale of grain within a triangular symbol of the female organ of generation and of transformation, rebirth, seasonal change, and the peaceful transfer of political power called a valknut, which also declares a place of sanctuary beyond all law.
The Valknut is today a unifying symbol of Norse and Germannic paganism, and is also historically used to memorialize warriors slain in battle, as on the Tängelgårda Stone on the island of Gottland and is now associated with Odin, with seidr or poetic vision, and in its unicursal form as a continuous path of three interlocking triangles symbolizes Infinity as a kind of Moebius Loop. Snorri Sturluson describes it as the heart of the jötunn Hrungnir in the Skáldskaparmál as “three sharp-pointed corners just like the carved symbol hrungnishjarta.” This makes it a symbol both of Odin as a death and battle god and of Waelburga as the Great Mother goddess in her aspect as death and winter; a unitary symbol of the chthonic forces of both masculinity and femininity as coequals and King and Queen of the Wild Hunt.
May Day is a time of maypoles, courtship, and celebrations of the arrival of Spring and of fertility as a festival of light; but tonight is a festival of darkness, wildness, and of the flight of the forces of winter before the coming of spring, an order which will once again be reversed in half a year as the forces of darkness and light share rulership of our world.
Walpurgisnacht is a mirror image of Halloween, in which we may enter the spirit world through the Labyrinth of the Gates of Dreams rather than one wherein spirits may enter our world as intrusive forces, which together divide the year at six months to a day. Dance and music, feasts, derangement of the senses and forbidden sexuality, and the use of psychedelics in ecstatic vision in the flying ritual, but most especially the enactment of unauthorized identities and transgressive personae through masquerade, are all part of the carnival aspects of these rites of spring. As with Tibetan mask dances, sometimes we must let our demons out to play. The purpose is to break the bonds of the old order, and achieve a new vision of ourselves.
As written by Octave Mirbeau; “Monsters, monsters! But there are no monsters! What you call monsters are superior forms, or forms beyond your understanding. Aren’t the gods monsters? Isn’t a man of genius a monster, like a tiger or a spider, like all individuals who live beyond social lies, in the dazzling and divine immortality of things? Why, I too then-am a monster!”
I question and challenge the idea of normality, the authorization of identities, and the tyranny of other people’s ideas of virtue.
When you begin to question the boundary and interface between normality as authorized identity and transgression as seizure of power, between subjugation and liberty, the grotesque and the beautiful, idealizations of masculinity and femininity, of madness and vision, and to challenge the tyranny of other people’s ideas of virtue, you enter my world, the place of unknowns and the limitless possibilities of becoming human, marked Here Be Dragons on our maps of human being, meaning, and value.
Welcome to freedom and its wonders and terrors; to reimagination, transformation, and discovery. May the new truths you forge bring you joy.
Trollhunters by Guillermo del Toro, Official Trailer Netflix
And no one ever told the story of the descent into the underworld on which Trollhunters is based like Edvard Grieg
Edvard Grieg: In the Hall of the Mountain King from Peer Gynt
Iceland Symphony Orchestra
Edvard Grieg: Peer Gynt Suite No.1 & No.2 - Bjarte Engeset (op. 46, op. 55, op. 23) Kristiansand Philharmonic Orchestra
Goethe’s Faust illustration of Walpurgisnacht
Much as I adore the passage on Walpurgisnacht by Goethe in Faust, no one has ever described it better than Robert Burns. An unforgettable poem for me, as I discovered it when my mother had a friend come to her English class to declaim it in his fabulous kilt, prefacing the poem with his story of how he was abducted while volunteer teaching Palestinian children; they put a bag over his head, and that was the last time he saw the light of day for seven years. The whole time he had only the works he had memorized to keep him sane, including the whole of Robert Burns.
The slime trail of Traitor Trump across the ruins of America now extends one hundred days; one hundred days of subversion of democracy and attacks on our rights as citizens and as human beings, one hundred days of treason and betrayal of the dream of America as a free society of equals and of the American Way of liberty, equality, truth, and justice, one hundred days of violations of our normalities, values, and ideals as written in the Constitution and the Bill of Rights, one hundred days of destruction, but not one day of despair.
When there is nothing left to lose, there is also nothing left to control us; in the Calculus of Fear that is politics force becomes irrelevant and power belongs to those who seize it through disobedience to and disbelief in Authority. The great secret of power is that it is hollow and brittle when not sustained by legitimacy and the faith of its citizens, and crumbles when met with refusal to obey and to believe.
The state cannot take our power; and if we refuse to give it to them will become nothing.
Now is the moment to take our power back, and restore our sovereignty and our universal human rights, while some systems of our society and institutions of our government remain unbroken, while some new sources yet dare to print the truth, some judges to act in accord with the will of the people as law and not the whim of the regime, some of our military and enforcers of public security uphold their sworn oaths to our Constitution and not oaths of fealty to a feudal lord, and some of us act according to our love, our duty of care for others, and as guarantors of each other’s rights and not in accord with our fear as weaponized in service to power by those who would enslave us.
We here in America must now Hold to the Last. As the line of Chamberlain goes in the film Gettysburg; “Hold to the last. To the last what? Exercise in rhetoric. Last shell? Last man? Last foot of ground? Last Reb?”
Far too often than I should have, I have chosen to claw my way out of the ruins of myself and my civilization to make yet another Last Stand, beyond hope of victory or even survival. Since its 2009 debut I have used the David Bowie song in the Inglorious Basterds scene Shoshanna Prepares For German Night to signal when I am about to do things from which there is no return I can foresee; I have done so as I began expeditions to Panjshir in Afghanistan, Mariupol in Ukraine, Palestine, and many other places, all of them distant shores in foreign lands where I tried to turn back the tides of history, but never before here in America. America is now a distant shore, where democracy and the idea that each of us has precisely the same value because we are human makes a Last Stand, and I with her.
If I am remembered and my life given meaning by the actions of others in liberation struggle, let it be by refusal to submit and solidarity of action, for these confer freedom, mutuality, and seizure of power. As the Oath of the Resistance given to me by Jean Genet in Beirut 1982 goes, “We swear our loyalty to each other, to resist and cease not, and abandon not our fellows.”
And one thing more; no matter how hard this gets, how painful, there is one thing that can win unwinnable fights; get back on your feet and fight again, and never stay down, regardless of the costs. Even when as Nietzsche warned the Abyss begins to look back at you and you become the monsters you hunt, because the one important difference is why we do so; not for ourselves but to set others free.
Let us make mischief for tyrants and bring confusion to the enemy, friends.
And to Trump I say, May he and all who voted for him die penniless, unloved, and in agony. May the ruin of our nation and our humanity be matched by the ruin of their lives, fortunes, and legacies. May they and all they love become nothing.
As I wrote in my post of April 5 2025, National Day of Protest and Mass Action Against the Trump Regime; A list of everything about Trump and his aberrant regime which is subhuman, degenerate, villainous, ridiculous and horrific would be an endless litany of woes and lamentations, a song of how far a man can fall from the limits of the human into bottomless chasms of darkness.
Trump begins as a thing consumed utterly and hollowed out by vices of pride and vanity, depravities and perversions, psychotic rages driven by Nazi ideologies of hate, and shaped by amoral nihilism and strange obsessions.
All of this and so much more is enacted now by his regime of sycophantic minions and grifters, like a freak show ruled by an evil clown which can be represented by JD Vance the Bearded Lady and Fake Jethro who believes in nothing and wishes only to gather the scraps of wealth and power like a remora riding a shark and who is willing to lie and show his belly to his master like Trump’s dog as are so many of the Party of Treason’s members of Congress, Pete Hegseth the Tattooed Man and Christian Identity nationalist who wishes to perform the Inquisition in America and the Crusades beyond our shores, and Elon Musk the Troll King who intends to destroy the state entirely and replace it with a fascist corporate hegemony free from ideas of humanity and the good in a Dark Enlightenment regime of profits before people. Then there are the Deplorables who are their voters, who may be represented by the zombified Kennedy who claims his brain was eaten by a worm and whose lunatic delusions decide our national healthcare policy; a mad idiot whose Pythian pronouncements determine the life or death of his mad idiot followers.
Today we seize the streets of our nation in over 1300 mass protests and the direct actions which will unfold in their shadows, in protest against the Trump regime and its mission of the subversion of democracy and theft of our citizenship and our humanity.
To the Trump regime and the Party of Treason’s Theatre of Cruelty we say No!
Let us give to fascist tyranny the only reply it merits; Never Again!
Join us.
As written by Robert Reich in his newsletter; “Friends,
Some Democrats fear they’re playing into Trump’s hands by fighting his mass deportations rather than focusing on his failures on bread-and-butter issues like the cost of living.
But it’s not either-or. The theme that unites Trump’s inept handling of deportations, his trampling on human and civil rights, his rejection of the rule of law, his dictatorial centralization of power, and his utterly inept handling of the economy is the ineptness itself.
In his first term, not only did his advisers and Cabinet officials put guardrails around his crazier tendencies, but they also provided his first administration a degree of stability and focus. Now, it’s mayhem.
A sampling from recent weeks:
1. The Secretary of Defense Pete Hegseth disaster. Hegseth didn’t just mistakenly share the military’s plans with the editor of The Atlantic; we now know he shared them with a second Signal group, including his wife, brother, and personal lawyer.
He’s a walking disaster. John Ullyot, who resigned last week as Pentagon spokesman, penned an op-ed in Politico that began: “It’s been a month of total chaos at the Pentagon.” Last Friday, Hegseth fired three of his senior staffers. His chief of staff is leaving. As Ullyot wrote, it’s “very likely” that “even bigger bombshell stories” will come soon. The Defense Department “is in disarray under Hegseth’s leadership.”
It’s not just the Defense Department. The entire federal government is in disarray.
2. The Harvard debacle. Trump is now claiming that the demand letter sent to Harvard University on April 11 was “unauthorized.” Hello? What does this even mean?
As Harvard pointed out, the letter “was signed by three federal officials, placed on official letterhead, was sent from the email inbox of a senior federal official and was sent on April 11 as promised. Recipients of such correspondence from the U.S. government—even when it contains sweeping demands that are astonishing in their overreach—do not question its authenticity or seriousness.”
Even though it was “unauthorized,” the Trump regime is standing by the letter, which has now prompted Harvard to sue.
3. The tariff travesty. No sooner had Trump imposed “retaliatory” tariffs on almost all of our trading partners — based on a formula that has made no sense to anyone — than the U.S. stock and bond markets began crashing.
To stop the selloff, Trump declared a 90-day pause on the retaliatory tariffs but raised his tariffs on China to 145 percent — causing markets to plummet once again.
To stem the impending economic crisis, he declared an exemption to the China tariffs for smartphones and computer equipment. By doing so, Trump essentially admitted what he had before denied: that importers and consumers bear the cost of tariffs.
Now, Trump is saying that even his China tariffs aren’t really real. Following warnings from Walmart, Target, and Home Depot that the tariffs would spike prices, Trump termed the tariffs he imposed on China “very high” and promised they “will come down substantially. But it won’t be zero. It used to be zero.” Markets soared on the news.
4. The attack on the Fed chair fiasco. When Trump renewed his attacks on Jerome H. Powell, the chair of the Federal Reserve — calling him “a major loser” and demanding that the Fed cut interest rates — Trump unnerved already-anxious investors who understand the importance of the Fed’s independence and feared that a politicized Fed wouldn’t be able to credibly fight inflation.
Then, in another about-face, Trump said Wednesday he had “no intention” of firing Powell, which also helped lift markets.
Bottom line: An economy needs predictability. Investors won’t invest, consumers won’t buy, and producers won’t produce if everything continues to change. But Trump doesn’t think ahead. He responds only to immediate threats and problems.
Who’s profiting on all this tumult? Anyone with inside knowledge of what Trump is about to do: most likely, Trump and his family.
5. The Kilmar Abrego Garcia calamity. After the Trump regime admitted an “administrative error” in sending Abrego Garcia to a brutal Salvadoran torture prison, in violation of a federal court order, Trump then virtually ignored a 9-0 Supreme Court order to facilitate his return.
To the contrary, with cameras rolling in the Oval Office, Trump embraced Nayib Bukele — who governs El Salvador in a permanent state of emergency and has himself imprisoned 83,000 people in brutal dungeons with no due process. Trump then speculated about using Bukele’s prisons for “homegrown” (i.e., American-born) criminals or dissidents.
Meanwhile, after the Trump regime deported another group of migrants to the Salvadoran prison under a rarely invoked 18th-century wartime law, the Supreme Court blocked it from deporting any more migrants.
6. ICE’s blunderbuss. Further illustrating the chaos of the Trump regime, ICE has been arresting American citizens. One American was detained by ICE in Arizona for 10 days until his relatives produced papers proving his citizenship, because ICE didn’t believe he was American. Meanwhile, ICE handcuffed and deported a group of German teenagers vacationing in Hawaii because they turned up without a hotel pre-booked, which ICE found “suspicious.”
Bottom line: Freedom depends on the rule of law. The rule of law depends on predictability. Just like Trump’s wildly inconsistent economic policies, his policies on immigrants are threatening everyone.
7. Musk’s DOGE disaster. Where to begin on his? Musk’s claims of government savings have been shown to be ludicrously exaggerated. Remember the claim that $50 million taxpayer dollars funded condoms in Gaza? This was supposed to be the first big “gotcha” from DOGE, but as we know now, it was a lie. The U.S. government buys condoms for about 5 cents apiece, which means $50 million would buy a billion condoms or roughly 467 for every resident of Gaza. Besides, according to a federal 2024 report, the U.S. Agency for International Development (USAID) didn’t provide or fund any condoms in the entire Middle East in the 2021, 2022, or 2023 fiscal years.
Then there have been the frantic callbacks of fired federal workers, such as up to 350 employees at the National Nuclear Security Administration who work on sensitive jobs such as reassembling warheads. Four days after DOGE fired them, the agency’s acting director rescinded the firings and asked them back. A similar callback has ensued at the Social Security Administration, after fired workers left the agency so denuded that telephone calls weren’t being answered and its website malfunctioned.
Bottom line: Trump and Musk are threatening the safety and security of Americans — for almost no real savings.
8. Measles mayhem. As measles breaks out across the country, sickening hundreds and killing at least two children so far, Trump’s secretary for health and human services, Robert F. Kennedy Jr., continues to claim that the measles vaccine “causes deaths every year … and all the illnesses that measles itself causes, encephalitis and blindness, et cetera.”
In fact, the measles vaccine is safe, and its risks are lower than the risks of complications from measles. Most people who get the measles vaccine have no serious problems from it, the CDC says. There have been no documented deaths from the vaccine in healthy, non-immunocompromised people, according to the Infectious Diseases Society of America.
Kennedy Jr. also says, “We’re always going to have measles, no matter what happens, as the [measles] vaccine wanes very quickly.” In fact, the measles vaccine is highly protective and lasts a lifetime for most people. Two doses of the vaccine are 97% effective against the virus, according to the CDC and medical experts worldwide. Before the vaccine was introduced in 1963, the U.S. saw some 3 million to 4 million cases per year. Now, it’s usually fewer than 200 in a normal year.
9. Student debt snafu. After a five-year pause on penalizing borrowers for not making student loan payments, the Trump regime is now requiring households to resume payments. This has caused the credit scores of millions of borrowers to plunge and a record number to risk defaulting on their loans.
Many of the households required to resume paying on their student loans are also struggling with credit card debt at near-record interest rates and high-rate mortgages they thought they would be able to refinance into a lower rate but haven’t. Instead of increasing Education Department staffing to handle a work surge and clarifying the often-shifting rules of its myriad repayment programs, the Trump regime has done the opposite and cut staff.
10. Who’s in charge? In the span of a single week, the IRS has had three different leaders. Three days after Gary Shapley was named acting commissioner, it was announced that Deputy Treasury Secretary Michael Faulkender would replace Shapley. That was the same day, not incidentally, that the IRS ended DOGE access to the agency.
What happened? Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent complained to Trump that Musk did an end run around him to install Shapley (who had been lauded by conservatives after publicly arguing that the Justice Department had slow-walked its investigation into Hunter Biden’s taxes).
Meanwhile, the Trump regime is cutting the IRS in half — starting with 6,700 layoffs and gutting the division that audits people with excessive wealth. These are acts of sabotage against the very agency meant to keep billionaires accountable.
At the same time, trade adviser Peter Navarro has entered into a public spat with Musk, accusing him of not being a “car manufacturer” but a “car assembler” because Tesla relies on parts from around the world. This prompted Musk to call Navarro a “moron” and “dumber than a sack of bricks” in a post on X, later posting that he wanted to “apologize to bricks” and referring to Navarro as “Peter Retarrdo.”
The State Department has been torn apart by Secretary of State Marco Rubio’s firing of Peter Marocco, the official who was dismantling USAID. Career officials charged that Marocco, a MAGA loyalist, was destroying the agency; Trump’s MAGA followers view Marocco’s firing as a sign that Rubio is part of the establishment they want to destroy.
Worse yet, Trump has fired more than a half-dozen national security officials on the advice of the far-right agitator Laura Loomer, who was granted access to the Oval Office and gave Trump a list of officials she deemed disloyal.
Bottom line: No one is in charge. Trump is holding court but has the attention span of a fruit fly. This is causing chaos across the federal government, as rival sycophants compete for his limited attention.
All this ineptitude in just the last few weeks reveals that the Trump regime is coming apart. Incompetence is everywhere. The regime can’t keep military secrets. It can’t maintain financial stability. It can’t protect children from measles. It cannot protect America.
While we need to continue to resist Trump’s authoritarianism, we also need to highlight his utter inability to govern America.
What do you think?”
As written by David Smith in The Guardian, in an article entitled Trump 100 days: delusions of monarchy coupled with fundamental ineptitude: Trump has wasted no time in trying to remake the US in his image – with results that are sweeping, vengeful and chaotic; “He has blinged it with gold cherubim, gold eagles, gold medallions, gold figurines and gilded rococo mirrors. He has crammed its walls with gold-framed paintings of great men from US history. In 100 days Donald Trump has turned the Oval Office into a gilded cage.
The portraits of Andrew Jackson, Ronald Reagan and other past presidents gaze down from a past that the 47th seems determined to erase. Trump is seeking to remake the US in his image at frightening speed. The shock and awe of his second term has challenged many Americans’ understanding of who they are.
In three months Trump has shoved the world’s oldest continuous democracy towards authoritarianism at a pace that tyrants overseas would envy. He has used executive power to take aim at Congress, the law, the media, culture and public health. Still aggrieved by his 2020 election defeat and 2024 criminal conviction, his regime of retribution has targeted perceived enemies and proved that no grudge is too small.
Historically such strongmen have offered the populace a grand bargain: if they will surrender some liberties, he will make the trains run on time. But Trump’s delusions of monarchy have been coupled with a fundamental ineptitude.
His trade war injected chaos into the economy, undermining a campaign promise to lower prices and raising the spectre of recession; his ally Elon Musk wreaked havoc on the federal government, threatening health and welfare benefits for millions; his foreign policy turned the world upside down, making friends of adversaries and turning allies into foes.
Having promised so much winning, Trump is losing. Just 39% of respondents approve of how he is handling his job as president, according to an opinion poll by ABC News, the Washington Post newspaper and Ipsos, while 55% disapprove. For the first time Trump is even under water on his signature issue of immigration.
“Donald Trump’s first 100 days as president have been 100 days from hell for the American people,” Chuck Schumer, the minority leader, wrote in a letter to Senate colleagues. “His first 100 days have been the worst for any president in modern history, and unsurprisingly, he has the lowest 100-day job approval any president has seen in 80 years.”
The scale of the disaster is hard to comprehend for anyone who expected a repeat of Trump’s first term. His first 100 days in 2017 were consequential enough: a travel ban on seven Muslim-majority countries, an order for construction of a wall along the US-Mexico border and the firing of his national security adviser, Michael Flynn, over undisclosed contacts with Russia. But while America’s guardrails bent, they did not break.
From the moment he was sworn in on 20 January 2025, with the tech oligarchs Musk, Jeff Bezos and Mark Zuckerberg looking on, it was clear that Trump’s second presidency would be of a different magnitude. Instead of the conservative stalwart Mike Pence as vice-president, there is the Maga isolationist JD Vance. Instead of the retired four-star general Jim Mattis as defence secretary, there is the former Fox News weekend host Pete Hegseth.
And instead of experienced hands ready to curb Trump’s impulses, there is a cabinet of sycophants eager to indulge them, including in ostentatious displays for the TV cameras. Trump, 78, told the Atlantic magazine: “The first time, I had two things to do – run the country and survive; I had all these crooked guys. And the second time, I run the country and the world.”
Leon Panetta, a former defence secretary and White House chief of staff, said: “In the first term there were some guardrails and individuals that were able to restrain him before he took action. In the second term he doesn’t have any guardrails and deliberately selected a cabinet in which loyalty was the primary quality that he was after.
“The problem is that he goes ahead and takes actions that can cause tremendous disruption. The only check that I can see is when something he does could very well lead to an economic disaster of one kind or another. It’s only when that seems clear that he basically pulls back.”
Trump and his allies had four years in political exile to plot and plan a disruptive agenda laid out in Project 2025, a set of proposals by the rightwing Heritage Foundation thinktank in Washington. Yet its execution has been undermined by the president’s mercurial nature, cabinet infighting and leaks, especially at the Pentagon, reportedly now in disarray.
Charlie Sykes, a conservative author and broadcaster, said: “I’m struck by this weird combination of a focused and very well-planned agenda on the one hand and reckless incompetence on the other. You have Russ Vought [director of the office of management and budget] and the Project 2025 folks who clearly had a blueprint for action ready to go and yet you also see this pattern of dysfunction running through agencies like the Department of Justice and Department of Defense.”
For Trump’s diehard supporters, his key strength is his success as a businessman and promise to run the economy accordingly. As president he has imposed tariffs on trading partners including Mexico, Canada and China, with Chinese goods facing a combined tax of 145%.
The impact has been profound, with consumer confidence plummeting, stock markets convulsing and investors losing confidence in the credibility of Trump’s policies. In the ABC News/Washington Post/Ipsos poll, 72% said they thought it was very or somewhat likely that his economic policies would cause a recession in the short term.
Trump, who promised be a dictator only on “day one”, has signed more than 135 executive orders, well ahead of any other president in their first 100 days, bypassing Congress. He tapped Musk to lead the “department of government efficiency”, or Doge, aimed at reducing government waste with a Silicon Valley-inspired “move fast and break things” mentality.
Doge has been slashing programmes, jobs and entire agencies, including the Department of Education, that by law receive funding under the purview of Congress. Musk and his team have combed through tax, social security and health records, putting private data at risk. While Musk initially aimed for $1tn in budget cuts, analysts predict that he will fall dramatically short.
Doge has caused turmoil in medical research by firing doctors and scientists working to cure diseases such as cancer and Alzheimer’s. It has frozen funding for military veterans’ facilities and fired critical workers at hospitals serving disabled veterans. Musk has also described health and social welfare programmes as “the big ones to eliminate” and social security as “the biggest Ponzi scheme of all time”.
Even long-term political observers are aghast at Trump’s acts of self-sabotage. Paul Begala, a former White House adviser and Democratic strategist, said: “I expected him to be stupid. I expected him to be chaotic. I expected his team to be a bunch of sycophants and nincompoops. I expected the tariffs and trade war.
“Here’s what I didn’t expect. For me, the defining word of these 100 days has been betrayal. A good politician takes office and tries to expand beyond his base; an average politician tries to reward his base; Trump is the first politician who’s screwing his base, betraying his base. I honestly don’t understand it.”
In keeping with his campaign promise, Trump has implemented some of the hardest-line immigration policies in the nation’s history, driving a sharp decline in illegal border crossings.
He invoked the Alien Enemies Act of 1798 to deport immigrants without due process, including sending alleged Venezuelan gang members to a mega-prison in El Salvador in defiance of a court order. The action was met with legal challenges and judicial rebuke. Trump also pledged to end birthright citizenship and proposed “gold cards” for millionaires to buy US citizenship.
Another defining theme of the first 100 days is retribution. On his first day in office, Trump pardoned virtually everyone who took part in the 6 January 2021 insurrection. He has actively targeted prosecutors who investigated him, former officials who criticised him and universities whose policies he disliked. He ordered the justice department to investigate Christopher Krebs, a cybersecurity director who refuted unfounded claims of election fraud in 2020.
Larry Sabato, director of the Center for Politics at the University of Virginia, said: “This will truly be known as the administration of revenge and retribution. No one’s ever done these things before. Even Richard Nixon, who kept an enemies list and was full of anger and resentment, couldn’t hold a candle to Trump.
“It’s frightening and has the effect of intimidating people. He loves to bully and he has done more than any other president, certainly in a short period of time. There’s just nothing like this in all of American history. I’ve had so many people my age say, can I survive this? Because it’s stressful.”
Trump’s executive orders have faced more than 150 lawsuits and judges have blocked the administration numerous times. The president called for the impeachment of a federal judge who ruled against him, prompting a rare rebuke from Chief Justice John Roberts. Last week agents arrested Hannah Dugan, a Milwaukee judge accused of helping a man evade immigration authorities at her courtroom.
Trump is also waging a culture war. Funding for arts and cultural institutions has been cut, and leaders ousted, with the president declaring them fronts for a “woke” agenda. The administration has gone after the media, fighting against news organisations in court and seeking to dismantle the Voice of America broadcaster. Access for some outlets has been restricted while “Maga media” have been platformed.
PEN America, which defends writers worldwide against autocratic regimes, said the opening weeks of the Trump White House were unlike anything seen since the red scare McCarthy era of the 1950s. It warned of a “five-alarm fire” for free speech, education, the right to protest and a war against ideas and language themselves.
The events – along with outlandish statements about annexing Greenland, retaking the Panama canal and making Canada the 51st state – have hurt America’s reputation around the globe.
Patrick Gaspard, a former official in the Barack Obama administration, said: “Donald Trump has been radically successful in demonstrating that in 100 days you can destroy a brand that’s been built up over nearly 250 years. If that’s a success then congratulations.”
He added: “We’re in DefCon 1 in a democracy where the president is radically consolidating power, politicising non-partisan agencies, attacking civil society and private firms, and literally disappearing people from our streets. Tragically, those with influence only seem to be moved by the volatility in the stock market because of tariffs, failing to see that the entire edifice that makes their success possible is being dismantled.”
Trump’s political honeymoon appears to be over. Even among Republicans, polling shows that there is ambivalence about his priorities, with only about half saying he has focused on the right things. Street protests are growing across the country, judges continue to hand him defeats and Harvard University stood its ground against him. As the Democratic party tries to regroup, Trump could find his second 100 days heavier going than his first.
In 2021 Sabato, the University of Virginia political scientist, told the Guardian that history would remember Trump as by far the worst president ever on the basis of his first term. “I was wrong,” he acknowledged last week. “This is the worst presidency in American history.
“The ignorance was actually our ally in the first Trump term. He didn’t know what he was doing and now, unfortunately, while he still doesn’t know what he’s doing, he knows more than he did. Trump believes he is infallible. He’s going to burn out with the public long before the end of this term.”
Shoshanna Prepares For German Night: America’s Last Stand
100 Days of Trump: The president has begun his second term at a whirlwind pace, slashing the government, upending international alliances, challenging the rule of law and ordering mass deportations
‘100-year timeframe’: how Project 2025 is guiding Trump’s attack on government: David A Graham’s latest book considers the vast far-right plan to change US politics – and why its architects are playing the long game
January 23 2025 We Have Our First Hero Of The Resistance To The Second Trump Regime, Now Called The Enshittification, Truth Teller Bishop Mariann Budde
January 30 2025 Anniversary of The Return of Our Clown of Terror, Traitor Trump, Most Successful Russian Agent to Ever Attack America, Figurehead of the Fourth Reich in the Global Subversion of Democracy, and Now Once Again Our Rapist In Chief, Who Began His 2024 Presidential Campaign on this the Anniversary of His Idol Hitler’s Seizure of Power as Chancellor of Germany
February 6 2025 We Rise and Resist: We Seize the Streets In Mass Actions and Protests Throughout America Against Trump’s Theatre of Cruelty and Closure of US Aid, Against Musk the Troll King’s Information Warfare, and Against Capture and Dismantling of the State By the Fourth Reich
February 7 2025 Troll King Elon Musk and the Great American Bank Robbery: the Theft of Our Private Records As Hostage Taking, Information Warfare, and Subversion of Democracy
February 8 2025 Trump Dreams of A New Crusader Kingdom In Gaza As A Co Conspirator In Netanyahu’s Zionist Ethnic Cleansing and Genocide of the Palestinians
February 17 2025 Among the Best and the Worst of Us: Our Presidents as Symbols and Figures of the American Soul, and Our Glorious Mass Actions and Protests In All Fifty Of Our State Capitals On This Day Against the Trump Regime’s Campaign To Destroy Our Democracy
February 23 2025 How It All Began; World War Three, the Capture of America and the Subversion of Democracy by Traitor Trump and the Fourth Reich, the Russian Invasion of Ukraine, and the Fall of Civilization
February 28 2025 On this Day of National General Boycott of Trump Co Conspirators In Fascist Tyranny and Terror and the Subversion of Democracy, Let Us Bring A Reckoning To Those Who Would Enslave Us In Honor Of Mangione the Avenger
March 4 2025 Anniversary of Our Supreme Court Putting Trump, An Insurrectionist, Russian Agent, and Nazi Revivalist Who Conspired In the Murders of Police Officers and Attempted Hanging and Guillotining of Members of Congress, On Our Election Ballots
March 19 2025 Tyrants Attack In Campaign Of Genocide: Netanyahu Bombs Civilian Aid Corridor In Gaza To Divide It Into Bantustans As Trump Bombs Yemen To Break Our Counter Blockade of the Israeli Blockade of Humanitarian Aid
April 10 2025 Attempts to Impose Order By Force and Control Create Their Own Resistance and Inevitably Fail Due to Internal Contradictions: Case of the Unpredictable Tariff Threats and the Collapse of the Stock Market and Global Economy
April 17 2025 Trump Regime Tests Its Power to Violate the Constitution and Abduct and Imprison Without Cause Or Trial Any Random Person and All Of Us: Case of Kilmar Ábrego García
Celebrate with me this anniversary of the joyous victory of Vietnam over America and the end of the Thousand Day War; for the day we abandoned Saigon we were liberated from our complicity in a great evil and the atrocity of an imperialist war which violated our own values and traditions of liberty and anticolonial revolutionary struggle as never before, though clearly not for the first nor the last time.
The glorious triumph of the people of Vietnam over horrific foreign oppression redeemed America from the dishonor of our enslavement to our betrayers, a malign and corrupt government of authoritarian force and control which sought to impose an exploitative regime and plunder by might of arms rather than to win accord by moral suasion. The famous photograph of the last helicopter fleeing our besieged embassy forever records the moment of liberation of both our peoples.
I was a Freshman in high school in 1975 when that photo of the Fall of Saigon engulfed America and the world like a tidal wave, changing everything, an event greeted with jubilation and a sense of being rescued from the hangman by teenage boys under threat of being drafted. My experience of the war had been as newsreels of remote horrors, from the vantage point of Telegraph Avenue and Haight Street and the seething cauldron of questioning and the total reimagination and transformation of human being, meaning, and value it had ignited in our society as the old order died and a new one was born.
From this event whose image became a character in the story of all humankind and in my own, I learned wonderful, terrible things; no matter how vast and all-seeing, authority becomes meaningless and delegitimized when the lies and illusions with which it manufactures consent and subjugates us are questioned, exposed, and disbelieved, and no matter how monstrous and enormous, power is irrelevant when met with disobedience and refusal to submit.
Tyranny need not always triumph over liberty.
How can we achieve this marvelous thing? Here we may look to the heroic and triumphant example of Vietnam as a model.
My own understanding and praxis of revolutionary struggle is shaped and informed by, though far from limited to, the Vietnamese strategy of which it is a rough translation, that of Dau Tranh, which means to struggle, and recasts Mao’s Long Game in the context of mass action. The goal of Dau Tranh, and what makes it unique, is to achieve a total war of civilizational transformation and systemic change by control of the enemy’s perceptions and ideas, wherein force is used only in the context of what Atherton called the Wilderness of Mirrors; for when the enemy realizes he cannot win against people who refuse to submit, that force is meaningless without legitimacy, that authority and the manufacture of consent to be governed is dispelled by disbelief and power made hollow by disobedience, systems and regimes of tyranny and unequal power shatter, collapse, and fade into nothingness.
Herein we ourselves are become the arbiters of our fate and bringers of change as Living Autonomous Zones, and the instruments of our own liberation and autonomy.
Three kinds of praxis or actions of values define Dau Tranh; action among the enemy on his own ground, action among the people on one’s own ground, and action among the enemy military which includes building peace movements and networks of alliance.
As written anonymously in a wargaming site;
“The Protracted War conflict model
Prosecution of the war followed the Maoist model, closely integrating political and military efforts into the concept of one struggle, or dau tranh. Dau Tranh was and remains the stated basis of PAVN operations, and was held to spring from the history of Vietnamese resistance and patriotism, the superiority of Marxism-Leninism and the Party, the overwhelming justice of Vietnam’s cause, and the support of the world’s socialist and progressive forces. War was to be waged on all fronts: diplomatic, ideological, organizational, economic and military.
Dau Tranh was divided into military and political spheres:
Political dau tranh: three elements
Dan Van- Action among your people: Total mobilization of propaganda, motivational & organizational measures to manipulate internal masses and fighting units. Example: Intensive indoctrination and total mobilization of all civilian and military personnel in North Vietnam.
Binh Van- Action among enemy military: Subversion, proselytizing, and propaganda to encourage desertion, defection and lowered morale among enemy troops. Example: contribution to large number of South Vietnamese Army deserters and draft evaders in early years.
Dich Van- Action among enemy’s people: Total propaganda effort to sow discontent, defeatism, dissent and disloyalty among enemy’s population. Involves creation and/or manipulation of front groups and sympathizers. Example: work among South Vietnamese and US media, activist and academic circles.
Military dau tranh: the three phases
The strategy of the communist forces generally followed the protracted Revolutionary Warfare model of Mao in China, as diagrammed above. These phases were not static, and elements from one appear in others. Guerrilla warfare for example co-existed alongside conventional operations, and propaganda and terrorism would always be deployed throughout the conflict.
Preparation, organization and propaganda phase.
Guerrilla warfare, terrorism phase.
General offensive – conventional war phase including big unit and mobile warfare.
As part of the final stage, emphasis was placed on the Khoi Nghia, or “General Uprising” of the masses, in conjunction with the liberation forces. This spontaneous uprising of the masses would sweep away the imperialists and their puppets who would already be sorely weakened by earlier guerrilla and mobile warfare. The Communist leadership thus had a clear vision, strategy and method to guide their operations.
Translation of Dau Tranh doctrine into military action
Militarily this strategy translated into a flexible mix of approaches on the ground:
Continued efforts to build the revolutionary VC infrastructure and weaken GVN forces via propaganda and organization.
Broad use of terrorism and low intensity guerrilla warfare.
Widening the field of conflict logistically by expanding bases and troop movement in Laos and Cambodia.
Small-unit mobile warfare using VC Main Forces and NVA regulars over the expanded space- especially during seasonal offensive thrusts.
Limited conventional operations where overwhelming numerical superiority could be concentrated to liquidate the maximum number of enemy effectives or control strategic blocks of territory.
A General Uprising by the aggrieved masses as the enemy weakened.
Full scale offensives by conventional forces with secondary guerrilla support.
Overall, this approach was successful. It did not occur in a vacuum however. It both shaped and reacted to events in the arena of struggle.”
As written by James A. Warren in the introduction to his biography of Giap, the general who defeated both France and America; “With the sage guidance of Ho Chí Minh and [political leader] Truong Chinh, Giáp developed a highly nuanced and sophisticated understanding of how to use socio-political activity—organization, mobilization, and thought control or “consciousness-raising”—to focus the energies of the entire population under Vietminh control on achieving the Revolution’s objectives. Taken together, these techniques of political dau tranh allowed Giáp to mobilize an astonishing amount of on-going human activity, choreographed in minute detail, toward (1) building an alternative society and government, marked by revolutionary fervor, high morale, and unity of purpose as defined by the senior leadership; and (2) the breakdown of the legitimacy of the colonial puppet government in the eyes of the entire country. Thus, political dau tranh was at once a constructive and a corrosive activity.”
“[General Võ Nguyên Giáp] brilliantly applied what historian Douglas Pike calls the “two pincers” of revolutionary power, political struggle and armed struggle, placing greater emphasis on one form over the other at various stages of the Revolution. Perhaps Giáp’s most important contributions to protracted warfare were his flexible integration of three types of forces (local militia in the villages, regional forces, and full-time main force units), and his creative use of various “fighting forms”—guerilla warfare, mobile independent operations by battalions, conventional set-piece battles, and political mobilization.”
[He presented] the Communist revolution as the only way to give the people power to shape their own history and destiny. Whether this was true or not in some objective sense…hardly mattered. What did matter was that the people and the soldiers loyal to the Revolution believed it was true.”
In the words of the magnificent Ho Chi Minh, who lived with grandeur and whose vision of our future possibilities of becoming human illuminated the soul of a nation and won her liberty; “The great victory of April 30 represents the triumph of the entire nation, of justice over brutality and of humanity over tyranny.”
So for my fascination with this glorious victory over imperialist forces of enormously more vast and terrible power and material superiority as a model of how we may seize power under such imposed conditions of struggle.
Far more revealing of the origins and processes of unequal power and the state as embodied violence are the myriad ways in which Vietnam and America are bound together by trauma and history through this war which was a journey through nightmares of ten thousand days, and became a Defining Moment of both our nations.
Whereas Vietnam experienced the War as a Theatre of Cruelty which unified a nation and a forge of national identity which consigned traditional society to the flames in liberation struggle, America’s lived experience was of the War as degradation, dehumanization, and amorality in the shattering of our lies and illusions as loss of national identity, like the Hobgoblin’s Broken Mirror, and the delegitimation of the state and the idea of America as a guarantor of democracy and our universal human rights through exposure of the horrors and atrocities of our colonial and imperial conquest and dominion of others in service to the wealth and power of hegemonic elites and those who would enslave us.
Often do I write of the legacies of history from which we must emerge in becoming human together; there are stories we must escape, and those we must keep, and if we are very lucky they are not always the same.
We celebrate Canada’s beautiful defiance of Trump’s terrorist threats of conquest and dominion in her election, and affirm our equal partnership and interdependence.
Ours is an alliance forged in the most terrible war the world has ever known, when our Office of Strategic Services which later became the CIA along with the FBI and British SOE was trained at Camp X in Ontario founded by Sir William Stephenson, a Canadian spymaster and ally of Churchill and FDR, and opened the day before the attack on Pearl Harbor; both the current FBI Academy at Quantico and the CIA school nearby are direct successors.
Another notable example of Canadian-American cooperation to defeat fascism is the First Special Service Force, which after the war was unified with the OSS Jedburg teams to become our Green Berets, the US Army Special Operations Force. The magnificent Lt Aldo Raine in the film Inglorious Basterds wears the crossed arrows patch of the FSSF Black Devils whose daring exploits inspired it.
Such alliances and models of Resistance against fascist tyranny and terror we now need again, to combat the treasonous and criminal Trump regime and its violations of our universal human rights and subversion of global democracy.
How if we should unite once again in solidarity of action against the Fourth Reich as we did the Third, as each other’s liberators and guarantors of our universal human rights and our parallel rights as citizens?
Let us become Unconquerable together, friends.
For we are many, we are watching, and we are the future.
As written in The Guardian’s editorial; “Canada’s astounding election comeback by the Liberals will hearten many outside its borders as well as within. The governing party’s Lazarus moment was sparked by a man who was not on the ballot – though he took the chance to reiterate that the country should become the 51st US state, implying that voters could then elect him.
By then it was already clear that Donald Trump’s threats had backfired. Monday’s result was a clear repudiation of his agenda. For two years, the Conservatives’ Pierre Poilievre looked like a dead cert as the next prime minister, assailing Justin Trudeau’s government on issues including the cost of living, housing and immigration. His party built a 25-point lead. But within four months, Mr Trudeau’s resignation, his warning that Mr Trump’s “51st state” remarks were no joke, and the imposition of swingeing US tariffs, transformed the contest. Mr Poilievre lost his seat. The Liberals are embarking on a fourth term, though this time perhaps as a minority, under Mr Trudeau’s replacement Mark Carney.
Mr Trump made Canada’s political and economic sovereignty the central issue. Mr Carney, a member of Mr Trump’s despised global liberal elite, pitched himself as the man for a crisis: an experienced technocrat from outside politics who guided Canada’s central bank through the great recession, and the UK’s through Brexit.
Both Mr Poilievre and Mr Trump said that the Conservative leader was not Maga material. But he certainly appeared Maga-adjacent, moving further right and building an energetic base by embracing culture wars and attacking “wokeism”, pledging “jail not bail” and promising to cut international aid and defund the national broadcaster.
His defeat was effected primarily by other parties’ supporters resolving to unite around the Liberals. The leftwing New Democrats lost around two-thirds of their seats, including that of their leader Jagmeet Singh, who has resigned – though they have retained enough to ensure a progressive majority in parliament. The Bloc Québécois saw a smaller fall, as Mr Trump’s aggression overshadowed separatist aspirations. But Conservative support actually rose. For the first time in almost a century, Canada’s two main parties each got over 40% of the vote.
Mr Carney has plenty to celebrate, but limited room for manoeuvre over difficult terrain: “President Trump is trying to break us so America can own us,” he warned in his victory speech. He knows that Mr Trump takes advantage of perceived weakness. But the US president also nurses grievances. Mr Carney has promised to work more closely with allies in Europe and Asia. His diplomatic experience and international contact book will help.
The external economic threat and internal cost of living crisis are inseparable. This campaign, thanks to Mr Trump, put the nation centre stage. But as prime minister, Mr Carney will also need to address society, and tackle the kind of underlying problems that have led to the triumph of Mr Trump and like-minded politicians elsewhere. He has promised to double housebuilding and create hundreds of thousands of skilled jobs, and wants to eliminate internal trade barriers. Opponents may well retort that Liberals have had three terms to realise their vision.
Other politicians should be cautious about drawing lessons from this very particular contest. Canada faces a unique threat from the US, though it has economic leverage as well as vulnerability. This is, nonetheless, a welcome rebuff to American bellicosity and rejection of rightwing populism.”
As written by Archie Bland and Leyland Cecco in The Guardian, in an article entitled Triumph for Carney: what happened in Canada’s election, and what will it mean? Leader of Liberals, who appear to have made a remarkable turnaround, has said old relationship with the US is over; “At the beginning of the year, Canada’s Conservatives had a 25-point lead over the Liberal government, and their leader, Pierre Poilievre, looked certain to be the country’s next prime minister. But as the votes cast in Monday’s election have been counted, the story of the campaign has been confirmed: victory for the Liberals and their new leader, Mark Carney, who have extended their decade of rule by as much as another five years.
With almost all polls counted, it appears likely that the Liberals will fall just short of a majority, and instead be the leading party in a minority government, as in the last two elections. Regardless, it represents a remarkable turnaround, and vindication for Carney’s efforts to present himself as the prime ministerial candidate who would most effectively stand up to Donald Trump. As for Poilievre: the CBC projects he has lost his seat.
What happened?
In one sense, the result isn’t surprising: even with well-documented antipathy to the Liberals after a decade in office, the task for a party that could so easily be portrayed as sympathetic to Donald Trump became insurmountable once the US president started threatening to annex Canada and ramping up tariffs.
By the same token, the lessons for other western democracies may be quite limited. But the result is still an index of Trump’s power as a recruiting sergeant for his opponents as well as his supporters – and, in Canada, a major blow to the prospects of rightwing populism, at least for now.
The last day of the election campaign was bleakly overshadowed by the deaths of 11 people after an attacker rammed a car into a Filipino street festival in Vancouver – an event whose sheer horror makes it hard to decipher its political valence. Until then, the month-long campaign was defined by Donald Trump.
Even on Monday, Trump told Canadians to “elect the man” who would make Canada the 51st state, which appeared to be a reference to himself. The election can broadly be described as pitting Liberal efforts to place that issue front and centre against Conservative attempts to play down their ties to Trump, neutralise the subject and pivot back to the cost-of-living concerns that had previously given them such a massive advantage.
Despite that drama, the extraordinary reversal in fortunes against the state of play when Justin Trudeau stood down in January was largely baked in by the time his successor, Mark Carney, called the election. And while there was a late tightening in the polls that ate into the Liberals’ lead, nothing happened during the campaign to change the fundamental calculus.
What were the actual results?
As of Tuesday morning the Liberals were leading or confirmed as victorious in 168 of 343 electoral districts, with the Conservatives on 144. This left the Liberals just short of the 172 threshold for an outright majority, meaning they would need the support of smaller parties to govern – but either way, their supporters were delighted.
“There was a bit of a sombre mood early on as Conservatives picked up some seats in Newfoundland,” said the Guardian’s Leyland Cecco, who was reporting from Ottawa.
“But as it became clear that Liberals were outperforming that level elsewhere, it started to feel buoyant. And when it was called, the room erupted in cheers. Now they’re in a weird ‘can we have it all’ feeling – but in the context of where they were a couple of months ago, this result is absolutely unbelievable.”
The former Liberal justice minister David Lametti summarised the mood: “We were dead and buried in December. Now we are going to form a government.”
What does this mean for Canada’s relationship with the US?
Mark Carney, whom British readers will remember from his stint running the Bank of England, is the model of a modern central banker: competent, conventional and colourless, more likely to be popular at Davos than in retail politics.
While the conventional wisdom for years has been that such figures are no longer viable political leaders, the specific circumstances in Canada this year have turned that analysis on its head. As he said himself in March: “I’m most useful in a crisis. I’m not that good in peacetime.”
Carney has promised to negotiate a new trade deal with the US, and has said he hopes to meet Trump in person soon – but that Canada has the leverage to wait until the time is right to do so. In the meantime, he wants to focus on lowering internal trade barriers and bolstering major investment projects, such as housing construction, to spur the economy.
He has also said that the old relationship with the US is over, and emphasised closer ties with the UK and Europe in his brief tenure as prime minister since he replaced Justin Trudeau. In his victory speech, Carney said: “This is Canada, and we decide what happens here.” He added: “We are over the shock of the American betrayal, but we must never forget the lessons.”
“Senior members of his team expect a call with Trump in the next few days,” Cecco said. “The US is obviously top of mind. We’re not talking about Europe becoming the dominant trading partner – but there will be an examination of whether the extent of the relationship with the US is still in Canada’s national interest.”
What does it mean for Pierre Poilievre and the Conservatives?
Before the tariff and annexation issues blew up, Poilievre, generally regarded as an effective and experienced politician, thought he had hit on a winning formula: stop short of Trump’s most radical positions on issues such as immigration and the role of the government, but mimic the Maga movement’s embrace of culture war issues and convince Canadians that someone aligned with Trump would be the best possible leader to deal with the White House.
It is now clear that this alignment was toxic. But whether the Conservatives are likely to tack back towards the centre is much less obvious, because the circumstances of this election were so remarkable – and it is anyone’s guess as to whether Trump will present such problematic baggage during the next election campaign.
“Poilievre leaned heavily on this more aggressive approach that energised the party base,” Cecco says. “In any other election, that might have been enough. But the collapse in the vote share for the smaller parties tilted things towards the Liberals.”
It’s too soon to say if Poilievre will be held personally responsible for the defeat. “Change did not get over the finish line tonight,” he said on Tuesday. “Change takes time. Most of all, it requires that we never give up.”
The CBC reported that he has told allies he wanted to stay on as party leader, pointing to the fact that the Conservatives had their highest vote share in many years. The most immediate and stunning challenge to his hopes: he lost his own seat in Ontario.
What about the smaller parties?
As the election turned into a binary choice about such a fundamental issue as which prime minister would be best placed to deal with the threat from Trump, the smaller parties appeared bound to suffer – and that was borne out in the results.
The New Democratic party, to the left of the Liberals, saw many of its supporters defect to Carney, and fell from 24 seats to fewer than 10; its leader, Jagmeet Singh, announced his resignation after being pushed into third place in his own seat. The separatist Bloc Québécois also saw its support collapse, falling from 32 seats to a projected 23. (This article from Montreal last week charts the damage done by Trump to the prospects of separatism in Quebec.)
The proportion of the vote share going to the two biggest parties was on track to be comfortably over 80%, the highest it’s been in almost 70 years. “The race was presidentialised,” Cecco said. “A lot of people who voted for the NDP in the past couldn’t see the point now. They have won majorities provincially, so the brand is not totally dead, but the federal wing has lost its way.”
Is this result a model for other progressive parties?
Up to a point. Some liberals will undoubtedly take heart from the idea that a moderate centre-left politician without a radical prescription for reconstructing how the state operates has prevailed against a Trump-adjacent opponent – and the election stands as evidence that Trump’s unpopularity can be turned to his opponents’ advantage around the world.
But the circumstances in Canada are so specific, and Canada’s ties to the US so unusually deep, that the parallels for other democracies are probably quite limited. And there is a danger that anyone who concludes that the way forward is to come across as a defender of the status quo is learning the wrong lesson. Studying Kamala Harris’s defeat in the US elections, after all, or looking at the state of French politics, would lead to very different conclusions.
But that is not to understate the significance of a seismic victory. “It’s an incumbent government surviving in what has recently felt like a sweep against them. And Donald Trump was on the ballot,” Cecco says. “This is the first major electoral repudiation of Trump outside of the United States. As one person put it to me: in Canada, we live on the edge of the volcano.”
As written by Timothy Garton Ash in The Guardian, in an article entitled Donald Trump, beware – this is what a global liberal fightback looks like: From the Canadian elections to universities and civil society, the campaign to turn the tide against anti-liberal nationalists is at last underway; “Liberals of all countries, unite! Just as anti-liberal powers outside the west are becoming stronger than ever, the assault on everything we stand for has been joined by the United States. Against this massed onslaught of anti-liberal nationalists we need a determined fightback of liberal internationalists. Canada’s election this week can contribute a strong mounted brigade.
A core insight of liberalism is that, if people are to live together well in conditions of freedom, power always needs to be dispersed, cross-examined and controlled. Faced with the raw, bullying assertion of might, whether from Washington, Moscow or Beijing, we now have to create countervailing concentrations of power. In the long history of liberalism, a free press, the law, labour unions, a business community kept separate from political power, NGOs, truth-seeking institutions such as universities, civil resistance, multilateral organisations and international alliances have all served – alongside multiparty politics and regular free and fair elections – to constrain the men who would be kings.
In rallying everyone who believes in equal individual liberty to this fight, we liberals have a problem of our own making. Policies associated in many people’s minds with liberalism over the last 40 years have themselves fed the reservoirs of popular discontent from which nationalist populists continue to draw support. Neoliberalism, hypercharged through a globalised financialised capitalism, has led to levels of inequality not seen for a hundred years. An identity politics intended to remedy the historic disadvantages of selected minorities has left many other members of our societies – especially white, male, working and middle class – feeling themselves culturally as well as economically neglected. Both these approaches reneged on liberalism’s central promise, lucidly summarised by the philosopher Ronald Dworkin as “equal respect and concern” for all.
Neoliberalism has also turned the world’s most powerful democracy into something very close to oligarchy. The separation of private wealth and public power – a precious and fragile innovation of modern liberal democracy – has been reversed. Insatiable plutocrats such as Elon Musk, Jeff Bezos and Mark Zuckerberg are now supporters of Donald Trump’s political power, while he promotes his own and his rich pals’ economic interests. With the help of the media and platforms the plutocrats control, Trump persuades many ordinary Americans that their suffering is entirely due to foreigners (immigrants, China), while in reality it is more likely to be the fault of people such as Musk, Bezos and Zuckerberg.
So we have to fight simultaneously on two fronts: with the enemies of liberalism and the problems created by liberalism itself. Unity will be strength. If we each try to negotiate separately with the bullies, be they in Washington, Moscow or Beijing, they will pick us off one by one.
These coalitions of counter-power will be composed of states, but also of civil society actors and active citizens. At least half the population of the United States is with us. Electoral authoritarian states such as Turkey and Hungary also have lots of would-be-free citizens. The world’s largest example of applied liberal internationalism, the 27-country European Union, will be crucial to the fightback. So will major individual democracies including Britain, Canada, Japan and Australia.
We need to do many things at once. Promoting free trade against Trumpian beggar-thy-neighbour protectionism is an obvious starting point. It’s also easier said than done, since mutually beneficial trading arrangements take time to craft. Yet there are some accessible immediate wins. A trade agreement between the EU and the Mercosur group of Latin American states only awaits ratification by all relevant parties. Britain and the EU should be more ambitious at their upcoming summit on 19 May. The EU doesn’t need anyone else’s involvement for it to create a single digital space and unified capital markets, nor to build up European defence industries, which would also be a neo-Keynesian economic stimulus.
The monopolistic platforms and mega-wealth of the American oligarchs are a danger to all other countries. If the EU were prepared to use its regulatory superpower, coordinated with the efforts of other liberal democracies, we could do more to curb them. But regulation and taxation alone are not enough.
Whether in Europe, Canada, Australia or Japan, our entire digital infrastructure is effectively American. Imagine one day your iPhone and iPad stopped working, along with your cloud provider, Google, Amazon, Facebook, Instagram, WhatsApp and Twitter (AKA X-itter). What would be left? TikTok! “And Bluesky”, you may add, referencing the liberal social platform of choice. But that too is American. This is not only about infrastructure. It’s about how we create the digital public sphere essential for the future of liberal democracy.
Civil society initiatives can also help. Why, for example, haven’t we already seen a major statement of solidarity with embattled US universities from universities across the liberal world?
So can consumer protests. The impact of a largely spontaneous boycott of Tesla cars is pushing Musk to return to his business activity, cutting the leisure time he can spend on vandalising his country’s administrative state. Canadians now have the BuyBeaver app on their phones, so they can avoid US-made goods. (I hope they boycott Russian ones too.)
It’s also a matter of fighting style. Anti-liberal nationalists use the bludgeon, we the rapier. When they go low, we go high. When they go ape, we stay cool. When they lie through their teeth, we stand by the facts.
In foreign policy, the most urgent challenge is to save Ukraine, which Trump is throwing under the bus. The fact that he is pressing the Ukrainians to abandon even their legal claim to Crimea being part of Ukrainian sovereign territory shows how supporting Ukraine is now essential to defending fundamental principles of liberal international order.
What emerges after this hurricane will not be the same as before. It will be transformed both by us learning from our own mistakes, so as to build back better, and by the revolutionary impact of Trump. A liberal democratic constellation that is not fundamentally secured by the US “liberal leviathan”, in the Princeton scholar John Ikenberry’s striking phrase, will be something very different from what we knew between 1945 and 2025.
Even the geography will change. Canada, for example, which once seemed – in the nicest possible way – somewhat peripheral to world affairs, comfortably tucked up there between a friendly America and a frozen Arctic, now suddenly looks like a frontline state. One of the world’s most liberal countries is, beside Ukraine, one of the most directly threatened by Trump’s anti-liberal assault. And the thawing Arctic is a major new theatre of international competition. Fortunately, it looks as if Canada is going to have a government that is not just Liberal in name but also combatively liberal in nature.
A quarter-century ago, when the United States was attacked by Islamist terrorists on 11 September 2001, the editor of Le Monde wrote a famous banner headline: “We are all Americans!” Today, friends of liberty the world over should say: “We are all Canadians!”
This Is How We Fight Fascism: the film Devil’s Brigade as a model of antifascist direct action
All Resistance Is War to the Knife: Inglorious Basterds
Note the Black Devils FSSF patch
The Supercommandos: First Special Service Force, 1942-1944 An Illustrated History, Robert Todd Ross
The Next Sure Thing, Dreams, Him Standing, Starlight, Indian Horse, Ragged Company, Medicine Walk, Dream Wheels, One Story One Song, For Joshua, One Native Life, Embers: One Ojibway’s Meditations, One Drum: Stories and Ceremonies for a Planet, Richard Wagamese
Monkey Beach, Son of a Trickster, Trickster Drift, Eden Robinson
The Deptford Trilogy: Fifth Business, The Manticore, World of Wonders, The Cornish Trilogy: The Rebel Angels, Whats Bred In The Bone, The Lyre of Orpheus, Robertson Davies
The Smaller Infinity, Patricia Monk
Not Wanted on the Voyage, Pilgrim, Timothy Findley
Selected Poems, Anne Hebert
Celia’s Song, Lee Maracle
Autobiography of Red, Eros the Bittersweet, The Beauty of the Husband: A Fictional Essay in 29 Tangos, Glass Irony and God, Antigonick, An Oresteia, Grief Lessons: Four Plays by Euripides, Iphigenia among the Taurians, Plainwater: Essays and Poetry, Men in the Off Hours, Decreation, Float, Elliott Hundley: The Bacchae (contributor), Anne Carson
Anne Carson: Ecstatic Lyre, Joshua Marie Wilkinson editor
Warlight, The Cat’s Table, Divisadero, Anil’s Ghost, The English Patient, In the Skin of a Lion, The Cinnamon Peeler: Selected Poems, Handwriting, Coming Through Slaughter, The Collected Works of Billy the Kid, Michael Ondaatje
The Edible Woman, Life Before Man, Interlunar, Cat’s Eye, The Handmaid’s Tale, Survival: A Thematic Guide to Canadian Literature, Margaret Atwood
Margaret Atwood’s Fairy-Tale Sexual Politics, Sharon Rose Wilson
Torch of Liberty 