Bogen er en tegneserie, tegnet af et antal amerikanske tegneserietegnere, med de dramatiske hovedepisoder i den amerikanske arbejderbevægelses kamp, incl. kampen mod krig.
“To my father who taught me that the owning class and the working class have
nothing in common “ GEORGE KUCEWICZ (fra forordet).
Jeg opfatter det derhen, at han ville give nutidens arbejdere deres historie,
som andre grupper har deres - og gøre det i en form, som kunne læses uden flere
års skolegang.
Det er i hvert fald lykkedes redaktørerne at producere en læselig og chokerende
historie, der illustrerer det amerikanske samfunds utrættelige indsats mod
organiserede arbejdere, ordentlige lønninger,
aktivister i almindelighed. o.s.v.
Jeg fik nærmest det indtryk, at det er hele grundlaget for det amerikanske
samfund - og at den kolde krig kun er ét produkt heraf !
IWW kæmper bl.a. for retten til at tale, skrive og
mødes frit - bogens tegneserie citerer The American Constitution - og det er jo
stadig aktuelt, at slås for virkeliggørelsen af dens indhold. Herved bliver bogen en stærk understregning af det amerikanske
samfunds gennemførte hykleri.
Guantanamos bure er ingen ny opfindelse og det er
tortur heller ikke.
IWW organiserede især de udenforstående, ufaglærte, nye immigranter, kvinder,
sorte, indianere.
The belief in freedom and internationalism makes the Wobblies just about the
most American ideal possible, and got them arrested and
sent to prison for long sentences during the First World War - by an acclaimed
liberal Democratic administration. because their ideas, their very existence,
represented a threat to the big men who wanted war. 3
It even looks a little like the world John Lennon summed up in the song “Imagine”:
no distant god, no country, just us humans, all of us, and our world. 3
The Wobbly world and promise was wrecked, finally, by the eager collaboration of
corporate business and the military, liberals and conservatives, all of them
committed firmly to Empire. 3
The 1914 edition of the Little Red Song Book carried the lyrics, 5
Wobblies most loved, after the Communist Manifesto, the booklet by Marx‘s
son-in-law Paul Lafargue: The Right To Be Lazy. 5
A considerable number of Wobblies were at least part Indian. 7
Hieronymus Bosch Jakob Boehme William Blake, the Shakers Edward Bellamy, 8
The first nationwide railroad strike took place in 1877, 9
mass movement for an eight-hour workday during 1885-86, 9
The American Federation of Labor founded in 1883, sought to organize skilled
workers 9
The Knights of Labor; founded in 1869 as a secret society invited all (except
Chinese) 9
May Day 1886 Haymarket 9
The 1890s saw the worst depression in American history. 10
Homestead, Pennsylvania, who fought a small war with the Carnegie corporation.
10
Pullman Strike, Eugene Victor Debs, Brotherhood of Locomotive Firemen, American
Railway Union. 10
Pullman Cars, President declared a national emergency, Debs, arrested and sent
to the Woodstock, Illinois jail, 11
Western Federation of Miners, Armed battles broke out in the 1890s, with
carbines, dynamite, and plenty of fighting, the “American Separation of Labor”
11
“Continental Congress of the Working Class”, William “Big Bill” Haywood Chicago,
June, 1905, 11
song (called “The General Strike” 12
Congress of Industrial Organizations (CIO) in the 1930s, 13
Lucy Parsons, (1853-1942) 13-4
Mary Harris Mother Jones
Big Bill Haywood (1869-1928)
Clarence Darrow
Elizabeth Gurley Flynn
Carlo Tresca
Red Emma Goldman
Joe Hill, med Frelsens Hær
ironi
Frank Little
Bindle Stiffs, E.B. Durst Ranch, Wheatland,Yuba County, Ca.
Ralph Chaplin
Ludlow massacre
Andrew Carnegie
Lawrence, Massachusetts, in 1912 and Paterson, New Jersey, in 1913, 51-
The steadiest single group was the Finns. ... they staged a massive political
strike in 1905 and became the third nation to win the vote for women. 52
The IWW conducted some thirty free-speech fights in
the decade after 1907, with a great deal of courage but also dramatic flair, and
not a little poetry. Even the local repression, driving Wobblies by the hundreds
into jail, was often a victory, for very much like the civil rights movement
fifty years later it brought a sense of solidarity marked by singing and good
cheer. Only the conspiracies of Woodrow Wilsons federal
government bent on war and successful empire-building brought an end, leaving
the next generations up to the present to fight for the right to assemble
peaceably under constitutional protections. 111
Many of the rousing Wobbly anthems were composed to reach workers through a dose
of humor; making fun of the bosses or the preachers, often adopting the language
of the Salvation Army in particular to mangle the original intent and put across
the logic of the class struggle. 112
[Spokane] Soon, the struggle had worn out the authorities’ determination and
legal budget. 113
NEARER MY JOB TO THEE BY JOE HILL 114-5
REMEMBER BY HARRISON GEORGE, 116-7
But they ain’t broke no laws yet ! And we ain’t gonna let them !
... the 1914 financial depression
THE TIMBERBEAST’S LAMENT
Regeneracion, brdr. Magon, Los Hermanos, 1909, Mexico, Diaz
magonistas
Joel Emmanuel Haggelund was born on October 7, 1879 in
Gävle, Sweden.
The IWW had been adamantly opposed to war since the beginning, but with the
climate of fanatical patriotism sweeping the nation, open opposition to the
draft was a risk many in the union did not want to take.
An emergency session of the General Executive Board was called in July of 1917
to decide the IWW’s stand on the draft. Frank Little was now chairman of the
board. He arrived on crutches, his ankle broken in Arizona while trying to
organize the striking miners of Bisbee. He had an untreated double rupture from
being jumped on by a gunman in El Paso. Combined with his rheumatism, Frank was
in a lot of pain.
The board argued for three days, but Frank refused to compromise his stand on
the war.
Frank Little’s funeral was the most impressive in Butte’s history over 7,000
people followed Frank’s body to his final resting place.
Frank wasn’t the first person murdered by Anaconda, and he certainly wasn’t the
last...
On September 11, 1973, multinational Anaconda Copper with the Nixon
administration funded the overthrow ond murder of democratically elected Chilean
President Salvador Allende by General Augusto Pinochet in a military coup.
Thousands were murdered, tortured and disappeared during a 17-year reign of
terror.
Today Butte is on industrial disaster area, having the largest contaminated body
of water in the country, the oId Berkeley Mining Pit.
Frank Little’s grave is well maintained by local activists to this day.
Butte, Montana
Peter Kupers drøm om, at han var Frank Chaplin ender med et billede, hvor hans
kone netop er faldet i søvn igen - og man ser to spøgelser i vinduet, der ligner
Cheney og Bush den mindre.
53 IWW members were arrested and detained in Sacramento, California to await
trial for violating the Espionage Act of 1917, whith criminalized
dissent
towards the US Government. They were put in a bullpen 21 square feet and got 1
cotton blanket each. They were held for the next 10 monh. There was not enough
room for all of them to lie down at once, so they took turns sleeping and shared
blankets. These men did not receive enough food or water, and suffered from too
much heat during the day and froze at night.
[Så der er rigtig meget, der er som i “de gode gamle dage”.]
Chaplin witnessed the torture of Mennonite conscientious objectors. A dozen of
them refused to work because their beards were cut off and were not permitted to
remove the buttons from their clothes, as their religious beliefs required. They
were handcuffed to the bars of cell block B for more than two weeks.
[Ray Becker] Demand for lumber increased dramatically with the onset of the war
in Europé in 1914. The timber trusts were making huge profits by selling to both
the Allies and the Germans. Production increased but wages did not. We organized
to better our conditions, but what made bosses hate us was our opposition to war
and especially our opposition to conscription, I was drafted in 1917 and refused
to register I went to jail, and managed to escape for nearly a year until the
police caught up to me in Spokane.
... the Mexican peasant uprising of Tarascans under Primo Tapia. Such events
illustrated the continuing link of peasants and workers mostly ignored by
Marxists, at their peril, and also a spirit of anarchism that had not been
vanquished and would be seen more vividly again. 215
[som brasilianske MST og indianerne i ??? og Bolivia i dag]
IWW Students for a Democratic Society the Student League for Industrial
Democracy 1962 243
... and the takeover of SDS by one Maoist faction after another. 244
At any rate, given the accelerating attack of corporations upon the planet and
all living creatures, it was getting close to now or never 244
United Cartoon Workers 248-9
Utah Phillips
I sing these songs, I tell these stories for a damn good reason - because they
give me a history of our people that I never got in school, see.
On May 24th,1990 Earth first! activists Judi Bari and Darryl Cherney were on
their way to perform at “Redwood Summer,” an activist event At 11.15am a bomb
exploded under the drivers seat of Baris car.
[Det er slet ikke forbi !!!]
Richard Held, FBI, Black Panther Party, American Indian Movement, Geronimo Ji
Jaga, Leonard Peltier
Next to songs, cartoons probably brought more workers around than any other
expression of Wob creativity. 269
Rube Goldbergs fantastic inventions (that accomplished nothing), 271 [ctr for
lighed med Storm P.]
[bogønsker findes i *.wpd]
Orla Jordal, 2007
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