# On this day



## brogdale (Apr 28, 2017)

Have we ever had an OTD thread? (Apologies in advance to pogofish if we have!)
Shall we have a go?

How about this for starters?


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## Dogsauce (Apr 28, 2017)

It's also Saddam Hussein's birthday & Ed balls day.

(Also my birthday which is why I remember)


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## brogdale (Apr 28, 2017)

Dogsauce said:


> It's also Saddam Hussein's birthday & Ed balls day.
> 
> (Also my birthday which is why I remember)


MHROTD!
How could I have forgotten Ed Baws day?


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## Ax^ (Apr 29, 2017)

Hitler got married


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## Raheem (Apr 29, 2017)

Ax^ said:


> Hitler got married



So Ed Balls Day is also Eva Hitler Eve.


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## brogdale (Apr 29, 2017)

I may be a day late (?) but I think this image was taken on the 29th...although Mussolini (2nd from left) was killed the day before.


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## Pickman's model (Apr 29, 2017)

1839: chartist riot at llanidloes, wales. An inn sacked and inmates driven out
1840: rioting at italian opera due to non-engagement of tamburini


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## brogdale (Apr 30, 2017)

42 years ago today The Việt Cộng took Saigon.
For those of us of a certain vintage, those news footage helicopter images are seared in the memory...


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## Sprocket. (Apr 30, 2017)

brogdale said:


> 42 years ago today The Việt Cộng took Saigon.
> For those of us of a certain vintage, those news footage helicopter images are seared in the memory...
> 
> View attachment 105649



I remember it well, Sandy Gall and Mike Nicholson and the ITN crew fighting to get on board one of those last flights out.


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## not-bono-ever (Apr 30, 2017)

Missed guernica by a couple of days - 80 years ago last Wednesday iirc


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## Pickman's model (Apr 30, 2017)

1883: birth of jaroslav hasek


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## Pickman's model (Apr 30, 2017)

brogdale said:


> 42 years ago today The Việt Cộng took Saigon.
> For those of us of a certain vintage, those news footage helicopter images are seared in the memory...
> 
> View attachment 105649


NVA, not viet cong


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## bi0boy (Apr 30, 2017)

In 1877 on this day St Albans Abbey became St Albans Cathedral.


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## Pickman's model (Apr 30, 2017)

bi0boy said:


> In 1877 on this day St Albans Abbey became St Albans Cathedral.


Yes, when St Albans constituted a bishoprick


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## Pickman's model (Apr 30, 2017)

1880: all jews ordered to leave st petersburg at 6 hours notice


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## bi0boy (Apr 30, 2017)

The 1741 British general election began today, leading within a year to the downfall of Robert Walpole after 20 years as PM in a vote of no confidence, which was primarily motivated by his poor leadership during the ongoing War of Jenkins' Ear


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## brogdale (May 1, 2017)

On May 1st 2004 the 'A10' accession states (Cyprus, the Czech Republic, Estonia, Hungary, Latvia, Lithuania, Malta, Poland, Slovakia, and Slovenia) joined the EU in the single largest extension of the union.


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## Yossarian (May 1, 2017)

On May 1st 1820, five radicals were executed after the unfortunate failure of the Cato Street Conspiracy to assassinate Prime Minister Lord Liverpool and his cabinet.



> The conspirators planned to assassinate the cabinet which was supposed to be together at a dinner. They would then seize key buildings, overthrow the government and establish a "Committee of Public Safety" to oversee a radical revolution ...
> 
> ... Thistlewood thought the act would trigger a massive uprising against the government. James Ings, a coffeeshop keeper and former butcher, later announced that he would have decapitated all the cabinet members and taken two heads to exhibit on Westminster Bridge.


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## Pickman's model (May 1, 2017)

1848: frightful butchery of polish insurgents in posen by prussian troops


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## Pickman's model (May 1, 2017)

1871: versailles troops carried insurgent position at clamart


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## Pickman's model (May 1, 2017)

1905: riots, with great loss of life, in warsaw


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## Yossarian (May 1, 2017)

Thousands of anti-capitalist protesters were illegally kettled by police in central London on this day on... holy crap, that was 16 years ago.


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## Pickman's model (May 1, 2017)

Yossarian said:


> Thousands of anti-capitalist protesters were illegally kettled by police in central London on this day on... holy crap, that was 16 years ago.


I seem to remember the cases against the police failed, that it was deemed legal


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## Lepton (May 1, 2017)

1941 The film _Citizen Kane_--directed and starring Orson Welles--opens in New York.


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## brogdale (May 1, 2017)

Pickman's model said:


> 1905: riots, with great loss of life, in warsaw


Exactly 50 years later; Constitution Square, Marszałkowska Residential Area in Warsaw.


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## LDC (May 1, 2017)

_The Calendar Riots_! Anyone remember that fantastic little zine/diary/book thing?

The calendar riots


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## PaoloSanchez (May 1, 2017)




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## seventh bullet (May 1, 2017)

Pickman's model said:


> NVA, not viet cong



NVA was the American term.  Viet Cong was pejorative.

Combined PAVN and PLAF units captured Saigon.


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## Pickman's model (May 1, 2017)

seventh bullet said:


> NVA was the American term.  Viet Cong was pejorative.
> 
> Combined PAVN and PLAF units captured Saigon.


Yes. But could you share your source for plaf in capture of Saigon?


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## seventh bullet (May 2, 2017)

Not off the top of my head right now, no, but locally trained irregulars and 'main force' troops led by Tran Van Tra prepared the ground for the approaching northerners in 1975.


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## bi0boy (May 2, 2017)

May the 1st was a busy day but the 2nd is when Isaac Dorislaus was stabbed to death in The Hague by Royalists led by the son of the Bishop of Brechin, as retribution for his role as a legal advisor in prosecuting Charles I.


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## phillm (May 2, 2017)

Bishop's sons have a bit of form it would seem...

G2: Danny Leigh meets Tim Westwood


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## brogdale (May 2, 2017)

OTD in 1933 the NSDAP forcibly closed German trade unions.


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## Pickman's model (May 2, 2017)

1908: strong afghan lashkar attacked lundi hotel but was twice repulsed


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## bi0boy (May 2, 2017)

In 1936 Haile Selassie boarded a British ship in Djibouti on his way to exile in Bath, England, 400 years to the day that Anne Boleyn was arrested for adultery, incest, and high treason, and taken to the tower.


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## brogdale (May 3, 2017)

OTD, 1926 the General Strike commences.


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## bi0boy (May 3, 2017)

In 1695 on this day parliament passed An Act for preventing Charge and Expence in Elections of Members to serve in Parliament


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## brogdale (May 5, 2017)

1981 Bobby Sands dies after 66 days on hunger strike.


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## brogdale (May 5, 2017)

Born Trier 199 years ago today:_


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## A380 (May 5, 2017)

Let's light this candle.






From Cape Canaveral, Florida, Navy Commander Alan Bartlett Shepard Jr. is launched into space aboard the _Freedom 7_ space capsule, becoming the first American astronaut to travel into space. The suborbital flight, which lasted 15 minutes and reached a height of 116 miles  was a major triumph for the National Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA). Obviously Yuri Gagarin had flown an orbital flight six weeks before. Still brilliant though.


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## brogdale (May 6, 2017)

...in 1953, born this day was one Anthony Charles Lynton Blair.


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## brogdale (May 6, 2017)




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## SpookyFrank (May 6, 2017)

Today in 1882 the US congress passed a law preventing Chinese immigrants from coming to the United States. Many Chinese already resident in the US were not naturalised citizens, thanks to previous racist legislation, so could not easily return home if they travelled to China to visit family.

As Mexico continued to welcome Chinese workers, the US began heavily policing its Mexican border to prevent Chinese from migrating North.

The Chinese Exclusion Act was not repealed until 1943 when the US alliance with China and war with Japan made it politically expedient to do so. Even after this Chinese immigration was still strictly limited and Chinese-Americans continued to face persecution from US authorities.


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## SpookyFrank (May 6, 2017)

And happy birthday to Orson Welles






...102 years old today!


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## Maltin (May 6, 2017)

Tottenham won the Double on this day in 1961 beating Leicester 2-0 in the FA Cup Final, the first team to do the double since Aston Villa in 1897. They haven't won the league in the 56 years since, finishing runner-up in 1962-63 and maybe this year. 

I don't like Tottenham just my parents got married on cup final day around then when Spurs were in the final and Jimmy Greaves' brother (or something) was their photographer and needed to rush off, and this thread reminded me about their anniversary and was checking if it was today but I think it must have been 55 years ago yesterday.


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## Maltin (May 7, 2017)

It's 11 years since Arsenal's last game at Highbury when they beat Wigan 4-2 to secure qualification for the Champions League after Tottenham lost to West Ham following eating dodgy lasagne. Arsenal haven't won the league since leaving Highbury. 

May 7, 2006: Farewell to Highbury


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## brogdale (May 8, 2017)

VE day.


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## Idris2002 (May 8, 2017)




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## Sprocket. (May 11, 2017)

The Bradford City fire was thirty-two years ago today.


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## SqueakyBumTime (May 12, 2017)

1991, Roxette scored their fourth US No.1 single with 'Joyride.'


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## brogdale (May 12, 2017)

SqueakyBumTime said:


> 1991, Roxette scored their fourth US No.1 single with 'Joyride.'


If you want a music OTD thread, how about you start one in _music, bands, clubs and festies, _eh? This one is in politics, protest & current affairs for a reason.


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## SqueakyBumTime (May 12, 2017)

brogdale said:


> If you want a music OTD thread, how about you start one in _music, bands, clubs and festies, _eh? This one is in politics, protest & current affairs for a reason.



There are other posts re: football and theatre in this thread. 
So take a hike


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## brogdale (May 12, 2017)

SqueakyBumTime said:


> There are other posts re: football and theatre in this thread.
> So take a hike


Unless they relate to a news/politics/history story, they don't really belong either. So don't post any more meaningless shite, eh? There's a good chap.


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## SqueakyBumTime (May 12, 2017)

brogdale said:


> Unless they relate to a news/politics/history story, they don't really belong either. So don't post any more meaningless shite, eh? There's a good chap.



Your own post from this very thread ... "on this day in music":



brogdale said:


> View attachment 106081



Meaningless shite. IN EXTREMIS.


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## brogdale (May 12, 2017)

SqueakyBumTime said:


> Your own post from this very thread ... "on this day in music":
> 
> 
> 
> Meaningless shite. IN EXTREMIS.


Strikes/industrial action = news/politics/protest/direct action.
Next?


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## SqueakyBumTime (May 12, 2017)

Fair enough. I joined the thread from Orson Welles onward. Apols.


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## Sprocket. (May 12, 2017)

On this day in 1926 a delegation from the Trades Union Congress visited 10 Downing Street to call off the General Strike. Called by the TUC in support of striking miners.


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## Sprocket. (May 14, 2017)

On this day in 1948 David Ben-Gurion proclaimed the state of Israel.


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## Ground Elder (May 16, 2017)

16th May, 1944

6000 Sinti, Romany and Roma rise up to resist the SS at Auschwitz-Birkenau.

*The Romani Uprising*


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## flypanam (May 17, 2017)

17 May 1974
The Dublin and Monaghan bombings took place.

Patrick Askin (44) Co. Monaghan
Josie Bradley (21) Co. Offaly
Marie Butler (21) Co. Waterford...
Anne Byrne (35) Dublin
Thomas Campbell (52) Co. Monaghan
Simone Chetrit (30) France
Thomas Croarkin (36) Co. Monaghan
John Dargle (80) Dublin
Concepta Dempsey (65) Co. Louth
Colette Doherty (20) and her unborn child, Dublin
Patrick Fay (47), Dublin & Co. Louth
Elizabeth Fitzgerald (59) Dublin
Breda Bernadette Grace (34) Dublin and Co. Kerry
Archie Harper (73) Co. Monaghan
Antonio Magliocco, (37) Italy
May McKenna (55) Co. Tyrone
Anne Marren (20) Co. Sligo
Anna Massey (21) Dublin
Dorothy Morris (57) Dublin
John (24), Anna (22), Jacqueline (17 months) & Anne-Marie (5 months) O'Brien, Dublin
Christina O'Loughlin (51), Dublin
Edward John O'Neill (39), Dublin
Marie Phelan (20), Co. Waterford
Siobhán Roice (19), Wexford Town
Maureen Shields (46), Dublin
Jack Travers (28), Monaghan Town
Breda Turner (21), Co. Tipperary
John Walsh (27), Dublin
Peggy White (44), Monaghan Town
George Williamson (72), Co. Monaghan

43 years on still no answers or justice.


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## Sprocket. (May 17, 2017)




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## rekil (May 19, 2017)

Battle Of Matewan 1920

West Virginia's mine wars, 1920-1921


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## A380 (May 28, 2017)

First Monkeys in space 28 May 1959. Not the first animals in space though.


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## Bahnhof Strasse (May 28, 2017)

25 years ago on this bank holiday Sunday the Malvern Hills were filled with the joyous sound of ravers avin'it at Castlemorton


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## brogdale (Jun 7, 2017)




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## A380 (Jun 15, 2017)

15 June 1215. Maybe not actually that important at the time. But it was a start.


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## brogdale (Jun 18, 2017)




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## brogdale (Jun 18, 2017)

2 serving MPs were first elected OT(hat)D; do you know who they are?


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## brogdale (Jun 18, 2017)

14 years later...


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## Supine (Jun 18, 2017)

War of 1812 begins as US declares war against Britain

Happy times!


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## Lucy Fur (Jun 18, 2017)

1815, Battle of Waterloo........


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## crossthebreeze (Jun 18, 2017)

brogdale said:


> 2 serving MPs were first elected OT(hat)D; do you know who they are?


Must be Dennis Skinner and Kenneth Clarke?


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## brogdale (Jun 18, 2017)

crossthebreeze said:


> Must be Dennis Skinner and Kenneth Clarke?


Doh....in 1.


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## A380 (Jun 18, 2017)

Supine said:


> War of 1812 begins as US declares war against Britain
> 
> Happy times!


It's why they had to paint the White House white.


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## nuffsaid (Jun 20, 2017)

20/6/1837 Victoria, aged 18, crowned Queen of England. Let the Victorian era commence......build stuff, especially railways.


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## DotCommunist (Aug 20, 2017)

Peterloo. 198 yrs old but not forgotten.


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## farmerbarleymow (Aug 20, 2017)

DotCommunist said:


> Peterloo. 198 yrs old but not forgotten.



I'm going to this later.

Campaign Events for The Peterloo Massacre Memorial Camapaign


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## DotCommunist (Aug 20, 2017)

farmerbarleymow said:


> I'm going to this later.
> 
> Campaign Events for The Peterloo Massacre Memorial Camapaign



fair play. Its worth remembering.
I found this fairly interesting if a bit 'man fuck the ancien regime, these people are still here and still doing it'




			
				letter to the guardian said:
			
		

> I am grateful to Simon Szreter (Letters, 26 October) for pointing out the direct familial lineage of George Osborne to the baronets of Ballentaylor, and that such members of the landed wealth elite dominated the House of Lords and opposed progressive forms of taxation on the super-wealthy a century ago. Professor Szreter notes that the financial elite, a century later, still defends its own. Depressingly, I can go a century better. When workers had the temerity to assemble peacefully in Manchester to demand the vote in 1819, the magistrates called in the militia. The cavalry charged, 15 protesters were killed and up to 700 were injured. This was the Peterloo Massacre. The Tory government now passed the repressive Six Acts to gag newspapers, prevent public meetings, and restrict freedom of speech. Playing a key role in drafting these laws, as lord chancellor, was Lord Eldon. His fourth-great-grandson is Jeremy Hunt, the present secretary of state for health. Plus ça change!
> *Dr John Hull*
> _Sheffield_


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## Pickman's model (Aug 20, 2017)

20/8/1898 fog in channel interrupted navigation and led to several collisions and groundings


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## SpookyFrank (Aug 22, 2017)

brogdale said:


> 2 serving MPs were first elected OT(hat)D; do you know who they are?



Ken Clarke and the Beast of Bolsover

E2a: only two months late. Ken Clarke holds the title 'father of the house' by virtue of having taken his oath before Skinner.


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## A380 (Oct 4, 2017)




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## Sprocket. (Oct 9, 2017)

Ernesto 'Che' Guevara killed 50 years ago 9 October 1967.


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## not-bono-ever (Oct 9, 2017)

^^^^^

Riding motorbikes with Che Guevara's son

and you can now go on a bike tour of Cuba on a Harley (narsty) starting at $4.3K with his son.

Should be on a minsk or a Cossack for proper authentic lolz


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## Sprocket. (Oct 9, 2017)

'A body will try to make a shilling wherever and whenever a body can'.


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## bubblesmcgrath (Oct 9, 2017)

Sprocket. said:


> Ernesto 'Che' Guevara killed 50 years ago 9 October 1967.


Bought some of the commemorative stamps launched here......


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## Mordi (Oct 10, 2017)

bubblesmcgrath said:


> Bought some of the commemorative stamps launched here......



Jim Fitzpatrick must be very pleased, if at least because An Post will be one of the few to pay him image rights. I'll definitely pick some up for postcards when I'm next down south.


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## Yossarian (Oct 11, 2017)

Oct 11, 1972 - 60 US sailors injured in unrest on the USS Kitty Hawk, which was off the coast of Vietnam. The military said it was a race riot, though the causes included attempts by the Marines to disrupt the activities of anti-Vietnam War sailors, which included the publishing of onboard anti-war newspaper "Kitty Litter."


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## krtek a houby (Oct 11, 2017)

National Coming Out Day, apparently.


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## Lucy Fur (Oct 11, 2017)

Born:


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## A380 (Oct 14, 2017)

October 14 1947. Chuck Yeager breaks the sound barrier in the Bell X1 rocket plane.


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## A380 (Oct 21, 2017)

October 21 1806

Battle of Trafalgar.

Ending the threat of invasion of the UK mainland and so starting the end of bonapartism, well the first time around anyway.


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## planetgeli (Oct 21, 2017)

Aberfan Oct 21st 1966


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## Pickman's model (Nov 9, 2017)

times 9/11/2007

cressida dick is currently met police commissioner.


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## Yossarian (Mar 16, 2018)

March 16, 1968 - American soldiers massacre 504 unarmed civilians, mostly women and children, in My Lai, Vietnam.


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## Sprocket. (Apr 1, 2018)

1 April 1984.
Marvin Gaye shot dead by his father.


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## A380 (Apr 4, 2018)

Dr Martin Luther King murdered for his beliefs and the the inspiration he gave to millions. 4th April 1968.


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## rekil (May 10, 2018)

40th anniversary of Peppino Impastato's death yesterday.

Impastato, Giuseppe, 1948-1978



Spoiler: ANPI


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## A380 (Jun 14, 2018)

14 June 1992. Argentinian forces in the Falkland Islands surrendered to the British task force.


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## A380 (Jun 18, 2018)

18 June 1815 Battle of Waterloo or Belle Alliance


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## DotCommunist (Oct 15, 2018)

Sankara murdered, 1987


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## A380 (Oct 21, 2018)

Battle of Trafalgar 1805


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## Serge Forward (Oct 21, 2018)

A380 said:


> View attachment 150250
> 
> Battle of Trafalgar 1805


Wrong day mate. I swear it was 31st March 1990.


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## krtek a houby (Oct 21, 2018)

Michael Davitt founded the Land League, 1879


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## brogdale (Oct 21, 2018)

1966


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## A380 (Oct 21, 2018)

brogdale said:


> 1966
> 
> View attachment 150298


A disgrace and then the fucking Coal Board tried to get their hands on money donated to the families to  pay for the repairs.


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## mauvais (Oct 22, 2018)

A380 said:


> 14 June 1992. Argentinian forces in the Falkland Islands surrendered to the British task force.


I can understand the whole Japanese OAPs keeping WWII going in the jungle thing, but not so much on the largely barren Falklands.


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## A380 (Oct 22, 2018)

mauvais said:


> I can understand the whole Japanese OAPs keeping WWII going in the jungle thing, but not so much on the largely barren Falklands.


They survived entirely on penguin eggs and Tunocks  tea cakes stolen from isolated farm houses...


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## rekil (Nov 3, 2018)

Kiel Mutiny.


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## MrSki (Nov 7, 2018)

1979. 39 bleeding years ago! This premiered. 


Certainly helped me keep on the straight & narrow.


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## Streathamite (Nov 8, 2018)

bi0boy said:


> In 1877 on this day St Albans Abbey became St Albans Cathedral.


That's a major revelation for me - I never knew I actually got baptised - and confirmed - in a Cathedral.
Locals will still always refer to it as 'the Abbey'.


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## A380 (Nov 9, 2018)

Streathamite said:


> That's a major revelation for me - I never knew I actually got baptised - and confirmed - in a Cathedral.
> Locals will still always refer to it as 'the Abbey'.


You’d only call it a Cathedral if you came from a long way away like Russia.

Come to visit cathedral. Tower is 83 meters high. We deterred by slush.


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## yield (Nov 13, 2018)

Bloody Sunday, 13th November 1887


> Bloody Sunday took place in Trafalgar Square, London on 13 November 1887, when marchers protesting unemployment and coercion in Ireland, as well as demanding the release of MP William O'Brien, clashed with the Metropolitan Police and the British Army. The demonstration was organised by the Social Democratic Federation and the Irish National League.
> 
> Violent clashes took place between the police and demonstrators, many "armed with iron bars, knives, pokers and gas pipes". A contemporary report noted that 400 were arrested and 75 persons were badly injured, including many police, two policemen being stabbed and one protester bayonetted.


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## MrSki (Nov 22, 2018)




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## MrSki (Nov 22, 2018)




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## mx wcfc (Nov 22, 2018)

MrSki said:


>


The faces on their faces says it all.  She is distraught.  He's smiling and thinking "Thank fuck that's over"


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## Yossarian (Dec 6, 2018)




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## flypanam (Jan 21, 2019)

21st January Ireland's War of Independence was launched by an ambush at Soloheadbeg in Tipperary.
Soloheadbeg: what really happened?


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## Sprocket. (Jan 30, 2019)

370 years ago today that Charles I head came off. Glad he wore two shirts, it’s a bit chilly this time of year.


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## brogdale (Feb 22, 2019)

Executed by guillotine.



> The condemned was calm and collected.


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## Sprocket. (Feb 22, 2019)

brogdale said:


> Executed by guillotine.
> 
> 
> 
> View attachment 162646



What an inspiring and courageous young woman.


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## Sprocket. (Feb 22, 2019)

I recall writing an essay about the White Rose Resistance and Sophie and Hans Scholl. I had to explain what the point and results were of their actions.
I went beyond the usual essay plan and  it ended up a total rant.


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## brogdale (Feb 22, 2019)

Sprocket. said:


> I recall writing an essay about the White Rose Resistance and Sophie and Hans Scholl. I had to explain what the point and results were of their actions.
> I went beyond the usual essay plan and  it ended up a total rant.


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## Sprocket. (Feb 22, 2019)

This is a very emotive telling of the story. Great film, hard to imagine the courage needed to take on the Nazis at their peak.
Do students still study Nazi Germany for A level History?


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## A380 (Mar 5, 2019)




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## Wookey (Mar 5, 2019)

Stalin died on this day in 1953.

In researching this post, I also discovered that 100 people were crushed to death at his funeral, and his medicine cabinets were discovered to be full of high grade cocaine.


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## RubyToogood (Mar 5, 2019)

brogdale said:


>



Ah! I have been really wanting to watch that


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## brogdale (Dec 14, 2019)

382!


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## flypanam (Mar 7, 2020)

44 years ago loyalist/British armed forces detonated a car bomb in my home town killing  one and injuring 17 others.


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## dessiato (Mar 8, 2020)

flypanam said:


> 44 years ago loyalist/British armed forces detonated a car bomb in my home town killing  one and injuring 17 others.


Castleblayney?


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## dessiato (Mar 8, 2020)

1754 the Marquis of Enseñada became the premier of Spain.


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## krtek a houby (Mar 8, 2020)

Dylan releases _Subterranean Homesick Blues_, 1965


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## flypanam (Mar 8, 2020)

dessiato said:


> Castleblayney?



Yes!


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## brogdale (Mar 29, 2020)

The Battle of Towton


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## mystic pyjamas (Mar 29, 2020)

One of the largest and bloodiest battles on British soil.


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## brogdale (Mar 31, 2020)

Feeling old?

30 years today.


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## Sprocket. (Mar 31, 2020)

brogdale said:


> The Battle of Towton
> 
> View attachment 203875


It is one of those strange places where when you stand, you feel surrounded by silence.


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## brogdale (May 5, 2020)

39 years ago today Bobby Sands died.

3 days afterwards I found myself in the middle of this protest in Paris as it gathered at the British Embassy on rue du Faubourg Saint-Honoré:


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## brogdale (May 18, 2020)

40 years since Ian Curtis took his life.
40 years!


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## Sprocket. (May 18, 2020)

brogdale said:


> 40 years since Ian Curtis took his life.
> 40 years!


Yep, the pudding!
Seems like yesterday.


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## mx wcfc (May 18, 2020)

Sprocket. said:


> Yep, the pudding!
> Seems like yesterday.


Seems like centuries ago to me.  I remember being pretty blown over by it and my bassist didn't speak to anyone for a week.  I am wearing my Unknown Pleasures t-shirt today in tribute.  I'm sure I saw  a "listening party" advertised on the internet for evening - I must find it.


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## Pickman's model (May 18, 2020)

1891 attempt to expel queen nathalie from serbia frustrated by students; she was sent to austria the next day


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## A380 (May 18, 2020)

18 May 1991 Helen Sharman launches to visit Mir as the first British cosmonaut / astronaut. 




(Yes Michael Foal and Piers Sellers were British but they  had to become a US citizens to move  from working for NASA to flying for them. Also not counting the  dual national space tourists... full list here: Category:British astronauts - Wikipedia


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## Serge Forward (May 18, 2020)

brogdale said:


> 40 years since Ian Curtis took his life.
> 40 years!


I was involved in the Manchester music scene back then and Ian's death was very sad.

I saw Joy Division twice, once as Warsaw at the Electric Circus and once as JD at Bolton Tech (where they performed in front of about 15-20 people). To be honest, I never really got them. I suppose Warsaw were okay (more punky) but I didn't like Joy Division and thought they were rubbish - only marginally better than their terrible support band called the Curb (or Kerb). That said, the band I was in still tried to copy Joy Division's sound


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## Steel Icarus (May 18, 2020)

brogdale said:


> Feeling old?
> 
> 30 years today.
> 
> View attachment 204221


That's a mad, amazing photo


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## A380 (Jun 14, 2020)

14 June 2020. 38 years since the war in the Falklands ended and three years since the Grenfell Tower fire.


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## A380 (Jun 16, 2020)

16 June 1963 Valentina Tereshkova was the first woman in space.


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## GarveyLives (Jun 16, 2020)

*16 June 1976: Student Mbuyisa Makhubo carries fatally injured Hector Pieterson after he was shot by South African troops during the 1976 Soweto uprising, during which African children - several hundred of them, according to some estimates - were massacred by the white supremacist government in South Africa.*


----------



## Maggot (Jun 16, 2020)

On this day in 2016 Jo Cox was murdered.


----------



## Sprocket. (Jun 16, 2020)

I remember the Soweto massacre happening. It still disgusts me that England cricketers thought it okay to go and play there.


----------



## Streathamite (Jun 17, 2020)

bi0boy said:


> In 1877 on this day St Albans Abbey became St Albans Cathedral.


Well they kept that one bloody quiet. That's where I was growing up at the time, and I don't remember any publicity to that end


----------



## Streathamite (Jun 17, 2020)

seventh bullet said:


> NVA was the American term.  Viet Cong was pejorative.
> 
> Combined PAVN and PLAF units captured Saigon.


Surely NVA was regular North Vietnamese army, Viet Cong was undercover guerrilla insurgents wholly based in South Vietnam (ie NLF)


----------



## seventh bullet (Jun 17, 2020)

It's just a little misunderstanding about the use of differing names.  PAVN is the People's Army of Vietnam, the armed forces of the DRV (NVA was an American term). 

Off the top of my head, The People's Liberation Armed Forces (for the liberation of the south), pejoratively known as the Viet Cong, an earlier name given to Communist insurgents fighting the Diem regime (the overlapping phases of struggle termed by them as 'Destruction of the Oppression' and rural 'Concerted Uprisings'), were the armed wing of the National Liberation Front, divided into broadly described rural and urban insurgents and better trained and armed 'main force' fighters under PAVN command.

The latter's activities were contingent on the strategic needs of the former, it was an adaptation of People's War after all.  After Tet, PAVN took a more commanding role than they already had been doing in the south as ARVN and US troops really hammered the southerner's fighting capabilities.


----------



## petee (Jun 17, 2020)

Streathamite said:


> Well they kept that one bloody quiet. That's where I was growing up at the time, and I don't remember any publicity to that end



you're 145 years old?


----------



## planetgeli (Jun 18, 2020)

Orgreave. June 18th 1984.

Never forget.


----------



## Sprocket. (Jun 18, 2020)

planetgeli said:


> View attachment 218253
> 
> Orgreave. June 18th 1984.
> 
> Never forget.


Never, we are the enemy within!
It’s a housing estate now.


----------



## A380 (Jun 29, 2020)




----------



## Ax^ (Jun 29, 2020)

just a day late


----------



## Sprocket. (Jun 29, 2020)

Perhaps one of the better results of this incident is that before this, there were only three republics in Europe. By the end of 1918 there were thirteen.


----------



## A380 (Jul 1, 2020)

1 July 1916. First day of the battle of the Somme. Just on the first day 19,240 British* soldiers  were killed.

By the end of the battle in November a million people had been killed. A million people.

* A huge number from what is now Northern Ireland


----------



## A380 (Jul 7, 2020)

7 July 2005


----------



## yield (Jul 11, 2020)

Bosnia's Srebrenica massacre 25 years on - in pictures


----------



## A380 (Aug 7, 2020)

7th August 1840. Putting kids up chimneys banned.


----------



## Bahnhof Strasse (Aug 7, 2020)

A380 said:


> 7th August 1840. Putting kids up chimneys banned.
> 
> View attachment 225433



Downhill ever since


----------



## A380 (Aug 7, 2020)

Bahnhof Strasse said:


> Downhill ever since



Kids today are  all spoilt. Direct correlation.


----------



## A380 (Oct 21, 2020)




----------



## A380 (Oct 21, 2020)

Also Trafalgar Day.
21 October 1805


----------



## A380 (Nov 18, 2020)

18 November 1987. 31 people killed in a fire at Kings Cross Underground station because the escalators hadn’t been cleaned for years to save money.




Station  officer Colin Townsley was commanding the first LFB pump on scene, he went down to conduct an initial assessment without BA. His body was later found next to that of a woman he has tried to save rather than escaping himself.


----------



## brogdale (Nov 20, 2020)




----------



## brogdale (Nov 20, 2020)

869 death of England's first patron saint at the hands of the Danish archers:


----------



## brogdale (Nov 20, 2020)

and...who knew...


----------



## brogdale (Nov 20, 2020)

And if you're reckoning on keeping the feast of St Edmund during this pandemic anniversary, this medieval rhyme may help with your provision buying?

_Set garlike and pease, saint Edmund to please

 _


----------



## brogdale (Nov 20, 2020)

No prizes for guessing where he was buried.


----------



## Sprocket. (Nov 20, 2020)

Bury, no not that one!
Doing his Saint Sebastian impression.


----------



## Sprocket. (Nov 20, 2020)

Sprocket. said:


> Bury, no not that one!
> Doing his Saint Sebastian impression.


He was a bit naive though. A gang of Vikings ask you if you believe in life after death and you say yes.


----------



## brogdale (Nov 20, 2020)

Sprocket. said:


> He was a bit naive though. A gang of Vikings ask you if you believe in life after death and you say yes.


Not called the Great Heathen Army for nothing, eh?


----------



## Sprocket. (Nov 20, 2020)

brogdale said:


> Not called the Great Heathen Army for nothing, eh?


Noisy ancestors!


----------



## brogdale (Nov 20, 2020)

Sprocket. said:


> Noisy ancestors!


Having (really quite) garlic-laden ragu 'shepherds pie' & peas for tea tonight; hope the patron Saint of pandemics is pleased.


----------



## platinumsage (Nov 21, 2020)

brogdale said:


> 869 death of England's first patron saint at the hands of the Danish archers:
> 
> View attachment 239678



I once looked up the veracity of the 20th November date, suspecting it was just chosen as a convenient feast day, as there are no contemporary written accounts.

However it seems the earliest written account is by Abbo of Fleury, some 115 years after Edmund's death who heard it from Dunstan the Archbishop of Canterbury, who as a child heard it from Edmund's armour bearer. So there's a reasonable case that the tale wasn't embellished too much in the telling.


----------



## Sprocket. (Nov 21, 2020)

platinumsage said:


> I once looked up the veracity of the 20th November date, suspecting it was just chosen as a convenient feast day, as there are no contemporary written accounts.
> 
> However it seems the earliest written account is by Abbo of Fleury, some 115 years after Edmund's death who heard it from Dunstan the Archbishop of Canterbury, who as a child heard it from Edmund's armour bearer. So there's a reasonable case that the tale wasn't embellished too much in the telling.


Yes, alongside many of the made up pants we hang too much tradition on in the world.


----------



## brogdale (Nov 21, 2020)

_Mayflower _dropped anchor off Cape Cod in 1620.


----------



## brogdale (Nov 21, 2020)

100 years ago; Bloody Sunday


----------



## BCBlues (Nov 21, 2020)

Birmingham pub bombings. Tragic on all fronts. Six men jailed for being Irish in the wrong place and at the wrong time. 21 innocent people dead, hundreds injured. The anti Irish hatred that this act manifested went on for years in Brum so much that even family events such as the St Patrick's Parade were not viable. 

Birmingham pub bombings 46th anniversary marked with 100-car convoy through city Birmingham pub bombings 46th anniversary marked with 100-car convoy through city


----------



## 8115 (Nov 21, 2020)

Yesterday was 75 years since the start of the Nuremberg trials.


----------



## brogdale (Nov 22, 2020)

30 years ago; Fatch resigns


----------



## BCBlues (Nov 22, 2020)

brogdale said:


> 30 years ago; Fatch resigns
> 
> View attachment 239899



Wonder what she'd have to say about Johnson taking her mantle of worst PM ever.


----------



## brogdale (Nov 22, 2020)

57 years ago



too young to remember, but I remember seeing my Mum crying when Bobby was shot.


----------



## butchersapron (Nov 24, 2020)

80 years ago today the Bristol Blitz began. Before it ended:

_919 tons of high-explosive bombs plus many thousands of incendiary bombs dropped in clusters
1,299 people killed, 1,303 seriously injured and 697 rescued from the debris of bombed buildings
89,080 buildings damaged including 81,830 houses completely destroyed and over 3,000 rendered unusable and later demolished_

Most of the old town centre was destroyed, hence the current sometimes odd look of places near the new centre.

Collection of oral histories.


----------



## Jay Park (Nov 24, 2020)

butchersapron said:


> 80 years ago today the Bristol Blitz began. Before it ended:
> 
> _919 tons of high-explosive bombs plus many thousands of incendiary bombs dropped in clusters
> 1,299 people killed, 1,303 seriously injured and 697 rescued from the debris of bombed buildings
> ...



Why didn’t we rebuild like the Germans did in Dresden?


----------



## brogdale (Dec 12, 2020)

1 year ago:


----------



## Jay Park (Dec 12, 2020)

brogdale said:


> 1 year ago:
> 
> View attachment 243114



Yuk


----------



## Sprocket. (Dec 12, 2020)

Eighty years ago tonight my dad on his way by train along with many other members of his squadron spent the night in the Victoria Railway Station in Sheffield during the Blitz on Sheffield. They were on their way from his previous base in Lincolnshire to Hull for disembarkation to Iceland.
Fortunately none were injured, unlike many residents of Sheffield.


Sheffield Blitz firefighter remembered on raid anniversary Sheffield Blitz firefighter remembered on raid anniversary


----------



## Fairweather (Dec 12, 2020)

Nice one Sprocket, my grandfather was a regular at this boozer but was working that night.





						Death at Marples - 12th December 1940
					

The Chris Hobbs Pages are Personal Pages with a Difference. They are a Personal Resource Centre  as well as being a Family History Repository dedicated to my ancestors



					www.chrishobbs.com


----------



## Sprocket. (Dec 12, 2020)

Fairweather said:


> Nice one Sprocket, my grandfather was a regular at this boozer but was working that night.
> 
> 
> 
> ...


Truly horrific night, many times when walking down the subway alongside the rebuilt Marples I shuddered thinking of all those buried people alongside where I was walking.
As an apprentice in Sheffield in the seventies I worked with many craftsmen who had been working at Firth Brown and Vickers who had close calls to talk about.


----------



## Fairweather (Dec 12, 2020)

I’ll have to chat with my mum but I’m sure he worked at Hadfields which is now the site of Meadowhall. He died in 1980 when I was 13 but he did a good job, his six kids hated and the four that are still around despise the Tories.


----------



## Sprocket. (Dec 12, 2020)

Hadfield’s was a massive site and a good firm to work for.


----------



## Fairweather (Dec 12, 2020)

Sprocket. said:


> Hadfield’s was a massive site and a good firm to work for.


If I can find it I’ll pm you a mention of him, I wish we had blokes like him around today. He knew which side he was on.


----------



## Bahnhof Strasse (Dec 13, 2020)

Irma Grese and Josef Kramer were sent on their way to hell, very much living up to the adage hanging’s too good for ‘em.


----------



## Sasaferrato (Dec 13, 2020)

seventh bullet said:


> NVA was the American term.  Viet Cong was pejorative.
> 
> Combined PAVN and PLAF units captured Saigon.





			viet cong stamps - Google Search


----------



## butchersapron (Dec 25, 2020)

Ciao Ceaușescu (Ignores vulgar opp for CathC related vid)


----------



## flypanam (Jan 1, 2021)

100 years ago today the IRA ambushed the RIC in Ballybay, Co, Monaghan.








						The Royal Irish Constabulary Forum-The Ballybay Ambush, Co. Monaghan
					

On the 1st January 1921, an ambush of the police at Ballybay, Co. Monaghan, resulted in the deaths of two men and the wounding of three others. Backgr




					irishconstabulary.com


----------



## A380 (Jan 28, 2021)

28 January 1986 - the Challenger accident.


----------



## brogdale (Feb 18, 2021)

2 years ago today:


----------



## danny la rouge (Feb 18, 2021)

brogdale said:


> 2 years ago today:
> 
> View attachment 254987


Bellendathon!  I’d forgotten all about it.


----------



## brogdale (Feb 18, 2021)

danny la rouge said:


> Bellendathon!  I’d forgotten all about it.


Shocker, innit?


----------



## planetgeli (Feb 19, 2021)

Swansea blitz: Childhood memories of 'bombing horror', 80 years on
					

The Three Nights' Blitz began on 19 February 1941, killing 230 and injuring nearly 400.



					www.bbc.co.uk
				




The Swansea blitz. Three nights of intense bombing. 80 years ago tonight.



William of Walworth Clair De Lune


----------



## William of Walworth (Feb 20, 2021)

It's amazing that even Kilvey Hill was spared FFS


----------



## AmateurAgitator (Feb 20, 2021)

On this day, 20th February 1895, Black abolitionist and advocate for women's rights who escaped slavery, Frederick Douglass, died in Washington DC aged 77. Douglass wrote his first autobiography in 1845, in which he named his former enslaver, and so he headed to the UK and Ireland, in part to avoid his former enslaver trying to reclaim his "property". There he spent two years raising the international profile of the movement to abolish slavery. He then returned to the US and set up a newspaper, The North Star, and after the civil war fought for the rights of the poor, women, Black people, Native Americans and Asian migrant workers.

On the latter, during a wave of anti-Asian racism sweeping the US, Douglass argued to people of European descent that they did not exclusively own the country: “It is the right you assert by staying here, and your fathers asserted by coming here.” The right to migrate, he said, is the “great right that I assert for the Chinese and Japanese, and for all other varieties of men equally with yourselves, now and forever. I know of no rights of race superior to the rights of humanity, and when there is a supposed conflict between human and national rights, it is safe to go to the side of humanity.”


----------



## AmateurAgitator (Feb 21, 2021)

On this day, 21 February 1965, el-Hajj Malik el-Shabazz, better known as Malcolm X, instrumental speaker and activist of the US civil rights and Black power movements, was assassinated while preparing to address a crowd of supporters in New York.

Formerly a member of the Nation of Islam (NoI), Malcolm X publicly split with the organisation due to issues such as NoI leader Elijah Mohammed failing to approve action to respond to police attacks on Black Muslims in Los Angeles. Instead he founded his own mosque, as well as the secular Organization of Afro-American Unity. Already a target of both the police and FBI, NoI activist Louis Farrakhan also declared Malcolm to be "worthy of death".

On February 21, Malcolm stepped up to speak at the Audubon ballroom when he was shot. Mujahid Abdul Halim, a NoI member from New Jersey was apprehended fleeing the scene with a clip from one of the murder weapons, and admitted his participation in the killing. However, two other Black Muslims from the Harlem mosque were subsequently arrested and convicted of the crime: Khalil Islam and Muhamad Abdul Abdulaziz. This was despite a lack of evidence and the fact that they, and Halim, protested their innocence. In an effort to win the freedom for Islam and Aziz, Halim even filed affidavits naming his four co-conspirators – all from the New Jersey mosque. But prosecutors repeatedly refused to reopen the case.

A posthumous letter attributed to a former undercover New York police officer has just been released by his family, claiming that, at the direction of his bosses, he provoked two of Malcolm X's security guards into committing crimes shortly before the assassination so that they could be arrested and would be unavailable to protect him at the Audubon.

After the case gained new attention following the 2020 release of a Netflix documentary series on the murder, Manhattan district attorney Cyrus Vance Jr agreed to review the case, which is currently ongoing.


----------



## AmateurAgitator (Feb 23, 2021)

Today is Japanese American Internment Remembrance Day. On this day in 1942, President Franklin Delano Roosevelt issued Executive Order 9066 which authorized the federal government to incarcerate thousands of Japanese Americans. More than 110,000 American citizens and immigrants of Japanese ancestry were forced to leave behind their homes, businesses, and ways of life. Today let's remember internment survivors and all the communities that continue to have their civil liberties violated today.


----------



## AmateurAgitator (Feb 24, 2021)

On this day, 24 February 1909, Ethel MacDonald was born in Motherwell, Scotland. She later moved to Glasgow, worked in retail, and became an anarchist. When the Spanish civil war began in 1936 she travelled to revolutionary Barcelona and wrote for Scottish newspapers. She described how factories and villages were collectivised and how churches were turned into hospitals, libraries, and schools.

Her writings also contain interesting details that help us to picture life at the time: British volunteers tended to get drunk upon arriving in Spain “perhaps… because they are unaccustomed to wine”; men and women soldiers were indistinguishable in dress, except that “all the girls had beautifully permed hair and were strikingly made up.” She also achieved fame as the English language voice of the CNT union radio station. Her reports were listened to around the world and her Scottish accent proved especially popular in the US.

In May 1937 the Communist Party began to purge the anti-fascist movement of revolutionaries who didn’t agree with the Moscow line. In Barcelona, Ethel helped anarchists defend the barricades against CP troops, and later she smuggled food and letters to imprisoned comrades. She helped foreign anti-fascists escape Spain and the UK press dubbed her the “Scots Scarlet Pimpernel.” Soon she too was imprisoned by the CP, and upon her release she went into hiding, moving from house to house as she sheltered among Barcelona’s anarchists until she managed to get to France, and from there back to Glasgow.

After the outbreak of WWII she received call up papers for Women’s National Service. She returned them with the words “Get Lost.” When she received further papers, she wrote back, “Come and get me.” Authorities decided against chasing the Scots’ Scarlet Pimpernel. She remained active in the radical movement until her death.


----------



## AmateurAgitator (Feb 28, 2021)

On this day, 28 February 1969, Black Panthers held an armed demonstration at the capitol building in Olympia, Washington, in protest at state attempts to disarm them. Following large numbers of police murders of unarmed Black people, the revolutionary socialist Black Panther Party started armed self-defence patrols.

The Republican mayor of Seattle had already passed one such law in the city. So state legislators proposed a law which would make exhibiting "firearms or other weapons in a manner manifesting intent to intimidate others" a gross misdemeanour. Lawmakers rushed through the legislation, and upon hearing of Panther plans to demonstrate police panic, drafting in dozens of armed state troopers and mounting a machine gun on the roof.

The Panthers arrived in four cars, unloaded their weapons at the request of the police while one of them, Aaron Dixon entered the building and made a five minute statement to the legislature, while others held the doors shut, forcing the officials to listen. Despite the protest, governor Dan Evans signed the bill into law that day. The National Rifle Association, supposedly a 'gun rights advocacy group', did not support the Panthers, and elsewhere supported Republican legal moves to take their guns away.


----------



## Pickman's model (Mar 1, 2021)

brogdale said:


> 39 years ago today Bobby Sands died.
> 
> 3 days afterwards I found myself in the middle of this protest in Paris as it gathered at the British Embassy on rue du Faubourg Saint-Honoré:
> 
> View attachment 210893


40 years ago today, 1 march 1980, bobby sands embarked on hunger strike


----------



## AmateurAgitator (Mar 2, 2021)

On this day, 2 March 1921, a workers' uprising began in Labin, Croatia, by a multinational group of around 2,000 miners. The miners were rebelling against an Italian fascist attack on a union militant the previous day. A few days later, they declared a Republic, which lasted until April when 1,000 soldiers arrived and put down the revolt.



This is a short history of the rebellion: The Republic of Labin, 1921


----------



## GarveyLives (Mar 2, 2021)

New Cross Fire anniversary march organisers call for big turnout















(Source: Graham Turner via Getty Images)


*Lest We Forget 2 March 1981*​


----------



## AmateurAgitator (Mar 5, 2021)

On this day, 5 March 1871, the revolutionary socialist of Polish-Jewish descent Rosa Luxemburg was born. Splitting from the Social Democrats (SPD) when they supported World War I, she co-founded the Spartacus League, which later renamed itself the Communist Party of Germany (KPD), and enthusiastically took part in the German revolution of 1918.


Luxemburg was a critic both of the "ultra-centralism" of Russian Bolshevik Vladimir Lenin, and also of reformist socialists, declaring: “People who pronounce themselves in over of the method of legislative reform in place of and in contradistinction to the conquest of political power and social revolution, do not really choose a more tranquil, calmer and slower road to the same goal, but a different goal. Instead of taking a stand for the establishment of a new society they take a stand for surface modifications of the old society. . . . Our program becomes not the realization of socialism, but the reform of capitalism not the suppression of the system of wage labor, but the diminution of exploitation, that is, the suppression of the abuses of capitalism instead of the suppression of capitalism itself.”

Luxemburg and her colleague Karl Liebknecht were later murdered by the right-wing paramilitary Freikorps acting on behalf of the SPD in the wake of the failed Spartacist uprising of 1919.


----------



## AmateurAgitator (Mar 6, 2021)

On this day, 6 March 1913, Joe Hill's song "There is Power in a Union" first appeared in the Industrial Workers of the World union's Little Red Song Book.


Sung on picket lines and in working class protests around the country, it asks workers: "Would you have mansions of gold in the sky/and live in a shack, way in the back?/Would you have wings up in heaven to fly/And starve here with rags on your back?" And advises them: "There is power, there is power/In a band of workingmen,/When they stand hand in hand/That’s a power, that’s a power/That must rule in every land,/One Industrial Union Grand".

Hill was executed by the state of Utah in 1915 in what is widely regarded as a politically-motivated miscarriage of justice.


----------



## Pickman's model (Mar 6, 2021)

Count Cuckula said:


> On this day, 6 March 1913, Joe Hill's song "There is Power in a Union" first appeared in the Industrial Workers of the World union's Little Red Song Book.
> 
> 
> Sung on picket lines and in working class protests around the country, it asks workers: "Would you have mansions of gold in the sky/and live in a shack, way in the back?/Would you have wings up in heaven to fly/And starve here with rags on your back?" And advises them: "There is power, there is power/In a band of workingmen,/When they stand hand in hand/That’s a power, that’s a power/That must rule in every land,/One Industrial Union Grand".
> ...


----------



## Pickman's model (Mar 6, 2021)

1840 lord william russell murdered by his valet courvoisier
1859 death of alexander vom humboldt
1882 epping forest declared open to people for ever
1882 irish invincibles murder lord frederick cavendish and mr burke, phoenix park


----------



## AmateurAgitator (Mar 7, 2021)

On this day, 7 March 1942, Lucy Parsons, anarchist, co-founder of the revolutionary Industrial Workers of the World union and lifelong advocate for working people, the homeless, women, and African-Americans, died in a house fire.


Born into slavery in Virginia to an enslaved mother, Parsons later moved to Texas and became a famous revolutionary firebrand. Instead of voting for politicians, Parsons advocated direct action to change the world, advising workers: "Never be deceived that the rich will allow you to vote away their wealth."

As dangerous to the authorities in death as in life, after the fire the police confiscated all her papers and books. She was also the widow of Haymarket martyr Albert Parsons.


----------



## AmateurAgitator (Mar 8, 2021)

On this day, 8 March 1917, thousands of housewives and women workers in St Petersburg, Russia defied union leaders' appeals for calm and took to the streets against high prices and hunger, thus igniting the February revolution (so-called because of the different calendar in use in Russia at the time). The following day, 200,000 workers joined them by striking, shouting slogans against the tsar and the war. Some military units began to join the workers, and by 15 March, tsar Nicholas II was forced to abdicate.

On the same date the following year, women in Austria celebrated International Women's Day on this date for the first time as thousands took to the streets protesting against World War I. There is a popular myth that March 8 was chosen on the anniversary of an 1857 strike of women workers in New York, and a further stoppage on the same date in 1908, however this is incorrect.


----------



## AmateurAgitator (Mar 12, 2021)

On this day, 12 March 1912, Polish Jewish resistance activist Ala Gertner was born. While an enslaved labourer at a munitions factory under Nazi occupation, Gertner stole gunpowder which she smuggled to prisoners at Auschwitz Birkenau to build grenades. The resistance at the camp used these makeshift weapons, among others, to destroy Crematorium IV and kill several SS officers. Gertner and three other women were executed for their role in the uprising in 1945.


----------



## Pickman's model (Mar 12, 2021)

1862 george peabody presented £150,000 for dwellings for london poor
1868 attempt on duke of edinburgh in new south wales by o'farrell, a fenian
1878 explosion at union brook colliery, kearsley, bolton; 43 lives lost


----------



## GarveyLives (Mar 15, 2021)

*15 March 2011*:  David Victor Emmanuel (aka Smiley Culture) killed in police custody during a raid on his home.






*David Victor Emmanuel (aka Smiley Culture)  *
*
10 February 1963 - 15 March 2011
*
*Lest We Forget*​


----------



## AmateurAgitator (Mar 16, 2021)

On this day, 16 March 1921, the Red Army under the command of Leon Trotsky staged their bloody final assault on the workers and sailors of Kronstadt, after they revolted against the burgeoning Bolshevik dictatorship. The rebels, mostly dissident communists and socialists, protested against the suppression of strikes in Petrograd, and were calling for trade union freedom, free speech for workers and revolutionaries, freedom for socialist political prisoners and for the abolition of enhanced food rations to Party bureaucrats.


Trotsky had previously described the sailors as the "pride and glory of the revolution" due to their key role in the 1917 revolution. But when they rebelled against the new rulers Trotsky ordered they "shoot them like partridges".

Some have attempted to claim that the Kronstadt sailors in 1921 were mostly different individuals to those in 1917, however detailed research by individuals like Israel Getzler showed that the make-up of the garrison was overwhelmingly the same.


----------



## AmateurAgitator (Mar 18, 2021)

On this day, 18 March 1938, the German Nazi party introduced new gun laws. Right-wing US pro-gun advocates frequently claim that supposedly strict laws were introduced to disarm the population which then helped enable the Holocaust. But in reality the new legislation was a relaxation of the previous, stricter rules of the Weimar Republic in 1928, especially in terms of purchase, carrying and transfer of weapons. And they were much less restrictive than the previous 1919 German law which completely prohibited the possession of firearms.

A few months later, on November 11, 1938, Hitler imposed further regulations to confiscate weapons, including guns, as well as knives and batons, held by Jewish people. Although it is worth noting that the Weimar Republic already forbade "Gypsies" (Roma and Sinti people) from owning guns.
The 1928 law required a licence for buying or transferring any firearm or ammunition. The Nazi law abolished all regulation of rifles, shotguns and ammunition, and instead just required a licence for handguns. It also established exceptions, extending licences to children and enabling many more people to own guns without a licence, including hunters, government workers and Nazi party members.

So while it is true to state that the Nazis did disarm Jewish people, most claims from right-wingers about Hitler being an advocate of gun-control are false. Similar claims that these laws enabled the Holocaust to take place are also false, as the number of German Jews was far too small to have been able to resist the Nazi military might, even if they had all possessed guns. And most of those killed in the Holocaust were not even German Jews covered by 1938 law in any case.

And contrary to their stated objectives, the US National Rifle Association has previously supported gun-control laws in order to disarm Black Americans.


----------



## AmateurAgitator (Mar 18, 2021)

On this day, 18 March 1871, the Paris commune, one of the most significant early attempts at a working class uprising to create socialism, was established. The workers of Paris, joined by mutinous national guardsmen, seized the city and set about re-organising a society based on workers' councils. The communards were able to hold the city until late May when, upon retaking the city, troops massacred 30,000 workers in bloody revenge.


----------



## AmateurAgitator (Mar 21, 2021)

On this day, 21 March 1991, the abolition of the poll tax in the UK was announced, following a mass non-payment campaign and widespread rioting. The hated tax, introduced by Margaret Thatcher's Conservative government, charged the working class the same as the rich as there was a charge for every individual in a household. 

Despite the defeat of the working class movement in Britain in the 1980s, people up and down the country self-organised an unprecedented campaign which resulted in over 17 million people refusing to pay, with thousands of people clogging the country's court system. It was later replaced by the council tax, which charged rates based on house value.


----------



## AmateurAgitator (Mar 25, 2021)

On this day, 25 March 1939, the Nazis brought in a tougher new law forcibly conscripting all 10 to 18-year-olds into the Hitler Youth. But despite years spent trying to mould "national socialist" youths, thousands of working class young people formed gangs known as the "Edelweiss Pirates" to socialise and organise their own fun activities. 

They began to get into fights with Hitler Youth patrols and when the war started they conducted sabotage, slacked at work and began to help Jewish people, deserters and POWs. Some became partisans and launched armed attacks on Nazi officials. Some of them were executed, but many survived the war, where young workers slacking off continued to be a problem for the Allied occupiers.


----------



## AmateurAgitator (Mar 27, 2021)

On this day, on March 27, 1942, the French government of Vichy issued the decree of barbers, in which it required barbers to collect the cut hair and donate it to the war effort to make shoes and sweaters. Zazous rebels refused and let their hair grow out. Zazous were young anti-fascists who wore fancy suits, listened to jazz and swing music-which was mostly performed by black musicians-and fought fascists on the street. Police cornered them and fascist youth groups in Vichy chased them and cut their hair.


----------



## Spandex (Mar 27, 2021)

Count Cuckula said:


> On this day, on March 27, 1942, the French government of Vichy issued the decree of barbers, in which it required barbers to collect the cut hair and donate it to the war effort to make shoes and sweaters. Zazous rebels refused and let their hair grow out. Zazous were young anti-fascists who wore fancy suits, listened to jazz and swing music-which was mostly performed by black musicians-and fought fascists on the street. Police cornered them and fascist youth groups in Vichy chased them and cut their hair.
> 
> View attachment 260522


The Zazous were an interesting youth subculture. They defied the Nazi occupation in France by dropping out, hanging around jazz clubs, dressing cool and slacking off. When the Nazis required Jews to wear yellow stars they wore their own yellow stars with _Zazou_ written on it. Mainly aged 17 to 20 and quite middle class the Viche authorities hated them. The Viche press published loads of articles slating them and, like you say, fascists attacked them on the streets, driving the subculture underground. Ultimately when the Nazis imposed forced labour in France in 1942/43 the subculture died out, as healthy young people didn't want to draw attention to themselves.

The French Resistance hated them too, seeing their attitude to the war as apathetic and flippant.

Love this dude's look:


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## not a trot (Mar 27, 2021)

Spandex said:


> The Zazous were an interesting youth subculture. They defied the Nazi occupation in France by dropping out, hanging around jazz clubs, dressing cool and slacking off. When the Nazis required Jews to wear yellow stars they wore their own yellow stars with _Zazou_ written on it. Mainly aged 17 to 20 and quite middle class the Viche authorities hated them. The Viche press published loads of articles slating them and, like you say, fascists attacked them on the streets, driving the subculture underground. Ultimately when the Nazis imposed forced labour in France in 1942/43 the subculture died out, as healthy young people didn't want to draw attention to themselves.
> 
> The French Resistance hated them too, seeing their attitude to the war as apathetic and flippant.
> 
> Love this dude's look:



Is that a young Midge Ure ?


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## AmateurAgitator (Mar 30, 2021)

On this day, 30 March 1915, Francesc Sabaté Llopart (AKA El Quicko), anti-fascist resistance fighter, and the most tenacious of the anti-Franco guerrillas, was born in Hospitalet de Llobregat, Catalonia.


With the outbreak of the civil war in 1936, Sabaté joined the anarchist Young Eagles column and fought against General Francisco Franco's Nationalists on the Aragon front. After the defeat of the Republic, Sabaté was interned in a concentration camp in France, and later joined the French resistance against Nazi occupation.
Following the end of World War II he re-entered Spain and joined the growing underground resistance to the regime. Amongst his many legendary exploits he freed other imprisoned activists, robbed banks, assassinated fascist leaders and cheated death on many occasions.

After robbing the home of a wealthy Franco supporter, Manuel Garriga, Sabaté left a note which read: "We are not robbers, we are libertarian resistance fighters. What we have just taken will help in a small way to feed the orphaned and starving children of those anti-fascists who you and your kind have shot. We are people who have never and will never beg for what is ours. So long as we have the strength to do so we shall fight for the freedom of the Spanish working class. As for you, Garriga, although you are a murderer and a thief, we have spared you, because we as libertarians appreciate the value of human life, something which you never have, nor are likely to, understand."

Sabaté outlived nearly all of the other active resistance fighters, only eventually succumbing to the bullets of the Civil Guard in 1960.


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## AmateurAgitator (Mar 31, 2021)

On this day, 31 March 1990, the poll tax riots broke out in Trafalgar Square, London, after police attacked 200,000 people demonstrating against an extremely unpopular and highly regressive tax introduced by Margaret Thatcher's Conservative government.


Police launched a violent assault on peaceful demonstrators, including rapidly driving police vans through the crowd. But this backfired severely when the crowd defended itself, pushed back the police, then went on the offensive, destroying property and expropriating goods from stores (looting). South Africa House, the diplomatic outpost of the apartheid regime, was set on fire.

One participant recalled: "The most important thing for me was the way people were prepared to face the riot police. I’ve never seen anything like it. It was incredible to see people running in to pull others out when they were being arrested… The next thing that sticks in my mind was seeing the ordinary pigs in full flight down Whitehall, and the roar of the crowd chasing them… The noise was brilliant, the bravery of people on my side was enough to convince me that we are not so helpless after all."

Police arrested more than 300 people on the day, with around 150 subsequent arrests. Meanwhile leading left establishment figures denounced the rioters promised to "name names" and "root out the trouble-makers". But the riot helped spur more widespread opposition to the tax, introduced the following week, and was eventually defeated by a mass non-payment campaign.


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## AmateurAgitator (Apr 3, 2021)

On this day, 3 April 1948, a left-wing uprising began on the Korean island of Jeju.


Jeju had been largely self-governing following the end of World War II, when North and South Koreas were divided up between the USSR and USA following the defeat of Japan. However, Jeju islanders were angry with violent US-backed police and feared that planned elections organised by the UN in South Korea alone would reinforce the division between North and South.

They attacked police stations and right-wing paramilitaries, in particular targeting those who collaborated with the Japanese imperialists. The US military government sent troops to the island, and the US-backed South Korean authorities brutally suppressed the rebellion, massacring many thousands including women and children. When the uprising was finally crushed the following year up to 10% of the island's population were dead, and 70% of villages destroyed.

Subsequent US-backed dictatorships in South Korea banned any mention of the Jeju uprising, and speaking of it was punishable by beatings, torture and lengthy prison sentences.


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## Pickman's model (Apr 3, 2021)

1801: execution of bounty mutineers at portsmouth


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## A380 (Apr 4, 2021)

Pickman's model said:


> 1801: execution of bounty mutineers at portsmouth


Frankly deserved for inventing the world’s second worst chocolate bar.


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## AmateurAgitator (Apr 6, 2021)

On this day, 6 April 1871, rebel national guard troops of the 137th Battalion in the Paris commune seized the local guillotine, smashed it to pieces and burned it outside the town hall of the 11th district to the applause of a huge crowd of onlookers.


The government had recently created a new type of guillotine which was quicker and easier to transport. The district commune committee had voted to seize these "servile instruments of monarchist domination" and destroy them "once and forever… for the purification of the district and the consecration of our new freedom".

While some on the left glorify the guillotine, in fact it has mostly been used as a weapon against radicals and the powerless. For example while use of the guillotine is most famously remembered in terms of the execution of aristocrats during the French revolution, the new "revolutionary" government soon began using it against those on their left.

 The German Nazi government was also a big proponent of the guillotine, executing over 16,000 people with the device, including many resistance activists like Sophie and Hans Scholl. More recently it was used in places like French colonies in the Caribbean, in state socialist East Germany and in France itself, where its last use was against a Tunisian agricultural worker who was convicted of murder and was beheaded in 1977.


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## Pickman's model (Apr 7, 2021)




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## AmateurAgitator (Apr 11, 2021)

On this day, 11 April 1945, as US forces approached, the inmate resistance seized control of Buchenwald concentration camp in Germany. However, when the Allies took control of the concentration camps, according to the US Holocaust Memorial Museum some of those interned for homosexuality were not freed but were required to serve out the full term of the sentences they had received under the homophobic Nazi penal code.

Thousands of LGBT+ people were interned in concentration camps, most made to wear a pink triangle. Many of them were subjected to medical experiments, castrated, or murdered.

After “liberation,” the US army handbook for the occupation of Germany established that, while most Holocaust survivors should be released from concentration camps, “criminals with a prison sentence still to serve will be transferred to civil prisons.” Gay and bisexual men, and trans women had been convicted under paragraph 175 of the criminal code, which had been strengthened by the Nazis, and were therefore considered common criminals. Homosexuality was also against the law at that time in Allied countries, including the US, the UK, and the USSR.

One prisoner, Hermann R, who was detained at Landsberg Fortress, southwest of Dachau, joined liberation celebrations. But two weeks later, A US military commissioner told him: “Homosexual – that’s a crime. You’re staying here!”

US occupation authorities kept the Nazified paragraph 175 on the books, and in the first four years after the end of the war, around 1,500 men per year were arrested under it. Later, West Germany kept it as well and convicted over 50,000 men before it was finally revoked in 1969. East Germany on the other hand reverted to the pre-Nazi paragraph 175, and convicted some four thousand men before revoking it in 1968.

LGBT+ people were not recognised as victims of the Holocaust and had their pensions deducted for the time they spent interned in concentration camps, with most never receiving any compensation.


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## AmateurAgitator (Apr 12, 2021)

40th anniversary of the Brixton uprising today


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## A380 (Apr 12, 2021)

12 April 1961 Yuri Gagarin first person in space.


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## AmateurAgitator (Apr 13, 2021)

On this day, 13 April 1919, the Jallianwala Bagh massacre took place in Amritsar, India, when British troops opened fire on a crowd of predominantly Sikh pilgrims, murdering up to 1000 or more people and injuring many more. As well as pilgrims, there were large numbers of Muslims and Hindus, many of whom were farmers, traders and merchants attending a horse and cattle fair. The youngest victim was just six weeks old. 

The killings were not reported in Britain until December that year, and no one charged with any offence. The incident sparked widespread outrage and led to the non-cooperation movement which began the following year. 

In 1940 an Indian independence activist who was wounded in the massacre, Udnam Singh, assassinated the Lieutenant Governor who was responsible, and was subsequently executed.


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## AmateurAgitator (Apr 13, 2021)

On this day, 13 April 1985, Danuta Danielsson, a woman of Polish-Jewish origin whose mother had been put in a concentration camp during the Second World War, hit a neo-nazi of the now defunct Nordic Reich Party on the head with her handbag in Växjö, Sweden. The fascists were subsequently chased out of town.


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## AmateurAgitator (Apr 14, 2021)

On this day, 14 April 1919 in Limerick, Ireland, a general strike was declared in protest against the declaration by the British military of a ‘special military area’ in the region, which led to the establishment of a soviet (workers' council).


The military crackdown was in response to an attempt to an attempted jailbreak of trade unionist and Irish Republican Army volunteer Robert J Byrne, which ended with the death of Byrne as well as two police constables. The military zone prevented freedom of movement for everyone other than people issued special permits by the British Army and the Royal Irish Constabulary – including many workers who needed to enter in order to go to work.

A strike began in protest at the move by workers at the condensed milk factory in Lansdowne on Saturday, April 12, and that evening workers gathered and decided to call for a general strike beginning at 5 AM on Monday, April 14. 15,000 walked out and by the following day everything was shut down except for banks, public services, and enterprises given permits by the strike committee which had been established.

The workers then took control of the town, closing down the pubs, maintaining order, and arranging for the distribution of food which was brought in from around Ireland and from trade unions in Britain. The strike committee set up its own newspaper and then printed its own money, while the British troop presence in the area increased.
On April 27, with Irish capitalists and British trade union leaders withdrawing their support for the soviet, it was declared over with the promise that the special military designation would be withdrawn seven days later, which it was.




The Bruree soviet mills. The sign says: Bruree Worker's Soviet Mills -  We Make Bread Not Profits.


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## AmateurAgitator (Apr 15, 2021)

On this day, 15 April 1989, the Hillsborough disaster took place during an FA Cup semi-final between Liverpool and Nottingham Forest when a crush occurred after police directed fans into overcrowded areas, resulting in 96 dead and over 700 injured.


Though it was caused by police negligence and a ground which did not adequately meet health and safety standards, the police and the Conservative government, with help from the mainstream media, concocted an entirely false story blaming working class Liverpool fans for the disaster. The right-wing tabloid Sun newspaper falsely claimed that Liverpool fans robbed the dead, urinated on police and attacked officers who were trying to save lives.

After years of campaigning by the families of the victims, eventually in 2012 the truth finally came to light, with the Hillsborough Independent Panel determining that the primary cause of the disaster was a "lack of police control". They also revealed that police had doctored 164 witness statements, that Conservative MP Irvine Patnick had passed lies from the police to the press. The police also went to extreme lengths in their attempts shift responsibility to the victims, even testing the blood of dead children for alcohol to try to blame them for their own deaths.

New inquests held in 2016 also found that the crush was caused by police, exacerbated by stadium defects. They determined that the senior police officer responsible breached his duty of care and that this amounted to gross negligence. They determined that the 96 victims were unlawfully killed.

To this day, many people in Liverpool still boycott The Sun.


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## AmateurAgitator (Apr 19, 2021)

From the facebook page of Atilla the Stockbroker:

Today is the anniversary of the Jewish Warsaw Ghetto Uprising of 1943 against fascist genocide, one of the most heroic ‘last stands’ in the history of humanity, led by Marek Edelman.

I honour the memory of Marek Edelman and of his fellow ghetto fighters, Bundists, Communists, Labour Zionists and anarchists, divided politically but united in life, and mostly in death, against fascism.

It is a tragedy that right wing Revisionism, in the modern day shape of Likud and Netanyahu, now claim control over the narrative of a history in which their hateful ideas had no place.


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## AmateurAgitator (Apr 19, 2021)

From the Working Class History page:


On this day, 19 April 1943, the Warsaw ghetto uprising broke out in earnest when Jewish people fought back against Nazi attempts to deport them to the Treblinka extermination camp.

2000 German troops and police backed up with tanks entered the ghetto with the intention of removing the surviving residents, and were met by around 750 resistance fighters with a small number of smuggled small arms and some home-made Molotov cocktails. They forced the Germans to retreat and come back with reinforcements. After several days of failure to overcome the rebels, the Germans began burning down the entire ghetto one building at a time.

Despite this, the resistance managed to hold out against the onslaught for 27 days, killing around 300 Germans. While some fighters managed to escape through the sewers, 7000 Jewish people were killed and another 7000 eventually deported to Treblinka.



Pictured: Warsaw ghetto resistance fighters including Malka Zdrojewicz, right, who survived the death camps.


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## AmateurAgitator (Apr 22, 2021)

On this day, 22 April 1993, Stephen Lawrence, a Black British teenager, was murdered in a racist attack while he waited for a bus in Eltham, London. Rather than devote adequate resources to finding the killers, instead the London Metropolitan Police infiltrated the Lawrence family's campaign for justice in order to find ways to smear and discredit the family. However, ultimately years of campaigning forced the government to acknowledge the institutional racism of the police force, and two of the killers were eventually convicted in 2012.


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## AmateurAgitator (Apr 25, 2021)

On this day, 25 April 1945, Milan and Turin were liberated from fascism following a working class uprising and general strike. Though other towns and cities had been liberated both before and afterwards, it was 25 April which would become immortalised in Italy's annual Liberation Day celebration.


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## AmateurAgitator (Apr 25, 2021)

On this day, 25 April 1974, Portugal’s right-wing Estado Novo dictatorship was overthrown by a military coup by low ranking army officers who had formed the Movement of the Armed Forces (MFA). When officers loyal to the dictatorship ordered the troops to open fire, a mutiny by rank-and-file soldiers effectively prevented a counter-revolution. The events would become known as the Carnation Revolution, as few shots were fired and people adorned troops with red and white carnations which were in season and being widely sold on the streets at the time.


The collapse of the regime was then followed by a working class uprising which lasted over 18 months. Urban workers took over their workplaces and rural workers took over land and farmed it collectively.

The key factor in the unpopularity of the regime was the long-running colonial war against independence movements in Angola, Mozambique, Guinea Bissau, Cape Verde, and São Tomé and Principe which had been raging since anti-colonial uprisings in the early 1960s. After the revolution these former colonies all soon achieved independence.


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## Badgers (Apr 26, 2021)




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## AmateurAgitator (Apr 26, 2021)

On this day, 26 April 1982, the trial of the Bradford 12 began at Leeds Crown Court. The 12 were activists of the United Black Youth League, arrested on conspiracy charges for preparing to defend their community from fascists by making Molotov cocktails.


The trial lasted nine weeks with the defence taking the surprising decision to put forward the case that because the police had failed to defend Asian and Afro-Caribbean people in Britain from racist attacks, then those communities had the right to take action in self-defence. In a landmark verdict, the 12 were all acquitted.


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## The39thStep (Apr 26, 2021)

Count Cuckula said:


> On this day, 25 April 1974, Portugal’s right-wing Estado Novo dictatorship was overthrown by a military coup by low ranking army officers who had formed the Movement of the Armed Forces (MFA). When officers loyal to the dictatorship ordered the troops to open fire, a mutiny by rank-and-file soldiers effectively prevented a counter-revolution. The events would become known as the Carnation Revolution, as few shots were fired and people adorned troops with red and white carnations which were in season and being widely sold on the streets at the time.
> 
> 
> The collapse of the regime was then followed by a working class uprising which lasted over 18 months. Urban workers took over their workplaces and rural workers took over land and farmed it collectively.
> ...


Demo form yesterday


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## AmateurAgitator (Apr 26, 2021)

On this day, 26 April 1937, the ancient Basque town of Guernica was bombed and largely obliterated by the German and Italian air forces at the behest of the Spanish nationalists during the civil war and revolution. A third of Guernica’s 5,000 inhabitants were killed or wounded. It was one of the earliest examples of mass aerial bombardment of civilians in a conflict, and was famously depicted in Picasso’s painting, Guernica, a copy of which now hangs by the UN Security Council. Possibly the world’s most famous anti-war artwork, it was covered by officials when Colin Powell was due to speak about the Iraq war in 2003.


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## weltweit (Apr 26, 2021)

Count Cuckula said:


> .. it was covered by officials when Colin Powell was due to speak about the Iraq war in 2003.


Why?


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## AmateurAgitator (Apr 26, 2021)

weltweit said:


> Why?


So as not to offend him or 'show him up'. It's an anti-war piece of art and he has always been a war-hawk who was said to be involved in the My Lai massacre.

Edit: Having looked at this after years of hearing about it, it appears Powell was infact involved in the whitewashing of atleast one investigation into the My Lai massacre, not involved in the massacre itself.

At the time of the massacre though, Powell was an Army Major serving as an assistant chief of staff of operations for the American Division.


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## weltweit (Apr 26, 2021)

Count Cuckula said:


> So as not to offend him or 'show him up'. It's an anti-war piece of art and he was a war-hawk who was said to be involved in the My Lai massacre in Vietnam.


Lunacy, should have made another and displayed them both for him!


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## Bahnhof Strasse (Apr 28, 2021)

On this day in 2017 brogdale started this thread.


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## Sprocket. (Apr 28, 2021)

On this day in 1945, Walter Audisio an Italian partisan leader, allegedly shot Benito Mussolini and his mistress, Claretta Petacci.  After the war, Audisio was elected to the Italian parliament as a member of the Communist Party where he served for twenty years.

Walter Audisio. (1909-1973)


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## platinumsage (Apr 28, 2021)

It's also 1954 years since Saint Aphrodisius retrieved his decapitated head from a well and walked through the city of Béziers, stepping on snails without crushing them, to bury himself in a cave.


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## Bahnhof Strasse (Apr 28, 2021)

platinumsage said:


> It's also 1954 years since Saint Aphrodisius retrieved his decapitated head from a well and walked through the city of Béziers, stepping on snails without crushing them, to bury himself in a cave.
> 
> View attachment 265336




Mushrooms are great fun.


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## AmateurAgitator (Apr 28, 2021)

On this day, 28 April 1945, Italy’s fascist dictator, Benito Mussolini, was executed by anti-fascist partisans in the village of Giulino de Mezzegra, northern Italy.
After his reign of terror was deposed in 1943, Mussolini was broken from captivity by Nazi troops, and put in charge of a puppet government in northern Italy, which was occupied by Germany.


As more of Italy was liberated by partisan and Allied forces, he tried to escape to Switzerland disguised in a German uniform. But he was spotted by a resistance member who called out “We’ve got Big-Head!”

Mussolini was executed near Lake Como alongside a number of other senior fascists and his mistress. Their bodies were then taken to Milan and dumped in Piazzale Loreto in the early hours of the following morning, where they were soon hung up from the frame of a petrol station.

The previous year, the Milan Gestapo had publicly executed 15 Italian partisans in that square and hung their bodies there for several days. Subsequently, Mussolini was reported to have said “for the blood of Piazzale Loreto, we shall pay dearly.”
*


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## Bahnhof Strasse (Apr 28, 2021)

On this in 1789 Fletcher Christian led a mutiny on HMS Bounty.


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## AmateurAgitator (Apr 29, 2021)

On this day, 29 April 1932, Korean anti-colonial activist Yun Bong-gil hurled a bomb into the Japanese emperor's birthday celebrations in Shanghai, killing several leading military and civil officials.


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## Argonia (Apr 30, 2021)

30th April 1945: Hitler shot himself


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## Bahnhof Strasse (May 1, 2021)

29 years ago this weekend, the best free party ever took place...




Old bill working as parking attendants, nutter with a watering can full of rhubarb & custards selling his wares right in front of the coppers, EPIC  


Happy Beltane folks.


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## platinumsage (May 1, 2021)

Bahnhof Strasse said:


> 29 years ago this weekend, the best free party ever took place...
> 
> View attachment 265863View attachment 265864View attachment 265865
> 
> ...



And if you want to feel old, someone who was there would have been able to say "29 years ago this weekend, the Beatles first reached number one in the charts"


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## A380 (May 1, 2021)




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## flypanam (May 3, 2021)

3rd May 1921 Ireland was partitioned.


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## platinumsage (May 4, 2021)

125 years since the first edition of the Daily Mail. Taking up more space on the front page than any other subject were a series of notices with extensive detail on the formation of The Cycle Manufacturer's Tube Company Limited, which was liquidated three years later and whose assets were acquired by the Coventry Tube and Metal Company.


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## AmateurAgitator (May 10, 2021)

On this day, 10 May 1968, the “night of the barricades” took place in Paris as the May 68 rebellion escalated. Thousands of high school and university students took to the streets that evening, occupied the Latin Quarter and began barricading the streets with overturned cars, billboards, repurposed construction site materials and paving stones.

Le Monde newspaper reported that: "Sixty barricades will be put up in this way and be continually fortified. Many of them were higher than two meters tall. A veritable frenzy takes hold of the demonstrators in their hunt for materials that can reinforce the barricades they are building: cars, wood beams, rolls of wire, breeze blocks, scaffolding. Construction sites are pillaged. Helmets are taken, work vests; bulldozers are started up. There are soon anthills piling up, built of all that can be dragged along… There’s a sort of laborious, almost meticulous exaltation. A contagious enthusiasm, almost a joy."


Meanwhile, local residents fed the demonstrators, passing them food into the streets. At 2:15 AM on May 11, riot police moved in to try to clear out the protesters with tear gas and truncheons. Protesters singing the "Marseillaise" and the "Internationale" fought back with paving stones, while locals poured water from their windows onto the students to help them deal with the teargas. Police responded by firing tear gas into people's apartments.

By the early hours of the morning, police had forced most of the demonstrators to retreat. But their violence provoked widespread sympathy for the students, and the protests continued to grow, culminating in a general strike with factory occupations by millions of workers.


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## Orang Utan (May 10, 2021)

Count Cuckula said:


> On this day, 10 May 1968, the “night of the barricades” took place in Paris as the May 68 rebellion escalated. Thousands of high school and university students took to the streets that evening, occupied the Latin Quarter and began barricading the streets with overturned cars, billboards, repurposed construction site materials and paving stones.
> 
> Le Monde newspaper reported that: "Sixty barricades will be put up in this way and be continually fortified. Many of them were higher than two meters tall. A veritable frenzy takes hold of the demonstrators in their hunt for materials that can reinforce the barricades they are building: cars, wood beams, rolls of wire, breeze blocks, scaffolding. Construction sites are pillaged. Helmets are taken, work vests; bulldozers are started up. There are soon anthills piling up, built of all that can be dragged along… There’s a sort of laborious, almost meticulous exaltation. A contagious enthusiasm, almost a joy."
> 
> ...


My dad was a student in Paris then. Got arrested twice. They coshed him the second time and took him to hospital to get stitched up and the student doctor who treated let him out of a window!


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## brogdale (May 10, 2021)

Count Cuckula said:


> On this day, 10 May 1968, the “night of the barricades” took place in Paris as the May 68 rebellion escalated. Thousands of high school and university students took to the streets that evening, occupied the Latin Quarter and began barricading the streets with overturned cars, billboards, repurposed construction site materials and paving stones.
> 
> Le Monde newspaper reported that: "Sixty barricades will be put up in this way and be continually fortified. Many of them were higher than two meters tall. A veritable frenzy takes hold of the demonstrators in their hunt for materials that can reinforce the barricades they are building: cars, wood beams, rolls of wire, breeze blocks, scaffolding. Construction sites are pillaged. Helmets are taken, work vests; bulldozers are started up. There are soon anthills piling up, built of all that can be dragged along… There’s a sort of laborious, almost meticulous exaltation. A contagious enthusiasm, almost a joy."
> 
> ...


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## GarveyLives (May 11, 2021)

(Source: as stated in image)

*On 11 May 1981, Robert Nesta ("Bob") Marley died of cancer.*​


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## AmateurAgitator (May 12, 2021)

On this day, 12 May 1940, 20-year-old Austrian Jewish Edinburgh University student Edgar Lion was arrested by British police. His friends wouldn't see him or hear from him for years. Lion was taken to a police station, then shipped to the Isle of Man alongside thousands of other Jewish detainees where they were locked up in hotels surrounded by barbed wire. He was then taken to a dockyard and told to choose between two ships. He chose the one on the left, and so was taken to Canada – the other would end up in Australia.

In Canada, Lion was then interned alongside 2,300 other Jewish refugees in internment camps alongside German Nazis who had also been interned. Here the refugees were forced to perform harsh and boring physical labour for almost no pay: in Lion's camp, Sherbrooke, detainees could choose to make fishing nets or socks. The refugees were held in camps in appalling and unsafe conditions for nearly three years.



Learn more about struggles of Jewish people in Britain at this time in our podcast episodes 35-37 about the anti-fascist 43 Group: https://workingclasshistory.com/.../17/e35-37-the-43-group/


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## AmateurAgitator (May 13, 2021)

On this day, 13 May 1968, up to 10 million workers began a general strike in France in the May 68 rebellion, as hundreds of thousands took to the streets in Paris following violent student riots. While the rebellion did not overthrow capitalism, which was the aim of a number of participants, it did result in many significant improvements to pay and working conditions.


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## marty21 (May 13, 2021)

A380 said:


> View attachment 265867


Interrupted the snooker


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## GarveyLives (May 13, 2021)

(Source: Archival footage from PBS documentary 'Let the Fire Burn')​
Bones of Black children killed in police bombing used in Ivy League anthropology course

Philadelphia incinerated remains of police bombing victims _without telling families_


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## AmateurAgitator (May 14, 2021)

On this day, 14 May 1938, the players of the England football team raised their arms to give the Nazi "Heil Hitler" salute before a match in Berlin. They had been instructed to do so directly by the British Foreign Office. Reportedly the players at first refused, until the British ambassador and Football Association secretary intervened and ordered them to do so. 

At the time the British government had signed an agreement with Hitler permitting his annexation of parts of Czechoslovakia, and much of the British ruling class supported the dictatorships of Hitler, Mussolini and Franco as bulwarks against communism. According to his biographer one of the players, Stan Cullis, would not perform the salute and was dropped from the team for that match as a result.


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## AmateurAgitator (May 14, 2021)

On this day, 14th May 1940, 81 years ago the most dangerous woman in America died, a radical fighter, Red Emma, anarcho-communist, true feminist, tireless speaker, great writer, persecuted by all, the great Emma Goldman.

Emma Goldman, was a legendary anarchist and defender of women's rights and sexual freedom, died in Toronto, Canada, at the age of 70. Born into a Jewish family in Lithuania, then part of the Russian Empire, she emigrated to the USA, where she became known as "Red Emma".

An electrifying public speaker and extremely competent propagandist, she was arrested countless times for her activism and described by FBI Director J. Edgar Hoover as "the most dangerous woman in America." In the 1890s she helped run an ice cream parlor with her partner Alexander Berkman, who later attempted to assassinate an industrial businessman who had had striking workers killed.

When Berkman was incarcerated, Goldman helped organize a daring jailbreak attempt, digging a tunnel into the prison from a nearby house, although it was unsuccessful. She was eventually deported from the United States for her activities to Russia, where she joined the revolution, although she became critical of the Bolshevik state when they began to suppress strikes and workers' protests.

She later traveled to Spain to help in the fight against fascism during the Spanish civil war and remained active until the end.


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## AmateurAgitator (May 18, 2021)

On this day, 18 May 1980, workers and students in Gwangju, South Korea, rose up against their brutal US-backed dictator, Chun Doo-hwan.

Peaceful protesters were fired upon, with many shot and others beaten and stabbed to death by paratroopers. This sparked an uprising across the city, as local residents raided local armouries and police stations, seized weapons and eventually succeeded in driving out government troops.

Workers and locals then took control of the city, running it collectively for several days, until paratroopers invaded once more and bloodily suppressed the rebellion, killing hundreds.

Though unsuccessful in meeting its immediate goals, the uprising contributed to the end of decades of dictatorship late in the 1980s.

We spoke with participants in the rebellion for our podcast which is coming soon. So subscribe today on your favourite podcast app or at https://workingclasshistory.com/podcast to ensure you don't miss it.

Pictured: Gwangju residents and citizens' militia during the uprising.


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## MrSki (May 18, 2021)

Same day as Ian Curtis died.


----------



## brogdale (May 18, 2021)

Count Cuckula said:


> On this day, 18 May 1980, workers and students in Gwangju, South Korea, rose up against their brutal US-backed dictator, Chun Doo-hwan.
> 
> Peaceful protesters were fired upon, with many shot and others beaten and stabbed to death by paratroopers. This sparked an uprising across the city, as local residents raided local armouries and police stations, seized weapons and eventually succeeded in driving out government troops.
> 
> ...


For anyone who's not see it:
A Taxi Driver - Wikipedia


----------



## A380 (May 18, 2021)

18 May Helen Sherman became The first British person in space.


----------



## AmateurAgitator (May 19, 2021)

On this day, 19 May 1925, El-Hajj Malik El-Shabazz, better known as Malcolm X, was born in Omaha, Nebraska. The son of a supporter of Marcus Garvey and local leader of the Universal Negro Improvement Association, he would become one of the most influential advocates of equal rights as well as one of the harshest critics of white supremacy in the United States before his assassination in 1965.

In particular his advocacy of self defence for Black people shocked the establishment:

"Every time you pick up your newspaper, you see that I'm advocating violence. I have never advocated any violence. I've only said that Black people who are the victims of organised violence perpetrated upon us, we should defend ourselves… So, we only mean vigorous action in self-defence and that vigorous action we feel we're justified in initiating by any means necessary. The press call us racist and people who are 'violent in reverse.'… They make you think that if you try to stop the Klan from lynching you, you're practising 'violence in reverse.'"

Originally a member of the Nation of Islam, El-Shabazz later left the group and founded the secular Organization of Afro-American Unity. He increasingly came to reject capitalism as inherently linked to racism, declaring in 1964: "You can't have capitalism without racism."

Just three days before his murder he delivered a speech stating:

"We are living in an era of revolution, and the revolt of the American Negro is part of the rebellion against the oppression and colonialism which has characterised this era… it is incorrect to classify the revolt of the Negro as simply a racial conflict of Black against white, or as a purely American problem. Rather, we are today seeing a global rebellion of the oppressed against the oppressor, the exploited against the exploiter."


----------



## spitfire (May 20, 2021)

This is quite amusing, bit of a slow burner but On This Day...


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## AmateurAgitator (May 24, 2021)

On this day, 24 May 1988, the homophobic 'Section 28' passed into law in the UK under the Conservative government of Margaret Thatcher.

Section 28 was introduced as an amendment to the Local Government Act of 1988. It was supported by the right-wing press, especially the Daily Mail and Telegraph, and reactionary religious groups like parts of the Church of England, the Roman Catholic Church and the Muslim Council of Britain. It stated that local authorities "shall not intentionally promote homosexuality or publish material with the intention of promoting homosexuality" or "promote the teaching in any maintained school of the acceptability of homosexuality as a pretended family relationship".

The legislation arose at a time when AIDS was on the radar and there was media panic about the 'loony left' councils "indoctrinating" (educating) children with information about homosexuality in schools. It led to a spring in gay activism in Britain, and a comics anthology written by Alan Moore and others was also published in opposition to it - AARGH! Artists Against Rampant Government Homophobia.

Section 28 was eventually repealed in 2003, despite the opposition of later Conservative leaders like David Cameron and Theresa May who tried to keep the law on the books.


----------



## Badgers (May 24, 2021)




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## GarveyLives (May 25, 2021)

*On 25 May 2020 ...*










*What Minneapolis Police said happened*


















*What the entire world saw happen*​


----------



## AmateurAgitator (May 25, 2021)

On this day, 25 May 1978, police in Aotearoa/New Zealand attacked a land occupation by Māori people at Bastion Point, near Auckland, which was demanding the return of the stolen land. The Ōrākei Māori Action Committee had been occupying the land for 506 days before police moved in to evict them, arresting 222 people and demolishing buildings. However, protests continued, and in 1988 the government agreed to return the land to the Ngāti Whātua people.


----------



## BillRiver (May 25, 2021)

RIP George Floyd.

George Floyd’s Brother Can’t Mourn. He’s Too Busy Fighting.


----------



## AmateurAgitator (May 29, 2021)

From Derry anarchists (facebook):

On May 29, 1830, Louise Michel was born in France, one of the most emblematic figures of anarchism, possibly on a par with references such as Bakunin, Malatesta and Teresa Claramunt. A teacher by vocation, Louise was a self-sacrificing feminist with criticisms and proposals that were advanced for the moment.

Her commitment to socialism and freedom will lead her to be part of the armed defense of the Paris Commune in 1871, leading the 61st Montmartre women's battalion, in addition to establishing the defense of the Clamart and Neouilly barricades, among others.

After the defeat in the Commune, she was imprisoned in the French colony of New Caledonia, where she became an anarchist and immediately collaborated with the independence movement.

Once liberated in France, together with Sebastian Faure, she promoted the newspaper Le Libertaire, in addition to re-engaging fully with the strike movements and the workers' struggle. She died in 1905 at the age of 74, leaving behind a whole life dedicated to the struggle for socialism, freedom and the emancipation of women. An inspiration to all anarchist thinking to this very day.


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## AmateurAgitator (May 29, 2021)

From Working Class History:

On this day, 29 May 1830, Louise Michel, Paris communard, teacher, anarchist and French national hero at the time, was born. She led an absolutely fascinating life.

Forced to hand herself in following the Paris commune when authorities threatened to murder her mother, she was charged with trying to overthrow the government, encouraging citizens to arm themselves, possession and use of weapons, wearing a military uniform, planning to assassinate hostages and more, and was sentenced to life time deportation to the prison colony of New Caledonia. There she supported the anti-colonial uprising of the Indigenous Kanak people, and returned when the communards were pardoned nearly seven years later.

She was subsequently jailed repeatedly and survived an assassination attempt when she was shot in the head.

This is a short biography: https://libcom.org/history/articles/1830-louise-michel


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## AmateurAgitator (May 30, 2021)

On this day, 30 May 1814, Mikhail Bakunin, Russian revolutionary and founder of collectivist anarchism was born. Born in Tsarist Russia, Bakunin developed a burning hatred of injustice. He left the army and threw himself into the radical movement, playing a leading role in the 1848 insurrection in Dresden. He was deported from France, arrested and sentenced to death in Germany, extradited and sentenced to death in Austria, extradited and jailed in Russia then exiled to Siberia, from where he escaped. 

Although sometimes flawed, his experiences led him to develop the ideas which formed the basis of the modern anarchist movement in the last decade of his life.

This is a short account of his incredible life: https://libcom.org/history/bakunin-mikhail-1814-1876


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## AmateurAgitator (Jun 1, 2021)

On this day, 1 June 1985, British police brutally attacked people heading to Stonehenge in the "Battle of the Beanfield". Police smashed the windows of vehicles the travellers and others were using, dragged people out through the broken glass, beating them and breaking teeth, glasses and bones. They arrested 420 people, the biggest mass arrest of civilians in hundreds of years, systematically looted, smashed and burned travellers' homes and 7 dogs were killed by the RSPCA. Authorities at the time were determined to destroy Britain's traveller communities.

This is a short account of what happened: https://libcom.org/history/1985-battle-beanfield


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## AmateurAgitator (Jun 4, 2021)

On this day, 4 June 1950, the 43 Group of militant anti-fascist Jewish ex-servicemen and women voted to disband itself at an extraordinary general meeting in London, England. The group had been formed four years prior by Jewish people who had fought in the British Army against the Nazis in World War II, who had seen the horrors of the concentration camps, and who returned home to see fascists organising openly on UK streets. They resolved to continue their fight against fascism, racism and anti-Semitism by any means necessary.

The group included people like decorated war hero Gerry Flamberg, apprentice hairdresser Vidal Sassoon, gay former officer Harry Bidney and women like Doris Kaye, who infiltrated fascist groups, and Julie Sloggan, who was one of its most ardent street fighters. They disrupted and broke up fascist meetings, usually after breaking through the fascists' police guard, and harassed fascist aristocrat Oswald Mosley and his followers in towns and cities up and down the country. 

Eventually Mosley went into exile, and fascist organising dwindled to such a level that the 43 Group dissolved itself. Although veterans of the group would throw themselves back into the movement when Mosley attempted a comeback in the 1960s.

Learn more about the 43 Group in our podcast episodes 35-37, with a former member: https://workingclasshistory.com/.../17/e35-37-the-43-group/


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## AmateurAgitator (Jun 15, 2021)

On this day, 15 June 1970, one of the biggest strikes in Turkish history took place after the government introduced two laws which made it more difficult for workers to change unions, in order to keep workers in the moderate Türk-İş union federation rather than joining the more militant DİSK federation. Up to 150,000 workers in Istanbul walked out, joined by others in Ankara, Izmir, Izmit and elsewhere. 

Police and soldiers attacked the workers, killing at least four workers, including Abdurrahman Bozkurt, Yaşar Yıldırım, Mehmet Gıdak and Mustafa Baylan and injuring nearly 200. The government then enacted martial law for three months, and thousands of workers were sacked, but resistance continued and in 1972 the new laws were annulled.


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## A380 (Jun 16, 2021)

And again. 16 June 1963 Valentina Tereshkova became the first woman in space.


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## AmateurAgitator (Jun 16, 2021)

On this day, 16 June 1531, English king Henry VIII modified the vagrancy laws he brought in the previous year, which were key in creating the working class. People kicked off communal land who were not in wage labour were designated as vagabonds, and on their first offence were to be whipped, then on the second whipped with half an ear sliced off and upon a third offence they were to be executed. This and similar laws enacted across Europe, backed up by intense state violence, created a class of people forced to sell their labour to survive: the working class.

Karl Marx described these legal mechanisms in volume 1 of his work, Capital: "Thus were the agricultural people, first forcibly expropriated from the soil, driven from their homes, turned into vagabonds, and then whipped, branded, tortured by laws grotesquely terrible, into the discipline necessary for the wage system."
This expropriation was extended across the globe by violent colonialism.

Rather than being a natural state of affairs as it is often portrayed, the creation of the working class was fiercely resisted for hundreds of years, and indeed still is to this day in some areas.


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## GarveyLives (Jun 16, 2021)

GarveyLives said:


> *16 June 1976: Student Mbuyisa Makhubo carries fatally injured Hector Pieterson after he was shot by South African troops during the 1976 Soweto uprising, during which African children - several hundred of them, according to some estimates - were massacred by the white supremacist government in South Africa.*







*Lest We Forget*​


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## AmateurAgitator (Jun 20, 2021)

On this day, 20 June 1905, the King of Sweden publicly and formally ended plans to invade the recently independent Norway. The announcement was prompted by the threat of a nationwide general strike by Swedish unions if mobilisation for war went ahead.

Find out more here: https://libcom.org/.../1905-swedish-workers-threaten...

Pictured: trams idled during a general strike in Sweden, 1909


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## AmateurAgitator (Jun 20, 2021)

Rafael Vicente, also known as "Subcomandante Marcos", a Mexican insurgent, former military leader, and spokesman for the Zapatista Army of National Liberation (EZLN) was born on this day in 1957.​


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## AmateurAgitator (Jun 20, 2021)

On this day, 20 June 1967, boxing legend Muhammad Ali was convicted for refusing the draft for the Vietnam war in Houston, Texas. Ali had been a vocal opponent of the US war, saying “Why should they ask me to put on a uniform and go 10,000 miles from home and drop bombs and bullets on brown people in Vietnam while so-called Negro people in Louisville are treated like dogs?”

To try to quell the escalating resistance to the war, Ali was given the maximum sentence of five years imprisonment and a $10,000 fine. But their efforts were unsuccessful, and the anti-war movement continued to grow. Despite the Nation of Islam beginning to distance themselves from Ali, demonstrations supporting him took place around the world, from Egypt to Guyana to London to Ghana. Four years later his conviction was overturned by the Supreme Court.

Ali had no regrets: "I wasn’t trying to be a leader. I just wanted to be free. And I made a stand all people, not just Black people, should have thought about making, because it wasn’t just Black people being drafted. The government had a system where the rich man’s son went to college, and the poor man’s son went to war. Then, after the rich man’s son got out of college, he did other things to keep him out of the Army until he was too old to be drafted."

Learn more about the movement against the Vietnam war in our podcast episodes 43-46. Find it wherever you get your podcasts or on our website: https://workingclasshistory.com/.../e43-46-the-movement.../


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## GarveyLives (Jun 22, 2021)

(Source:  as stated in image)

*On 22 June 1948, 1,027 passengers, the overwhelming majority of whom were from the Caribbean, disembarked 
from HMT Empire Windrush at Tilbury Docks, Essex.*​


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## A380 (Jun 24, 2021)

Bamber Lancashire riot/mutiny 

When black US troops got tired of white US teooos trying to apply Jim Crow in the UK.









						Black troops were welcome in Britain, but Jim Crow wasn't: the race riot of one night in June 1943
					

When black American troops stationed in an English town faced off against white US Army military police.




					theconversation.com


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## Argonia (Jul 4, 2021)

′′ Butcher of Lyon ": Sadistic nazi criminal Klaus Barbie was sentenced to life imprisonment 34 years ago today


----------



## A380 (Jul 7, 2021)




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## Sprocket. (Jul 7, 2021)

Sadly also 33 years ago as of 10pm last night the Piper Alpha disaster occurred. Terrible loss of life. No one should die at work.


----------



## AmateurAgitator (Jul 11, 2021)

On this day, 11 July 2002, German socialist and French resistance fighter Irene Bernard died aged 94. An office clerk and mother of three, she lived in Saarland, which was independent of Germany in the early days of Nazi rule, and became home to many Germans fleeing the regime.

 There she and her husband, Leander, assisted refugees. When Saarland was annexed by the German Reich in 1935, the Bernards fled to France to escape the Gestapo. There, they kept up their anti-fascist activities and helped volunteers on their way to fight general Franco's nationalists in the Spanish civil war. When the Wehrmacht occupied southern France in 1942, Irene joined Travail Antifasciste Allemand, a combat unit of the French resistance consisting of thousands of mostly German speakers. 

She later went underground, fought with the National Committee for Free Germany and gathered military intelligence. After the war, Bernard took care of wounded German soldiers who were prisoners of war. Later she returned to Saarland and became involved with women's and anti-war movements, and remained involved with anti-fascism and advocating for victims of Nazism.


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## platinumsage (Jul 11, 2021)

Also the Red Army and Outer Mongolian revolutionaries completed their crushing of an alliance of liberals, social-democrats, monarchists and nationalists by installing Dogsomyn Bodoo as Prime Minister of Mongolia, however he was soon accused of conspiring with reactionary enemies and shot to death a year later.


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## Sasaferrato (Jul 11, 2021)

A *referendum on territorial status* was held in the Territory of the Saar Basin on 13 January 1935. Over 90% of voters opted for reunification with Germany, with 9% voting for the status quo as a League of Nations mandate territory and less than 0.5% opting for unification with France.[1]


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## AmateurAgitator (Jul 14, 2021)

On this day, 14 July 1896, legendary Spanish anarchist and civil war fighter Buenaventura Durruti was born.

He got a job on the railways, joined the anarchist CNT union and took part in a general strike. Durruti (pictured, centre) later helped form the Los Solidarios action group, which fought against the dictatorship governing Spain with bank robberies and assassinations of senior officials.

In 1923 he was forced to flee first to France, then later Cuba, Chile, Mexico and Argentina, before returning to Spain in 1931 when the Second Spanish Republic was declared. There he began helping organise strikes and uprisings, and was repeatedly arrested, and deported to Spanish Guinea (now Equatorial Guinea).

Durruti returned to Spain once more, and with the outbreak of civil war in 1936 he helped organise revolutionary workers' militias to fight against the right-wing nationalists of general Francisco Franco.

In an interview during the war he told the journalist: "We are going to inherit the earth. There is not the slightest doubt about that. The bourgeoisie may blast and burn its own world before it finally leaves the stage of history. We are not afraid of ruins. We who ploughed the prairies and built the cities and can build again, only better next time. We carry a new world, here in our hearts. That world is growing this minute."

He was killed on November 19 while leading an attack during the defence of Madrid. Historians differ on whether he was shot by distant nationalist gunfire or by accidental friendly fire. His funeral in Barcelona was the largest in Spanish history, with half a million people in attendance.

Learn more about the Spanish civil war in episodes 39-40 of our podcast: https://workingclasshistory.com/.../e39-the-spanish.../


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## AmateurAgitator (Jul 17, 2021)

On this day, 17 July 1936, a Spanish military uprising began in Morocco as right wing generals declared war on the new Republican government.
In Barcelona workers began to respond as members of the Confederación Nacional del Trabajo union seized 200 rifles from the holds of two ships docked in the harbour and distributed them to union activists.

These events marked the beginning of the Spanish civil war. In the coming days, full-scale social revolution would break out which would set the Spanish working class, and volunteers from across the world, against the combined might of the bulk of the Spanish military backed up by Nazi Germany and fascist Italy.

Our podcast episodes 39-40 give an overview of the conflict: https://workingclasshistory.com/.../e39-the-spanish.../

Pictured: revolutionary militia fighters in Spain during the war


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## Argonia (Jul 28, 2021)

The First World War began with the declarations of war of Austria-Hungary to Serbia 107 years ago today. It was also the first comprehensive propaganda war in world history in terms of the use of film and photography


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## Sprocket. (Jul 28, 2021)

_“The First World War mobilised sixty-five million men, killed over eight million and left another twenty-one million wounded; it swept away four of the continent’s ancient empires and turned Europe into what Czech politician Thomas Masaryk described as ‘a laboratory atop a vast graveyard’.

Before the First World War there had been just three republics in Europe; by the end of 1918 there were thirteen”._

Dark Continent: Europe’s Twentieth Century.
Mark Mazower.


----------



## AmateurAgitator (Jul 28, 2021)

On this day, 28 July 1985, Anti-Fascist Action (AFA) was officially launched at a meeting in Conway Hall, London, attended by 250 people with representatives from Red Action, Class War, Jewish Socialists Group, Newham Monitoring Project, Workers’ Power, Searchlight and various local anti-racist bodies from across the country. Its dedication to ‘physical and ideological opposition’ to fascism would see it drive numerous far-right groups off the streets.

For example, the fascist British National Party (BNP) had been growing in confidence in Liverpool, launching violent attacks on left-wingers, including trying to burn down a bookshop run by feminist collective. Within a year the BNP had been beaten from the streets, and later admitted they "were driven underground" by anti-fascists. And in London, after the neo-Nazi record label Blood and Honour tried to organise public events in the city, they too were smashed off the streets by AFA members who took over their redirection points for shows in Marble Arch in 1989 and Waterloo in 1992.

AFA mostly wound down in the mid-1990s after the BNP had been forced to change its strategy from trying to control the streets to running in local elections.

We have some anti-fascist books and merch available in our online store which you can check out, proceeds help fund our work: https://shop.workingclasshistory.com/collect.../anti-fascist





Pictured: the AFA logo, designed by Clifford Harper


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## weltweit (Jul 28, 2021)

This day 28th July 1964 was a milestone in the life of weltweit .. the very beginning!


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## Pickman's model (Jul 28, 2021)

weltweit said:


> This day 28th July 1964 was a milestone in the life of weltweit .. the very beginning!


What, you were conceived then?


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## weltweit (Jul 28, 2021)

Pickman's model said:


> What, you were conceived then?


No, it was when I emerged to take my place ..


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## Pickman's model (Jul 28, 2021)

weltweit said:


> No, it was when I emerged to take my place ..


Ah. We have different notions of what constitutes the beginning then


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## weltweit (Jul 28, 2021)

Pickman's model said:


> Ah. We have different notions of what constitutes the beginning then


Well, it is true that I was alive before birth, but in no way independently, although as is the way with human children I wasn't in any way independent after birth either


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## Argonia (Jul 29, 2021)

116 years ago today Clara Bow was born as a silent movie star a Hollywood sex symbol


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## AmateurAgitator (Aug 4, 2021)

It's the 10th anniversary of the police murder of Mark Duggan that sparked the nationwide riots of 2011.


----------



## petee (Aug 4, 2021)

oops, missed it by a few









						Gerda Taro - Wikipedia
					






					en.wikipedia.org
				




Born Aug 1 1910


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## Pickman's model (Aug 4, 2021)

The queen mum would have been 121 today. If she was alive she'd be screaming inside a coffin


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## Sprocket. (Aug 4, 2021)

Pickman's model said:


> The queen mum would have been 121 today. If she was alive she'd be screaming inside a coffin


Scratching the lid with her lizard claws.


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## not a trot (Aug 4, 2021)

Pickman's model said:


> The queen mum would have been 121 today. If she was alive she'd be screaming inside a coffin



Screaming for a G & T.


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## GarveyLives (Aug 4, 2021)

Count Cuckula said:


> It's the 10th anniversary of the police murder of Mark Duggan that sparked the nationwide riots of 2011.







*Forensic Architecture analysis of the killing of Mark Duggan*​

*Mark Duggan’s* family: police ‘lack courage’ to reopen investigation

‘The *Mark Duggan* case was a catalyst’: the 2011 UK riots 10 years on













(Source: as stated in image)​
See:

Picturing *Mark Duggan*


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## weepiper (Aug 4, 2021)

On this day in 1914 Britain declared war on Germany.


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## Sasaferrato (Aug 5, 2021)

A day late, but worth posting.









						Noel Godfrey Chavasse - Wikipedia
					






					en.wikipedia.org
				










Two Victoria crosses and a Military Cross.

His twin brother, a chaplain, was also awarded the Military Cross.


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## AmateurAgitator (Aug 5, 2021)

On this day, 5 August 1936, Spanish railway worker, anti-fascist military leader and anarchist Buenaventura Durruti gave his famous “new world in our hearts” interview shortly after the outbreak of the civil war with journalist Pierre Van Passen.

After the right-wing nationalist military-rising, which was backed by Nazi Germany and fascist Italy, the workers and peasants of Spain fought back. Faced with potential devastation in the conflict, Durruti told Van Passen: “We have always lived in slums and holes in the wall. We will know how to accommodate ourselves for a while. For you must not forget that we can also build. It is we who built these palaces and cities, here in Spain and America and everywhere. We, the workers. We can build others to take their place. And better ones. We are not in the least afraid of ruins. We are going to inherit the earth; there is not the slightest doubt about that. The bourgeoisie might blast and ruin its own world before it leaves the stage of history. We carry a new world here, in our hearts. That world is growing in this minute.”

Our podcast episodes 39-40 give a brief overview of the Spanish civil war: https://workingclasshistory.com/.../e39-the-spanish.../


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## brogdale (Aug 5, 2021)

3 years gone.


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## Sprocket. (Aug 17, 2021)

On this day in 1887 Marcus Garvey was born.


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## Sasaferrato (Aug 17, 2021)

brogdale said:


> 1966
> 
> View attachment 150298



An enduring memory. I was 14, and can clearly remember Richard Dimbleby reporting, up to his knees in mud, tears streaming down his face.


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## AmateurAgitator (Aug 18, 2021)

Sasaferrato said:


> up to hos knees


hos knees?


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## Sasaferrato (Aug 18, 2021)

Count Cuckula said:


> hos knees?


Corrected.


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## brogdale (Aug 18, 2021)

Sasaferrato said:


> An enduring memory. I was 14, and can clearly remember Richard Dimbleby reporting, up to his knees in mud, tears streaming down his face.


My childhood memory is of my Mum & my Nan crying and hugging me tightly.


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## AmateurAgitator (Aug 24, 2021)

On this day, 24 August 1943, French philosopher and anti-fascist Simone Weil died in London. Previously she had opposed French colonialism in Asia and North Africa, taken part in the factory occupations during the popular front government in 1936, then travelled to Spain to fight against the right-wing military rising of general Francisco Franco. Weil fought in the Durruti column until she was injured in an accident and left the country. 

In collaborationist Vichy France, she got a job as an agricultural labourer and worked with the resistance, until she travelled to London with her Jewish parents to keep them safe. There she continued writing on behalf of the resistance, sleeping only around three hours per night. Her cause of death was officially designated a suicide from self-starvation and tuberculosis, but biographers state that while people in occupied France lived on minimal food rations, Weil did the same, which severely worsened her illness.

Learn more about the Spanish civil war in our podcast episodes 39-40: https://workingclasshistory.com/.../e39-the-spanish.../

Pictured: Weil in Spain


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## AmateurAgitator (Aug 25, 2021)

On this day, 25 August 1944, a group of 32 Spanish and eight French resistance fighters tackled an entire German column, consisting of 1,300 men in 60 lorries with six tanks and two self-propelled guns, in La Madeleine, France. The Maquis blew up the road and rail bridges and positioned themselves on surrounding hills with machine guns. The battle raged from 3:00pm till noon the following day. Three Maquis were wounded, while 8 Germans were killed, nearly 200 wounded and the rest surrendered. After his humiliating defeat, the Nazi commander killed himself before he could be captured.

We have a podcast episode coming soon on the Spanish resistance. Find us on your favourite podcast app by searching "Working Class History" and subscribe today to make sure you don't miss it.

Pictured: some of the La Madeleine fighters


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## AmateurAgitator (Aug 30, 2021)

On this day, 30 August 1976, riots broke out at the Notting Hill Carnival in London, after carnival-goers, sick of police harassment of the many Black attendees, fought back against officers.

Both Black and white young people set fire to police vehicles, hurled stones and other projectiles at the police, smashed windows and expropriated goods from stores.
Police at the time did not have riot equipment, so they try to use dustbin lids and road signs as shields, and drove their vehicles into the crowd, although some of them had to be abandoned when they were pelted with stones, then set on fire. Anarchy magazine reported that "Police were knocked over like ninepins by volleys of bricks and bottles". Meanwhile the notoriously violent Special Patrol Group helped spread the disturbances by attacking people at random.

By the end of the night, over 300 police were injured, with 35 of their vehicles damaged. 17 young Black people were subsequently put on trial for 79 offences, but only two were convicted.

White Riot by the Clash was written by Joe Strummer after he attended the carnival.


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## Serene (Aug 30, 2021)

Count Cuckula said:


> On this day, 5 August 1936, Spanish railway worker, anti-fascist military leader and anarchist Buenaventura Durruti gave his famous “new world in our hearts” interview shortly after the outbreak of the civil war with journalist Pierre Van Passen.
> 
> After the right-wing nationalist military-rising, which was backed by Nazi Germany and fascist Italy, the workers and peasants of Spain fought back. Faced with potential devastation in the conflict, Durruti told Van Passen: “We have always lived in slums and holes in the wall. We will know how to accommodate ourselves for a while. For you must not forget that we can also build. It is we who built these palaces and cities, here in Spain and America and everywhere. We, the workers. We can build others to take their place. And better ones. We are not in the least afraid of ruins. We are going to inherit the earth; there is not the slightest doubt about that. The bourgeoisie might blast and ruin its own world before it leaves the stage of history. We carry a new world here, in our hearts. That world is growing in this minute.”
> 
> ...


Whats with the " and Anarchist " bit? 😂


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## AmateurAgitator (Aug 30, 2021)

Serene said:


> Whats with the " and Anarchist " bit? 😂


Definitely up there with the most stupid and pointless comments I've seen posted on these forums.


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## Serene (Aug 30, 2021)

Count Cuckula said:


> Definitely up there with the most stupid comments I've seen posted on these forums.


I dont know who he was. I just looked it up and seen he was indeed an Anarchist. My comment was from me finding the description amusing, and not from saying it was incorrect.


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## AmateurAgitator (Aug 30, 2021)

Serene said:


> I dont know who he was. I just looked it up and seen he was indeed an Anarchist. My comment was from me finding the description amusing, and not from saying it was incorrect.


Your comment was completely pointless and very stupid and ignorant.


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## Serene (Aug 30, 2021)

Count Cuckula said:


> Your comment was completely pointless and very stupid and ignorant.


I found your post about the Historical character to be interesting and I thank you for it. I enjoy reading about history. The post I made where I was laughing was subjective. I didnt intend it to disparage your post, and I apologise if it came across in that way. I was laughing at the way that the word appeared, it got me laughing.


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## AmateurAgitator (Aug 31, 2021)

On this day, 31 August 1913, police attacked a crowd in Dublin in a drunken rampage that became known as “Bloody Sunday.” It was one of many violent confrontations that took place in the early days of the Dublin Lockout, a bitter industrial dispute that lasted until 1914 and saw two strikers killed and many hundreds wounded. Jim Larkin’s Irish Transport and General Workers Union had attempted to organise the workers on Dublin’s tram network, and the owner of the company, William Murphy, had fired hundreds of workers whom he suspected of sympathising with the union.

When the workers struck in protest, the Dublin employers demanded en masse that their workers sign a pledge declaring that they would neither join the ITGWU nor strike with them in solidarity. When workers refused, the employers locked them out, replacing them with scab labour from Britain or elsewhere in Ireland. From the start, the strike was characterised by intense violence between the strikers on one side and the scabs and police on the other. In pitched battles, strikers and their families smashed tram windows and fought with the police, throwing stones and firing slingshots that had been supplied by James Connolly.

In response to the escalating violence, the authorities banned a proposed march. But Larkin was not a man easily deterred, and he promised he would appear dead or alive. The road was overlooked by the Imperial Hotel, which was part-owned by Murphy. Wearing a fake beard, the fiery trade unionist shuffled into a hotel dressed as an elderly man, and once a crowd had gathered on the street below, he cast off his disguise and ran to the window, from where his booming voice exhorted the workers to action and victory. Immediately, around 300 police attacked, beating the crowd, most of whom were uninvolved onlookers. One such onlooker, the MP Handel Booth, later described how the police, “behaved like men possessed… wildly striking with their truncheons at everyone within reach.”


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## Badgers (Sep 3, 2021)

3 September 1189. Richard I (“The Lionheart”) was crowned King of England at Westminster Abbey. The ceremony was performed by Baldwin of Exeter, the Archbishop of Canterbury. The ceremony was an elaborate affair, consisting of many prayers and rites.


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## DotCommunist (Sep 3, 2021)

wasn't that the longest he spent in england in his whole life, spending the rest of it beefing with saladin over who bagsies the holy land.


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## MrSki (Sep 3, 2021)

DotCommunist said:


> wasn't that the longest he spent in england in his whole life, spending the rest of it beefing with saladin over who bagsies the holy land.


Could he even speak English as it was then?


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## AmateurAgitator (Sep 10, 2021)

On this day, 10 September 1676, pioneering English revolutionary Gerrard Winstanley died aged 66. He was a tailor, then farmworker and the primary theoretician of the movement called the Diggers, or True Levellers during the English civil war who took over enclosed lands and farmed them collectively.

In 1649, prefiguring many later communist and anarchist thinkers, Winstanley wrote in The True Levellers Standard Advanced: "In the beginning of Time, the great Creator Reason, made the Earth to be a Common Treasury, to preserve Beasts, Birds, Fishes, and Man, the lord that was to govern this Creation; for Man had Domination given to him, over the Beasts, Birds, and Fishes; but not one word was spoken in the beginning, That one branch of mankind should rule over another."

He went on to argue that: "Those that Buy and Sell Land, and are landlords, have got it either by Oppression, or Murder, or Theft; and all landlords lives in the breach of the Seventh and Eighth Commandements, Thous shalt not steal, nor kill."

Pictured: illustration of Winstanley by Clifford Harper


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## AmateurAgitator (Sep 11, 2021)

On this day, 11 September 1973, right-wing general Augusto Pinochet launched a coup against the elected left-wing government in Chile of Salvador Allende. Allende had appointed Pinochet as head of his armed forces the previous month, and used the position to orchestrate the coup. (Content note: this post contains graphic descriptions of violence and sexual violence).

On day one, the new government began rounding up thousands of people – mostly working class activists and left-wingers – in the national stadium, killing many. The brutal military dictatorship, which was backed by western powers like the US and UK, implemented the harsh right-wing economic ideology of the neoliberal Chicago Boys.

While international observers heralded the resultant "economic miracle", in reality living standards declined for the vast majority of the population, with wages falling and spending on healthcare, education and housing being cut.

Any workers who attempted to resist were murdered, tortured, imprisoned or "disappeared". A popular method of execution by the regime was to throw civilians to their deaths from helicopters into the ocean or over the Andes mountains. Many of the alt right today celebrate these murders with "helicopter memes".

Over the next 17 years, more than 3,000 people were murdered by the regime, with more than 37,000 others illegally imprisoned or tortured. Many prisoners, men and women, were systematically raped and sexually abused by guards, with women a particular target. In addition to being violated by guards, some women were sexually assaulted with dogs, rats and spiders, and forced to have sex with male family members. Many children of those killed were given to the Catholic church, or adopted, with the children either not informed or told their parents had died in accidents.


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## AmateurAgitator (Sep 12, 2021)

On this day, 12 September 1992, anti-racist group Anti-Fascist Action fought neo-Nazis heading to a Blood & Honour music gig in the Battle of Waterloo in London. It was probably the biggest street fight against fascists in the city since Lewisham in 1977.

Blood & Honour drew crowds of up to 2000 racists to listen to bands with names like "Dead P*ki in the Gutter". To try to avoid anti-fascists, Blood & Honour didn't disclose the location but instead chose Waterloo station as a redirection point. So around 100 anti-fascists headed to the station.

One of the participants later recalled: "I was very nervous. I thought we were going to be slaughtered. Everyone knew that Blood and Honour could muster ten times more people than we had."

But the Nazis were turning up in small groups, and so, the anti-fascist wrote: "We spent the rest of the afternoon ambushing groups of fascists as they arrived, and trying to avoid the police. For example, four fascists arrived by car and were set upon until every window was broken, and the rest of the car was not exactly in showroom condition. The battles raged in all the surrounding streets. A comrade from Norwich and myself piled into a group of three fascists by the Waterloo roundabout. One of them turned to attack my comrade and I stuck my foot out to trip him up and with wonderful luck it was perfectly timed and he keeled over and hit his head, crack, on the pavement."

Learn more in this short personal account of the events: https://libcom.org/.../15-waterloo-blood-and-honour-gig...


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## AmateurAgitator (Sep 15, 2021)

On this day, 15 September 1888, the first ever Yom Kippur ball was held in London, England. It was organised by local Jewish anarchists through the East End Yiddish newspaper Arbayter Fraynd (Worker's Friend), and was intended as an explicity anti-religious gathering in an area populated largely by Jewish immigrants.
Billed as a dinner with lectures and recitations followed by singing and dancing, support was drummed in the day before under the slogan “Down with superstition! Long live the spirit of freedom!”.

There was an exceptionally high turnout and despite numerous attempts to disrupt the gathering leading to the police making several arrests, the 24-hour event was seen as a victory. Yom Kippur balls were subsequently organised by Jewish radicals elsewhere in cities like New York and Montréal.

Learn more about Yiddish-speaking revolutionaries at this time in this book: https://shop.workingclasshistory.com/.../revolutionary...

Pictured: members of Arbayter Fraynd in London, 1912.


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## AmateurAgitator (Sep 17, 2021)

On this day, 17 September 1963, Raghbir Singh, a Sikh man, became the first person of colour to work on a bus in Bristol, England, after a mass campaign forced the dropping of the "colour bar" the previous month. The ban on hiring Black or Asian workers was enforced by the Bristol Omnibus Company and the TGWU union, but after a four-month boycott workers voted to end the practice.

This is a history of the dispute: https://libcom.org/.../black-white-buses-1963-colour-bar...


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## Badgers (Sep 17, 2021)

#OnThisDay 1991: Bottom was first broadcast … and brought much hilarity.


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## AmateurAgitator (Sep 25, 2021)

On this day, 25 September 1968, the Seattle city council brought in a gun-control law at the behest of Republican mayor, James Braman to prevent self-defence patrols by the Black Panthers.

Authorities around the US were panicked by the sight of Black people defending themselves from violence by white racists and police. In particular they were alarmed in Seattle when armed Panthers appeared at Rainier Beach high school to defend Black students who had been attacked and threatened by whites.
The city passed an emergency measure to prohibit the display of a "dangerous weapon" to "intimidate others". It was just one of many laws introduced around this time, often by Republicans, and often with the support of the National Rifle Association, to disarm Black people.

Learn more about the Panthers in these books by former members: https://shop.workingclasshistory.com/.../black-panthers


Pic: Panther protest against a similar law in Feb 1968


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## AmateurAgitator (Sep 28, 2021)

On this day, 28 September 1846, troops from the 1st Royal Dragoons opened fire on starving food rioters in Dungarvan, Ireland. A contemporary report described how “The distress” was “truly appalling in the streets; for, without entering the houses, the miserable spectacle of haggard looks, crouching attitudes, sunken eyes and colourless lips and cheeks, unmistakably bespeaks the sufferings of the people.” Meanwhile, an abundance of food was being exported for profit. On 28 September, several thousand people attempted to break into the quay-side grain stores. When the ringleaders were arrested, a section of the crowd demanded release of the prisoners and then marched to the centre of town, where they looted several bakeries.

The British 1st Royal Dragoons were deployed to the scene and the riot act was read. When the crowd refused to disperse, Captain Sibthorp gave orders to fire. Two rioters were seriously wounded, and one of them, Michael Fleming, subsequently died of his injuries. In the coming days, four companies from the Lancashire Regiment were sent to enforce order in Dungarvan, but despite their presence, on 1 October dock workers refused to load grain for export as they feared reprisals. The Great Famine (which was really mass murder and not a famine - food was exported rather than there being an actual shortage of it) lasted until the 1850s. It killed around a million people and forced an even greater number to flee Ireland.

Pictured: Artist’s impression of the Dungarvan food riot from the London Pictorial Times


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## AmateurAgitator (Sep 29, 2021)

Stop the City - Thirty eight years ago today 1500 people descended on the City of London in the first of four huge protests against war, militarism, capitalism and the exploitation of people, animals and nature.


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## Serge Forward (Sep 29, 2021)

Got my collar felt by the filth on that one.


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## AmateurAgitator (Oct 2, 2021)

On this day, 2 October 1766 the Great Cheese Riot of Nottingham, England, began. At the annual Goose Fair, a mob formed who were angry at the excessive price of cheese, and groups of mostly women and children seized cheeses and began wheeling or carrying them away.

The mayor attempted to restore order but was knocked down by a cheese. Two or three of the crowd were arrested, so then the crowd attacked the building housing them, tearing up the pavement and smashing its windows until they were released.

The army arrived the next day and serious clashes with rioters occurred, with soldiers repeatedly firing at crowds, killing one William Egglestone by accident as he attempted to guard some cheese. Still, on Saturday rioting and expropriations continued, with a crowd seizing a boat full of cheese. Several hundred people then attempted to burn a windmill before eventually retreating from the soldiers who had been sent to defend it.


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## Serge Forward (Oct 2, 2021)

And an excellent pamphlet on this, from Notts People's Histreh, can be downloaded here: https://peopleshistreh.files.wordpress.com/2011/06/cheeseriotsebook.pdf


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## AmateurAgitator (Oct 4, 2021)

On this day, 4 October 1936, Oswald Mosley's British Union of Fascists planned to march through a predominantly Jewish section of East London, instead the Battle of Cable Street occured. The fascists were met by over 100,000 local residents and workers who – insistent that 'They shall not pass!' – fought both the blackshirts and the police protecting them, forcing the march to be abandoned.

Reg Weston who was there, described what happened when the fascists and their police escort met the crowds, including many women and dockworkers: "The fascists were assembling by the Royal Mint and police started to make baton charges, both foot and mounted, to try to clear a way for them to escort a march. They did not succeed. A barricade started to go up. A lorry was overturned, furniture was piled up, paving stones and a builders yard helped to complete the barrier. The police managed to clear the first, but found a second behind it and then a third. Marbles were thrown under the hooves of the police horses; volleys of bricks met every baton charge."

Meanwhile, women stood at the windows of local tenements, hurling missiles at police, and heading downstairs to pursue officers who fled.
Eventually, Weston explained: "the Metropolitan Police chief, who had been directing operations, told Sir Oswald it would be impossible for him to have his march through the East End to his proposed rally in Victoria Park. The uniformed Blackshirts formed up and marched. But they marched west not east. They went through the deserted City of London and ended up on the Embankment, where they just dispersed - defeated."

Learn more about Cable Street, and the fight against Mosley in the 1940s in our podcast episodes 35-37. Listen on every major podcast app or our website: https://workingclasshistory.com/.../17/e35-37-the-43-group/


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## AmateurAgitator (Oct 7, 2021)

On this day, 7 October 1879, Joe Hill, songwriter and Industrial Workers of the World revolutionary union martyr, was born in Sweden. Songs he wrote, like Rebel Girl and The Preacher and the Slave – which is where the phrase "pie in the sky" comes from – were sung by thousands of workers on picket lines across the United States, which had become his new home. He was executed by the state in Utah in 1915 for a crime he almost certainly didn't commit.

We have made available this extensive book on his life and works in our online store. Proceeds help fund our work: https://shop.workingclasshistory.com/.../joe-hill-the-iww...


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## AmateurAgitator (Oct 7, 2021)

On this day, 7 October 1944, an armed rebellion broke out in the Auschwitz concentration camp. Resistance members in the camp found out the Sonderkommando (the Jewish prisoners tasked with working in the crematoria and disposing of bodies) were due to be murdered on that day. So the group fought back with knives and improvised weapons, like handmade grenades made from smuggled gunpowder in sardine cans. They burned down Crematorium IV, killed three SS officers, even cremating one, and injured others.




Pictured: Roza Robota, a member of the Auschwitz resistance.


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## Sprocket. (Oct 7, 2021)

This is, I believe the story told in Tim Blake Nelson’s brilliant and brutal film, The Grey Zone.
It is a tough watch, but testament to the bravery of those who rose against the SS.
I recommend the film.


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## AmateurAgitator (Oct 11, 2021)

On this day, 11 October 1946, the British government announced that 1,038 military camps had been squatted in England and Wales by 39,535 people in a wave of occupations of empty properties by ex-servicemen and their families. Over 4,000 people had occupied such camps in Scotland as well. It was part of a huge wave of squatting of empty properties by working class families demanding decent housing after World War II, and forced the government to implement a huge programme of council house building.


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## AmateurAgitator (Oct 12, 2021)

Serge Forward said:


> Got my collar felt by the filth on that one.


I hope you didn't get too much shit from the filth.


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## Serge Forward (Oct 12, 2021)

Not on that occasion. A nice chap from Birnbergs turned up and made sure it was all tickety boo.


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## AmateurAgitator (Oct 12, 2021)

Serge Forward said:


> Not on that occasion. A nice chap from Birnbergs turned up and made sure it was all tickety boo.


What's birnbergs?


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## Serge Forward (Oct 12, 2021)

A decent law firm that's often there if you get nicked on a demo.


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## deeyo (Oct 12, 2021)

...1999 in stockholm, sweden, björn söderberg was shot & killed by nazi scum.







__





						SAC Activist Murdered by Fascists
					

An article from the UK based anarchist journal, Black Flag on the 1999 murder of a Swedish syndicalist by fascists.




					libcom.org
				













						20 år sedan mordet på Björn Söderberg – och ett förändrat Sverige
					

Det har gått 20 år sedan mordet på syndikalisten Björn Söderberg. Attentatet var kulmen på en upptrappad våldsvåg från den svenska vit makt-rörelsen under 1990-talet. Arbetarens Johan Apel Röstlund minns tillbaka och pratar med några av dem som var med den omskakande hösten 1999.




					www.arbetaren.se
				




(second link to a very good article in swedish. google translate is your friend.)


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## belboid (Oct 13, 2021)

On the day that most likely translates to October 13, 1157 BCE in our current calendar, the earliest recorded strike in history was first reported. The dispute is recounted in a papyrus written by a scribe in the ancient Egyptian town that is now called Deir el-Medina. Gangs of skilled construction workers in the employ of Pharaoh Ramses III stopped work when, eighteen days after their payday, they had still not received their wages, which would have been paid in food and other goods. The workers shouted that they were hungry and sat down by a temple. Officials gave them some pastries, and they returned home, but the following day they protested once more, demanding their pay at the central grain storehouse in Thebes. Eventually they received their back pay, but the pattern of workers needing to go on strike to be paid what they were owed was repeated multiple times.
*


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## AmateurAgitator (Oct 16, 2021)

On this day, 16 October 1854, Oscar Fingal O'Flahertie Wills Wilde was born in Dublin, Ireland. After graduating from Trinity College, Wilde left for Oxford and then London, where he became an advocate of libertarian socialism and an early inspiration for what would, many years later, become a movement for LGBT+ rights. Wilde’s most overt political statements are to be found in his essay, “The Soul of Man under Socialism,” in which he observed that “Disobedience, in the eyes of anyone who has read history, is man's original virtue. It is through disobedience that progress has been made, through disobedience and through rebellion.”

He was a leading proponent of aestheticism and became famous as the author of The Importance of Being Earnest and The Picture of Dorian Gray.
At the height of his fame he was convicted of gross indecency after unsuccessfully prosecuting his male lover’s father for libel. He was sentenced to two years hard labour and his experiences in prison inspired his final work, The Ballad of Reading Gaol. He lived his final years in exile and poverty and died of meningitis at the age of 46.

Here is his essay "The Soul of Man under Socialism": https://libcom.org/.../soul-of-man-under-socialism-oscar...


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## AmateurAgitator (Oct 19, 2021)

On this day, 19 October 1989, after 15 years in prison, a UK judge quashed the convictions of the Guildford Four calling them unreliable and based on confessions extracted by police through violence and threats against family members. The four innocent Irish people had been framed for bombings of two pubs in Guildford that had been carried out by the pro-independence Irish Republican Army, which killed four soldiers and a construction worker. No police were punished for the torture or lies.

This was an article written about it at the time: https://libcom.org/history/after-guildford-four-red-menace


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## AmateurAgitator (Oct 26, 2021)

On this day, 26th October 1983, the Northwood and Pinner hospital in England was occupied by its workers in protest at its proposed closure, led by matron Jean Carey.
From the following day, they ran the hospital themselves collectively and eventually the workers won, and it stayed open for a further 25 years.


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## AmateurAgitator (Oct 29, 2021)

On this day, 29 October 1940 in France, Iranian Muslim diplomat Abdol Hossein Sardari wrote to Vichy collaborationist government officials to try to persuade them that Jews from Central Asia (Jugutis) were not technically Jewish under Nazi race laws. In 1943, as a result of his arguments, the Nazis eventually agreed and exempted them. Sardari began issuing Iranian passports to Jews, without the consent of his bosses, and helped up to 2000 escape the regime.


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## AmateurAgitator (Nov 2, 2021)

On this day, 1 November 1910, anarchist and syndicalist workplace militants met in Barcelona to found the National Confederation of Labour union, the CNT, with the aim to “speed up the economic emancipation of the working class through the revolutionary expropriation of the bourgeoisie”. The CNT would grow to become the leading force in Spanish working class politics, playing a leading role in various general strikes, uprisings and the Spanish civil war and revolution. Four decades of Franco failed to break it and it is still active today.

Learn more about the Spanish civil war in our podcast episodes 39-40. Find them wherever you get your podcasts or go to https://workingclasshistory.com






Pictured: members of the CNT women's section, Mujeres Libres, c1936


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## AmateurAgitator (Nov 4, 2021)

On this day, 4th November 1910, in a prelude to the Champagne riots of the following year, several grape growing communes in the Champagne region of France decided to stop paying taxes. Growers were angry at Champagne producers driving down prices, and importing cheaper grapes from elsewhere in Europe to make their "Champagne," and so they wanted the government to legislate that Champagne had to be made mostly from grapes from the region.

 A few months later on January 17th, simmering discontent erupted into violence when growers in the village of Damery intercepted a truck of imported grapes and threw it into the river Marne. Growers then raided the warehouses of a producer they considered "fraudulent,", and raised a red flag at the town hall. Protests, including singing of the Internationale, escalated to a full-blown insurrection. The government responded by initiating a nine-month occupation of the area by 40,000 troops, but they did implement the law protesters had demanded.


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## AmateurAgitator (Nov 9, 2021)

On this day, 9th November 1918, German workers were fighting to end World War I as revolution swept the country and the Kaiser abdicated. Berlin was gripped by an anti-war general strike, while rebel sailors, soldiers and workers were taking to the streets. The deputy chairman of the Socialist Party (SPD), Philipp Schneidemann, learned that revolutionary socialist Karl Liebknecht, fresh from prison, planned to declare a socialist republic. So to avoid being outmanoeuvred, he defied the party leader and took to a balcony at the Reichstag where he declared a republic. That evening, dozens of workers from large Berlin factories, mistrusting the SPD leadership, occupied the Reichstag and announced elections to factory and army regiment councils to form a revolutionary government the following day.

Learn more about the German revolution in this book: https://shop.workingclasshistory.com/.../all-power-to-the...


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## AmateurAgitator (Nov 10, 2021)

On this day, 10th November 1944 13 members of the Ehrenfeld anti-Nazi resistance group were hanged in the street in Cologne by the Gestapo. Those killed were named :

 Hans Steinbrück, Gustav Bermel, Johann Müller, Franz Rheinberger, Adolf Schütz, Bartholomäus Schink, Günther Schwarz, Roland Lorent, Peter Hüppeler, Josef Moll, Wilhelm Kratz, Heinrich Kratina and Johann Krausen.

Steinbrück had escaped from a concentration camp and formed a resistance group based in the suburb of Ehrenfeld. He had stockpiled a number of weapons, and with others had shot several police officers.

Six of those executed were working class youths, members of the nationwide underground group the Edelweiss Pirates, which was an anti-authoritarian alternative to the Hitler Youth. There were over 3,000 Pirates in Cologne alone, including Schink, who shirked at work, fought running battles with young Nazis, and carried out acts of sabotage against the military, like assassinating the head of the Cologne Gestapo.




Learn more about the pirates and related groups in our podcast episode 4: https://workingclasshistory.com/.../wch4-anti-nazi-youth.../


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## Saul Goodman (Nov 10, 2021)

November 10th 1969, first episode of Sesame Street.


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## Carvaged (Nov 10, 2021)

Nov 10th 1989 the Germans began smashing up the Berlin Wall; and Martin Luther - of the Reformation - was born, in 1483.


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## Pickman's model (Nov 10, 2021)

1977: a work study offices is lamed by the red brigades in turin


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## AmateurAgitator (Nov 11, 2021)

Today, 11th November, is Armistice Day, commemorating the end of World War I in 1918. The official commemorations never mention what actually ended the war: the mutinies and revolutions which swept Russia and Germany, as well as Bulgarian, French and British forces, albeit to a lesser extent.

So take some time to remember those tens or hundreds of thousands of British troops in World War I who mutinied or tried to find ways of avoiding killing their German fellow workers, like Harry Patch, the last survivor of the war, or the millions of Germans, French and Russians who did likewise.

Learn more about the mutinies and combat resistance in our podcast episode 38 with Srsly Wrong: https://workingclasshistory.com/.../e38-mutiny-with.../


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## AmateurAgitator (Nov 22, 2021)

On this day, 22nd November 1980, Leeds Women Against Violence Against Women held a demonstration to protest police inaction around the Yorkshire Ripper murders and the proposed curfew for women. Around 500 protesters marched through Leeds where they blocked traffic, attempted to storm a TV and radio station, smashed windows at the university, fought police and journalists, and attacked a cinema which was showing a film involving Ripper-style killings of women. The women also argued that any curfew for women's safety should not be on women, but on men.

More information: https://secretlibraryleeds.net/.../the-leeds-women.../


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## AmateurAgitator (Nov 25, 2021)

On this day, 25th November 1941, three young Austrian boys, members of the Schlurf movement, were arrested by the Gestapo for destroying a Hitler Youth noticeboard. The Schlurfs were working class Austrian youths who rejected Nazism, militarism, racism and the work ethic. They had long hair and listened to jazz and swing music. The boys wore sharp double-breasted suits and the girls or "Schlurf kittens" wore coloured dresses with knee length hemlines. The Nazis campaigned against the "Schlurf menace", and many Schlurfs fought Hitler Youth in the streets. After the Allied victory, the new "democratic" authorities continued to denounce as "Schlurfs" young workers who rejected work discipline and authority.

More in our podcast episode 4: https://workingclasshistory.com/.../wch4-anti-nazi-youth.../


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## AmateurAgitator (Dec 9, 2021)

On this day, 9th December 1842, one of the founders of contemporary anarchist communism, Peter Kropotkin was born. An activist, scientist, and philosopher, he abandoned his aristocratic background in favour of the revolutionary working class struggle. He participated in the 1917 Russian revolution, and wrote numerous influential works, including Mutual Aid: a Factor of Evolution. In this work he criticised interpretations of the ideas of Charles Darwin which focused on competition, and highlighted instances of cooperation in the natural world. "If we ... ask Nature: 'who are the fittest: those who are continually at war with each other, or those who support one another?' we at once see that those animals which acquire habits of mutual aid are undoubtedly the fittest. They have more chances to survive, and they attain, in their respective classes, the highest development of intelligence and bodily organization."

These ideas continue to be influential today. Evolutionary biologist Stephen Jay Gould wrote of Kropotkin: "I would hold that Kropotkin’s basic argument is correct. Struggle does occur in many modes, and some lead to cooperation among members of a species as the best pathway to advantage for individuals. If Kropotkin overemphasized mutual aid, most Darwinians in Western Europe had exaggerated competition just as strongly. If Kropotkin drew inappropriate hope for social reform from his concept of nature, other Darwinians had erred just as firmly (and for motives that most of us would now decry) in justifying imperial conquest, racism, and oppression of industrial workers as the harsh outcome of natural selection in the competitive mode."

We have made available several of Kropotkin's works, as well as a brand new beautiful illustrated edition of Mutual Aid in our online store. Check them out here: https://shop.workingclasshistory.com/.../all/peter-kropotkin


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## AmateurAgitator (Dec 14, 2021)

On this day, 14th December 1853, Errico Malatesta, an Italian mechanic and key anarchist theorist was born in Italy. You can get an idea of his effectiveness as an organiser from police reports about him at the time: “Malatesta’s return from London was the signal for a reawakening of the anarchist movement in Ancona ... Malatesta immediately set about reorganising it... In a short time in Ancona, anarchists and sympathisers number some 600 individuals, consisting predominantly of dock porters, workers, and criminal elements of the town... his qualities as an intelligent, combative speaker who seeks to persuade with calm, and never with violent, language, are used to the full to revive the already spent forces of the party, and to win converts and sympathisers, never losing sight of his principle goal, which is to draw together the forces of the party, and undermine the bases of the State, by hindering its workings, paralyse its services, and doing anti-militarist propaganda, until the favourable occasion arises to overturn and destroy the existing State”. He was sentenced to death three times, and spent many years in jail or exile but lived until the age of 78.

This book is a great account of his life and ideas: https://shop.workingclasshistory.com/.../life-and-ideas...


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## AmateurAgitator (Dec 16, 2021)

On this day, 16th December 1871 in France, teacher and revolutionary Louise Michel was put on trial in the wake of the crushing of the Paris commune, where the workers and soldiers had taken over. She was charged with trying to overthrow the government, encouraging citizens to arm themselves, possession and use of weapons amongst other offences. Exiled to prison in New Caledonia, Michel spent four months in a cage on a prison ship. She became a national hero, and was granted amnesty in 1880. When a man tried to assassinate her, Michel defended him in court, claiming "he was misled by an evil society".

Read a short biography of her here: https://libcom.org/history/michel-louise-1830-1905


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## AmateurAgitator (Dec 20, 2021)

On this day, 20th December 1973, the Spanish fascist prime minister who was hand-picked as dictator Francisco Franco's successor, Luis Carrero Blanco, was assassinated in Madrid. Basque separatists ETA had spent five months digging a tunnel under a road he went down to attend mass. They then detonated a bomb as he drove over, shooting his car 20 metres into the air and over a five-storey building, earning Carrero Blanco the nickname of "Spain's first astronaut".

His successor was unable to hold together different factions of the government, and so this action was credited by some for helping accelerate the restoration of democracy after Franco's death.

Learn more about the civil war which resulted in Franco's seizure of power in our podcast episodes 39-40: https://workingclasshistory.com/.../e39-the-spanish.../

Pictured: a recreation of the incident from the 1979 film, Ogro -


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## AmateurAgitator (Dec 27, 2021)

On this day, December 27th, back in 1861, Bakunin arrives in London after escaping from Siberia via Japan and the United States.

He had been caught in Dresden in 1849 and sentenced to the death penalty in January 1850. A sentence that was later commuted to life imprisonment.
Bakunin had lived more than 10 years in prison, spending some of them chained to the wall and in cold, damp conditions.
With his arrival in London in 1861 he again made contact with Ogarev and Herzen.

3 years later, French Proudhonian workers and some English workers created the AIT, International Workers Association to which Bakunin joined until 1868, being the one who fights the intellectual and organisational despotism of Marx and his accumulation of intriguers.

Mikhail Bakunin later died on July 1, 1876, leaving a philosophical and practical legacy for world anarchism.


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## AmateurAgitator (Dec 27, 2021)

On this day, 27th December 1831, the Christmas rebellion in Jamaica escalated as 60,000 of the British colony's 300,000 enslaved people went on strike and rose up against slavery.

It is known as the Christmas rebellion as it began with a strike on Christmas day, demanding wages and more free time. The plantation owners rejected the demands, and so on December 27th, enslaved people on the Kensington estate downed tools and set their sugarcane fields on fire. The rebels organised their own military units, and travelled through other estates, burning buildings and crops and recruiting others to join them.

Lasting 11 days, it was the biggest revolt of enslaved people in the British Caribbean colonies, and cost over £50 million damages in current money. While only 14 whites were killed, over 500 Black people were killed or executed in the aftermath. But as a result slavery across the British Caribbean was largely abolished two years later.


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## A380 (Jan 3, 2022)

Siege of Sidney Street 3 January 1911


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## AmateurAgitator (Jan 4, 2022)

On this day, 4th  January 1960 thousands of council tenants in St Pancras, London began a rent strike against rent increases by the Conservative council. As in most rent strikes, women played a leading role. The strike lasted 8 months and culminated in pitched battles with hundreds of police against evictions. Eventually Labour and the Communist Party persuaded tenants to change tack and instead elect a new Labour council who would reverse the increase - but they never did. However, concessions were achieved in the struggle.

This is a detailed history of the events: https://libcom.org/history/rent-strike-st-pancras-1960


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## AmateurAgitator (Jan 5, 2022)

A380 said:


> Siege of Sidney Street 3 January 1911



According to the Jewish anarchists who took the Latvians in, the Latvians were Bolsheviks and not anarchists and were nothing but trouble. They regretted having anything to do with them.


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## Serge Forward (Jan 5, 2022)

That's interesting as I'd heard they were Latvian nationalists. The mystery continues...


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## AmateurAgitator (Jan 8, 2022)

Should have posted this yesterday -

On the 7th January 1994, lifelong Jewish revolutionary Leah Feldman was cremated in London after dying aged approximately 94. Born around 1899 in Warsaw, Poland, she devoted her life to the self-emancipation of the working class. Feldman moved to London where she worked in clothing sweatshops in the East End, and became active in the Yiddish-speaking anarchist movement.

With the outbreak of revolution in Russia she travelled there, then moved south and joined the Revolutionary Insurrectionary Army of the Ukraine led by Nestor Makhno, preparing clothes and food for war orphans. Later in life Feldman organised anarchist groups in Palestine, raised money for the anti-Nazi resistance in Germany, and supported anti-fascists in Spain during the civil war against the forces of general Francisco Franco.

Feldman began going blind, but continued her activism and in the 1960s smuggled weapons to anarchists in Spain who were continuing underground resistance to Franco. The Catalan anarchists nicknamed her "la yaya Makhnowista" ("the Makhnovist granny").

Feldman remained as active as her health allowed until the end, after at least eight decades of revolutionary activism.

See her short biography here: libcom.org/history/articles/1899-1993-leah-feldman


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## AmateurAgitator (Jan 10, 2022)

On this day, 10th January 1859, Catalan educator and anarchist, Francesc Ferrer i Guàrdia was born. He is best known for his development of the idea of the Modern School: radical, secular education particularly for working class children, which remains influential around the world today.

Born the 13th of 14 children, Ferrer's formal education ended at the age of 13 when he began work, later working on the railways before becoming a Spanish teacher in France. At the age of 24 Ferrer became a Freemason, at a time when Masonic lodges where important organising spaces for secular radicals and anarchists.
In 1901 a wealthy student of Ferrer died and left him a property in Paris in her will, which Ferrer was able to sell to set up his first Modern School in Barcelona. The school opened in September 1901 with 18 boys and 12 girls, and Ferrer set about propagating its methodology elsewhere.

In 1909, a strike broke out in Barcelona in protest at the Spanish government sending poor and working class conscript soldiers to suppress an uprising against Spanish colonialism in Morocco. The events culminated in the Tragic Week, when civil guards violently crushed the strike. A major force behind the stoppage was the revolutionary group Solidaridad Obrera (Workers' Solidarity), which Ferrer had covertly funded. Despite Ferrer having minimal input into the strike itself, he was accused by the state of masterminding it, and was quickly sentenced to death by a kangaroo court and executed.


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## AmateurAgitator (Jan 10, 2022)

On this day, 10th January 1918, 200 housewives marched through working class districts of Barcelona calling textile workers – mostly women and girls – out on strike against the high cost of living. Strikes, demonstrations and attacks on shops and coal yards continued even until after a new military governor declared a state of siege and suspended civil rights.

This is a great account of working class women's protests in Spain in the early 20th century: https://libcom.org/.../female-consciousness-collective...


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## AmateurAgitator (Jan 13, 2022)

Doh! Should have posted this yesterday -

On this day 12th January 1989, the punk subculture was identified as the primary problem in a "youth analysis" produced by the East German (DDR) government.
In the early 1980s authorities estimated there were around 1,000 punks in the country, and around 10,000 visibly identifiable punk sympathisers, who had developed a national network to exchange information and ideas, and had links with left wing and anarchist punks in West Germany.

Punks were surveilled by the Stasi intelligence service and the political police, forced to sign papers identifying themselves as potential criminals, routinely arrested and interrogated, beaten by police, had their mohawks cut off. They were banned from youth clubs, restaurants, cafes and bars, and often stripped of their identification documents and given replacement IDs which restricted travel within the DDR and prevented travel elsewhere in the Eastern Bloc. Some punks who could not be recruited as informants for the Stasi were badjacketed – i.e. rumours were spread by authorities that they were in fact informants.


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## AmateurAgitator (Jan 13, 2022)

On this day, 13th January 1919, there was a mutiny on the British Royal Navy patrol boat Kilbride at Milford Haven, which was to be sent to Russia to fight against the revolution. The sailors rebelled and hoisted the red flag. It was one of a series of mutinies and rebellions by British sailors around this time.

There is a short account of this and other naval mutinies of the time here: https://libcom.org/.../royal-navy-mutinies-british-1918






Pictured: the Kilbride, c1916


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## AmateurAgitator (Jan 13, 2022)




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## GarveyLives (Jan 17, 2022)

17 January 1960 ...





... *Patrice Lumumba* overthrown and murdered.


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## GarveyLives (Jan 18, 2022)




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## Puddy_Tat (Jan 19, 2022)

19 January 1917, fire and explosion and the Brunner Mond factory, Silvertown (making munitions with TNT)



			The Silvertown Explosion | The History of London


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## AmateurAgitator (Jan 30, 2022)

On this day, 30th January 1965, former British Prime Minister Winston Churchill's funeral took place. One of its most memorable moments was when cranes on the London docks dipped as his funeral barge went past. However, it later emerged that the dockworkers had originally refused to dip the cranes as they "didn't like" Churchill, and had to be paid extra to do it.

While typically depicted as a national hero today, in fact Churchill was hated by many, especially working class people, hence why he lost the 1945 election. And despite being presented as an anti-fascist, Churchill actually supported fascism. He declared that Italian fascist dictator Benito Mussolini was "a really great man", and wrote that he "whole-heartedly" supported Mussolini "from the start of the finish in [his] triumphant struggle against the bestial appetites and passions of Leninism [communism]", and supported Mussolini's invasion of Abyssinia (now Ethiopia), describing the independent African nation as not "civilised".

Churchill also supported the military coup of general Francisco Franco and his fascist army in Spain, and wrote of his admiration for Adolf Hitler in Germany, with whom he also advocated appeasement until late in 1938, even after Hitler's invasion of Czechoslovakia. Churchill was also to blame jewish people for their predicament regarding persecution in Germany in an article in the Times that was never published.

In his younger days Churchill also opposed the vote being given to women, or working class men. Famously, he was a virulent racist, who supported using poison gas on civilians, and he sent troops against striking British workers. During World War II he was also a key architect of the manufactured Bengal famine, which killed between two and four million people. Churchill also sent the hated Black & Tans to Ireland during Ireland's War of Independence to murder, plunder and pillage. Burning Ireland's 3rd City of Cork during their stay.

This clip from Jeremy Paxman's documentary discusses Churchill's funeral and includes a former docker explaining why they didn't want to lower their cranes for him:


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## platinumsage (Jan 30, 2022)

It's all kicking off today: Churchill's funeral, Bloody Sunday, Hitler taking office, Cromwell's execution, Charles I's execution, the Tet offensive, Ghandi assassinated, Andrew Jackson assassination attempt etc









						Is Today Cursed? Why January 30 Is The Worst Day In History
					

Gandhi is killed, Hitler becomes Chancellor, and more. January 30th is the worst.




					allthatsinteresting.com


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## rubbershoes (Jan 30, 2022)

It may be out of character with the previous posts, but we could all take a quiet moment and consider that on this day in 1988, Tiffany topped the UK charts with I Think We're Alone Now.

Momentous times, indeed


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## not a trot (Jan 30, 2022)

rubbershoes said:


> It may be out of character with the previous posts, but we could all take a quiet moment and consider that on this day in 1988, Tiffany topped the UK charts with I Think We're Alone Now.
> 
> Momentous times, indeed


The Beatles performed their famous rooftop concert on this day in 1969.


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## AmateurAgitator (Jan 30, 2022)

not a trot said:


> The Beatles performed their famous rooftop concert on this day in 1969.


Yeah but they were the Beatles. They were shite. So it doesn't matter.


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## krtek a houby (Jan 30, 2022)

AmateurAgitator said:


> Yeah but they were the Beatles. They were shite. So it doesn't matter.



Tis often and easily said, but far from the case.


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## AmateurAgitator (Jan 30, 2022)

krtek a houby said:


> Tis often and easily said, but far from the case.


All I know is that myself, and many others with good taste in music, never feel the need to listen to them - because such a need does not exist. There are many who consider it to be the case that Oasis are a great band, just as an example, but they too are very wrong. Not that I wish to derail this thread into the realm of the Beatles or music in general.


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## krtek a houby (Jan 30, 2022)

AmateurAgitator said:


> All I know is that myself, and many others with good taste in music, never feel the need to listen to them - because such a need does not exist. Not that I wish to derail this thread into the realm of the Beatles or music in general.



Fair enough. But that's an opinion. It doesn't signify "good taste in music". Whatever that means...


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## AmateurAgitator (Jan 30, 2022)

krtek a houby said:


> Fair enough. But that's an opinion. It doesn't signify "good taste in music". Whatever that means...


It's a correct opinion.


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## AmateurAgitator (Jan 30, 2022)

Also on this day in 1984, Luke Kelly - probably Ireland's greatest folk singer - died at the age of 43.


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## A380 (Jan 30, 2022)

The Beatles wrote more good  songs than Charles I, Cromwell and Gandhi combined.


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## krtek a houby (Jan 31, 2022)

AmateurAgitator said:


> It's a correct opinion.



It's _your_ opinion. Because you believe you have "good taste"


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## krtek a houby (Jan 31, 2022)

AmateurAgitator said:


> Also on this day in 1984, Luke Kelly - probably Ireland's greatest folk singer - died at the age of 43.



imho, it's a toss up between himself & Christy Moore.


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## platinumsage (Jan 31, 2022)

Guy Fawkes was executed today


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## AmateurAgitator (Jan 31, 2022)

On this day, 31th  January 1919, striking workers fought police in the centre of Glasgow and the army was deployed to restore order. The strikers demanded the working week be reduced from 54 to 40 hours, to create jobs for demobilised soldiers and increase workers’ leisure time.

The strike began on Monday 27 January, and by Friday 31st, 60,000 workers had downed tools. The newspapers were outraged: The Scotsman referred to “Terrorism on the Clyde” and the Glasgow Herald claimed the workers were deploying “the methods of terrorism.” On this day, upwards of 60,000 protesters gathered in George Square and sang “The Red Flag.” The Glasgow Evening News described what happened next: “The police found it necessary to make a baton charge, and strikers and civilians - men, women, and children - were felled in the melée that followed.”

Initially overwhelmed, the workers quickly retaliated and forced the police back. A turning point in the battle came when a lorry carrying glass bottles was trapped by the crowd. As the strikers began to pelt the police with stones and bottles, many police broke ranks and fled. Led by demobilised servicemen, the workers then marched to Glasgow Green, where they were again attacked by the police. This time they uprooted iron railings and counter-charged. The violence continued until late into the night, and the Secretary of State for Scotland famously told the War Cabinet, “It is a misnomer to call this situation in Glasgow a strike - this is a Bolshevist uprising."
So the following morning, while the local regiment were confined in their barracks, 10,000 troops entered the city. With tanks and machine-gun detachments set up in key locations and thousands of soldiers patrolling the streets, the militancy of the strike was annulled.

On Monday 10 February, after the employers agreed to a 7-hour reduction in the working week, the strike was called off.


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## surreybrowncap (Jan 31, 2022)

John Lydon’s birthday.
He is 66


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## not a trot (Jan 31, 2022)

surreybrowncap said:


> John Lydon’s birthday.
> He is 66


OAP


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## hitmouse (Jan 31, 2022)

A day late now, but I've just remembered the Fulvio Grimaldi description of Bloody Sunday:




__





						CAIN: Events: Bloody Sunday: 'Blood in the Street' by Fulvio Grimaldi
					





					cain.ulster.ac.uk
				



It's worth a read if you've not read it already, not particularly light reading though.


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## Sprocket. (Feb 2, 2022)

Seventy-nine years ago today. The 2nd of February 1943, The Soviet Goverment announced the total defeat and surrender of all German Forces at the Port of Stalingrad. 
Bringing to an end one of the most brutal battles of WW2 and one that was pivotal in the eventual defeat of Nazi Germany.


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## AmateurAgitator (Feb 4, 2022)

On this day, 4th February 1987, Afghan political and women’s rights activist Meena Keshwar Kamal was assassinated in Pakistan. She founded the Revolutionary Association of the Women of Afghanistan (RAWA) in Kabul in 1977, whose mission was to “give a voice to the deprived and silenced women of Afghanistan” and taught Afghan women how to read and write. Two men subsequently confessed to her murder, who were both linked to the KHAD secret police agency under Soviet occupation. Kamal and RAWA opposed the Soviet occupation of Afghanistan. RAWA’s work continues, though mostly in secret due to the rule of the Taliban.


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## AmateurAgitator (Feb 5, 2022)

On this day, 5th February 1981, the 240 mostly women workers at the Lee Jeans factory in Greenock, Scotland, occupied their workplace upon learning that it was due to be closed and production moved elsewhere. They barricaded the doors with chairs, and two of them climbed onto the roof and down a drainpipe to buy 240 portions of fish and chips and Irn Bru. They kept up the occupation for seven months, when management caved and agreed to a buyout, giving the jobs back to all 140 workers still occupying the plant.


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## AmateurAgitator (Feb 7, 2022)

On this day, 6th February 1919, perhaps the most spectacular strike in US history took place: the Seattle general strike. Nearly 100,000 downed tools in support of striking shipyard workers but, more importantly, then elected a general strike committee and began running the city and essential services themselves.

While the shipyard workers did not get their pay increase, the five-day general strike was a historic and successful experiment demonstrating that workers could run society ourselves.
After the strike ended, the newspaper of the Central Labor Council, the Union Record, explained its importance:

"We see but one way out. In place of two classes competing for the fruits of industry, there must be, eventually only one class sharing fairly the good things of the world. And this can only be done by the workers learning to manage.
"When we saw in our General Strike: The Milk Wagon Drivers consulting late into the night over the task of supplying milk for the city’s babies; The Provision Trades working twenty-four hours out of the twenty-four on the question of feeding 30,000 workers; The Barbers planning a chain of co-operative barber shops; The steamfitters opening a profitless grocery store; The Labor Guards facing, under severe provocation, the task of maintaining order by a new and kinder method; When we saw union after union submitting its cherished desires to the will of the General Strike Committee: then we rejoiced. For we knew it was worth the four or five days pay apiece to get this education in the problems of management. Whatever strength we found in ourselves, and whatever weakness, we knew we were learning the thing which it is necessary for us to know.

"Someday, when the workers have learned to manage, they will begin managing. And we, the workers of Seattle, have seen, in the midst of our General Strike, vaguely and across the storm, a glimpse of what the fellowship of that new day shall be."
This is the detailed official history of the strike: The Seattle general strike of 1919


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## AmateurAgitator (Feb 7, 2022)

D'oh! Wrong day!


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## AmateurAgitator (Feb 8, 2022)

On this day, 8th February 1921, Peter Kropotkin, famous proponent of anarchist-communism, died of pneumonia in Russia. In his life he founded and participated in revolutionary groups in Russia, England, France and Switzerland, and wrote many key texts in the development of anarchist theory. These included Mutual Aid: a Factor in Evolution, which showed how cooperation was a key factor for any successful species, and Fields, Factories and Workshops: a practical model on how a free society, run by the working class, could function.


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## AmateurAgitator (Feb 9, 2022)

On this day, 9th February 2007, Alejandro Finisterre, the anarchist poet and inventor of the Spanish version of table football (foosball) died in Zamora, Spain.

He invented the game following injury during the Spanish civil war and revolution so injured children could still play football. Fleeing following the fascist victory, he ended up in Guatemala, where he played table football with Che Guevara. After the US-backed military coup in the country, he was kidnapped by Franco's agents and put on a plane to Madrid. However on board he went to the toilet, wrapped a bar of soap in newspaper and emerged shouting "I am a Spanish refugee" and threatening to blow up the plane. Supported by the crew and passengers, the plane landed and let him off in Panama.


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## AmateurAgitator (Feb 10, 2022)

On this day, 10th February 1960, civil rights sit-ins that had been moving through North Carolina, after beginning in Greensboro, arrived in Raleigh. Around 150 Black students demonstrated against whites-only lunch counters at drugstores across the city; the drugstores responded by closing the counters. Protests continued for several days, and crowds of racist white people heckled and harassed the protesters, sometimes escalating into violence. One white woman even reprimanded the aggression of the counter-protesters, stating “You’re going about this in the wrong way… I’m as much a segregationist as you are, but I believe you should meet courtesy with courtesy.”
The mayor, WG Enloe, issued a public statement declaring: “It is regrettable that some of our young Negro students would risk endangering Raleigh’s friendly and cooperative race relations by seeking to change a long-standing custom in a manner that is all but destined to fail”.

But the protests were successful, and as part of a national direct action movement achieved the formal banning of segregation in 1964.


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## AmateurAgitator (Feb 11, 2022)

On this day, 11th February 1918 in Copenhagen, armed unemployed workers attacked the Danish stock exchange demanding unemployment benefits. Two meetings for the unemployed were held earlier in the day, and syndicalist speakers called on the assembled poor to use direct action. The crowds armed themselves with clubs and guns and stormed the most powerful symbol of the capitalist class in the city. Later, 40,000 demonstrated in protest at arrests of syndicalists in the wake of the action.


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## AmateurAgitator (Feb 11, 2022)

On this day, 11th February 1916, Lithuanian-born Jewish anarchist Emma Goldman was arrested in New York City for distributing information on birth control. She was technically charged with breaching the Comstock Act, which banned "obscene" material from the mail or from being transported across state lines.

Goldman's arrest came as she was due to deliver a public lecture on family planning, which was a key concern for working class people. Radicals argued that family planning was essential for working class people to be able to have an acceptable standard of living, and believed that authorities opposed birth control so that there would be an oversupply of labour to keep down wages and fill the army.

Emma Goldman decided to defend herself in court, and used the trial to generate large amounts of publicity for her message. She was eventually convicted, and rather than pay a $100 fine she chose to serve 15 days in prison.


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## AmateurAgitator (Feb 14, 2022)

On this day, 14th February 1779, British coloniser captain James Cook was killed by a Native Hawaiian by being stabbed in the neck as he tried to kidnap a local leader.

Cook became famous in particular for assisting the British invasion of Aotearoa (New Zealand) and Australia. Within two hours of his crew's arrival in Aotearoa in 1769, they had shot and killed a Māori man called Te Maro. Over the next few days at least eight more Ngati Oneone hapu and Rongowhakaata iwi people were killed. In 1770, after Cook's arrival in Australia, his men shot two Aboriginal Gweagal people.

In Hawaii, on February 14, news of Cook and his marines killing a local chief caused an angry crowd of several hundred Indigenous people to gather. Cook was also attempting to kidnap the Hawaiian aliʻi nui (hereditary ruler), Kalaniʻōpuʻu. Some of the crowd gathered stones and spears, at which point Cook fired at the crowd, killing one. Rather than run in fear, as the colonisers anticipated, the local people began throwing stones at the marines, and a man called Kanaʻina hit Cook on the head with a club. Cook was then stabbed and killed, and which point a full-scale battle broke out, forcing the marines to retreat. By the end of the fight, several locals had been killed as well as four British soldiers.


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## AmateurAgitator (Feb 16, 2022)

On this day, 16th February 1943, US-born translator, writer and German anti-Nazi resistance activist Mildred Fish-Harnack was beheaded in Berlin: the only US woman to be executed on dictator Adolf Hitler's personal orders.

Fish-Harnack was a leading activist in the largest underground resistance group in Berlin, known to its members as the Circle, but better known to many by the name given to it by the Nazis: the "Red Orchestra". The group recruited other resistance activists, distributed anti-fascist propaganda, and some of its members provided valuable intelligence on Nazi military plans to rival governments, including the US and Soviet Union.

Fish-Harnack was arrested alongside her husband, Arvid Harnack, and brutally tortured, tried and sentenced to hard labour, while Arvid was executed. But her sentence enraged Hitler, who ordered she be retried and sentenced to death.
Upon reviewing the case after Germany's defeat in World War II, US intelligence determined that Fish-Harnack's execution was justified. The US then recruited the Nazi who prosecuted Fish-Harnack, and helped him avoid being charged with war crimes at Nuremberg. Meanwhile, British intelligence recruited the Nazi responsible for Fish-Harnack's arrest and torture, faking his death and giving him a new identity as a factory manager in West Germany.
*
We have nearly finished producing a double podcast episode about Mildred Fish-Harnack in conversation with Rebecca Donner, Mildred's great great-niece and author of the fantastic book about Mildred's life, All the Frequent Troubles of Our Days. Our patreon supporters will get to listen to these episodes first. Join us and get early access to our podcasts at https://patreon.com/workingclasshistory


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## AmateurAgitator (Feb 17, 2022)

On this day, 17th February 1942, Huey P Newton, founding member of the revolutionary socialist Black Panther Party, was born in Monroe, Louisiana.

Newton described his early activism in the Party, which involved conducting armed patrols to protect Black people from police harassment: "I always carried lawbooks in my car. Sometimes, when a policeman was harassing a citizen, I would stand off a little and read the relevant portions of the penal code in a loud voice to all within hearing distance… If the policeman arrested the citizen and took him to the station, we would follow and immediately post bail. Many community people could not believe at first that we had only their interest at heart. Nobody had ever given them any support or assistance when the police harassed them, but here we were, proud Black men, armed with guns and a knowledge of the law. Many citizens came right out of jail and into the Party, and the statistics of murder and brutality by policemen in our communities fell sharply."

Newton himself was shot by the police after being racially abused, and he was then jailed for killing a police officer in the ensuing shootout. But following a global campaign for his release, his conviction was overturned on appeal. He was tried twice more, but after the district attorney failed to get a conviction on either occasion he gave up and dismissed the charges.

Later the BPP developed survival programs like free breakfast for children and health clinics while Newton continued to develop Porton revolutionary theories. He developed the concept of revolutionary intercommunalism for the Party, as opposed to Black nationalism, and was a fierce critic of sexism and homophobia within radical movements, arguing that when people organise "revolutionary conferences, rallies, and demonstrations, there should be full participation of the gay liberation movement and the women's liberation movement."


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## AmateurAgitator (Feb 20, 2022)

On this day, 20th February 1988, 20,000 people in Manchester marched against Margaret Thatcher's homophobic section 28 law, which made it illegal for public bodies to "promote" homosexuality, which included banning schools teaching the "acceptability of homosexuality as a pretended family relationship". The law was abolished in 2003, although later Conservative prime minister David Cameron voted against the complete scrapping of the ban. Current Conservative prime minister Boris Johnson voted in favour of scrapping section 28, although he had previously compared gay marriage to bestiality in a book he published, and referred to gay men as "tank-topped bumboys" while working as a journalist.


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## GarveyLives (Feb 21, 2022)

(Source: AP Photo/Eddie Adams)

*... human rights activist Malcolm X assassinated on this day, 57 years ago.*​


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## AmateurAgitator (Feb 22, 2022)

On this day, 22nd February 1943, three German White Rose activists, students Christoph Probst, Hans and Sophie Scholl, were executed by guillotine for urging the overthrow of the Nazi government: just some of the many Germans who attempted to oppose fascism. As the blade fell, Hans called out “Let freedom live!”




Pictured: Hans, left, Sophie, centre and Christoph, right


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## Sprocket. (Feb 22, 2022)

AmateurAgitator said:


> On this day, 22nd February 1943, three German White Rose activists, students Christoph Probst, Hans and Sophie Scholl, were executed by guillotine for urging the overthrow of the Nazi government: just some of the many Germans who attempted to oppose fascism. As the blade fell, Hans called out “Let freedom live!”
> 
> 
> View attachment 311447
> ...


I wrote an essay on The White Rose Resistance Group. It was a difficult topic, but I fully admired the courage and resilience of those young people.


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## AmateurAgitator (Mar 2, 2022)

On this day, 2nd March 1971, the Israeli Black Panthers, a left-wing group made up of children of North African and Middle Eastern migrants, held an illegal protest in front of Jerusalem's city hall. 2-300 people attended protesting against discrimination against Sephardi and Mizrahi Jews and calling for the release of activists who had been arrested pre-emptively for planning the demonstration. The action attracted media attention and a significant number of supporters.

The Israeli Panthers also emulated the US Panther organisation's survival programs, and attempted to help provide for the basic needs of poor Mizrahi Jews by engaging in activities like the expropriation of milk from delivery trucks in wealthy neighbourhoods.

According to BlackPast, due to the US Panthers' support for Palestinians, the Israeli prime minister Golda Meier "feared the IBPP would form an alliance with Palestinians. Consequently, she appointed a commission to study “Youth in Distress” and found $22.9 million to fund services for Mizrahi."


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## GarveyLives (Mar 2, 2022)

*2 March 1981: The Black People's Day of Action, London*​


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## AmateurAgitator (Mar 5, 2022)

On this day, 5th March 1871, the revolutionary socialist of Polish-Jewish descent Rosa Luxemburg was born. Splitting from the Social Democrats (SPD) when they supported World War I, she co-founded the Spartacus League, which later renamed itself the Communist Party of Germany (KPD), and enthusiastically took part in the German revolution of 1918.

Luxemburg was a critic both of the "ultra-centralism" of Russian Bolshevik Vladimir Lenin, and also of reformist socialists, declaring: “People who pronounce themselves in over of the method of legislative reform in place of and in contradistinction to the conquest of political power and social revolution, do not really choose a more tranquil, calmer and slower road to the same goal, but a different goal. Instead of taking a stand for the establishment of a new society they take a stand for surface modifications of the old society... Our program becomes not the realization of socialism, but the reform of capitalism not the suppression of the system of wage labor, but the diminution of exploitation, that is, the suppression of the abuses of capitalism instead of the suppression of capitalism itself.”

Luxemburg and her colleague Karl Liebknecht were later murdered by the right-wing paramilitary Freikorps acting on behalf of the SPD in the wake of the failed Spartacist uprising of 1919.


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## AmateurAgitator (Mar 5, 2022)

On this day, 5th March 1984, the great UK miners’ strike began when miners at Cortonwood colliery walked out in response to the Conservative government’s announcement of a pit closure plan. Some other pits were already on strike in other disputes, but the strikes against closures spread across Yorkshire, and four days later the National Union of Mineworkers called a national strike, which was joined by a majority of miners around the country.

Women, many of them miners’ wives, played a crucial role in supporting the strike, helping the workers to remain out for nearly a year.

Prime minister Margaret Thatcher and her government were determined to break the power of workers’ organisations and push through mass privatisation and free market reforms. They had learned from their previous defeats in miners’ strikes in 1972 and 1974. They built up coal stocks, so they could withstand a long strike, and then deliberately provoked the strike by announcing the closure plan in spring when coal was in less demand than during the cold winter months. The defeat of the miners, who had been the most well-organised and most militant group of workers in Britain, marked a decisive turning point in the balance of power between workers and employers in the country. It eventually led to the much more atomised and individualised nature of the working class in Britain today.


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## AmateurAgitator (Mar 8, 2022)

On this day, 8th March 1917, thousands of housewives and women workers in St Petersburg, Russia defied union leaders' appeals for calm and took to the streets against high prices and hunger, thus igniting the February revolution (so-called because of the different calendar in use at the time). The following day, 200,000 workers joined them by striking, shouting slogans against the tsar and the war. Some military units began to join the workers, and by 15th March, tsar Nicholas II was forced to abdicate.

On 8th March 1918, women in Austria celebrated International Women's Day on this date for the first time as thousands took to the streets protesting against World War I. There is a popular myth that March 8th was chosen on the anniversary of an 1857 strike of women workers in New York, and a further stoppage on the same date in 1908, however this is incorrect, as this excellent history of the radical, working class origins of International Women’s Day explains:  On the socialist origins of International Women's Day - Temma Kaplan


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## Sprocket. (Mar 8, 2022)

AmateurAgitator said:


> On this day, 5th March 1984, the great UK miners’ strike began when miners at Cortonwood colliery walked out in response to the Conservative government’s announcement of a pit closure plan. Some other pits were already on strike in other disputes, but the strikes against closures spread across Yorkshire, and four days later the National Union of Mineworkers called a national strike, which was joined by a majority of miners around the country.
> 
> Women, many of them miners’ wives, played a crucial role in supporting the strike, helping the workers to remain out for nearly a year.
> 
> ...


Apologies for any derail.


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## AmateurAgitator (Mar 9, 2022)

Sprocket. said:


> Apologies for any derail.


No it's fine, what you posted was interesting.


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## AmateurAgitator (Mar 9, 2022)

On this day, 9th  March 2020, tens of thousands of women across Mexico went on strike in protest at gender-based violence which kills thousands of women each year in the country.

Transport, banking, education and retail were amongst the industries affected by women either staying at home or taking to the streets, under the slogan "Un Día Sin Nosotras" ("A Day without Us"). One worker, Isaura Miranda, a biologist, told the New York Times why she took part: “I just realised I had to do something… I can’t carry on with this feeling of rage and impotence over so many deaths that are cruel, without dignity… Also, I don’t want my daughter to go out one day and never come back again."

Support for the action was so widespread that many large corporations and government departments were pressured into agreeing not to discipline women who took part in the action. Mexico's left-wing president, Andrés Manuel López Obrador, blamed "past neoliberal policies" for endemic violence against women, 10 of whom are murdered each day, and accused right-wing opponents of helping organise the strike.


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## AmateurAgitator (Mar 12, 2022)

On this day, 12th March 1912, employers caved in to most of the demands of the Bread and Roses strike by 20,000 garment workers, mostly women and girls, in Lawrence, Massachusetts. The stoppage, after it was started by Polish women, was denounced by the American Federation of Labor as "revolutionary" and "anarchistic", and so the workers instead turned to the radical Industrial Workers of the World union for support. The name of the strike referred to the workers wanting their basic needs met, "bread", as well as the beautiful things in life, "roses".

The workers held meetings which were translated into almost 30 languages, faced down savage police and militarily repression, who killed one woman and beat and jailed many others, and eventually won big concessions across the whole garment industry. In particular, the workers won a 15% pay increase, double pay for overtime and amnesty for most of the strikers. A campaign to free IWW organisers arrested during the strike continued until they were acquitted in November.


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## AmateurAgitator (Mar 13, 2022)

On this day, 13th March 1940, Indian revolutionary Udham Singh assassinated former lieutenant governor of the Punjab, Michael O'Dwyer, at a meeting in London. The assassination was in revenge for the 1919 Jallianwala Bagh massacre when O'Dwyer dispatched troops to attack a peaceful protest, resulting in around 1,800 people being killed and over 1,200 wounded. O'Dwyer referred to the events as a "correct action".

While in custody, Singh called himself "Ram Mohammad Singh Azad": the first three words of the name reflect the three major religions of Punjab (Hindu, Muslim, and Sikh), while the last, "azad", means "free".
Convicted of murder, Singh was sentenced to death. Speaking at his trial, Singh explained: "He deserved it. He was the real culprit. He wanted to crush the spirit of my people, so I have crushed him. For full 21 years, I have been trying to seek vengeance. I am happy that I have done the job."


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## AmateurAgitator (Mar 15, 2022)

On this day, 15th March 1919, thousands of women in Egypt marched in protest against the British occupation. In particular the arrest and deportation to Malta of Saad Zaghlul, a prominent Egyptian politician, and several other activists caused widespread outrage, and boosted anti-colonial sentiment. It was an early event in the Egyptian revolution which would eventually topple British rule.


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## AmateurAgitator (Mar 16, 2022)

On this day, 16th March 1921, the Red Army under the command of Leon Trotsky staged their bloody final assault on the workers and sailors of Kronstadt, after they revolted against the burgeoning Bolshevik dictatorship. The rebels, mostly dissident communists and socialists, protested against the suppression of strikes in Petrograd, and were calling for trade union freedom, free speech for workers and revolutionaries, freedom for socialist political prisoners and for the abolition of enhanced food rations to Bolshevik Party bureaucrats.

Trotsky had previously described the sailors as the "pride and glory of the revolution" due to their key role in the 1917 revolution. But when they rebelled against the new rulers Trotsky ordered them to be "subdue[d]… by force of arms", and a committee headed by Grigory Zinoviev threatened to "shoot" them "like partridges".

Trotsky and Zinoviev were both later killed themselves by the dictatorship they had helped establish.

Some have attempted to claim that the Kronstadt sailors in 1921 were mostly different individuals to those in 1917, however detailed research by researchers like Israel Getzler showed that the make-up of the garrison was overwhelmingly the same.
A similar rebellion also took place in Ukraine, in favour of control by workers and peasants themselves, rather than Party bureaucrats, which was also eventually crushed by the Red Army.


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## AmateurAgitator (Mar 16, 2022)

On this day, 16th March 1971, two US lieutenants at the Bienhoa air base near Saigon (now Ho Chi Minh City), Vietnam, were killed when a fragmentation grenade exploded in the officers quarters. It was just one of hundreds of incidents during the Vietnam war of what was dubbed "fragging", when US troops would kill officers who they saw as oppressive or put them in excessive danger with their "gung ho" attitude.

Amidst a powerful anti-war movement in US forces, sometimes anti-war GI newspapers would put bounties on the heads of unpopular officers, in some cases forcing the officers to be sent back to the US and replaced.
In this instance, private Smith, a 24-year-old Black GI from Watts, Los Angeles, was accused of the attack but was later acquitted at a court-martial.


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## Dystopiary (Mar 16, 2022)

Also in Vietnam on this day, was the Mỹ Lai massacre in 1968, the mass murder of civilians in South Vietnam. Between 347 and 504 unarmed people were killed by US Army soldiers.


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## petee (Mar 16, 2022)

AmateurAgitator said:


> On this day, 16th March 1921, the Red Army under the command of Leon Trotsky staged their bloody final assault on the workers and sailors of Kronstadt, after they revolted against the burgeoning Bolshevik dictatorship. The rebels, mostly dissident communists and socialists, protested against the suppression of strikes in Petrograd, and were calling for trade union freedom, free speech for workers and revolutionaries, freedom for socialist political prisoners and for the abolition of enhanced food rations to Bolshevik Party bureaucrats.
> 
> Trotsky had previously described the sailors as the "pride and glory of the revolution" due to their key role in the 1917 revolution. But when they rebelled against the new rulers Trotsky ordered them to be "subdue[d]… by force of arms", and a committee headed by Grigory Zinoviev threatened to "shoot" them "like partridges".
> 
> ...



it was an unhappy moment when i read a poster on this board (whose name i do really forget) refer to this as "the only good thing trotsky ever did."


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## AmateurAgitator (Mar 21, 2022)

On this day, 21st March 1991, the abolition of the poll tax in the UK was announced, following a mass non-payment campaign and widespread rioting. The hated tax, introduced by Margaret Thatcher's Conservative government, charged the working class the same as the rich as there was a charge for every individual in a household. Despite the defeat of the working class movement in Britain in the 1980s, people up and down the country self-organised an unprecedented campaign which resulted in over 17 million people refusing to pay, with thousands of people clogging the country's court system. It was later replaced by the council tax, which charged rates based on house value.


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## GarveyLives (Mar 21, 2022)

*21 March 1960:   South African police opened fire on a crowd of peaceful unarmed African demonstrators in the township of Sharpeville, killing 69 Africans and injuring 186 more. Most of them had been shot in the back.*


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## AmateurAgitator (Mar 23, 2022)

On this day, 23rd March 1931, Indian revolutionary socialists Bhagat Singh, Shivaram Rajguru and Sukhdev Thapar (pictured, L-R) were executed by British colonial authorities in what is now Punjab, Pakistan. They had been sentenced to death for assassinating a senior British police officer in 1928, to avenge the police killing of Lala Lajpat Rai during an anti-colonial demonstration.

While they opposed British colonialism, rather than narrow nationalism they advocated working class revolution against both British and Indian capitalists. They were all just 22-23 years old. Singh commented: "They may kill me, but they cannot kill my ideas. They can crush my body, but they will not be able to crush my spirit".

In the wake of their conviction, Mohandas Gandhi appealed to the Viceroy of India to commute their sentences, but he also appealed to huge crowds not to take action to secure their release, as he had signed a truce agreement with authorities. After they were executed, Gandhi was greeted by a crowd he described as "incensed" flying black flags and shouting “Gandhi go back”, “Down with Gandhism”, “Gandhi's truce has sent Bhagat Singh to gallows” and “Long live Bhagat Singh”. After their deaths, Bhagat Singh in particular became a national hero.


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## Pickman's model (Mar 23, 2022)

On this day in 1991 was the last national anti-poll tax march in London, where anarchists were beastly to the militant speakers who were incessantly heckled. Contrary to my expectations militant did not report this as anarchists cheer all-britain anti-poll tax federation speakers


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## AmateurAgitator (Mar 25, 2022)

On this day, 25th March 1939, the German Nazi government brought in a tougher new law forcibly conscripting all 10 to 18-year-olds into the Hitler Youth. But despite years spent trying to mould "national socialist" youths, thousands of working class young people formed gangs known as the "Edelweiss Pirates" to socialise and organise their own fun activities. They began to get into fights with Hitler Youth patrols and when the war started they conducted sabotage, slacked at work and began to help Jewish people, deserters and POWs. Some became partisans and launched armed attacks on Nazi officials. Some of them were executed, but many survived the war, where young workers slacking off continued to be a problem for the Allied occupiers.


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## GarveyLives (Mar 27, 2022)

(Source: as stated in image)

​

*27 March 2007:  Toyin Agbetu, a Pan African human rights activist, from the Ligali Organisation, paid respect to African Ancestors by challenging the British monarch, Elizabeth Saxa-Coburg-Gotha (Windsor), church and government's commemorative ritual of appeasement and self approval at Westminster Abbey to mark the bicentenary of the British parliamentary Act to abolish what they disingenuously refer to as a 'slave trade'. *


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## AmateurAgitator (Mar 30, 2022)

On this day, 30th March 1915, Francesc Sabaté Llopart, anti-fascist resistance fighter, and the most tenacious of the anti-Franco guerrillas, was born in Hospitalet de Llobregat, Catalonia.

With the outbreak of the civil war in 1936, Sabaté joined the anarchist Young Eagles column and fought against General Francisco Franco's Nationalists on the Aragon front. After the defeat of the Republic, Sabaté was interned in a concentration camp in France, and later joined the French resistance against Nazi occupation.

Following the end of World War II he re-entered Spain and joined the growing underground resistance to the regime. Amongst his many legendary exploits he freed other imprisoned activists, robbed banks, assassinated fascist leaders and cheated death on many occasions.

After robbing the home of a wealthy Franco supporter, Manuel Garriga, Sabaté left a note which read: "We are not robbers, we are libertarian resistance fighters. What we have just taken will help in a small way to feed the orphaned and starving children of those anti-fascists who you and your kind have shot. We are people who have never and will never beg for what is ours. So long as we have the strength to do so we shall fight for the freedom of the Spanish working class. As for you, Garriga, although you are a murderer and a thief, we have spared you, because we as libertarians appreciate the value of human life, something which you never have, nor are likely to, understand."

Sabaté outlived nearly all of the other active resistance fighters, only eventually succumbing to the bullets of the Civil Guard in 1960.


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## AmateurAgitator (Mar 31, 2022)

On this day, 31st March 1990, the poll tax riots broke out in Trafalgar Square, London, after police attacked 200,000 people demonstrating against an extremely unpopular and highly regressive tax introduced by Margaret Thatcher's Conservative government.

Police launched a violent assault on peaceful demonstrators, including rapidly driving police vans through the crowd. But this backfired severely when the crowd defended itself, pushed back the police, then went on the offensive, destroying property and expropriating goods from stores (looting). South Africa House, the diplomatic outpost of the apartheid regime, was set on fire.

One participant recalled: "The most important thing for me was the way people were prepared to face the riot police. I’ve never seen anything like it. It was incredible to see people running in to pull others out when they were being arrested… The next thing that sticks in my mind was seeing the ordinary pigs in full flight down Whitehall, and the roar of the crowd chasing them… The noise was brilliant, the bravery of people on my side was enough to convince me that we are not so helpless after all."

Police arrested more than 300 people on the day, with around 150 subsequent arrests. Meanwhile leading left establishment figures denounced the rioters promised to "name names" and "root out the trouble-makers". But the riot helped spur more widespread opposition to the tax, introduced in England the following week, and was eventually defeated by a mass non-payment campaign.


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## AmateurAgitator (Apr 1, 2022)

On this day, 1st April 1649, a farmer and writer called Gerrard Winstanley along with a small group of 30 to 40 men and women occupied St. George's Hill, Watton, Surrey, England and began tilling the land collectively. Over the coming months, numerous local people would join them and for the movement which became known as the Diggers.

Winstanley was a Protestant who began to write pamphlets criticising the church which held that "god is in the heavens above the skies". Instead he argued that god was "the spirit within you". In a pamphlet published in January 1649 he wrote: "In the beginning of time God made the earth. Not one word was spoken at the beginning that one branch of mankind should rule over another, but selfish imaginations did set up one man to teach and rule over another."

The politics of the Diggers were a form of proto-communist anarchism, advocating direct action, common ownership and the dissolution of hierarchy.


*


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## Dystopiary (Apr 1, 2022)

Good stuff, AmateurAgitator. I appreciate you doing these.


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## AmateurAgitator (Apr 1, 2022)

Dystopiary said:


> Good stuff, AmateurAgitator. I appreciate you doing these.


Thankyou. I simply copy and paste from the Working Class History facebook page most of the time.


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## AmateurAgitator (Apr 7, 2022)

On this day, 7th April 1926, Violet Gibson, a 49-year-old Irish aristocrat and peace activist attempted to assassinate Italy's fascist dictator, Benito Mussolini, in Rome.

She had armed herself with a pistol wrapped in a shawl, and a rock to break his car window if needed. As she fired at his head, Mussolini moved, meaning that the bullet hit his nose, travelling through both nostrils. She tried to fire again but the gun misfired. She was violently beaten and almost killed by an angry mob, until she was arrested by police.

Gibson endeavoured to obtain release by convincing doctors she was mad. While her conversations and correspondence were lucid and rational, her absence of children was interpreted as psychologically abnormal. Along with a previous suicide attempt, and a violent reaction she had to a fascist inmate, she was deemed "insane".

She was deported to Britain, where she spent the rest of her life in a mental hospital. No one attended her funeral.


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## AmateurAgitator (Apr 7, 2022)

On this day, 7th April 1872, radical doctor, women's rights advocate, anti-war prisoner and lesbian from a working class background Marie Diana Equi was born in New Bedford, Massachusetts. Moving to Portland, Oregon, she was one of the first women doctors in the state, who provided birth control information and abortions when both were illegal. She was clubbed by police while supporting a strike of women cannery workers, which led her to become an anarchist and to get involved with the Industrial Workers of the World union. In 1918 she was sentenced to 3 years in prison at San Quentin for opposing US involvement in World War I, but maintained her activism after her release.


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## AmateurAgitator (Apr 8, 2022)

On this day, 8th April 2013, former Conservative prime minister Margaret Thatcher died. Street parties broke out across the UK, particularly in working class areas and in former mining communities which were ravaged by her policies.

Her legacy is best remembered for her destruction of the British workers' movement, after the defeat of the miners' strike of 1984-5. This enabled the drastic increase of economic inequality and unemployment in the 1980s. Her government also slashed social housing, helping to create the situation today where it is unavailable for most people, and private property prices are mostly unaffordable for the young.

Thatcher also complained that children were "being cheated of a sound start in life" by being taught that "they have an inalienable right to be gay", so she introduced the vicious section 28 law prohibiting teaching of homosexuality as acceptable.
Abroad, Thatcher was a powerful advocate for racism, advising the Australian foreign minister to beware of Asians, else his country would "end up like Fiji, where the Indian migrants have taken over". She hosted apartheid South Africa's head of state, while denouncing the ANC as a "typical terrorist organisation". Chilean dictator Pinochet, responsible for the rape, murder and torture of tens of thousands of people, was a close personal friend.

Back in the UK, she protected numerous politicians accused of paedophilia including Peter Hayman, Peter Morrison and Cyril Smith. She also lobbied for her friend, serial child abuser Jimmy Savile, to be knighted despite being warned about his behaviour.

Thatcher was eventually forced to step down after the defeat of her hated poll tax by a mass non-payment campaign.


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## AmateurAgitator (Apr 9, 2022)

On this day, 9th April 1898, Paul Robeson, Black singer, actor, American football player, communist and anti-colonialist was born in Princeton, New Jersey. The son of a previously-enslaved father who escaped a plantation, and a blind mother who died when he was six years old, Robeson learned 15 languages including Latin, ancient Greek and Swahili, and played in the National Football League while graduating from law school.

He quit the sport to focus on his acting and singing careers, starring in films such as “All God’s Chillun Got Wings” (1924) and releasing hits like “Ol’ Man River”.

He also became a revolutionary, and was deeply involved with the struggle against fascism, actively supporting the fight against nationalist general Francisco Franco during the Spanish civil war. He played an active role supporting many workers' struggles, as well as the fight against racism and colonialism.

After World War II, as cold war tensions escalated, he was attacked by the anti-communist programme of Sen Joseph McCarthy, blacklisted and had his passport revoked, which destroyed his career. This began a slide into depression and mental illness, which later resulted in a suicide attempt and repeated medical intervention.

Despite his hardship, he maintained his ideals, and to a tribute held for his 75th birthday which he was unable to attend, he sent a recorded message stating: “I want you to know that I am the same Paul, dedicated as ever to the worldwide causes of humanity for freedom, peace, and brotherhood.”


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## AmateurAgitator (Apr 19, 2022)

On this day, 19th April 1943, the Warsaw ghetto uprising broke out in earnest when Jewish people fought back against Nazi attempts to deport them to the Treblinka extermination camp.

2,000 German troops and police backed up with tanks entered the ghetto with the intention of removing the surviving residents, and were met by around 750 resistance fighters with a small number of smuggled small arms and some home-made Molotov cocktails. They forced the Germans to retreat and come back with reinforcements. After several days of failure to overcome the rebels, the Germans began burning down the entire ghetto one building at a time.

Despite this, the resistance managed to hold out against the onslaught for 27 days, killing around 300 Germans. While some fighters managed to escape through the sewers, 7,000 Jewish people were killed and another 7,000 eventually deported to Treblinka.



Pictured: Warsaw ghetto resistance fighters including Malka Zdrojewicz, right, who survived the death camps.


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## AmateurAgitator (Apr 22, 2022)

On this day, 22nd April 1993, Stephen Lawrence, a Black British teenager, was murdered in a racist attack while he waited for a bus in Eltham, London. Rather than devote adequate resources to finding the killers, instead the London Metropolitan Police infiltrated the Lawrence family's campaign for justice in order to find ways to smear and discredit the family. However, ultimately years of campaigning forced the government to acknowledge the institutional racism of the police force, and two of the killers were eventually convicted in 2012.


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## The39thStep (Apr 25, 2022)

On this day Portugal overthrows 48 years of fascism 



also on this day, Italy overthrows 23 years of fascism


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## The39thStep (Apr 25, 2022)




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## AmateurAgitator (Apr 25, 2022)

The39thStep said:


> On this day Portugal overthrows 48 years of fascism
> 
> 
> 
> ...



The Estado Novo was para-fascist, not fascist. It had some characteristics of fascism but not all of them.


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## Pickman's model (Apr 25, 2022)

AmateurAgitator said:


> The Estado Novo was para-fascist, not fascist. It had some characteristics of fascism but not all of them.


but did it meet the fascist minimum?


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## AmateurAgitator (Apr 25, 2022)

Pickman's model said:


> but did it meet the fascist minimum?


I don't think so no. It did not have everything in the fascist core if you ask me.


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## The39thStep (Apr 25, 2022)

AmateurAgitator said:


> The Estado Novo was para-fascist, not fascist. It had some characteristics of fascism but not all of them.


This news will be of great relief to those who lived under it


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## ouirdeaux (Apr 25, 2022)

I never use the word fascism, because in my experience no two people agree on what it means. It tends to be used to describe a variety of unpleasant state behaviours. I'm not sure how splitting hairs about whether Portugal's regime technically adhered to some academic definition of fascism is advancing the sum of human knowledge.


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## Pickman's model (Apr 25, 2022)

ouirdeaux said:


> I never use the word fascism, because in my experience no two people agree on what it means. It tends to be used to describe a variety of unpleasant state behaviours. I'm not sure how splitting hairs about whether Portugal's regime technically adhered to some academic definition of fascism is advancing the sum of human knowledge.


i think it is more broadly used in its 1960s definition of 'people the speaker or writer doesn't like'


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## AmateurAgitator (Apr 25, 2022)

The39thStep said:


> This news will be of great relief to those who lived under it


I very much doubt it matey.


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## AmateurAgitator (May 5, 2022)

On this day, 5th May 1882, pioneering British feminist, anti-fascist and left communist Sylvia Pankhurst was born in Manchester. The daughter of famous suffragette Emmeline Pankhurst, Sylvia became disillusioned with the mainstream movement during its right-wing turn, and instead focused on organising amongst working class women.

When the Women's Social and Political Union threw its support behind the Allies in World War I, she opposed the war, and supported the campaign against conscription. Sylvia then supported the Russian revolution, and travelled there, meeting Bolshevik leader Vladimir Lenin, although when Lenin bankrolled the establishment of the Communist Party of Great Britain, Pankhurst considered it too right-wing for her.

Later in life she supported anti-fascists in the Spanish civil war, helped Jewish refugees from Nazi-occupied Europe and was extremely active in campaigning against the Italian invasion of Ethiopia. Security services monitored her for decades, and even in 1948 MI5 (UK domestic intelligence) weighed up different options for "muzzling the tiresome Miss Sylvia Pankhurst." After the death of her companion, she moved to Ethiopia on the invitation of its emperor, Haile Selassie, and upon her death in 1960 received an Ethiopian state funeral.

While her mother and sister have been commemorated at Parliament in London, the House of Lords has vetoed plans to place a memorial to Sylvia at the site on numerous occasions.


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## AmateurAgitator (May 13, 2022)

On this day, 13th May 2021, local residents in Glasgow won the release of two people who had been detained by immigration officers by surrounding the vehicle and blockading it for several hours.

During Eid celebrations, Border Force snatched up the men and put them in a van. This was noticed by neighbours, who quickly surrounded the vehicle and contacted friends and local tenant and anti-eviction groups. One man climbed underneath the wheels of the van, where he remained for the duration of the subsequent events. One local resident, Lotte, told the Scotsman newspaper she wanted "to express my utter disgust at the brutal removal of my neighbours from their home".

Soon the crowd had swelled to hundreds of people. Hundreds of police also came to the scene to try to clear the way for the immigration van to leave, but they were unable to dislodge the crowd. By the early evening, authorities relented and agreed to set the men free.

One of those detained, Lakhvir Singh, from India, issued a statement through a translator stating: "I’ve been astonished and overwhelmed by the support I’ve received from the people of Glasgow."


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## AmateurAgitator (May 14, 2022)

On this day 14th may 1940, Emma Goldman died.

Emma Goldman was born in Kovno in the Russian Empire June 27, 1869. Goldman immigrated to the US in 1885 and worked in a clothing factory in Rochester before moving to New York City in 1889. Influenced by the libertarian writings of Johann Most, Goldman became an anarchist. Working closely with Alexander Berkman, Goldman became active in the trade union movement.

Goldman and Berkman edited and published the journal, Mother Earth, between 1906-1917. Goldman also wrote Anarchism and Other Essays (1910) and The Social Significance of the Modern Drama (1914).

 An opponent of America's involvement in the First World War, Goldman was imprisoned for two years for obstructing conscription.

In 1919 Alexander M. Palmer, the attorney general and his special assistant, John Edgar Hoover planned to deport a large number of left-wing figures. On 7th November, 1919, over 10,000 suspected communists and anarchists were arrested in twenty-three different cities.

She and Berkman were deported to Russia, but Goldman was shocked by the ruthless authoritarianism of the Bolshevik regime, its repression of anarchists, and its disregard for individual freedom. After less than two years, she and Berkman left Russia in despair.

Her memories "Living My Life", is a unique time document.


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## AmateurAgitator (May 16, 2022)

On this day, 16th May 1920, workers at Knocklong creamery in County Limerick declared a soviet (workers' council) and established workers’ control of production. They prepared for the takeover by arranging deals for milk with local farmers and contracts to sell their butter with retailers. They hoisted a red flag and an Irish tricolour and for five days they continued production under the slogan “We make butter not profits.” They returned control to the owners in exchange for reduced hours, better pay, and the replacement of a hated manager. The success of their revolt inspired similar actions by employees at other businesses owned by the Cleeves family, including in Bruree, where a soviet was declared in 1921.


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## The39thStep (May 16, 2022)

AmateurAgitator said:


> On this day, 5th May 1882, pioneering British feminist, anti-fascist and left communist Sylvia Pankhurst was born in Manchester. The daughter of famous suffragette Emmeline Pankhurst, Sylvia became disillusioned with the mainstream movement during its right-wing turn, and instead focused on organising amongst working class women.
> 
> When the Women's Social and Political Union threw its support behind the Allies in World War I, she opposed the war, and supported the campaign against conscription. Sylvia then supported the Russian revolution, and travelled there, meeting Bolshevik leader Vladimir Lenin, although when Lenin bankrolled the establishment of the Communist Party of Great Britain, Pankhurst considered it too right-wing for her.
> 
> ...


There was a very odd protest at her statue in Manchester over the weekend


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## AmateurAgitator (May 16, 2022)

The39thStep said:


> There was a very odd protest at her statue in Manchester over the weekend


Who was protesting and why was it odd?


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## AmateurAgitator (May 16, 2022)

The39thStep said:


> There was a very odd protest at her statue in Manchester over the weekend


I just saw a photo of this posted online and apparently it was the MRA bellends.


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## The39thStep (May 16, 2022)

AmateurAgitator said:


> I just saw a photo of this posted online and apparently it was the MRA bellends.


Who are MRA ? All I saw was a photo of some people masked up round the statue and a group of woman arguing with them .


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## AmateurAgitator (May 16, 2022)

The39thStep said:


> Who are MRA ?


Mens Rights Activists


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## AmateurAgitator (May 16, 2022)

The39thStep said:


> All I saw was a photo of some people masked up round the statue and a group of woman arguing with them .


Where abouts did you see that?


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## The39thStep (May 16, 2022)

AmateurAgitator said:


> Where abouts did you see that?


On some Manchester Twitter link


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## AmateurAgitator (May 16, 2022)

The39thStep said:


> On some Manchester Twitter link


Okey dokey. The bloke whose post I saw seemed to think they are MRA's but he wasn't sure what organisation/group they were.


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## AmateurAgitator (May 16, 2022)

The39thStep said:


> There was a very odd protest at her statue in Manchester over the weekend


The protest you saw was at the Emmeline Pankhurst statue not Sylvia. Daily Heil and GBeebies are claiming the protesters were pro-trans but who knows - I certainly don't trust those two 'media outlets' but they are the only sources I can find on it  -which I find suspicious in itself tbh.


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## The39thStep (May 16, 2022)

AmateurAgitator said:


> The protest you saw was at the Emmeline Pankhurst statue not Sylvia. Daily Heil and GBeebies are claiming the protesters were pro-trans but who knows - I certainly don't trust those two 'media outlets' but they are the only sources I can find on it  -which I find suspicious in itself tbh.


Cheers


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## AmateurAgitator (May 17, 2022)

The39thStep said:


> There was a very odd protest at her statue in Manchester over the weekend


TERF fuckwits vs IdPol wankers so it turns out.


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## The39thStep (May 17, 2022)

AmateurAgitator said:


> TERF fuckwits vs IdPol wankers so it turns out.


I keep well clear of that shit storm tbh


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## AmateurAgitator (May 18, 2022)

On this day, 18th May 1980, workers and students in Gwangju, South Korea, rose up against their brutal US-backed dictator, Chun Doo-hwan.

Peaceful protesters were fired upon, with many shot and others beaten and stabbed to death by paratroopers. This sparked an uprising across the city, as local residents raided local armouries and police stations, seized weapons and eventually succeeded in driving out government troops.

Workers and locals then took control of the city, running it collectively for several days, until paratroopers invaded once more and bloodily suppressed the rebellion, killing hundreds. Though unsuccessful in meeting its immediate goals, the uprising contributed to the end of decades of dictatorship late in the 1980s.


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## AmateurAgitator (May 25, 2022)

On this day, 25th May 1895, libertarian socialist author Oscar Wilde was imprisoned for two years' hard labour for "indecency" for having sex with men.

Though many potential witnesses refused to testify against him, he was convicted, and upon sentencing judge stated: “It is the worst case I have ever tried. I shall pass the severest sentence that the law allows. In my judgment it is totally inadequate for such a case as this. The sentence of the Court is that you be imprisoned and kept to hard labour for two years.”

Wilde's detention would cause him serious health problems which eventually contributed to his untimely death.

In his essay, The Soul of Man Under Socialism, in which he expounds his political ideas, he declares: "Disobedience, in the eyes of any one who has read history, is man's original virtue. It is through disobedience that progress has been made, through disobedience and through rebellion."

You can read the essay here: The soul of man under socialism - Oscar Wilde


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## GarveyLives (May 25, 2022)

*Lest We Forget ...*



GarveyLives said:


> *On 25 May 2020 ...*
> 
> 
> 
> ...


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## AmateurAgitator (May 25, 2022)

On this day, 25th May 1926, Ukrainian Jewish anarchist Shalom Schwartzbard approached Symon Petliura on Rue Racine in Paris' Latin Quarter and asked him, “Are you Mr. Petliura?” before shooting him five times shouting “This for the pogroms; this for the massacres; this for the victims.” When police arrived, Schwartzbard told them “I have killed a great assassin.”

Petliura had been supreme commander of the Ukrainian army during the Russian revolution and ensuing civil war during which approximately 50,000 Jewish people were murdered in pogroms, including 14 members of Schwartzbard's family.

In Ukraine, Schwartzbard had helped organise the defence of Jewish areas from pogroms, and later enthusiastically joined the Russian revolution. He fought in a Red Guard militia made up mostly of Ukrainian anarchists and Jews, and later joined the Red Army until his unit refused an order to undertake a suicidal mission, for which 24 of his comrades were killed, but Schwartzbard managed to escape.

In France, he was put on trial for Petliura's murder but as acquitted after the jury decided Petliura got what he deserved.


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## AmateurAgitator (May 26, 2022)

On this day, 26th May 1944, a general strike broke out in Marseille, Vichy France. Metalworkers, public servants and transport workers joined a stoppage of shipyard workers the previous day, demonstrating in front of the City Hall demanding "bread!". The strike remained unbroken until the Gestapo had arrested 15,000 workers — but the crackdown was short lived as Marseille was liberated soon after.




Pictured: French resistance partisan migrants in Marseille


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## platinumsage (May 26, 2022)

On this day in 946, Edmund, King of the English, was stabbed to death by a convicted thief while attempting to arrest him for breaking his exile.


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## brogdale (May 26, 2022)

platinumsage said:


> On this day in 946, Edmund, King of the English, was stabbed to death by a convicted thief while attempting to arrest him for breaking his exile.


Those subsequently extolling the divine right of monarchs really should have learnt from this.


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## AmateurAgitator (May 28, 2022)

On this day, 28th May 2013 during the Turkish Occupy Gezi protests, the "woman in red", Ceyda Sungur, was pepper sprayed by police, which became the defining photo of the movement.

The protests began against development of Gezi Park in Istanbul but transformed into a national movement against the increasing authoritarianism of the right-wing government of  Recep Tayyip Erdoğan.

A university worker, Sungur didn't want notoriety, saying "a lot of people who were at the park and they were also tear-gassed… There is not (a) difference between them and I." She was subsequently arrested for “provoking people to disobey laws”, although the following year the charges were dismissed.


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## weltweit (May 28, 2022)

There is someone on my LinkedIn feed posting on this day in Afghanistan this soldier was killed by an IED on patrol in Helmand. They are all twenty to thirty year old soldiers. It is quite sad.


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## Spandex (May 29, 2022)

On this day, 29th May, 1453 the city of Constantinople fell to the Ottoman Turkish army, bringing to a final end the Roman empire after over 2,000 years of history (if you include the time of kings, the republic, the empire and the Byzantine periods).

The city had been besieged on 6th April by between 60,000 and 80,000 Ottomans (contemporary exaggerations put the figure at 200,000). The huge city walls, long said to be impregnable, had held out well, but the new siege cannons finally breached the walls and a massive go-for-broke, throw-everything-at-them assault at dawn on 29 May finally saw the Ottomans enter the city and proceed to loot, pillage and rape, burning any symbols of Christianity they found. Emperor Constantine XI, depending on what source you believe, either died fighting to defend the city, died trying to escape the city or was magically encased in marble and buried beneath the city which he would, one day, return to rule again.

In late afternoon Ottoman Sultan, Mehmed II, entered the city, called an end to the pillaging (4,000 people had been killed outright, and over 50,000 were shipped off as slaves) and declared that the Hagia Sophia church, the centre of Orthodox Christianity, be immediately converted into a mosque. Constantinople was renamed Istanbul and was the centre of the Ottoman empire until it's fall in 1922. A flood of refugees made for Italy, bringing knowledge with them that powered the Renaissance.


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## The39thStep (May 30, 2022)

On this day anniversary of the death of Lyudmila Pavlichenko in 1974.

Offered a role of Nurse by the Red Army which she turned down as she wanted to fight at the front . Became a world renowned sniper during WW2 for the Red Army and accredited with 309 kills . Nicknamed ‘Lady Death’ the Nazis made efforts to get her to defect , she was invited to meet Roosevelt and his wife , and when interviewed it’s claimed she said ‘ I never killed men, I killed fascists ‘.


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## BCBlues (May 31, 2022)

Zeppelin Airship Attacks On London: Mapped
					






					londonist.com
				




The first air raid on London in 1915.
This must have been scary as hell at the time to see such a big monstrosity looming overhead.


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## spitfire (Jun 1, 2022)

Spoiler: tweet


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## AmateurAgitator (Jun 4, 2022)

On this day, 4th June 1976 an 18 year-old Sikh schoolboy, Gurdip Singh Chaggarwas, was fatally stabbed in a racist attack outside the Dominion theatre in Southall, London. When one passerby asked a police officer who had been killed, he responded "just an Asian".

His murder triggered riots in the area, and prompted local Asian and Black youths to form the Southall Youth Movement, which took the fight to racists in the streets. Black and Asian young people formed similar groups up and down the country at the time.




Pictured: the Southall riots


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## AmateurAgitator (Jun 4, 2022)

On this day, 4th June 1950, the 43 Group of militant anti-fascist Jewish ex-servicemen and women voted to disband itself at an extraordinary general meeting in London, England. The group had been formed four years prior by Jewish people who had fought in the British Army against the Nazis in World War II, who had seen the horrors of the concentration camps, and who returned home to see fascists organising openly on UK streets. They resolved to continue their fight against fascism, racism and antisemitism by any means necessary.

The group included people like decorated war hero Gerry Flamberg, apprentice hairdresser Vidal Sassoon, gay former officer Harry Bidney and women like Doris Kaye, who infiltrated fascist groups, and Julie Sloggan, who was one of its most ardent street fighters. They disrupted and broke up fascist meetings, usually after breaking through the fascists' police guard, and harassed fascist aristocrat Oswald Mosley and his followers in towns and cities up and down the country. Eventually Mosley went into exile, and fascist organising dwindled to such a level that the 43 Group dissolved itself. Although veterans of the group would throw themselves back into the movement when Mosley attempted a comeback in the 1960s.





Pictured: Members of the group Gerry Flamberg (front left) and Jonny Wimborne (front right) standing outside the court house after the acquittal on an attempted murder charge against a fascist. The smiling man between them is Len Rolnick.


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## flypanam (Jun 5, 2022)

James Connolly was born on this day 1868.


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## AmateurAgitator (Jun 7, 2022)

On this day, 7th June 2020, Black Lives Matter protesters in Bristol, UK, pulled down a statue of enslaver Edward Colston and threw it into Bristol Harbour.

Colston was a wealthy trader of enslaved people, whose company transported more than 100,000 people who were abducted from West Africa and enslaved in the 17th century. Those kidnapped were branded with the initials of Colston's company, RAC.
Four people, Sage Willoughby, Rhian Graham, Milo Ponsford and Jake Skuse, were subsequently arrested and charged with criminal damage for their role in the removal of the statue. In the dock, Willoughby argued that having a statue honouring Colston would be like "having a Hitler statue in front of a Holocaust survivor".

All four defendants were acquitted by the jury. Willoughby subsequently responded to those who argue that removing statues is trying to change history, stating: "We didn't change history, we rectified it".


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## Sasaferrato (Jun 8, 2022)

On this day Roger Nutbeem, Scouse Farrell and Kenny Preston died on the Galahad. R.I.P.


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## AmateurAgitator (Jun 8, 2022)

Sasaferrato said:


> On this day Roger Nutbeem, Scouse Farrell and Kenny Preston died on the Galahad. R.I.P.


Nutbeem hehehe


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## AmateurAgitator (Jun 14, 2022)

On this day, 14th June 1381, during the peasants’ revolt in England, Wat Tyler’s rebel army of some 50,000 to 100,000 people captured London Bridge and the Tower of London. There they killed the chancellor, Archbishop Simon of Sudbury, and the treasurer, Sir Robert Hales. 

The rebellion had broken out in May in protest at the imposition of a poll tax on everyone aged fifteen and over, which exacerbated the economic hardship of workers and the poor. People were also enraged by the brutality of tax inspectors, who measured people’s pubic hair to determine their age, which was seen as state-sanctioned sexual assault, particularly in the case of girls and women. The rebellion soon developed into a deep and sophisticated social movement demanding radical changes to feudal society and peaked with the taking of the Tower.

On June 15th, Wat Tyler attended a parley with the king Richard II, where he was murdered. Realising his weak position, Richard promised the rebels that he would implement many of their demands, including the abolition of the tax, and even the abolition of forced labor and serfdom, but, while the poll tax was ended, once the rebels had dispersed and returned home, they were no longer a threat, so Richard reneged on all of his other pledges and hanged 1,500 of them. It was a brutal but important lesson not to trust the promises of the powerful.




Pictured: revolting peasants killing the Chancellor and treasurer.


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## AmateurAgitator (Jun 17, 2022)

On this day in 1953, in what became an uprising of more than one million people, 300 East German construction workers protested at government buildings, demanding the reversal of a 10% increase in work quotas.


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## Pickman's model (Jun 17, 2022)

AmateurAgitator said:


> On this day, 14th June 1381, during the peasants’ revolt in England, Wat Tyler’s rebel army of some 50,000 to 100,000 people captured London Bridge and the Tower of London. There they killed the chancellor, Archbishop Simon of Sudbury, and the treasurer, Sir Robert Hales.
> 
> The rebellion had broken out in May in protest at the imposition of a poll tax on everyone aged fifteen and over, which exacerbated the economic hardship of workers and the poor. People were also enraged by the brutality of tax inspectors, who measured people’s pubic hair to determine their age, which was seen as state-sanctioned sexual assault, particularly in the case of girls and women. The rebellion soon developed into a deep and sophisticated social movement demanding radical changes to feudal society and peaked with the taking of the Tower.
> 
> ...


I like the way the swordsmen look so happy


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## A380 (Jun 18, 2022)

18th June 1815 an alliance of European armies defeat the army of Napoleon at Waterloo finally ending the second global war.


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## The39thStep (Jun 18, 2022)

AmateurAgitator said:


> On this day, 4th June 1950, the 43 Group of militant anti-fascist Jewish ex-servicemen and women voted to disband itself at an extraordinary general meeting in London, England. The group had been formed four years prior by Jewish people who had fought in the British Army against the Nazis in World War II, who had seen the horrors of the concentration camps, and who returned home to see fascists organising openly on UK streets. They resolved to continue their fight against fascism, racism and antisemitism by any means necessary.
> 
> The group included people like decorated war hero Gerry Flamberg, apprentice hairdresser Vidal Sassoon, gay former officer Harry Bidney and women like Doris Kaye, who infiltrated fascist groups, and Julie Sloggan, who was one of its most ardent street fighters. They disrupted and broke up fascist meetings, usually after breaking through the fascists' police guard, and harassed fascist aristocrat Oswald Mosley and his followers in towns and cities up and down the country. Eventually Mosley went into exile, and fascist organising dwindled to such a level that the 43 Group dissolved itself. Although veterans of the group would throw themselves back into the movement when Mosley attempted a comeback in the 1960s.
> 
> ...


 Len Rolnick was the leader of the Communist Party cell in the 43 Group


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## AmateurAgitator (Jun 19, 2022)

On this day, 19th June 1843, a crowd of over 2000 Rebecca rioters gathered and attacked the Carmarthen workhouse in Wales, and set about destroying it. It took the arrival of a unit of the British army to disperse them.

Rebecca rioters blackened their faces and dressed as women to disguise themselves, and waged war against excessive road tolls which had been implemented by landowners in Wales. The movement, dubbed "Rebecca and her daughters" was possibly a reference to the Biblical figure who had spoken of the need to “possess the gates of those who hate them”.

Over a four-year period, Rebecca rioters would approach toll gates en masse and dismantle them. One newspaper reported on a typical case: “pickaxes, hatchets, crowbars, and saws were set in operation and the gate was entirely demolished.” Tollhouse keepers were also attacked or intimidated.

Eventually, the government decided to take action and force the tolls to be reduced.


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## AmateurAgitator (Jun 27, 2022)

On this day, 27th June 1936, the Soviet Union reversed the 1920 Bolshevik "decree on the protection of women's health" which legalised abortion and granted women numerous reproductive rights. The new law forbade all abortions, apart from cases where the life of the mother was at risk, or where there was a serious hereditary disease. Both doctors and women seeking abortions were criminalised by the new law. 

While arguing that the decision to legalise abortions was right, the Communist Party claimed that "only under conditions of socialism… where woman is an equal member of society… is it possible seriously to organise the struggle against abortions by prohibitive laws as well as by other means." Following famines, the government was keen to increase population growth, and the Party had begun to place more emphasis on the importance of the family unit. The ban remained in place until after the death of Joseph Stalin in 1953.


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## platinumsage (Jun 27, 2022)

William P. Dean was accused of, on this day in 1842, levying war against the state of Rhode Island, presumably as part of the Dorr Rebellion. I can't find anything about him other than this primary source. Anyone?

"And the jurors aforesaid, upon their oaths aforesaid, do further present: That the said William P. Dean, being an inhabitant of and residing within the said State of Rhode Island and Providence Plantations, and being under the protection of the laws of the said State of Rhode Island and Providence Plantations, and owing allegiance and fidelity to the said State, not weighing the duty of his said allegiance, and wickedly and traitorously devising and intending the peace of the said State to disturb, and to stir up, move, and excite insurrection, rebellion, and war against the said State, on the twenty seventh day of June, in the year of our Lord one thousand eighteen hundred and forty two, at Glocester aforesaid, in the aforesaid country of Providence, with force and arms, unlawfully, falsely, maliciously, and traitoriously did conspire, compass, imagine, and intend to raise and levy public par, insurrection, and rebellion against the said State; and in order to perfect, fulfil, and bring to effect the said compassings, imaginations, and intents of him, the said William P. Dean, he, the said William P. Dean, afterwards, to wit, on the said twenty-seventh day of June, in the year of our Lord one thousand eight hundred and forty-two, at Glocester aforesaid, in the aforesaid county of Providence, with a great multitude of other persons, whose names are at present to the jurors aforesaid unknown, to a great number, to wit, to the number of five hundred other persons, and upward; armed and arrayed in a warlike manner, that is to say, with guns, muskets, swords; pistols, dirks, and other warlike weapons, as well offensive as defensive, being then and there unlawfully, maliciously, and traitorously assembled and gathered together, did falsely and traitorously assemble and gather themselves together against the said State, and then and there, with force and arms, did falsely and traitorously, and in a warlike and hostile manner, array and dispose themselves against the said State; and then and there, that is to say, on the day and year last aforesaid, at Glocester aforesaid, in the aforesaid county of Providence, in pursuance of their traitorous intentions and purposes aforesaid, he, the said William P. Dean, with the said other persons so as aforesaid traitorously assembled, and armed and arrayed in manner aforesaid, most wickedly, maliciously, and traitorously did ordain, prepare, and levy public war against the said State, contrary to the duty of the allegiance of the said William P. Dean, against the form of the statute in such case made and provided, and against the peace and dignity of the State."


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## AmateurAgitator (Jul 4, 2022)

On this day, 4th July 1981 was the heaviest night of rioting in Toxteth, Liverpool, which began when police tried to arrest a young Black man, who was subsequently rescued by a crowd. Both white and Black people had then begun to fight back against the police. Martin Kettle and Lucy Hodges described what happened in their book, Uprising!: "Rioters commandeered milk floats, a stolen fire engine and a cement mixer and drove them straight into police lines. They were armed with every conceivable weapon, including lengths of scaffolding which they thrust at the riot shields like medieval knights... At one point they managed to seize a fire hose which the police had been using on them and turn it on the officers. Faced with this attack, the police had no alternative but to retreat, leaving behind them a no-go area open to a crowd of jubilant looters".

Several buildings were burned down, including a bank and a private members' club, and there was widespread looting. The Guardian newspaper reported that middle-aged women, white and Black queued up with shopping trolleys to expropriate goods from supermarkets. Police resorted to the use of CS gas for the first time in mainland Britain, firing door-piercing rounds at protesters, which seriously injured at least two people.
That summer, rioting occurred in cities across England, largely provoked by police aggression, particular against young Black people.


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## AmateurAgitator (Jul 6, 2022)

On this day, 6th July 1921, the Arditi del Popolo, an early militant anti-fascist organisation, had its first official public rally in the botanical garden in Rome, Italy. The police reported that 15,000 people were in attendance, and that "there were numerous red and black flags", whereas the press reported between 30,000 and 70,000 attendees.

Arditi was the name of the Italian army special forces unit in World War I, so the name "Arditi del Popolo" meant "People's Arditi". On July 6th they formed themselves into three battalions of 1000 fighters each, with the purpose of defending workers from violent attacks by the fascist blackshirts of Benito Mussolini.

After the rally there were some clashes and shootouts between the Arditi, fascist squads and the police, during which 10 people were wounded and some Arditi members were arrested for weapons possession. The group brought revolutionary trade unionists, anarchists, communists, and socialists together, and within its first year it had grown to include over 100 offices and 20,000 members.


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## AmateurAgitator (Jul 14, 2022)

On this day, 14th July 1896, legendary Spanish anarchist and civil war fighter Buenaventura Durruti was born. At the age of 14 he left school and began training as a mechanic in a railway yard. In 1917 he took part in a strike which was crushed by the army who killed 70 workers, injured over 500 and imprisoned 2000.

He later joined the Confederación Nacional del Trabajo (CNT) union, fought against the dictatorship of Miguel Primo do Rivera and was forced into exile, where he travelled to Latin America, where he undertook bank robberies in Chile and Argentina to fund the workers' movement.

Durruti later returned to Spain, and with the right-wing military rising of general Francisco Franco, he joined the fighting in Barcelona, during which the coup attempt was crushed and CNT workers took over the city. In an interview Durruti told a journalist that the working class "are going to inherit the earth. There is not the slightest doubt about that. The bourgeoisie may blast and burn its own world before it finally leaves the stage of history. We are not afraid of ruins. We who ploughed the prairies and built the cities can build again, only better next time. We carry a new world, here in our hearts. That world is growing this minute."

Durruti headed a column of 3000 revolutionary militia members and travelled to the Saragossa front to fight the nationalists. He and his column later came to Madrid to defend the city which was under attack, during which he was killed. His body was transported back to Barcelona where half a million workers took to the streets to attend his funeral.


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## platinumsage (Jul 14, 2022)

Also the "Priestly" riots in Birmingham, where people destroyed four churches and thirty other buildings in protest against the purchase of certain library books (amongst other issues ).


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## BCBlues (Jul 14, 2022)

platinumsage said:


> Also the "Priestly" riots in Birmingham, where people destroyed four churches and thirty other buildings in protest against the purchase of certain library books (amongst other issues ).



Meantime, up the road a bit, on 14th July 1712, the Newcomen Engine, the world’s first steam engine, was invented in the Black Country. Hence, today is Black Country Day.


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## AmateurAgitator (Jul 14, 2022)

platinumsage said:


> Also the "Priestly" riots in Birmingham, where people destroyed four churches and thirty other buildings in protest against the purchase of certain library books (amongst other issues ).











						Priestley Riots - Wikipedia
					






					en.wikipedia.org


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## AmateurAgitator (Jul 17, 2022)

On this day, 17th July 1936, a Spanish military uprising began in Morocco as right wing generals declared war on the new Republican government. The rising had been due to begin at 5 AM on July 18, but the plot in Melilla, Spanish Morocco, had been uncovered, and so a local military officer decided to initiate the coup attempt a day early.

The rebel officers arrested loyal officers, seized all the public buildings in the city, as well as the aerodrome, and made lists of union members, left-wing activists, Republicans and Freemasons, and arrested them all..
Some residents in working class districts attempted to resist, but they had no arms, and so were quickly overcome. Anyone who resisted was summarily shot, including the mayor and the loyal local general. Rebels in Melilla then telephoned plotters in Ceuta and Tetuán, who then initiated their rising as well, arresting or executing anyone who resisted.

The following day, workers across Spain began to go on strike and requisition weapons to defend themselves and the Republic, even though the Republican government would refuse to give them arms.
These events marked the beginning of the Spanish civil war. In the coming days, full-scale social revolution would break out which would set the Spanish working class, and volunteers from across the world, against the combined might of the bulk of the Spanish military backed up by Nazi Germany and fascist Italy.


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## spitfire (Jul 18, 2022)




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## AmateurAgitator (Jul 18, 2022)

On this day, 18th July 1969, Black Panthers held a conference in Oakland alongside the white anti-racist Young Patriots Organisation and Puerto Rican street gang-turned-radical group the Young Lords.

The Young Patriots were a group of poor, mostly Appalachian migrants in Chicago. Although they opposed racism, they originally wore Confederate flags, which they believed were a symbol of rebellion. As they worked more with communities of colour, they abandoned the flag as an irredeemable symbol of white supremacy.

Leading Panther Fred Hampton played a key role in building links with them and other white working class youth, until he was assassinated by police.

In his speech, William "Preacherman" Fesperman of the Young Patriots, argued for armed self-defence against police brutality: "A gun on the side of a pig means two things: it means racism and it means capitalism and the gun on the side of a revolutionary, on the side of the people, means solidarity and socialism."


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## AmateurAgitator (Jul 19, 2022)

On this day, 19th July 1936, in response to a right-wing coup by general Francisco Franco, workers across Spain took up arms and launched one of the most far-reaching social revolutions in history. The ensuing civil war pitted the working class against the Spanish capitalists, who were backed by Nazi Germany and fascist Italy. In the revolutionary areas, anarchist and socialist workers and peasants took over workplaces and land and began to run them collectively.

Thousands of mostly working class people came from all over the world to aid the workers of Spain. One of them was British socialist author George Orwell, who described the scene in Barcelona: "It was the first time that I had ever been in a town where the working class was in the saddle. Practically every building of any size had been seized by the workers and was draped with red flags or with the red and black flag of the Anarchists; every wall was scrawled with the hammer and sickle and with the initials of the revolutionary parties… Every shop and café had an inscription saying that it had been collectivised… Waiters and shop-walkers looked you in the face and treated you as an equal. Servile and even ceremonial forms of speech had temporarily disappeared. Nobody said ‘Señor’ or ‘Don’ or even ‘Usted’".

Western democracies, including Britain and France, abandoned the republic and enforced a blockade on Spain which stopped the flow of aid and weapons to the anti-fascists. Meanwhile, Italy and Germany openly flouted the ban, and the US oil giant Texaco supplied the nationalists with oil and other supplies without even demanding payment, while stopping any supplies to the republic.

Ultimately, after nearly three years of bitter and bloody warfare, the nationalists with their superior weaponry and equipment, were victorious.


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## AmateurAgitator (Jul 20, 2022)

On this day, 20th July 1943, two Jewish members of the Waldkommando work unit at the Sobibor concentration camp attacked their Ukrainian guard and encouraged other members of the unit to escape. The Waldkommando was composed of 20 Polish and 20 Dutch Jews, and it supplied wood for the crematorium by cutting down trees and digging out the stumps. Szlomo Podchlebnik and Josef Kopf initiated the breakout with a knife Podchlebnik had in his boot. Several Polish prisoners – Podchlebnik, Kopf, Zyndel Honigman, Chaim Korenfeld, Abram Wang, and Aron – were able to successfully escape. Kopf and Licht were murdered by Polish antisemites in separate incidents after their escape. The others survived the duration of the war. After the breakout, only Dutch Jews who were unable to speak Polish and did not know the countryside were allocated to the Waldkommando at the camp.


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## AmateurAgitator (Jul 22, 2022)

On 22nd July 1936 the Ritz Hotel in Barcelona, named El Palace, was taken over by its workers and socialised during the revolutionary events after the outbreak of the Spanish civil war.

The hotel was seized by workers' committees of the CNT and UGT unions as part of the socialisation of the hotel industry. The workers eliminated ostentation, renamed the hotel Hotel Gastronómico No 1, provided meals for local working class families, converted the hotel rooms into hospital rooms and repurposed the basement as a bomb shelter.

Later on, as the Republican government consolidated power and gradually put an end to workers' self-management, the state took control of the hotel in 1937, and used it to host official visitors and for government meetings.


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## AmateurAgitator (Aug 11, 2022)

On this day, 11th August 1964, 18-year-old Scottish anarchist Stuart Christie was arrested in Madrid while carrying explosives to blow up Spain’s right-wing dictator general Francisco Franco.

Christie was working with the underground anarchist resistance to the regime, which began after Franco's victory in the Spanish civil war in 1939. However, unbeknownst to Christie at the time, the resistance group had been infiltrated and its plan betrayed.
When Christie went to an American Express office in Madrid, he noticed a member of staff alerting undercover police, and promptly left.

He later recounted to the Guardian newspaper: "I felt curiously detached as I took a deep breath and walked out of the office, trying to keep my face expressionless. Mustering all the confidence I could, I paused at the doorway to look at the group of five men now standing to one side of the entrance. Until I appeared at the doorway they had been deep in conversation. They stopped briefly, exchanging knowing looks with one another, and carried on. An empty taxi pulled in to the pavement beside me. But when the driver appeared to invite me to get in, I knew it was an undercover police car. I was being hemmed in. By this time I had reached the corner of the busy calle Cedaceros. As I steeled myself to make a dash through the crowds I was suddenly grabbed by both arms from behind, my face pushed to the wall and a gun barrel thrust into the small of my back. I tried to turn my head but I was handcuffed before I fully realised what had happened. It was all over in a matter of moments."

When arrested Christie was wearing a kilt, which confused the Spanish press in to describing him as "a Scottish transvestite." He was sentenced to 20 years in prison but after an international campaign in his support he was released in 1968.

Christie remained active supporting and helping record the history of the Spanish resistance movement until the end of his life in August 2020.


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## AmateurAgitator (Aug 12, 2022)

On this day, 12th August 1911, a strike of working women and girls in south London began which rapidly spread into a mass walkout. Amidst a wave of strikes of mostly male transport and dockworkers across Britain, a group of mostly non-union women and girls working in factories walked out and began parading through the streets, calling on other workers to join them. Custard, jam, biscuit, tool and tent-making factories were among those shut down, with around 14,000 women from over 20 different employers on strike within a few days. 

Employers complained of a "reign of terror" by the workers, and the government responded by ordering troops to be stationed in nearby Southwark Park. The strikers got assistance from the National Federation of Women Workers, who raised money and helped the women formulate concrete demands to make of employers. Companies rapidly began to cave in, abolishing piecework and increasing pay in most of the struck enterprises over the next month. While many male unionists had dismissed women workers, like Labour MP and union leader Will Thorne who claimed that women "do not make good trade unionists", thousands of women joined unions during the dispute and organised themselves.


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## Dystopiary (Aug 12, 2022)

On this day in 2020, Aliaksandr Vikhor, aged 25, died after being beaten by police in Minsk. 

On the evening of 9th of August, the rigged Belarusian election results were announced immediately after the polling stations closed. It was claimed that Alyaksandr Lukashenka (Alexander Lukashenko) had received an unfeasible 80%+ of the votes. The majority had voted for Sviatlana Tsikhanouskaya, who had stood in place of her husband Sergei after he was detained and refused candidacy. 

People came out en masse throughout Belarus to protest the rigged election results. Law enforcement repressed the demonstrators using police batons, rubber bullets, grenades with lead balls, water cannons, tear gas and stun grenades. Many people were injured. 

Aliaksandr Vikhor, known as Sasha, was on the way to see a date when he was detained in Homel. Despite him telling them he felt ill, the police beat the young man. Other detainees asked for help but they were ignored. The police filmed him and mocked him as he lay on the concrete floor having seizures. 

The authorities have refused to open an investigation into Mr Vikhor's death. He was the second person to be killed following the protests. The first, Alexander Taraikovsky, died after being shot on August 10 2020. 

May the killers and their enablers be brought to justice.


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## AmateurAgitator (Aug 17, 2022)

On this day, 17th August 1909, Indian revolutionary Madan Lal Dhingra was executed by the British for his assassination of Sir Curzon Wyllie, an army officer and head of the secret police, who was trying to uncover and defeat anti-colonial activists. While Dhingra was supported by anarchist Guy Aldred, who was sentenced to 12-months' hard labour for publishing a sympathetic article about him, Mohandas Gandhi condemned him. On trial, he refused to acknowledge the authority of the court, and stated "I hold the English people responsible for the murder of eighty millions of Indian people in the last fifty years, and they are also responsible for taking away ₤100,000,000 every year from India to this country."





A shame he blamed 'the English people' rather than the British ruling class. Good on him for taking out the officer though. And bloody Gandhi again - what a right shit he was.


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## AmateurAgitator (Aug 19, 2022)

On this day, 19th August 1909, the first edition of the revolutionary Industrial Workers of the World union’s Little Red Songbook was published in the US. Spreading faster than many radical texts, these songs were sung by thousands on picket lines across the country in the coming years, including perhaps the most famous, 'Solidarity Forever', written by Ralph Chaplin during a miners' strike in West Virginia in 1912. It also included numerous songs by Joe Hill, the Swedish immigrant IWW activist who was executed by the state of Utah in 1915.


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## AmateurAgitator (Aug 20, 2022)

On this day, 20th August 1976, the Grunwick strike began in London when Devshi Bhudia was dismissed from a photo processing plant for working too slowly and three colleagues walked out in his support. Three days later they began picketing in what became an iconic dispute and one of the key struggles of the working class, particularly the Asian and female working class in the UK in the late 20th century.

One of the strikers, Sunil Desai, whose mother Jayaben became a key leader of the strike, told his manager before walking out: "What you are running is not a factory, it is a zoo. But in a zoo there are many types of animals. Some are monkeys who dance on your fingertips. Others are lions who can bite your head off. We are those lions, Mr Manager."

The workers remained out for nearly two years, and while they were unsuccessful in achieving their stated aims, they helped transform the UK workers' movement by pushing white union workers to recognise Asian, Black and migrant workers as their fellow workers rather than as rivals for jobs.


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## GarveyLives (Aug 21, 2022)

(Source: www.independent.co.uk)






(Source: The family of Sean Rigg)

*21 August 2008:  Sean Rigg restained to death by Brixton Police*​


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## AmateurAgitator (Aug 24, 2022)

On this day exactly 100 years ago, 24th August 1922, radical historian, author, WWII bombardier and activist, Howard Zinn, was born to a Jewish immigrant family in Brooklyn, New York City. Author of the incredible book A People’s History of the United States, Zinn did perhaps more than anyone else in recent years to popularise the history of ordinary people, our history and our struggles.


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## AmateurAgitator (Aug 25, 2022)

On this day, 25th August 1921, the Battle of Blair Mountain, the largest armed rebellion in the US since the civil war, began. For five days in late August and early September, 1921 in Logan County, West Virginia, 10,000 striking coal miners battled with armed strikebreakers and deputies following the killing of miners and their supporters in Welch and Sharples. Faced with the overwhelming firepower of US federal troops and even the air force, the miners eventually surrendered or returned to their homes.


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## Dystopiary (Aug 25, 2022)

"Today #Belarus marks Independence Restoration Day. On this day 31 years ago, the Declaration on State Sovereignty came into force. Lukashenka was among the 3% of MPs who did not vote for independence. We see it today since he and Putin are the main threats to our sovereignty" 

- Hanna Liubakova, journalist on the Belarusian authorities' "wanted" list


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## AmateurAgitator (Aug 26, 2022)

On this day, 26th August 1972, Falkirk FC was due to play against Montrose in a Scottish League Cup football match, but Falkirk players had gone on strike and stated they would refuse to play unless a financial penalty imposed by their manager was rescinded.

Players, led by later Manchester United manager Alex Ferguson (pictured), walked out during a prior training session, after manager Willie Cunningham withdrew food and travel expense payments from players to penalised them for losing a match, 6-1, against St Johnstone. Ferguson had previously been a union shop steward and taken part in wildcat strikes while working in the Glasgow shipyards.

Following the walkout, the club owners sided with players against the manager, rescinded the penalty and ultimately the incident led to Cunningham leaving his post as manager. The match went ahead and resulted in a 3-0 win for Falkirk.


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## The39thStep (Aug 28, 2022)

The Ukrainian Auxiliary Police were mainly OUN, Organisation of Ukrainian Nationalists, a fascist armed force led by Bandera and Melnyk.


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## AmateurAgitator (Aug 30, 2022)

On this day, 30th August 1948, leading Black Panther activist Fred Hampton was born in Summit, Illinois. Hampton was instrumental in forming links between the Black Panthers and organisations of working class Chinese people, whites, Puerto Ricans and Mexicans in what he dubbed the Rainbow Coalition.

A revolutionary internationalist, he explained: "We're going to fight racism not with racism, but we're going to fight with solidarity. We say we're not going to fight capitalism with Black capitalism, but we're going to fight it with socialism."

Hampton was a central target of the FBI's COINTELPRO programme, which resulted in him being drugged by an FBI operative, then shot in the shoulder while he was asleep, then shot twice more in the head at point-blank range by Chicago police during an FBI raid in 1969. He was only 21 years old.


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## AmateurAgitator (Sep 3, 2022)

On this day, 3rd September 1942, Jewish residents of the Łachwa Ghetto in modern-day Belarus staged an uprising against the Nazi army occupying their community. It was a response to the planned mass killing of Jewish inhabitants of the area, which had begun the previous day.

Long before this order was made public, though, the Jews of Łachwa had been organising across lines of political affiliation and class to build an underground resistance against the Nazis. This underground was primarily led by young people, such as Issac Rosczyn (pictured, left), Asher Hafets, Hersz Migdalowicz, and more who built a core group of 30 residents.

Violent rebellion began that morning when Dov Lopatin (right), another leader in the area, set fire to a government building to signal the rest of the community. Working off the plans of the underground, Jewish residents set dozens of other buildings ablaze, then rushing to the surrounding forest in an attempt to escape. Meanwhile, members of the underground used stolen axes, knives, and iron bars to free community members already trapped on Nazi trucks, resulting in brutal force being directed at the young men.

Machine gunfire devastated the 1,000 residents fleeing to the forest, with hundreds of them being murdered as they ran. Of the 2,100 Jewish residents of the ghetto, 1,500 died in the uprising, with hundreds more being dragged to execution pits and shot immediately afterward. By the end of the war, only 90 former residents of Lachwa remained alive to tell their story. The Łachwa Ghetto rebellion was one of many instances of resistance by Jewish people to the fascist genocide.


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## brogdale (Sep 5, 2022)

45 years ago an RAF "commando unit" kidnapped ex-Nazi/industrialist Hanns Martin Schleyer in one episode of what is now commonly referred to as the German Autumn.


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## AmateurAgitator (Sep 6, 2022)

On this day, 6th  September 1966, Mozambican-Greek revolutionary Dimitri Tsafendas assassinated the architect of apartheid, South African Prime Minister Hendrik Verwoerd, by stabbing him during a parliamentary session. Tsafendas (pictured) was at the time working in the Parliament building.

Despite the bravery of his act, anti-apartheid leaders and his family distanced themselves from Tsafendas after the assassination. In his statement to police he was clear about his motives, saying that he "did believe that with the disappearance of the South African prime minister a change of policy would take place… I was so disgusted with the racial policy that I went through with my plan to kill the prime minister."

But authorities decided to claim he was mentally ill so as to not admit their security had been beaten. And Tsafendas, under torture and facing the death penalty, eventually agreed to plead insanity.

Thus, he was subsequently found not guilty of murder by reason of insanity, and sent to a secure psychiatric hospital. He survived to see the end of the apartheid regime, but the new African National Congress government did not order his release. He died in custody in 1999.


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## AmateurAgitator (Sep 7, 2022)

On this day, 7th September 1934, anti-fascists hung a banner atop the BBC headquarters advertising a demonstration against a rally by Oswald Mosley and his British Union of Fascists that weekend. While Mosley had been invited on the BBC to promote his Nazi views and advertise his demonstration, the BBC, like the rest of the British press, refused to give a platform to anti-fascists, or mention the counter-protest. Despite this, on the day, over 100,000 Londoners overwhelmed the fascists and their police guard and drove them out of Hyde Park.


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## AmateurAgitator (Sep 8, 2022)

On this day, 8th September 1946, numerous empty properties were squatted by homeless ex-servicemen and their families in London in a wave of occupations across the country. 148 luxury flats in the Duchess of Bedford House in Kensington were squatted, as was a block in Weymouth Street, Marylebone, as well as houses in Campden Hill and Holland Park. In the coming days, more properties would be taken over around the city. Taken by surprise, police at the Duchess of Bedford House reportedly expressed sympathy for the families and arranged for a Women's Voluntary Service than to bring them hot drinks. But in subsequent occupations this did not recur and police took action like preventing supplies being brought to families and dispersing supporters with violence. Meanwhile, *the Labour health minister, Aneurin Bevan, instructed local authorities to cut off gas and electricity to squatted premises.* On 20th September, a High Court injunction was issued against all of the London squats, and the occupiers then voluntarily left. Most of them went to a "rest centre" organised by local authorities, from which they were eventually rehoused.



Nye Bevan was a cunt.


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## AmateurAgitator (Sep 14, 2022)

On this day, 14th September 1940, to protest insufficient provision of air raid shelters for working-class Londoners during the Blitz, dozens of protesters (with the help of some sympathetic waiters) occupied the luxury air raid shelter at the luxury Savoy Hotel in Central London to draw attention to the stark differences in shelter for rich and poor.

The action was organised by members of the Communist Party from Stepney, in East London. One of its members, Phil Piratin, described the available shelters for working class people: "The shelters, which until the blitz were deserted, were now packed to overflowing, and now the conditions were revealed. The little trench shelters in the little Stepney parks were a foot deep in water. The benches were half-a-dozen inches above the water. It was quite impossible to use them, and certainly impossible to stay in them night after night. Now the street surface shelters were being put to the test. Many of them were destroyed."

By contrast, Piratin describes what they found at the Savoy: "In fact, there was some effort to stop us, but it was only a matter of seconds before we were downstairs, and the women and children cam streaming in afterwards. While the management and their lackeys were filled with consternation, the visitors from the East End looked round in amazement. ‘Shelters,’ they said, ‘why we’d love to live in such places!’ Structurally, the lower ground floor had been strengthened with steel girders and by other means. But the appearance of the place! There were three sections. In each section there were cubicles. Each section was decorated in a different colour, pink, blue and green. All the bedding, all the linen, was of course the same uniform colour. Armchairs and deck chairs were strewn around. There were several ‘nurses’ – you could easily recognise them."

The action was widely publicised, and resulted in improvements to shelters for working class Londoners.



Pic: the Savoy shelter, 1939


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## The39thStep (Sep 22, 2022)

St Pancras rent strike 



Article here , need to scroll down to second article 









						Search Results for “St Pancras ” – past tense
					

London radical histories and possibilities




					pasttenseblog.wordpress.com


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## AmateurAgitator (Sep 23, 2022)

On this day, 23rd September 1945, the Saigon commune came into being when workers rose up, independently of the Vietminh, when French and Japanese troops, supported by Gurkhas under British command, entered the city.

Centred in poor suburbs of what is now Ho Chi Minh City, the rebels cut down trees and flipped over cars and trucks to build makeshift barricades. The insurgents shot colonial police and officials, and in some areas popular resentment at years of racism and abuse exploded in mass killings of French civilians.

Meanwhile, the official independence movement, the Viet Minh, avoided direct conflict, instead supporting a food blockade of the foreign troops. Although as Ngo Van Xuyet (pictured), a participant in the uprising commented, this was "a futile hope, as the British ships controlled the access to the harbour." The Viet Minh at the time was attempting to secure recognition from Britain as the de facto government of Vietnam after the defeat of Japan in World War II, and so wanted to preserve order.

On October 5th, additional French forces arrived under the command of General Leclerc, and by the following week the uprising was essentially defeated.


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## AmateurAgitator (Sep 28, 2022)

On this day, 28th September 1955, during a visit by dictator general Francisco Franco to Barcelona, anarchist resistance activist Francesc Sabaté hailed a cab and had it drive around the Catalan capital. During the journey he fired anti-regime leaflets through the sun-roof from a mortar he had assembled from inside his suitcase on the back seat. He reassured the worried driver saying "Don't worry, I work for the government and I am distributing informational materials." He later left the driver with a generous tip.


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## AmateurAgitator (Oct 4, 2022)

I do believe that today is the 86th anniversary of the Battle of Cable Street


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## AmateurAgitator (Oct 7, 2022)

On this day, 7th October 1879, Joe Hill, songwriter and Industrial Workers of the World union martyr, was born in Sweden. Songs he wrote, like Rebel Girl and The Preacher and the Slave – which is where the phrase "pie in the sky" comes from – were sung by thousands of workers on picket lines across the United States, which had become his new home. He was executed by the state in Utah in 1915 for a crime he almost certainly didn't commit.


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## Pickman's model (Oct 7, 2022)

1944: sonderkommando revolt at auschwitz-birkenau Prisoner Revolt at Auschwitz-Birkenau


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## platinumsage (Oct 9, 2022)

That famous student t-shirt silhouette model died today 55 years ago.


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## The39thStep (Oct 9, 2022)

platinumsage said:


> That famous student t-shirt silhouette model died today 55 years ago.


Executed with a machine gun after being taken  prisoner


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## AmateurAgitator (Oct 10, 2022)

On this day, 10th October 1937, British aristocratic fascist leader Oswald Mosley was knocked unconscious and hospitalised in Liverpool by a stone thrown by anti-fascists who attacked a Nazi meeting at which he had attempted to address the crowd. The Glasgow Herald newspaper reported: "Sir Oswald Mosley was hit on the head by a stone and knocked semi-conscience immediately he stood on the top of a loud-speaker van to address an open-air meeting at Queens Drive, Liverpool, yesterday. As the van was being driven to a piece of waste land, hundreds of missiles were thrown, Sir Oswald, had not had time to utter a word when a large stone hit him on the temple and he fell on his face. Mounted police who were standing by in a neighbouring yard, immediately rushed out and charged the crowd back. A Fascist bodyguard stood by to guard Sir Oswald in spite of showers of bricks from large sections of the crowd."



 😂


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## AmateurAgitator (Oct 12, 2022)

On this day, 12th October 1910, Italian footballer and anti-fascist partisan Bruno Neri was born in Faenza. He began his football career with his hometown team, and later moved to Fiorentina.

There, he played in midfield and played over 200 matches. After the fascist takeover of Benito Mussolini, Neri was the only Fiorentina player to refuse to give a fascist salute at the opening of their new Giovanni Berta stadium. Despite this he was recruited to play for Italy's national team, and later recruited by FC Torino.

In 1940, he left top division football and returned to his home team of Faenza as a player-manager, where he also became actively involved in resistance to fascism.

After the toppling of Mussolini's government in 1943 and the subsequent German occupation of North Italy, Neri joined the partisan resistance. He became a member of the Ravenna battalion and fought under the nom de guerre of "Berni".

In between underground armed action against the Nazis, Neri continued playing football, until killed in action in the mountains in 1944. After the war, Faenza renamed their stadium after him.


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## Orang Utan (Oct 13, 2022)

(he was also founder of the Berni Inn chain of terrible pretend foreign food restaurants popular in the UK in the 60s and 70s)


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## AmateurAgitator (Oct 13, 2022)

On the day that most likely translates to October 13th, 1157 BCE in our current calendar, the earliest recorded strike in history was first reported. The dispute is recounted in a papyrus written by a scribe in the ancient Egyptian town that is now called Deir el-Medina. Gangs of skilled construction workers in the employ of Pharaoh Ramses III stopped work when, eighteen days after their payday, they had still not received their wages, which would have been paid in food and other goods. The workers shouted that they were hungry and sat down by a temple. Officials gave them some pastries, and they returned home, but the following day they protested once more, demanding their pay at the central grain storehouse in Thebes. Eventually they received their back pay, but the pattern of workers needing to go on strike to be paid what they were owed was repeated multiple times.


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## friendofdorothy (Oct 16, 2022)

Sorry didnt get a chance to post yesterday - On yesterday it was the sad anniversary of the murder of Jodie Dobrowski. Some of us involved in Hate Crime Awareness Week held a minute's silence on the common.

Murder of Jody Dobrowski - Wikipedia.   








						Barman killer had been released early
					

One of two men jailed for life for the murder of a barman in an attack motivated by "homophobic thuggery" had been released from prison early, police confirmed today.




					www.theguardian.com


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## AmateurAgitator (Oct 16, 2022)

John Brown's raid on Harper's Ferry began on the 16th October 1859.


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## AmateurAgitator (Oct 21, 2022)

On this day, 21st October 1920, the battle of Cheongsan-ri began in Manchuria between the Korean Independence Army and the Japanese Imperial Army. Korean military forces under the command of anarchist general Kim Jwa-jin (pictured) were ambushed by Japanese troops. They successfully defended themselves, killing over 200 attackers, and forcing Japanese troops to flee. Fighting continued, with the Japanese army suffering heavy casualties. By the early hours of October 26, there had been 10 confrontations, with 1,200 Japanese casualties compared with only 100 casualties amongst the Korean independence forces, and the few Japanese survivors panicked and fled. It was the most spectacular victory of the independence army, which effectively wiped out an entire division of the Japanese Imperial Army.

Unfortunately, in the Svobodnyy city incident, the Soviet Union refused to help and then attempted to disarm the Korean independence militias after they fled Japanese-occupied Manchuria due to adverse conditions, seeking normalized relations with Japan. This heightened conflict between communists and Kim and he was eventually assassinated by Park Sangsil, a communist, in 1930.

The Soviet Union's hostility towards Korean independence activists and refugees would continue - Koreans eventually became the first ethnicity in that country to be wholesale resettled, with more than 200,000 being dumped in Kazakhstan in cattle trains without much food or supply. Stalin was being paranoid about Japanese spies and he considered Koreans to be under their influence.

More than a quarter perished before they established some of the first farms in the region, and the Korean diaspora in Central Asia and the Soviet Union continue to be a sizable minority.

Kim Il-sung, a no-name raider in Manchuria and eventually a low-rank Red Army functionary who climbed up his way to manage Korean affairs in a largely indifferent institution was therefore a puppet to the very man who had imposed genocidal conditions on his own people. It's no wonder North Korea turned out the way it did. The man was a jumped-up collaborationist, the lowest dreg.


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## AmateurAgitator (Oct 21, 2022)

On this day, 21st October 1970 the first women's liberation demonstration took place in Japan in Tokyo, kickstarting a new wave of the feminist movement in the country. The women were demanding legalisation of the contraceptive pill and opposing any prohibition of abortion. After the failure of the mass movement against the Japan-US security treaty, women student activists finally felt able to express their demands as women, which they had kept quiet so as not to be seen to "undermine" the struggle against the treaty. Sexual liberation and free love also exploded following the failure of the student movement, and without contraceptives, millions of women were having to have abortions. The pill was only eventually legalised in 1999.


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## AmateurAgitator (Oct 22, 2022)

On this day, 22nd October 1935, British colonial authorities declared a state of emergency on the Caribbean island of St Vincent to repress a rebellion against prices which had been kept high to benefit sugar interests. At midnight that morning a British warship arrived to reinforce local police. Though disorder in the capital, Kingstown, had subsided, the uprising continued for two days in rural areas, and police met strong resistance in Byera's Hill, Campden Park and Stubbs, where demands for land and for higher wages were heard. The state of emergency was continued for three weeks.


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## AmateurAgitator (Oct 23, 2022)

On this day, 23rd October 1956, a nationwide revolt in Hungary saw thousands of people organise themselves into workers’ councils and militias, demanding not a transition to capitalism but rather a socialism controlled by the working class itself.

Peter Fryer, a member of the British Communist Party and a journalist for the Party newspaper the Daily Worker wrote in his first dispatch: "After eleven years the incessant mistakes of the Communist leaders, the brutality of the State Security Police, the widespread bureaucracy and mismanagement, the bungling, the arbitrary methods and the lies have led to total collapse. This was no counter-revolution, organised by fascists and reactionaries. It was the upsurge of a whole people, in which rank-and-file Communists took part, against a police dictatorship dressed up as a Socialist society-a police dictatorship backed up by Soviet armed might. And I have no hesitation in placing the blame for these terrible events squarely on the shoulders of those who led the Hungarian Communist Party for eleven years. . . . They turned what could have been the outstanding example of people’s democracy in Europe into a grisly caricature of Socialism. They reared and trained a secret police which tortured all-Communists as well as non-Communists-who dared to open their mouths against injustices. It was a secret police which in these last few dreadful days turned its guns on the people whose defenders it was supposed to be."


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## AmateurAgitator (Oct 24, 2022)

On this day, 24th October 1975, 90% of women in Iceland went on general strike for equality with men. At the time, women in the country earned over 40% less than men on average.

A radical feminist group called the Red Stockings initially proposed the idea of a strike against low pay and to show the centrality of women's paid and unpaid labour to the capitalist economy. A committee of feminist organisations then decided to call for a "day off" for women, which was then supported by key trade unions.

One woman, Annadis Rudolfsdottir later recalled to the Guardian: "In the days preceding the 24th it seemed that women everywhere were grouping together, drinking coffee, smoking incessantly but doing a lot of agitated talking. My granny, who was working incredibly hard in a fish factory, was not going to take the day off. But the questions raised by the women's movements whirred around her mind. Why were young men taking home higher wages than her when her job was no less physically strenuous?"

The "day off" was hugely successful: the vast majority of Iceland's wage-earning women stayed home, and house workers refused to cook, clean and look after children. Newspapers were not printed, telephone calls weren't connected, and many schools were closed. Flights were cancelled, fish factories closed, and many other businesses disrupted. 25,000 women then rallied in the capitol, Reykjavík, bringing traffic to a standstill.

The year after the strike, the Icelandic government passed the Gender Equality Act outlawing sex discrimination and formed a Gender Equality Council. Today Iceland has the lowest gender inequality in the world, although women still earn only 80% of men’s wages, so discrimination and the struggle against it continues.


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## Pickman's model (Oct 24, 2022)

today in 1945 vidkun quisling, first of that name, was executed


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## AmateurAgitator (Oct 25, 2022)

On this day, 25th October 1983, the Hayes Cottage Hospital in England was occupied by its staff and run under workers' control in protest at its proposed closure the following week.

A leaflet about the occupation issued at the time stated: "This action was taken after a lot of thought but it was clearly the only way to stop the closure after other avenues had been exhausted.

"The reaction of the people of Hayes has been really magnificent. We have had visitors coming round with food, supplies and money…
"G.P's connected with the hospital are to start admitting patients again so we will be running just as before. Certainly, the patients in the Cottage Hospital are solidly behind the "work-in. Fifteen of them have signed a petition demanding the retention of the hospital and one patient has insisted that if any attempt is made to move her she intends to die in the ambulance".

The workers self-managed the hospital until December, when the health authority caved in and agreed to keep it open. The hospital remained open until the 1990s, when it was turned into a nursing home.


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## AmateurAgitator (Oct 26, 2022)

On this day, 26th October 1983, the Northwood and Pinner hospital in England was occupied by its workers in protest at its proposed closure, led by matron Jean Carey. From the following day, they ran the hospital themselves collectively and eventually the workers won, and it stayed open for a further 25 years.


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## AmateurAgitator (Nov 3, 2022)

On this day, 3rd November 1918, in the German port city of Kiel, sailors and workers elected the first Council of Soldiers in Germany. Before, in the morning, hundreds of armed sailors of the German Navy had gathered at the house of the local trade unions. A few days earlier, around 1,000 sailors had been imprisoned for mutiny after refusing to go into battle against the British navy. Fearing a wide-spread rebellion, the admirals had called off the attack.

After Karl Artelt, a sailor and machinist from Magdeburg, and the sailor Lothar Popp from Bavaria called the sailors to free their comrades, the men marched to local factories first to ask workers to join, and workers began to walk out on strike. When 6,000 sailors and workers were about to approach the prison on the Landstraße near the Cafe Kaiser, they faced a line of soldiers, rifles in hand. Their lieutenant, named Steinhäuser, gave the order to shoot. Nine demonstrators died. A sailor shot back, killing the lieutenant. A few minutes later the local admiral, unsure of the loyalty of his own troops opened the prison gates and the prisoners were free.

In the evening, the sailors and workers introduced working class democracy to Kiel, to Germany by electing the Council of Soldiers with Karl Artelt as chairman. As their first action, the Council presented demands to the local military commander, Bartels: Abdication of the Kaiser, free elections and women’s right to vote. Flabbergasted, Bartels responded: “But gentlemen, this is a political program.” Afterwards, dozens of sailors’ delegations set off into the night by railroad to carry the revolt into the country. By November 5th, the red flag was flying over ships in Kiel harbour, while the mutiny spread, and the German revolution gathered momentum.


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## AmateurAgitator (Nov 5, 2022)

On this day, 5th November 1921, German Jewish communist resistance fighter and nurse Marianne Prager-Joachim was born. After the Nazis took power, she worked as a forced labourer in the Siemens factory in Berlin, where she joined the Baum resistance group in the plant, which consisted of other Jewish communist workers. She was executed in 1943 for her part in an arson attack on a Nazi anti-communist propaganda exhibition the previous year.


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## AmateurAgitator (Nov 7, 2022)

On this day, 7th November 1917, the October revolution began in Russia (named because of the different calendar which was in use at the time). Bolsheviks, anarchists and Left-Socialist Revolutionaries participated in the overthrow of the Alexander Kerensky-led provisional government, which was committed to continuing Russia's participation in the disastrous First World War. They seized control of key locations in St Petersburg, culminating in the storming of the Winter Palace.




Pictured : Image from the 1920 film, The Storming of the Winter Palace, recreating the event.


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## platinumsage (Nov 7, 2022)

AmateurAgitator said:


> On this day, 7th November 1917, the October revolution began in Russia (named because of the different calendar which was in use at the time). Bolsheviks, anarchists and Left-Socialist Revolutionaries participated in the overthrow of the Alexander Kerensky-led provisional government, which was committed to continuing Russia's participation in the disastrous First World War. They seized control of key locations in St Petersburg, culminating in the storming of the Winter Palace.
> 
> 
> View attachment 350567



A year later evangelist Billy Graham was born.


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## AmateurAgitator (Nov 8, 2022)

On this day, 8th November 1939, factory worker and folk musician Georg Elser attempted to assassinate German Nazi dictator Adolf Hitler. He bombed the pub where Hitler stayed every year on the anniversary of the Nazi putsch of 1923.
Elser began work in an arms factory in 1936, and decided to try to kill Hitler. Under police interrogation he explained he made the decision because he believed Hitler was preparing to bring Germany into another war, among other reasons like how wages had been driven so low by the Nazi regime.

In 1938 Elser began stealing small amounts of explosives from the factory where he worked, and knew that Hitler travelled to the Buergerbraukeller beer hall in Munich each year to celebrate the putsch. So he moved to Munich and attempted to get a job in the pub. In this effort he was unsuccessful, so he got a job in a quarry where he could steal more explosives, and began eating in the pub every day. Just before closing, he hid in a cupboard, and after everyone had left he began hollowing out a pillar to house a timebomb.

He set it to go off at 9:20 PM on November 8, by which time Hitler had previously arrived. But on this occasion, unbeknownst to Elser, Hitler cancelled his stay and left just 13 minutes earlier. Instead the bomb killed six senior Nazis as well as a waitress.
Despite torture, Elser refused to implicate anyone else in the attack, and he was sent to the Dachau concentration camp where he was murdered a few days before liberation.


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## AmateurAgitator (Nov 9, 2022)

Kristallnacht happened 84 years ago today.


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## AmateurAgitator (Nov 11, 2022)

On this day, 11th November 1887, four of the Haymarket martyrs were executed in Chicago. They were anarchist labour organisers framed for a bombing because of their role in the fight for the 8-hour day. The May Day holiday around May 1 each year commemorates the martyrs. Lucy Parsons, a formerly-enslaved Black anarchist activist, and wife of Albert Parsons, one of the martyrs, recalled that day:

"On that gloomy morning of November 11, 1887, I took our two little children to the jail to bid my beloved husband farewell. I found the jail roped off with heavy cables. Policemen with pistols walked in the enclosure. I asked them to allow us to go to our loved one before they murdered him. They said nothing. Then I said, 'Let these children bid their father goodby, let them receive his blessing. They can do no harm.' In a few minutes a patrol wagon drove up and we were locked up in a police station while the hellish deed was done. Oh, Misery, I have drunk thy cup of sorrow to its dregs but I am still a rebel."

The others to be executed were George Engel, Adolph Fischer, August Spies and Louis Lingg, although Lingg cheated the hangman by blowing himself up the previous night.

Upon his sentencing, Spies told the court: "if you think that by hanging us you can stamp out the labour 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, flames will blaze up. It is a subterranean fire. You cannot put it out. The ground is on fire upon which you stand."
On the gallows, he said: "There will be a time when our silence will be more powerful than the voices you strangle today."


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## AmateurAgitator (Nov 12, 2022)

On this day, 12th November 1977, the first Reclaim The Night march took place in the UK in Leeds, York, Bristol, Manchester, Newcastle, Brighton and London. They were called by the Leeds Revolutionary Feminist Group, who were inspired by news of co-ordinated women-only ‘Take Back The Night’ marches against sexual harassment, held across towns and cities in West Germany on 30 April 1977.

This was particularly significant to women in the area because of the serial murders by Peter Sutcliffe, dubbed by the press as the ‘Yorkshire Ripper’, who sexually attacked and murdered thirteen women across Yorkshire between 1975 and 1980. Women in the area were angry that the police response to these murders seemed slow and that the press barely reported on them when it was mainly women involved in sex work who were murdered. But when a young female student was murdered, the press and the police seemed to take more notice.

The police response was to tell women not to go out at night, effectively putting them under curfew. This was not a helpful suggestion, especially for women working late shifts or night shifts, or those involved in sex work who often had no choice about whether they went out at night or not.


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## AmateurAgitator (Nov 16, 2022)

On this day, 16th November 2019, Chilean street "riot dog" Rucio Capucha was injured by police water cannon during a protest in Santiago. Rucio Capucha was following in the pawprints of legendary protest dog Negro Matapacos, frequently joining riots on the side of protesters and confronting the police. As with other Chilean protest dogs, he was thus often subjected to violent attacks by the police. On this occasion, video shows he was clearly deliberately targeted by police in a water cannon truck, who blasted him with it as he walked through an empty section of street during a protest. The blast left him with a contusion on his left lung, but he was cared for by veterinary students and survived. He was then adopted and lives happily with a family.


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## AmateurAgitator (Nov 17, 2022)

On this day, 17th November 1983, six people of Indigenous and mestize origin founded the Zapatista Army of National Liberation (EZLN) in the mountains of Chiapas, Mexico. 11 years later, around 3,000 armed EZLN members launched an uprising taking control of a considerable amount of land in the region, freeing prisoners and destroying police and army barracks. In a counter-attack by the Mexican army, the guerrillas lost control of many towns and cities and retreated into the Lacandon jungle.

Subsequently the Zapatistas established a number of self-governing autonomous communities, with a population of over 300,000 people who are mostly from the Chol, Kanjobal, Mame, Tjolobal, Tzeltal, Tzozil, and Zoque Indigenous communities. Other than personal property, private ownership was abolished, with collective ownership of land and collectively owned and run workplaces. Radical, democratic schools, where pupils are not graded, were established, as was a universal healthcare service, drastically improving public health and reducing infant mortality. The communities also have a strong commitment to Indigenous, women's and LGBT+ rights.

So if you know five people who think like you, set up a group!


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## AmateurAgitator (Nov 18, 2022)

On this day, 18th November 1949, security forces massacred 21 striking miners and a bystander at the British government-owned coal mine at Enugu in Nigeria. Britain's Labour government led by Clement Atlee was keen to maximise output in order to fund the rebuilding of infrastructure and repay debts to the US in the wake of World War II.

The miners, many of whom were British Army veterans who served in south-east Asia, had occupied their mine demanding backpay for a period of time where they were paid according to a casual system called "rostering" which was later declared illegal.
The British Colonial Office had dispatched union bureaucrats from the Trades Union Congress (TUC) all around the Empire in order to try to organise workers in ways that their discontent could be integrated into the system. A local TUC adviser tried to divide the mine workers up into five separate branches, which ran contrary to the local Igbo workers Jiffy culture of organising together in mass meetings, so they ignored him.

Since striking was illegal at the time, workers began a wildcat go-slow, adopted from miners in Durham, England and known as "welu nwayo" in Igbo. The workers were sacked, so they then occupied the mine.

Violence began when a British policeman, Captain F.S. Philip panicked when he saw some of the African miners dancing and chanting and shot a young miner called Sunday Anyasado, killing him. He then killed a machine worker, Livinus Okechukwuma, and when, hearing all the noise, Okafor Ageni emerged from the mine to ask “Anything wrong?” he was murdered. Shooting continued for several minutes, hitting dozens of workers, many in the back, and security forces left the wounded to die on the ground. In addition to 22 deaths, 51 people were wounded.

The massacre fuelled rapid support for the anti-colonial movement.



Pictured: a memorial to the massacre


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## AmateurAgitator (Nov 21, 2022)

On this day, 21st November 1920, soldiers of the Irish Republican Army assassinated 15 suspected British intelligence officers. In retaliation, policemen from the Royal Irish Constabulary (RIC) raided Croke Park stadium where a Gaelic football match was being watched by thousands of spectators. The RIC fired indiscriminately into the crowd, killing 14 people, including one of the players, Michael Hogan. 80 people were also injured.

The names of the others who were killed were Jerome O'Leary, 10, William Robinson, 11, John Scott, 14, Jane Boyle, 28, James Burke, 44, Daniel Carroll, 30, Michael Feery, 30, Tom Hogan, 19, James Mathews, 48, Patrick O'Dowd, 57, Thomas Ryan, 27, James Teehan, 26, and Joe Traynor, 20.


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## Pickman's model (Nov 21, 2022)

.


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## AmateurAgitator (Nov 21, 2022)

On this day, 21st November 1922, Mexican revolutionary leader of Zapotec and mestizo descent, Ricardo Flores Magón, died after months of illness and neglect in Leavenworth Prison, Kansas.

His anarchist communist ideas were highly influential in the Mexican revolution, and he was a leader of the revolutionary Mexican Liberal Party (PLM). Flores Magón also organised with the Industrial Workers of the World union and edited the newspaper Regeneración, which helped spark the initial rebellion against the dictatorship of Porfirio Díaz. He popularised what became the central slogan of the revolution: "Tierra y libertad" ("Land and Liberty").

Flores Magón and other editors of Regeneración fled Mexico to the US in order to keep publishing after constant raids and repression by Mexican authorities. But he then began to be persecuted by US authorities, who were working with the Mexican government. After playing a cat and mouse game with agents for several years, Flores Magón was eventually arrested and imprisoned for supposedly obstructing the US war effort during World War I.

While in prison, he described how he experienced the persecution of the US government, and how he felt “caught by the formidable mechanism of a monstrous machine, and my flesh may get ripped open, and my bones crushed, and my moans fill the space and make the very infinite shudder, but the machine will not stop grinding, grinding, grinding.”


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## AmateurAgitator (Dec 1, 2022)

On this day, 1st December 1955 Rosa Parks, a Black civil rights activist, refused her bus driver’s order that she give up her seat in the "coloured" section to a white passenger after the white section was filled in Montgomery, Alabama.
Contrary to the popular myth that Parks was simply a woman who was tired at the end of the work day and so refused to stand up, she was actually an activist dedicated to fighting segregation, had attended direct action training and had undertaken fundraising work to support other Black women who had previously been arrested for refusing to vacate their seats for white people, like 15 year old Claudette Colvin. Parks later declared "The only tired I was, was tired of giving in."
Parks' act triggered a widespread bus boycott across the city, which successfully desegregated public transport in the area. The protest also gave added impetus to the civil rights movement across the US.


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## AmateurAgitator (Dec 2, 2022)

Should've posted this yesterday -

On the 1st December 1921, striking workers at Castleconnell fisheries in Ireland occupied their workplace and declared a soviet (workers council). The following day at a Dáil cabinet meeting, labour minister Constance Markiewicz was instructed to contact the Irish Transport and General Workers' Union (ITGWU) and inform them that the soviet would be suppressed by the Irish Republican Army. Police and volunteers were also to be used to evict the strikers. However it appears this did not transpire, and the workers eventually vacated the premises voluntarily on December 22nd after the boss agreed to arbitration, which later ruled in favour of the workers.





Pictured: a soviet at Bruree Creamery, 1921.


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## AmateurAgitator (Dec 3, 2022)

On this day, 3rd December 1944, British-trained and equipped Greek police, alongside Nazi collaborators, fired on an anti-Nazi demonstration in Athens, killing 28 people, while US and British troops watched. Previously British forces had attempted to disperse the crowd and shot tracer fire overheads of demonstrators, to no avail. The rationale behind the move was to weaken the anti-Nazi partisans, who had been allied with Britain for the previous three years, as Prime Minister Winston Churchill felt they had been too influenced by communists.


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## AmateurAgitator (Dec 4, 2022)

Fred Hampton - murdered by cops 4th December 1969.

“We ain’t gonna fight no reactionary pigs who run up and down the street being reactionary; we’re gonna organise and dedicate ourselves to revolutionary political power and teach ourselves the specific needs of resisting the power structure, arm ourselves, and we’re gonna fight reactionary pigs with international proletarian revolution. That’s what it has to be. The people have to have the power: it belongs to the people.”

- Fred Hampton, Black Panther & Revolutionary.


On the 4th December 1969, Chicago Black Panther leader Fred Hampton was murdered while asleep in his bed during a raid on his apartment by Chicago Police in conjunction with the FBI. He was killed along with three other Panther activists. Aged just 21, he was an active, charismatic and effective organiser, who had been making significant inroads into making links with working class whites and latino radical groups before his murder by the state.

Throughout 1969, the Chicago Black Panther Party began to form alliances across lines of race and ethnicity with other community-based movements in the city, including the Latino group the Young Lords Organisation and the working-class young southern whites of the Young Patriots - this move by the Panthers, terrified the US authorities.

Finding common ground, these disparate groups banded together in one of the most segregated cities in postwar America to collectively confront issues such as police brutality and substandard housing, calling themselves the Rainbow Coalition. Fred Hampton emphasised the need to keep focused on the real enemy and not be sidetracked, diverted, divided and weakened as a movement: “Black people need some peace, white people need some peace, and we're gonna have to fight, we're gonna have to struggle, we're gonna have to struggle relentlessly to bring about some peace, because the people that we're asking for peace, they're a bunch of megalomaniac warmongers and they don't even understand what peace means.”


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## AmateurAgitator (Dec 6, 2022)

On this day, 6th December 1918, Black soldiers in the British West Indies Regiment stationed in Taranto, Italy, mutinied and attacked their officers against appalling and racist treatment. The regiment consisted of over 15,000 people from the Caribbean. Many had been spurred to volunteer by activists like Marcus Garvey, who believed that if Black people showed loyalty to the British king, then they would show they deserved to be treated equally with whites.

Hundreds of volunteers never made it to England, suffering frostbite on the journey and being discharged without compensation. Those who made it to the war zone discovered that they were not allowed to fight, and instead were assigned dangerous and dirty work like digging trenches and loading ammunition. All of the commanding officers were white, and Black soldiers could not rise above the rank of sergeant.

A poem by one of the regiment, illustrated how the man felt:
"Stripped to the waist and sweated chest
Midday's reprieve brings much-needed rest
From trenches deep toward the sky.
Non-fighting troops and yet we die."

After the war ended, BWIR troops in Italy were forced to perform menial tasks, like cleaning toilets for white soldiers. And they discovered that white soldiers received a pay rise while they did not.
On December 6, tensions exploded and soldiers in the 9th Battalion revolted and attacked their Black officers. Three days later, the 10th Battalion went on strike, and a senior commander who had ordered them to clean the toilets of a white unit was assaulted.

A machine-gun company and another battalion were sent to suppress the mutiny, and one mutineer was shot. Key organisers were arrested, and 60 put on trial for mutiny, of whom one was executed and others jailed for three-20 years.

Although rebellion was crushed, many of the participants resolved to oppose colonialism back home and organise strikes for better pay. And many veterans participated in the strike wave in the Caribbean after the war.


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## Orang Utan (Dec 6, 2022)

AmateurAgitator 
while I'm grateful for these posts, shouldn't you be crediting and linking to where you got them from?


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## AmateurAgitator (Dec 6, 2022)

Orang Utan said:


> AmateurAgitator
> while I'm grateful for these posts, shouldn't you be crediting and linking to where you got them from?


Its something I'm sure I've done on this thread previously, but why is it really necessary?


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## Orang Utan (Dec 6, 2022)

AmateurAgitator said:


> Its something I'm sure I've done on this thread previously, but why is it really necessary?


So people don’t erroneously think you wrote these, and to acknowledge the originators. It’s good manners. 
To do otherwise is rather deceitful


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## SysOut (Dec 6, 2022)

AmateurAgitator said:


> Its something I'm sure I've done on this thread previously, but why is it really necessary?


To give credit to those who who did the research etc. So that we too can go and read those sources. It's a socialist attitude. Sharing.


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## Orang Utan (Dec 6, 2022)

SysOut said:


> To give credit to those who who did the research etc. So that we too can go and read those sources. It's a socialist attitude. Sharing.


Yes, the website you got them from also provide links for further reading, which aren’t provided here.

This is the site in question:





						A People's Calendar
					






					www.apeoplescalendar.org


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## AmateurAgitator (Dec 6, 2022)

SysOut said:


> To give credit to those who who did the research etc. So that we too can go and read those sources. It's a socialist attitude. Sharing.


However there are those who do not believe in the concept of intellectual/artistic property and see the information/material provided as much more important than people getting credit for stuff, which can be seen as a corporate concept (and has resulted in all sorts of things being copyrighted).

In anycase, as I've mentioned on here previously this stuff is done by people who are with Working Class History, I get the info from facebook (from their page). I've given them credit before but just didn't see it as necessary to do it with every single post on here.


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## Orang Utan (Dec 6, 2022)

AmateurAgitator said:


> However there are those who do not believe in the concept of intellectual/artistic property and see the information/material provided as much more important than people getting credit for stuff, which can be seen as a corporate concept (and has resulted in all sorts of things being copyrighted).
> 
> In anycase, as I've mentioned on here previously this stuff is done by people who are with Working Class History, I get the info from facebook (from their page). I've given them credit before but just didn't see it as necessary to do it with every single post on here.


I think you should from now on, to give people the opportunity to find out more.
And I don’t think you have given credit to them before. 

And your first paragraph there reads like after-the-fact self-justification rather than coming from earnestly-held political belief. 

Own your mistakes, fella


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## AmateurAgitator (Dec 6, 2022)

Orang Utan said:


> I think you should from now on


I really don't care what you think


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## Orang Utan (Dec 6, 2022)

AmateurAgitator said:


> I really don't care what you think


i'll do it for you from now on, and pair it with a different insult each time, until you do the decent thing.


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## Pickman's model (Dec 6, 2022)

AmateurAgitator said:


> However there are those who do not believe in the concept of intellectual/artistic property and see the information/material provided as much more important than people getting credit for stuff, which can be seen as a corporate concept (and has resulted in all sorts of things being copyrighted).
> 
> In anycase, as I've mentioned on here previously this stuff is done by people who are with Working Class History, I get the info from facebook (from their page). I've given them credit before but just didn't see it as necessary to do it with every single post on here.


I can see why someone who can't create something himself would say they don't believe in citing their sources assiduously


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## Orang Utan (Dec 8, 2022)

You missed out yesterday, AmateurAgitator
Don’t you like East Timorese and Indonesians?


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## AmateurAgitator (Dec 8, 2022)

Orang Utan said:


> You missed out yesterday, AmateurAgitator
> Don’t you like East Timorese and Indonesians?


Get a life dickhead. I don't have to explain myself to you.


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## AmateurAgitator (Dec 8, 2022)

Orang Utan said:


> i'll do it for you from now on, and pair it with a different insult each time, until you do the decent thing.


You're a sad weirdo


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## AmateurAgitator (Dec 8, 2022)

Orang Utan said:


> You missed out yesterday, AmateurAgitator
> Don’t you like East Timorese and Indonesians?


People from Egypt clearly don't matter to you 

You're on ignore now you creepy twat


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## Orang Utan (Dec 8, 2022)

AmateurAgitator said:


> People from Egypt clearly don't matter to you
> 
> You're on ignore now you creepy twat


Are you going to apologise for that?


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## Orang Utan (Dec 8, 2022)




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## Orang Utan (Dec 8, 2022)

More from Working Class History:

“On this day, 8 December 1949, a conference of dock workers in France agreed to prevent all cargo destined for Indochina from being transported from multiple ports during the anti-colonial war in the region. France had been at war with the anti-colonial movement in Vietnam since 1946 in a conflict which spread to the neighbouring French protectorates of Cambodia and Laos. The ports on the Mediterranean coast which were blacked were Marseille, Sete, Nice, Port-de-Bouc, Port-Saint-Louis, Port Vendre and Toulon. The move followed a refusal of dockers the previous month to load two ships headed for Indochina: the Montbeliard and the Cap Tourane (pictured). 
Learn more about the Vietnam war and opposition to it in our podcast series: Vietnam war – Working Class History “


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## platinumsage (Dec 16, 2022)




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## brogdale (Dec 23, 2022)




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## AmateurAgitator (Dec 29, 2022)

From Working Class History (to avoid petty arguments and this thread being derailed further by bellends with nothing better to do with their sad, pathetic, shit and futile lives but engage in petty, pointless arguments and be unnecessarily insultiing . . . )


On this day, 29th December 1939, French physician, libertarian socialist and women's rights activist Madeleine Pelletier died in an asylum where she had been interned after openly assisting an abortion for a teenage survivor of incest. Born into a poor family in 1874, Pelletier became a feminist and socialist, and was arrested for breaking a window at a polling place after she and other women were denied entry. While never admitted into intellectual circles, she was a pioneer of advanced feminist ideas, like gender roles being largely determined by society, rather than biology. While expressing no interest in sex in her personal life, and so possibly asexual, Pelletier advocated for women's rights to sexual pleasure, as well as to contraception and abortion. Despite all the misfortune she experienced, Pelletier declared: "I remain a feminist. I will remain one until my death even though I don't like women as they are now any more than I like the working class as it is. Slave mentalities revolt me."


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## brogdale (Jan 1, 2023)

50 years ago today the UK formally acceded to the, then, EEC.

Hey leavists, don't shoot the messenger!


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## brogdale (Jan 1, 2023)

brogdale said:


> 50 years ago today the UK formally acceded to the, then, EEC.
> 
> Hey leavists, don't shoot the messenger!


Whilst, literally, on this day...


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## PR1Berske (Jan 6, 2023)




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## AmateurAgitator (Jan 7, 2023)

On this day, 7th January 2019, a group of Indigenous land defenders was attacked by the Royal Canadian Mounted Police (RCMP) who had been instructed to use violence and were prepared to use deadly force. The activists were defending the Gidimt’en checkpoint, east of the Unist'ot'en protest camp, which had been erected to prevent the construction of a gas pipeline on ancestral lands of the Wet’suwet’en nation in the province of British Columbia, Canada. Senior RCMP officers had stated that “lethal" force was "req'd”, and had instructed police to “use as much violence toward the gate as you want”.

During the attack 14 people were arrested and the barricades were destroyed. For more than 20 years, First Nations peoples have been fighting the growing encroachment by fossil fuel companies in the region.
Despite the repression, resistance to the pipeline continued.

Tlingit land defender Anne Spice told the Guardian newspaper: “The police are here to support the invasion of Indigenous territories… It is what they’ve always done."
The paramilitary RCMP was specifically created to facilitate genocide against Indigenous peoples, by violent relocation, to suppress any resistance and forcibly remove Indigenous children from their families in order to place them in residential schools and indoctrinate them into colonialist and capitalist structures.





(From Working Class History)


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## AmateurAgitator (Tuesday at 8:59 AM)

On this day, 10th January 1859, Catalan educator and anarchist, Francesc Ferrer i Guàrdia was born. He is best known for his development of the idea of the Modern School: radical, secular education particularly for working class children, which remains influential around the world today. 

Born the 13th of 14 children, Ferrer's formal education ended at the age of 13 when he began work, later working on the railways before becoming a Spanish teacher in France. At the age of 24 Ferrer became a Freemason, at a time when Masonic lodges where important organising spaces for secular radicals and anarchists.

In 1901 a wealthy student of Ferrer died and left him a property in Paris in her will, which Ferrer was able to sell to set up his first Modern School in Barcelona. The school opened in September 1901 with 18 boys and 12 girls, and Ferrer set about propagating its methodology elsewhere.

In 1909, a strike broke out in Barcelona in protest at the Spanish government sending poor and working class conscript soldiers to suppress an uprising against Spanish colonialism in Morocco. The events culminated in the Tragic Week, when civil guards violently crushed the strike. A major force behind the stoppage was the revolutionary group Solidaridad Obrera (Workers' Solidarity), which Ferrer had covertly funded. Despite Ferrer having minimal input into the strike itself, he was accused by the state of masterminding it, and was quickly sentenced to death by a kangaroo court and executed.




(From Working Class History)


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## AmateurAgitator (Thursday at 12:25 PM)

Shoulda posted this yesterday - 

On this day, 11th January 1943, Italian-American anarchist union organiser and newspaper editor Carlo Tresca was assassinated in New York City.

Tresca had been a railway union activist and editor back in Italy, and migrated to the US to avoid a prison term. In his new home, Tresca travelled around the country, helping organise workers with the Industrial Workers of the World union. He was active in organising and supporting strikes of miners in Pennsylvania, textile and hotel workers in New York, silk workers in New Jersey and miners in Minnesota. Tresca also dodged assassination, bombing and lynching attempts, arrests, deportation and bogus criminal charges of offences including murder.

With the rise of fascism in Italy, Tresca agitated strongly amongst Italian workers in the US to oppose fascists' attempts to gain a foothold in the migrant community as well. Tresca was surveilled by the Department of Justice, and his anti-fascist newspaper Il Martello was held up in the post. Eventually when the Italian fascist government asked the US to suppress Il Martello, the government happily complied. They prosecuted Tresca for sending "obscene matter" through the post, and sentenced him to a year and a day's imprisonment, until mass outrage forced the president to commute his sentence.

The most recent research suggests that Tresca was murdered by contract killer Carmine Galante, on the orders of fascist-sympathising mobsters.

After his death, Tresca's friend Max Eastman wrote: "For Poetry’s sake, for the sake of his name and memory, Carlo had to die a violent death. He had to die at the hand of a tyrant’s assassin. He had lived a violent life. He had loved danger. He had loved the fight. His last motion was to swing and confront the long-expected enemy. So let us say farewell to Carlo as we hear him say—as he surely would if the breath came back—‘Well, they got me at last!’"




(From Working Class History)


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## Fozzie Bear (Thursday at 12:39 PM)

On this day in 1983, Colin Roach was killed by a gunshot in the lobby of Stoke Newington Police Station.

This, and the police response, led to a series of very heated community protests during which several people including Colin's grieving father, were arrested.

An independent community inquiry found that there was little evidence to suggest that Colin had killed himself and that it was impossible to know who had pulled the trigger because of the failure of the police to investigate the incident properly.


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## AmateurAgitator (Thursday at 1:21 PM)

On this day, 12th January 1904, a rebellion began by the Herero people in Namibia against oppression by German occupiers of their country. The rebellion had begun in January 1904 in response to rising tensions within the German colony and was initiated by an order from Samuel Maharero, leader of the Herero.

In 1884 the German state had declared South-West Africa a German colonial territory. The Germans took land from local African inhabitants and instituted laws and policies that served to oppress the local population. The Herero remained more economically powerful until a plague in 1897 killed up to 90% of their herds, weakening the Herero. German policies became more brutal in response and the Herero people’s freedom and culture became heavily restricted.

The rebellion began with the invasion of Okahandja, a city in central Namibia, by mounted Herero, who killed 123 people, mostly Germans, and set buildings alight. The uprising spread across the region with Herero occupying a military station and killing soldiers, besieging another city and ambushing a German military company.

Eventually, however, the Herero were overwhelmed by German forces. Many died of starvation and thirst as they fled through the Omaheke desert. 12,000 were forced to surrender and were placed in concentration camps where medical experiments and daily executions occurred. Many people from the camps were enslaved and forced to build railways, docks and buildings throughout the country.

80% of the Herero population of Namibia were wiped out during the revolt. General Lothar von Trotha, who was sent to crush the resistance, ordered that, “Within the German borders every Herero, whether armed or unarmed, with or without cattle will be shot.” A report published in London in 1918 stated that German soldiers had killed unarmed women and children.

The war and the extermination order by general Lothar von Trotha, are considered by most historians to be the first genocide of the 20th century.




(From Working Class History)


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## Pickman's model (Thursday at 1:32 PM)

today in 1881 20,000 lancashire colliers were on strike - which is particularly surprising as there was no union organisation bar small district unions 1881 Lancashire miners’ strike


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