Happy May Day

That we never forget.

On May 1, 1886, Lucy Parsons helped launch the world’s first May Day and the demand for the eight-hour work day. Along with her husband, anarchist and activist Albert Parsons, and their two children, they led 80,000 working people down the Chicago streets, while more than 100,000 marched in other U.S. cities. A new international holiday was born. Parsons went on to help found the Industrial Workers of the World, continued to give speeches, and worked tirelessly for equality throughout the rest of her life until her death in 1942. Read more about Lucy Parsons in this profile by William Loren Katz at the Zinn Education Project website: http://bit.ly/1cSoMvm and at the Lucy Parsons Center website: http://bit.ly/1fTZ3Tb Here are free role plays and writing activities on labor history from the book The Power In Our Hands (download for free on the Zinn Education Projectwebsite): http://bit.ly/RU5oFp Learn about the history of May Day and the Haymarket affair from an interview with James Green on Democracy Now!: http://bit.ly/1ububmN

Quote of the Day -- Campaign Finance Reform Edition from the Wayback Machine

Check out this very appropriate quote today. More American history too many don't know.

In 1906, President Theodore Roosevelt called for campaign finance reform. The result was the Tillman Act of 1907, the first law prohibiting corporate donations to national political parties. And note. Teddy Roosevelt was a member of the Republican Party. He'd no way be welcomed by them today.

So Very Few Americans Know Our Own National History

This man, Matthew Cooke, says it so well and so right.  Go here and watch this video.  And know it's true. Know he has his facts andour American history straight and correct. It's a very brief but very helpful to the point of important video, I feel strongly.

Trump-Republicans are the Modern Confederates: Let us not repeat 150-year old mistakes

I've said time and again, so very few Americans know our full, true national history and what that has meant for----and done to--- African-Americans and Blacks in our nation, even right up to today. 

We have to learn.

And then we have to react. We have to correct.

Fortunately, some, a few, are now seeing the insurrection and attack on our nation's Capitol last month for the treason it was.

McConnell: Trump Tricked Me Into Backing His Coup

They're also seeing Ms. Greene for what and who she is.

McConnell calls Rep. Greene's 'loony lies' a 'cancer' on GOP

No situation any better proves the old adage that if you don't know your own history, you are bound to repeat it any better than now, especially with that insurrection and treason of the traitors last month with the attack on our nation's Capitol.

The American History So Few Americans Know

 

“In Louisiana, black women were put in cells with male prisoners and some became pregnant. In 1848, legislators passed a new law declaring that all children born in the penitentiary of African American parents serving life sentences would be property of the state. The women would raise the kids until the age of ten, at which point the penitentiary would place an ad in the newspaper. Thirty days later, the children would be auctioned off on the courthouse steps 'cash on delivery.' The proceeds were used to fund schools for white children. . . many of [the black children] were purchased by prison officials.”

Source: American Prison: A Reporter's Undercover Journey into the Business of Punishment by Shane Bauer

No reparations, America?

Really?

On This Day, 1863

 On this day, November 19, 1863, then-President Abraham Lincoln gave his very brief and now very famous Gettysburg Address.

Four score and seven years ago our fathers brought forth on this continent a new nation, conceived in Liberty, and dedicated to the proposition that all men are created equal.

Now we are engaged in a great civil war, testing whether that nation or any nation so conceived and so dedicated, can long endure. We are met on a great battle-field of that war. We have come to dedicate a portion of that field, as a final resting place for those who here gave their lives that that nation might live. It is altogether fitting and proper that we should do this.

But, in a larger sense, we can not dedicate—we can not consecrate—we can not hallow—this ground. The brave men, living and dead, who struggled here, have consecrated it, far above our poor power to add or detract. The world will little note, nor long remember what we say here, but it can never forget what they did here. It is for us the living, rather, to be dedicated here to the unfinished work which they who fought here have thus far so nobly advanced. It is rather for us to be here dedicated to the great task remaining before us—that from these honored dead we take increased devotion to that cause for which they gave the last full measure of devotion—that we here highly resolve that these dead shall not have died in vain—that this nation, under God, shall have a new birth of freedom—and that government of the people, by the people, for the people, shall not perish from the earth.

Would that we had such an intelligent, capable, thoughtful President now.

On This Day, May 29, 1851

On this date, May 29, 1851, Sojourner Truth gave her fantastic, incredible, even important and sadly  still relevant "Ain't I A Woman?" speech.

Links:

Sojourner Truth - Quotes, Facts & Speech - HISTORY

Sojourner Truth - Wikipedia

75 Yeas Ago Today -- Happy V-E Day

On this day, May 8, 1945

Victory in Europe Day, V-E Day.

May we all be so strong and intelligent in our own time.

#neverforget

The Large--and Glaring--Problem of the Vietnam Documentary

Like so many Americans this past week, I've watched a good deal of Ken Burns' and Lynn Novick's documentary on PBS covering the Vietnam War.

I'll say right off the bat, it's good and it's important. It's important we Americans know more about this horrible saga. It's important we know more fully what took place and they do cover a lot of that and well.

That said, it seems it also needs to be made clear that this program also lets America off any moral hook and that it leaves out a great deal more information, information we sorely need to know. No one puts this information out there better on the series than Christopher Koch in his writing online this week in Medium.

The Tragic Failure of Ken Burns Vietnam

A bit from the article:

Burns and Novick tell us that the war was begun “in good faith by decent people out of fateful misunderstandings, American overconfidence and …” whatever the current threat. That’s probably true of most wars. However, as we used to teach our children, you have to be accountable for your actions. If you kill someone speeding the wrong way down a one way street you’ll get charged with manslaughter even if you’re rushing someone to the hospital.

It’s the lack of accountability, the failure to prosecute those who lied to get us into the war, who encouraged battlefield tactics that resulted in the massacre of women and children, who authorized the indiscriminate bombing of civilian targets, who drenched Vietnam in chemical poisons that will cause birth defects and death for generation.

In order to maintain this central lie, Burns and Novick must establish a false balance between good and evil on both sides. Every time the United States is shown doing something bad, Burns and Novick show us how the Vietnamese also did bad things. In one absurd example, Coyote intones something like, “we called them ‘Dinks,’ ‘Gooks,’ ‘Mamasans;’ they called us ‘invaders’ and ‘imperialists.’” The GI terms are dehumanizing, but the Vietnamese terms are accurate. People who cross 3,000 miles of ocean to attack a country that has done them no harm, are accurately called ‘invaders.’ I suppose you could argue about the ‘imperialist’ charge.

Vietnamese soldiers killed some 58,000 Americans and wounded a couple of hundred thousand more. Buns and Novick put the number of Vietnamese we killed at 3 million, but most experts say it was more like 4 million and Vietnam says its 6 million, with more people continuing to die from unexploded ordinance and Agent Orange. We destroyed 60% of their villages, sprayed 21 million gallons of lethal poisons, imposed free fire zones (a euphemism for genocide) on 75% of South Vietnam. They attacked US military bases in their country and never killed an American on American soil. There are no equivalences here.

Finally, besides we Americans knowing our history and knowing what happened in Vietnam, the horrors and tragedies and even the lies, all the lies, that got us there and then kept us there, it's important to know it all and to put and keep it in perspective because of what it's since gotten us first in Iraq and then in Afghanistan, where we still are, to this day.

Without the peace movement, there is no moral center to this series. The lack of accountability is fatal. That an American general can watch from a helicopter the massacre at Mai Lai (as the films tells us) and suffer no consequences is sickening. If military courts had aggressively prosecuted violators of human rights, or even if we only had held detailed and accurate reconciliations where the truth came out, there would have been a chance that our reckless invasions of Iraq with its policy of torture and the invasion of Afghanistan would not have followed so easily. When people are held accountable for their actions, perpetrators of questionable violent acts think twice.

Last week on NPR an American general in Afghanistan announced that we are not trying to occupy territory in Afghanistan, we are simply trying to kill terrorists. Here, again, is the same rationale of the body count that led to disaster in Vietnam. We are reliving the Vietnam War because no one was ever really held responsible for its horrors.

We need to learn. We need to know. And then we need to apply the lessons of this nightmare, of this past, of our past, to the mistakes we're making now and that we continue to make.

I understand that they wanted to make this series both palatable and acceptable to most all, if not all Americans. They didn't want it to be "harsh." They didn't want it to be seen as "too hard" on our nation, too critical, too condemning, if not damning. It would have instantly been branded as "Leftist" and "against the troops" and so, then, against the nation. But by making it palatable, they whitewashed the history, our history. They whitewashed and prettified what happened and what we did over there.

Ken Burns and Lynn Novick let us off easy. In not telling all that happened, they let us off easy. Consequently, we learn nothing. Tragically, we repeat the same mistakes, killing in other, different parts of the world.

Additional links: 

Ken Burns's Vietnam Documentary Promotes 

Misleading History

The tragedy of the PBS-Ken Burns version 

of the Vietnam War

Ken Burns' Vietnam War: An Object Lesson in the Failures of the Objective Lens

On This Day, July 2, 1917---Missouri and National History

Just some of the state and national history our society seems to go out of the way to NOT teach us.

The 1917 East St. Louis race riots

This photo ran in the St. Louis Star on July 3, 1917 with the caption: “Where the charred bodies of eight negroes burned in their homes at Eighth Street and Broadway were found today.” The bodies of some Black victims were buried in a common grave, according to the St. Louis Post-Dispatch. Others were thrown into Cahokia Creek which ran between downtown and the riverfront railyards. (Southern Illinois University Edwardsville, Bowen Archives).

Blacks in East St. Louis were beginning to come in from the Southern United States and were taking jobs, yes, at lower wages, from Union members. The white Union members would have nothing of it.

The St. Louis Post-Dispatch did a fantastic series of articles on this important time and group of events.

Archive editorial: 'The East St. Louis Murders'

Archive article: 'Several hundred Negroes brought across river'

Editor's Note: East St. Louis riot coverage

Archive article: 'Several hundred Negroes brought across river'

Bell that warned of approaching white mobs 

amid East St. Louis riots

Keep in mind, too, this East St. Louis event, this massacre, this slaughter, was far from the only one in our nation's history. Here are two more, anyway.

The Chicago Race Riot of 1919

Tulsa Race Riot (1921)

Keeping in mind, too, that the national disgrace that was the "Trail of Tears", where we displaced thousands of Native Americans, from East to Oklahoma, also went through Southern Missouri. In fact, it went right through what is now downtown Springfield. 

Trail of Tears - Native American History

I know that, as I went through grade school and high school, at no point during those years was it taught this history, that this abomination went through the Southern part of our state, Missouri.

So yes, let's know our national history.

All of it.

Maybe especially now, this time of year, around our Independence Day when we only remember how good and great we are.