Henry Ford’s dirty history

by John Newsinger

Socialist Review | October, 2017

Ford receiving the Grand Cross of the German Eagle from Nazi officials, 1938

Donald Trump’s reluctance to denounce neo-Nazis marching on the streets of the US has shocked many people. But there is a long history of US businessmen flirting with fascism, writes John Newsinger.

 

Donald Trump is by no means the first US businessman to flirt with the far-right and even fascism. In the 1920s and 1930s many American businessmen looked to fascism as a way to protect their interests.

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Red scientist: two strands from a life in three colours

by Hilary Rose and Steven Rose

Verso | October 07, 2017

From Felix Topolski’s Conference Sketchbook: International Congress of Intellectuals for Peace (Wroctaw, Poland, 1948). Left to right: J.D. Bernal, Hyman Levy, Ivor Montagu, Hewlett Johnson (behind him, Julian Huxley), J.B.S. Haldane.

First published by Verso in 1999, J.D. Bernal: A Life in Science and Politics, edited by Francis Aprahamian and Brenda Swann, brings together 13 essays that survey the life and work of the pioneering Marxist molecular biologist and crystallographer. In the article below, Hilary Rose and Steven Rose trace the arc of Bernal’s career.

Third World Quarterly row: Why some western intellectuals are trying to debrutalise colonialism

by Vijay Prashad

 Scroll.in | September 21, 2017

The ugliness of colonial power in India emerged at its end with the Bengal Famine and the Partition | Wikimedia Commons

Ek tarz-e-taghaful hai so vo unko mubarak;
Ek ‘arz-e-tamanna hai so ham karte-rahenge.

[There is a style of indifference to which they are welcome;
But our wishes, we will continue to list.]

— Faiz Ahmed Faiz, Dast-e-Saba, 1952

In 1950, Aimé Césaire, one of the clearest voices of the 20th century, looked back at the long history of colonialism that was coming to an end. He wanted to judge colonialism from the ashes of Nazism, an ideology that surprised the innocent in Europe but which had been fostered slowly in Europe’s colonial experience. After all, the instruments of Nazism – racial superiority as well as brutal, genocidal violence – had been cultivated in the colonial worlds of Africa, Asia and Latin America. Césaire, the effervescent poet and communist, had no problem with the encounter between cultures. The entanglements of Europe’s culture with that of Africa and Asia had forged the best of human history across the Mediterranean Sea. But colonialism was not cultural contact. It was brutality.

The left’s long history of militant resistance to fascism

A conversation with historian Mark Bray about the origins of modern anti-fascist movements.

by SARAH JAFFE

In These Times | September 15, 2017

Riots between anti-Fascists and Blackshirts (British Fascists) when Oswald Mosley’s supporters were gathering in Great Mint Street for a march through the East End of London in what is now called the Battle of Cable Street. In this image, anti-Fascists are pushed back by police on October 4, 1936 (Photo by ullstein bild/ullstein bild via Getty Images)

Welcome to Interviews for Resistance. We’re now several months into the Trump administration, and activists have scored some important victories in those months. Yet there is always more to be done, and for many people, the question of where to focus and how to help remains. In this series, we talk with organizers, agitators and educators about how to wage resistance and build a better world.

Mark Bray: My name is Mark Bray. I am a historian and a lecturer at Dartmouth College and author of Antifa: The Anti-Fascist Handbook and a political activist. I have been involved in a number of different projects over the years.

“Trail of Tears Walk” commemorates Native Americans’ forced removal

by ALBERT BENDER

People’s World | September 21, 2017

The ethnic cleansing of the Cherokee nation by the U.S. Army, 1838. This painting, The Trail of Tears, was painted by Robert Lindneux in 1942. | Public Domain

The “Trail of Tears Walk” held in Mt. Juliet and Woodbury, Tennessee on September 16 and 17 memorialized the tragic and brutal removal of the five Indigenous nations—Cherokee, Muscogee Creek, Choctaw, Chickasaw, and Seminole—from their homelands in the 1830s to present-day Oklahoma. The Northern Route of the Trail of Tears passed through these two Middle Tennessee towns located just south of Nashville. Thousands of Cherokees and hundreds of Creeks and African Americans traveled together on their way to unknown homes in the west.

Remembering the US-Backed Coup in Chile

teleSUR | September 11, 2017

Sept. 11 marks a dark day in the history of Chile. In 1973 the leftist government of Salvador Allende was brutally overthrown in a U.S.-backed coup that left the president dead, followed by the rounding up, torture, killing, disappearance, and exile of thousands of Chileans over the next decades.

The military dictatorship of Augusto Pinochet was to scar the nation, but resistance within the country and internationally never let up.

teleSUR takes a look at the coup, along with the popular president’s trajectory.

The last photo of President Salvador Allende alive at the La Moneda presidential palace, Sept. 11, 1973.Photo:Archive

Why the United States did not demonstrate the Bomb’s power, ahead of Hiroshima

by Frank von Hippel and Fumihiko Yoshida

Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists | August 04, 2017

Arthur H. Compton was one of the many past and future Nobel laureates who worked in the secret US nuclear weapons project during World War II. He directed the Metallurgical Laboratory (Met Lab) at the University of Chicago, where refugee Italian Nobelist Enrico Fermi supervised the construction of the first reactor, future Nobelist Eugene Wigner, from Hungary, led the design of the plutonium-production reactors subsequently built at Hanford, Wash., and future Nobelist Glenn Seaborg developed the first chemical process for extracting plutonium from irradiated uranium.

With these tasks completed, some of the scientists at the Met Lab began to consider the implications of nuclear weapons for the future. One of the products of their concern was a memorandum on “Political and Social Problems” written in early June 1945 by a committee of project scientists chaired by the refugee German Nobelist, James Franck. 

Remembering the Gulf of Tonkin, and the Consequences of Wanting to Believe

by JANINE JACKSON

FAIR | August 05, 2017

The USS Maddox in the Gulf of Tonkin. (photo: US Navy)

“American Planes Hit North Vietnam After Second Attack on Our Destroyers; Move Taken to Halt New Aggression,” was the Washington Post headline some 53 years ago, on August 5, 1964.

The front page of that day’s New York Times reported: “President Johnson has ordered retaliatory action against gunboats and ‘certain supporting facilities in North Vietnam’ after renewed attacks against American destroyers in the Gulf of Tonkin.”

Of course, as historians now acknowledge, there was no “second attack” by North Vietnam—no “renewed attacks against American destroyers.”

“The history of peoples is not measured by the periods of futile subjugation, but by their moments of rebellion”

by Gladys Martínez Verdecia

Granma | July 26, 2017

Photo: Osmay Pérez

Speech by Gladys Martínez Verdecia, member of the Communist Party of Cuba Central Committee and first secretary of the Party Provincial Committee in Pinar del Río, during the main act commemorating the 64th anniversary of the assaults on the Moncada and Carlos Manuel de Céspedes Garrisons. Pinar del Río, July 26, 2017, Year 59 of the Revolution

(Council of State transcript / GI translation)

Compañero Army General, Raúl Castro Ruz, first secretary of the Communist Party of Cuba Central Committee and President of the Councils of State and Ministers;

This week in history: U.S. minimum wage rises to $7.25 an hour

People’s World | July 24, 2017

About 300 protesters gathered at Coffman Memorial Union on November 29, 2016, calling on the Minneapolis City Council and the University of Minnesota to pass a $15/hour minimum wage for all Minneapolis workers / Fibonacci Blue, via Wikimedia (CC)

On July 24, 2009, the federal U.S. minimum wage rose to $7.25 per hour, up from $6.55.

In the 2010 midterm elections, many voters typically stayed home, and Republicans took control of the House of Representatives. There has not been a wage increase in eight years.

In real terms, that is, in purchasing power, the federal minimum wage peaked near $10.00 per hour in 1968, using 2014 inflation-adjusted dollars. In other words, the American working class has been in a steady economic decline for the last almost 50 years, despite a near doubling of productivity.