Black Flag Flying
Lesson: the intersection of war,
transatlantic trade, horrendous working conditions, and piracy
Berkshire Hills
Lesson: the bourgeois nature of the
American Revolution, and the peasant rebellion against the same
landlords that immediately followed the revolution, which gave rise
to the Bill of Rights.
The Man Who Burned the White House Down
Lesson: the War of 1812 – a
British effort to retake the colonies, or an unprovoked US invasion
and attempted annexation of Canada that failed miserably?
Trade War
Lesson: the First Opium War – an
early US effort at projecting military might far beyond its borders,
in cooperation with former colonial master, Great Britain, France and
Russia.
Landlord
Lesson: the Rent Strike Wars in
upstate New York, coupled with the fear of 1848 coming to the New
World, ended with a breakup of the great estates of the landed gentry
in New York, and ultimately to the revolutionary (for white people)
Homestead Act of 1862.
St Patrick Battalion
Lesson: in the 1840's there was
massive emigration from Europe to the US, so there was a labor
surplus. What did the US leadership do with a labor surplus? Start
a war, of course.
Egyptian Rag
Lesson: the case of the importation
of disinterred Egyptian mummy wrappings for the use of making paper
in the paper mills of Maine throughout the last half of the 19th
century is an especially macabre illustration of the problematic,
amoral tendencies of the market.
John Brown
Lesson: the abolitionist movement
took many forms, involving pacifists, militants, and those who were
pacifists in public but sending guns to people like John Brown in
private. John Brown and his supporters are best known for the failed
uprising they tried to foment in the town of Harper's Ferry, in what
is now West Virginia. What they should perhaps be better remembered
for is their successful efforts to drive the forces of slavery out of
the freshly-stolen US state of Kansas.
Joe Hill
Lesson: The early 20th
century saw the rise of the biggest, most militant and by far the
most artistic labor union in US history, the Industrial Workers of
the World. At many levels of government, the powers-that-be feared
the rise of the IWW to such a degree that they formed a national
police force, the FBI, in order to systematically crush this
organization.
Neither King Nor Kaiser
Lesson: there had been widespread
popular opposition to previous imperial adventures, and the most
massive global military mobilization to date, the First World War,
saw an equally massive antiwar movement arise throughout the US and
the world. In Washington, DC the Congress passed the Espionage Act
in order to suppress the antiwar movement and imprison its
leadership.
Battle of Blair Mountain
Lesson: Despite the suppression of
the IWW, the US labor movement continued to fight mostly unsuccessful
battles throughout the 1920's. The most dramatic of these struggles
was probably the Coal Mine Wars of 1920-21 in West Virginia, which
culminated in the three-day pitched battle when 10,000 union miners
laid siege to the town of Mingo.
Union Makes Us Strong
Lesson: the labor movement of the
1930's was much more successful. With the powers-that-be fearing an
armed uprising at the beginning of the Great Depression, for the
first time there was significant support for the labor movement on
the part of the federal government, which saw the CIO-led movement as
a less violent alternative to revolution.
The Last Lincoln Veteran
Lesson: many people would say that
the first battle in the course of World War II happened well before
1939 (and certainly before 1941, when the US officially entered the
war), when in 1936 the fascist-led armies of Germany and Italy
invaded Spain, in order to support the mutinous Spanish military in
its struggle against Spanish democracy. Progressive people from
across the US and the world volunteered to fight alongside the
Spanish democrats, while the US supplied essential oil to keep the
fascists' tanks running. When the US survivors of the Spanish Civil
War returned home, they were given the official designation of
Premature Antifascists.
Sugihara
Lesson: boatloads of Jews escaping
Nazi persecution in Europe were turned away from the US. Sweden
didn't publicly offer asylum to all Jews until late in the war, in
1943. While half of Europe's Jews were killed, the other half found
various means of survival and escape, generally involving the active
and death-defying assistance of non-Jews. Two of those people who
risked their lives and livelihood to save the lives of thousands of
European Jews was the Japanese diplomat to Lithuania, Chiune Sugihara
and his wife, Yukiko. (Some of the Sugihara Survivors eventually
settled in Wisconsin and elsewhere in the US.)
Henry Ford Was A Fascist
Lesson: Henry Ford was an active
supporter of fascism and a virulent anti-Semite. His company, the
Ford Motor Company, actively supported the war effort on all sides of
the war, arranging their finances in such a way to ensure that the
company would make massive profits regardless of the outcome of the
conflict.
Korea
Lesson: the Korean War may be known
by some in the US as “the forgotten war,” but it can never be
forgotten for millions of Koreans. More bombs were dropped on Korea
by the US Air Force than all sides of World War II combined. Dams
were bombed, valleys flooded, millions of civilians killed in a
genocidal campaign against the Korean people. Half a million Chinese
soldiers were killed, along with 38,000 US troops, before the
ceasefire that divided the Korean peninsula into two countries, North
and South.
Vasili
Lesson: the Cold War became a hot
war on many occasions, such as when the US Navy attacked Russian
submarines in international waters near Cuba. US authorities knew
that they were provoking Russian nuclear retaliation. Kennedy was
prepared to see a hundred million Americans die as a result of his
brinksmanship. The only reason World War III failed to occur was
because of the actions of one Russian submarine commander named
Vasili Arkhipov.
Song for Hugh Thompson
Lesson: the next genocidal war the
US would start in Asia would be in Vietnam and ultimately also Laos
and Cambodia. As in Korea, more bombs would be dropped by the US Air
Force in these three countries than in all sides of World War II
combined. As in Korea, millions of civilians would be killed by the
end of the war. Unlike Korea, the war in Vietnam did not result in a
division of the country into two halves, but in a complete defeat for
the invading forces. Though to call the Vietnamese victorious would
be a stretch, since their country was a charred, poisoned ruins that
had suffered carpet-bombing, mass defoliation, and an unknown number
of widespread massacres, such as the one at My Lai which helicopter
pilot Hugh Thompson encountered.
Dead
Lesson: rhetoric from President
Nixon, Governor Reagan and others had been heating up for some time
about how terrible the widespread antiwar movement was. The rhetoric
was far from empty, when the National Guard was called in in Ohio,
Mississippi and elsewhere, leading to two unprovoked massacres of
protesters. In Ohio they were shot at a distance of 300 feet, so the
idea that they were defending themselves from stone-throwing students
is patently absurd.
Assata
Lesson: after 100 years of Jim Crow
rule after the pullout of the southern US by the Union Army following
the Civil War, the civil rights movement and then the black power
movement rose up against racism and discrimination across the
country. The response by the state was devastating, with militant
activists such as the Black Panther Party being dealt with with
particular brutality. When Assata Shakur was shot while she had her
hands raised above her head by the New Jersey Turnpike in 1973, the
police had “shoot on sight” orders for all members of the Black
Liberation Army.
When Johnny Came Marching Home
Lesson: the phenomenon of the
homeless veteran was not a new one, but with the ongoing decline of
the US economy coinciding with the end of the Vietnam War and
coinciding with an ever-weakening social safety net, the image of the
homeless veteran became ever more commonplace.
East Tennessee
Lesson: sabotage has always been a
tactic used by disgruntled workers, and it has long been a tactic
employed by members of communities upset by corporations coming in
and destroying their land, water, and way of life. Industrial
sabotage at two mines in Tennessee and Kentucky in 1968 caused over a
million dollars worth of damage to mining equipment. In the decades
since then, groups like the Earth Liberation Front have caused tens
of millions of dollars in damage to industrial equipment, high-end
real estate developments, ever-expanding ski resorts, and more.
Wal-Mart
Lesson: the de-industrialization of
the US that began in earnest in the 1970's also saw the destruction
of downtown areas of cities throughout the country because of the
influence of big developers on urban planners which led to the rapid
spread of suburban shopping malls and big box stores, most notably
the biggest of them all, Wal-Mart.
Used To Be A City
Lesson: the death of Main Street in
the US had profound sociological implications. No longer were most
things in walking distance. The US became a suburban, car-dominated,
increasingly atomized society.
Song for Big Mountain
Lesson: particularly since the
discovery of coal, oil and uranium on mostly barren land that had
been set aside by the US government as Indian Reservation land,
reservation land has been officially designated a National Sacrifice
Zone. Much of it has been exhaustively mined for resources,
poisoning the land and water, causing cancer rates in some areas many
times the national average. From the 1970's to the present, the
mostly elderly population that remains at Big Mountain, in the Black
Mesa area of the Navajo Nation, has been a symbol of native
resistance to the rule of the energy companies and their politicians.
I'm Taking Someone With Me When I Go
Lesson: the alienating
suburbanization of the US, coupled with decaying social systems and
the easy availability of all sorts of firearms led to a big increase
in the number of massacres being committed across the US,
particularly from the 1980's to the present.
Drink of the Death Squads
Lesson: the huge phenomenon of the
outsourcing of US industry has generally involved US corporations
opening operations in countries where labor and environmental laws or
enforcement of those laws are very lax. In many cases in means
moving to countries where union organizing is prevented through the
use of Death Squads, such as in Colombia. The process of
corporations going where the wages and environmental and other
regulations are the worst is known as the Race to the Bottom.
Ballad of Eola Park
Lesson: in response to rising
post-industrial poverty, homelessness and hunger in the US, and in
protest against the massive US military budget that is one way to
explain all that poverty, one of the networks that arose nationwide,
beginning in the San Francisco Bay Area, is Food Not Bombs. Very
much an ongoing thing, FNB activists are frequently arrested for the
crime of feeding people in public spaces. Generally, city fathers
would rather make sure the soup kitchens are out of sight and out of
mind, in church basements, rather than in public parks.
A Brief History of the Orange Line
Lesson: although many highways were
built throughout the US from the 1950's onward, there were many
highways that were not built, as a result of the efforts of the
Anti-Highway Movement. Jamaica Plain, Massachusetts was the location
of one such struggle. The land for the highway had already all been
bought, and construction was underway, but the popular struggle put a
stop to the construction and ultimately forced the authorities to put
in an extension of the subway line instead, with a long, thin park on
top of it, thus making JP the homey neighborhood it is today.
More Gardens Song
Lesson: in the face of increasing
government neglect of increasingly blighted urban neighborhoods from
New York to Los Angeles, one popular response, beginning around the
time of the Tompkins Square Park movement in New York City in the
1980's, has been guerrilla gardening.
Sometimes I Walk the Aisles
Lesson: ever-weakening government
oversight of workplaces in the US and the rise of anti-union “Right
to Work” legislation in many states has had a depressing effect on
wages and worker safety. Examples of the consequences of “Right to
Work” legislation include events such as the fire at the chicken
nugget factory in Hamlet, North Carolina in 1991 that led to the
deaths of 25 workers, mostly African-American women.
Cordova
Lesson: in the wake of the Exxon
Valdez oil spill in Alaska's Prince William Sound, the fisheries were
poisoned and largely destroyed. The salmon's lives begin in
freshwater, and their numbers began to recover not long after the
spill. The herring, however, have never recovered to this day. When
it became clear that the herring were not going to be coming back,
every seaworthy vessel in the fishing town of Cordova, Alaska
participated in a three-day/three-night blockade of Prince William
Sound, forcing oil tankers to circle on either side of the blockade,
waiting to be able to go one way or the other. They ended their
blockade when the US government agreed to finance the first major
scientific study on the toxicity of oil, which, centuries into the
age of fossil fuels, had never to that point been done.
Song for the SOA
Lesson: the imperial foreign
policies of the US have long involved training the soldiers of client
states in how to maintain the rule of the elite in their corner of
the world. One institution where such training has taken place for
many decades is the School of the Americas in Columbus, Georgia, on
the Fort Benning military base. When graduates of the SOA executed
six Jesuit priests and their maid in El Salvador, Jesuits and others
from across the US began organizing frequent protests insisting on
the closure of this school for the Death Squads.
Song for Basra
Lesson: according to the UN, the
punishing sanctions on Iraq throughout the 1990's – under both
Republican and Democratic administrations in the US – led to the
deaths of half a million children. Throughout this period, during
which there was officially no war going on between the US and Iraq,
the US bombed Iraq regularly.
The Dying Firefighter
Lesson: the ongoing US occupation
of Iraq coupled with US support for the ongoing Israeli occupation of
Palestine gave rise to an increase in anti-American sentiment
throughout the Muslim world. One of the offshoots of this increasing
resentment was the growth of groups like Al-Qaeda and Islamic State.
On September 11th, 2001, Al-Qaeda operatives attacked the
US and killed several thousand people, along with themselves.
Who Would Jesus Bomb?
Lesson: while secularism is
increasingly the norm in most of the western world, increasing
poverty in the US has seen a growing Christian fundamentalist
movement. Both George Bush and Tony Blair considered themselves
religious Christians waging what Bush referred to as a “crusade”
against terrorism.
Barbara Lee
Lesson: before the fires had gone
out at the World Trade Center, the Congress voted overwhelmingly to
give President Bush nearly unlimited war-making powers. The sole
voice of dissent in the Congress was California's Barbara Lee.
Miami
Lesson: the end of the 20th
century saw the rise throughout the US of an anti-capitalist movement
that was challenging the “free trade” deals such as NAFTA and the
WTO. Hitting the notice of the world stage with the WTO protests in
Seattle in 1999, the protests in Miami outside of the FTAA meetings
in 2003 were widely seen as the nail in the coffin of this
short-lived anti-capitalist movement, which suffered from wanton
police brutality as well as internal divisions exacerbated by the
terrorist attacks on 9/11.
Operation Iraqi Liberation
Lesson: although most of the
hijackers were Saudi, and although the Taleban government of
Afghanistan offered to turn Osama Bin Laden over to another Muslim
country, the US insisted on invading and taking over Afghanistan in
retaliation for 9/11, and then proceeded to reason that it was
necessary to invade and occupy Iraq because of some undefined or
inaccurate threat that Saddam Hussein and the Iraqi government
presented. The result of the invasion, officially named Operation
Iraqi Freedom, but inadvertently and abortively dubbed Operation
Iraqi Liberation (OIL), was that a little more than a decade later, a
terrorist group even scarier than Al-Qaeda controls much of both Iraq
as well as Syria.
After We Torture Our Prisoners
Lesson: very soon after the US/UK
invasion of Iraq, the news broke that US prisoners were being
systematically tortured in prisons in Iraq, Afghanistan and
elsewhere. This, among other things, made the efforts at winning the
hearts and minds of the occupied peoples of the Muslim world that
much harder, since it became increasingly difficult for the US to
present itself as a real alternative to regimes that they were
replacing, which also engaged in wanton torture.
Paul Wolfowitz
Lesson: in 2005 Paul Wolfowitz was
appointed head of the World Bank. Previous to his appointment to
this position, he had been one of the chief architects of the
invasion and occupation of Iraq, which involved the wholesale
privatization of the Iraqi economy. Some people think Paul
Wolfowitz's career trajectory is a poetic illustration of the way
economic and military power is coordinated by the US empire.
Song for Cindy Sheehan
Lesson: in August of 2005 Cindy
Sheehan led a people's occupation of the outskirts of President
Bush's ranch in Crawford, Texas. This encampment marked the end of
what had been a very active, nationwide antiwar movement that began,
in that incarnation, in September, 2001.
New Orleans
Lesson: the
growing frailty of US infrastructure combined with the increased
power of hurricanes as a result of climate change resulted in a
devastating storm that destroyed much of the city of New Orleans in
2005. People from all over the country went to New Orleans to try to
help, but federal government efforts to assist were characterized
mainly by racism and incompetence. The city has since been
ethnically cleansed.
Holy Land Five
Lesson: the ongoing “war on
terror” begun officially in September 2001 has led to many
prosecutions of people on the grounds of terrorism. Almost all of
them have been cases of entrapment by FBI agents who created the
plots in the first place, and then sought accomplices. In the case
of the Holy Land Foundation, the founders of the charity were
sentenced to between 15-65 years for the crime of distributing food
and medicine to needy people in places like the occupied West Bank
and Gaza, but doing so through the wrong channels.
Song for Oscar Grant
Lesson: in recent years the
phenomenon of police killing young black men has captured the
attention of the news media and much of society. One of the earlier
police killings that got a lot of attention because the victim was
lying on the ground with handcuffs on when he was shot, and because
many people filmed the incident on their cell phones, was that of
Oscar Grant in Oakland, California on the first day of January, 2009.
In the Name of God
Lesson: the legalization of
abortion in the US in 1973 saw the rise of a violent anti-abortion
“pro-Life” movement that regularly bombed women's clinics and
killed medical staff, including, in 2009, Dr George Tiller of Kansas.
I Know A Man
Lesson: in recent years in many different US states and in
countries around the world, decades of struggle by LGBTQ for marriage
equality has started to bear fruit.
If Only It Were True
Lesson: in 2008
Barack Obama was elected president, and he was reelected in 2012.
Republicans have generally tried to paint him as a liberal, pacifist,
environmentalist advocate for the welfare state. His record would
tend to indicate otherwise.
Song for Chelsea Manning
Lesson: the
Obama administration has prosecuted and imprisoned more
whistle-blowers than any other administration in US history. Many
think Chelsea Manning should be given awards for exposing terrible
war crimes committed by US forces, but instead she is serving a
35-year prison sentence.
Laissez Les Bon Temps Rouler
Lesson: after
one of the worst environmental disasters in world history took place
in the Gulf Coast in 2010, the temporary ban on more deep water oil
drilling was lifted, making the possibility of another similar
disaster ever more likely.
Occupy Wall Street
Lesson: inspired
by the Arab Spring and angered by the bank bailout, the subprime
mortgage crisis, etc., many thousands of people across the US took to
the streets and formed public encampments in the center of hundreds
of cities in the US, Canada and elsewhere in the world. The Occupy
encampments often lasted at least two months, despite the fact that
most of them regularly had to deal with police brutality, altogether
many thousands of arrests, disruptive infiltrators, and in many
cases, rain and freezing temperatures.
Meanwhile In Afghanistan
Lesson: during
the NATO summit in Chicago in the spring of 2012, several young men
were arrested and charged with terrorism. It was a typical case of
entrapment. What was atypical was that this time those charged were
white Occupy activists who had come up from Florida to join the
protests, and made the mistake of staying in the home of someone with
beer-brewing equipment, which the undercover cops also staying there
claimed was going to be used for making molotov cocktails.
Osama Bin Laden Is Dead
Lesson: the
Obama administration's continuation of the “war on terror”
featured a helicopter raid on the home of Osama Bin Laden. Notably,
during the raid Bin Laden's body was dumped at sea. What message
does this send?
Prism
Lesson: probably
the world's most well-known whistle-blower is Edward Snowden, who
confirmed what many people suspected to be the case, that the NSA is
spying on everyone, everywhere, indiscriminately.
I Can't Breathe
Lesson: recent
years have seen a depressing series of police killings of young black
men on the streets of the US, and killer cops being acquitted of any
crime afterward, such as with the cases of Michael Brown in Ferguson,
Missouri, and Eric Garner in New York City.
Oil Train
Lesson: although
the data has never been clearer that global carbon emissions must be
dramatically decreased in order to avoid global climate catastrophe,
the US has instead engaged in an unregulated, oil- and shale-drilling
free-for-all. This has also involved a huge increase in rail traffic
and accidents on old, badly-maintained railroad tracks that pass
right through populated urban areas. In one town in Quebec, this
resulted in the deaths of 47 people one night. So far in the US
derailments resulting in explosions have been frequent, but have only
occurred in less populated areas.
Pipeline
Lesson: rather
than dealing with the climate crisis or even repairing aging rail
infrastructure, the US and Canada have been engaging in frenzied
pipeline-building, in order to ship the dirtiest fossil fuel in the
world to ports where it can be sold overseas.
Mudslide
Lesson:
badly-regulated or unregulated logging practices have been
characteristic of how resource extraction is done in the “free
market” USA. The result of the lack of oversight has been a lot of
unnecessary erosion and soil depletion, polluted land and water, and
landslides. Occasionally these landslides happen in populated areas,
such as when half of the town of Oso, Washington, was wiped out one
day.
A Dream Foreclosed
Lesson: the
Global Financial Crisis of 2008 resulted in banks being bailed out on
an unprecedented scale, and millions of people in the US losing their
homes. Unlike the banks, the people were not bailed out to any
significant extent. Many former homeowners are now living in
unstable circumstances, including in many cases, in cars and tents.
Gentrification Town
Lesson: while
many cities across the US lie abandoned and ignored, other cities
such as Seattle, San Francisco, and Portland, Oregon, are
experiencing rapid gentrification. Between the 2000 and the 2010
censuses, the historically African-American neighborhoods of Portland
have lost much of their black populations. Monthly rent in many
neighborhoods has doubled in the past decade. Under state law, rent
control in Oregon is illegal.
Song for Pelican Bay
Lesson: the US
has long been the leader in the world in terms of imprisoning the
highest proportion of its population compared to any other country.
In terms of imprisoning its black population, it beat apartheid South
Africa in terms of the number of people of African origin locked up.
There's a long history of resistance to US prison policies, which
involve systematic daily torture of tens of thousands of US citizens
through solitary confinement, beatings, and other cruel practices.
In the summer of 2013, tens of thousands of prisoners across
California went on a hunger strike.
Statue in the Harbor
Lesson: for most
of the history of the US, the only people who could officially
immigrate to the country were Europeans. People of color could only
fall into the category of “guest worker,” and were frequently
banned from entering or deported under the guise of laws like the
Chinese Exclusion Act and others. Policies have since gotten a bit
less racist, but not by much, as events of 2014 demonstrated, with
the widespread deportation of children, without giving them their
rights under international law to seek the asylum that many of them
so clearly needed.
TPP 101
Lesson: the US
has a long history of pushing for international “free trade”
agreements with other countries. These agreements consistently work
in favor of large transnational corporations, and are detrimental to
the US working class and workers around the world. The TPP and TTIP
are the latest in US-sponsored “free trade” deals, since the US
Democratic and Republican leadership agree that previous trade deals
such as the WTO are too democratic to work sufficiently well in favor
of the rich.
15
Lesson: unable
under restrictive anti-union laws in the US to effectively organize
through traditional means, labor unions in recent years have started
an organizing drive through nontraditional means, to raise the wages
of low-income workers up to $15 an hour, what is broadly considered
to be a minimal living wage –
a wage that allows one full-time job to support a small family.
Everything Can Change
Lesson: US
history is full of social movements that have accomplished much, and
forces allied with what the Occupy movement refers to as the 1%
trying to stop the progress of these movements. History also shows
that movements gain momentum and achieve some degree of
sustainability when there is a widespread sense of optimism among the
movement's participants, and society more broadly, that success is
possible.
