R. I. P. Donald Sutherland: Chameleonic actor and anti-war activist who combined charm with menace
Sutherland used his rising profile to become a prominent anti-war activist, which made him a target for the US establishment. In 2022, Kiefer Sutherland told The Independent: “Because of my father’s politics, they felt he was a Social Democrat, a socialist, who believed in nationalised healthcare and large government, and those were not necessarily ‘American values’.”
He didn’t let this unwanted attention deter him from speaking out. In 1971, Sutherland starred in Alan Pakula’s thriller Klute opposite Jane Fonda, a fellow anti-war protester with whom he had a two-year affair as his marriage to Douglas fell apart. In 1972, he co-wrote and co-produced an explosive anti-Vietnam-war documentary titled F.T.A., working with Fonda once again.
Sutherland went on to work with the great Italian directors Bernardo Bertolucci (playing a Fascist in 1900 in 1976) and Federico Fellini (as a made-up Lothario in Casanova, also in 1976), but also found time to play a dope-smoking college professor in John Landis’s college comedy Animal House in 1978. The same year, he starred in Philip Kaufman’s sci-fi horror Invasion of the Body Snatchers.
In 2015, at the age of 80, he told the BBC while promoting The Hunger Games: Mockingjay – Part 2 that he was determined to keep working right to the end. “It’s a passionate endeavor,” said Sutherland. “Retirement for actors is spelt ‘DEATH’.”
Today in Labor History June 20, 1893: Eugene Debs formed the American Railway Union (ARU), one of the first unions to organize by industry and regardless of race (along with the Knights of Labor and IWW, which he cofounded in 1905). Within a few months the union was leading an 18-day strike against the Great Northern Railroad, successfully forcing management to reverse three wage cuts, despite the fact that the nation was in the midst of a terrible depression. The victory set the union on a remarkable course in which it averaged 2,000 new members a day. Debs was jailed during World War I for making antiwar speeches. He ran for president from jail, as a socialist, and won 4% of the vote. The photograph shows union leaders who were jailed during the 1894 Pullman Strike, including Debs.
Today in Labor History June 18, 1923: A nationwide General Strike took place in Argentina in protest of the assassination of the anarchist Kurt Wilckens in his prison cell. Two workers were killed in the strike as police tried to raid the offices of the anarchist union FORA.
Wilckens was born in Germany. He moved to the U.S. in the 1910s, where he joined the IWW and was exposed to anarchist ideas. He worked as a copper miner in Arizona and was one of hundreds arrested and expelled from the region during the Bisbee Deportation, July 12, 1917. During the Bisbee strike, authorities sealed off the county and seized the local Western Union telegraph office to cut off outside communication, while several thousand armed vigilantes rounded up 1,186 members of the Industrial Workers of the World (IWW). The workers were herded into manure-laden boxcars and dumped in the New Mexico desert. After that, Wilckens was arrested for making antiwar statements and deported to Germany in 1920 under the Espionage Act.
However, Wilckens moved to Argentina that same year, at the height of the Libertarian Workers’ Movement. Workers in Patagonia rebelled in 1920-1922 and were violently suppressed by the military, led by Lieutenant Colonel Héctor Benigno Varela. They slaughtered 1,500 workers. While the British landowners cheered Varela with rounds of “He’s a jolly good fellow,” the local prostitutes all shouted “Assassins! Pigs! We won’t go with killers” when any soldiers entered their brothels. Many of the sex workers were jailed for “insulting men in uniform.” To avenge the workers massacred by the military, Wilckens, who was a Tolstoyan pacifist, bombed and shot Varela. At his trial, Wilckens stated that he had shot Varela so that he could never kill again.
Hector Olivera’s film about these events, “La Patagonia Rebelde,” came out in 1974. “Bisbee ‘17,” (1999) by Robert Houston, is a historical novel based on the Bisbee deportations. There was also a really interesting film of the same name that came out in 2018. In the film, the town’s inhabitants reenact the events 100 years later. It also includes interviews with current residents.
So far, no. But there is time. And the student protests in support of Palestine, and the union support of them, particularly at the University of California, is a positive sign.
What are the lessons we can learn from the past?
Organizers of Redwood Summer, in the 1990s, had the hubris to make a similar claim, that the actions they were organizing were so radical, would be so effective, that they'd make the radical 60s look like the mundane 50s. To be sure, the 90s were a radical time. We were organizing mass civil disobedience, direct actions and sabotage to end US support of death squads in Central America, to end the death penalty in the U.S., to end nuclear testing, to support immigrants at the southern border, to support LGBTQ rights, and to halt the U.S. war in Iraq. Food Not Bombs were getting arrested for serving free food to the unhoused, while publicizing the U.S. war machine. Homes Not Jails was liberating federally-owned buildings and converting them into squats for the unhoused to live in. And left-wing pirate radio stations were popping up in cities to report on and publicize these efforts. But in the end, the 90s did not make the 60s look like the 50s.
I participated in Redwood Summer (and many of these other movements). It was fun and exciting. But Redwood Summer, in particular, was supposed to be a collaborative effort between radical environmental and labor activists, as well as indigenous rights activists and others. There was a bit of this. A very little bit of it. Worse, there was too much class bigotry and arrogance by the predominantly white, middle class environmental activists, and this alienated the working class timber workers we hoped to unite with over saving the ancient redwood forests from being clear cut by Pacific Lumber.
So, one major lesson is that effective coalitions require real solidarity, which requires listening to others, and authentically nonhierarchical structures, in contrast to the hidden power structures that often evolve in movements, even within so-called anarchist organizations. (A great read on this topic is: "The Tyranny of Structurelessness," by Jo Freeman).
Perhaps the most powerful tool we have is the General Strike. Of course, this tool has been virtually obliterated by the Taft Hartley law, which bans them. Consequently, none of the mainstream unions will ever consider this tactic out of fear that their leadership will be imprisoned, and their war chests will be seized. But that doesn't mean we can't still have a General Strike. Just means it will have to be organized in other ways, outside of mainstream union channels, like word of mouth, social media, wheat pasting posters, stickers, etc. But it also requires good old-fashioned relational organizing: going "door-to-door," talking with colleagues at work, at school, neighbors, family, friends, educating them about the power of this tool. Actually listening to their fears and concerns. Providing support and mutual aid whenever possible. Empowering them. And it will require employed workers, not just students and professional activists. Why? Because if we really want to hurt the bosses, we need to halt profit-making, which is most effectively done by halting production. And while blocking roads and bridges can slow down business as usual for a few hours, getting millions of workers to refuse to work can halt a lot more business for a lot longer. It can literally bring capitalism to its knees. Compel leaders and decision-makers to buckle to our demands. It can even become revolutionary and lead to major social change. But we don't currently have millions of workers who are already radicalized to the point that they will participate in a General Strike, let alone believe that revolutionary social change is possible. So, there's a lot of organizing that still needs to be done. That's a lot of us going out and listening to our colleagues, neighbors, peers, doing the underappreciated, not so glorious, time consuming work of building a movement.
Today in Labor History June 9, 1843: Bertha von Suttner was born (d. 1914). She was an Austrian journalist, author, peace activist and Nobel Prize laureate. She was also a friend of Alfred Nobel, who famously told her that there would not be world peace until a weapon was invented that was so deadly it could annihilate countries in seconds. Some say that it was her activism and advocacy that inspired him to include a peace prize as part of his endowment. Von Suttner wrote “Lay Down Your Arms,” an anti-war novel that made her a leading figure in the Austrian peace movement. However, it was also considered a feminist novel for its characters resistance to accepting traditional gender roles. Tolstoy compared her favorably with Harriet Beecher Stowe.
Today in Labor History June 8, 1917: The Granite Mountain/Spectacular Mine disaster killed 168 men in Butte, Montana. It was the deadliest underground mine disaster in U.S. history. Within days, men were walking out of the copper mines all over Butte in protest of the dangerous working conditions. Two weeks later, organizers had created a new union, the Metal Mine Workers’ Union. They immediately petitioned Anaconda, the largest of the mine companies, for union recognition, wage increases and better safety conditions. By the end of June, electricians, boilermakers, blacksmiths and other metal tradesmen had walked off the job in solidarity.
Frank Little, a Cherokee miner and member of the IWW, went to Butte during this strike to help organize the miners. Little had previously helped organize oil workers, timber workers and migrant farm workers in California. He had participated in free speech fights in Missoula, Spokane and Fresno, and helped pioneer many of the passive resistance techniques later used by the Civil Rights movement. He was also an anti-war activist, calling U.S. soldiers “Uncle Sam’s scabs in uniforms.” On August 1, 1917, vigilantes broke into the boarding house where he was staying. They dragged him through the streets while tied to the back of a car and then hanged him from a railroad trestle.
Author Dashiell Hammett had been working in Butte at the time as a striker breaker for the Pinkerton Detective Agency. They had tried to get him to murder Little, offering him $5,000, but he refused. He later wrote about the experience in his novel, “Red Harvest.” It supposedly haunted him throughout his life that anyone would think he would do such a thing.
Today in Labor History June 7, 1971: The U.S. Supreme Court ruled 5-4 that clothing with the words "Fuck the Draft" was protected by the First amendment. The Court overturned the conviction of Paul Cohen for disturbing the peace, setting the precedent that vulgar writing is protected under the First Amendment to the United States Constitution.
In 1968, Kiyoshi Kuromiya designed this poster and sent orders by mail. He was arrested by the FBI and charged with sending indecent material through the Post Office. Later that year, after beating the charges, Kuromiya defied the authorities by handing out 2000 of the posters at the Chicago Democratic Convention. The photo is of Detroiter Bill Greenshields was taken at random during a 1967 March on the Pentagon and used by Kuromiya.
There has been no draft in the U.S. since 1973. Ending conscription was one of President Nixon’s campaign promises (not because he opposed conscription or imperialistic wars, but because he wanted to undermine the antiwar protest movement). However, if the U.S. and NATO continue their reckless escalation of the conflict in Ukraine, and their threat to station hundreds of thousands of troops along Russia’s entire western border, from Finland to the Balkans, the mass slaughter could rise to the scale of World War II. And this could force the U.S. and Europe to reimpose the draft, so that they are not forced to replicate Ukraine’s desperate move of sending people over the age of 50 to the front. Indeed, Germany is already considering reimposing conscription because they can’t find enough willing volunteers. https://www.economist.com/europe/2024/06/06/germany-is-thinking-about-bringing-back-conscription
Today in Labor History June 5, 1969: 250 imprisoned U.S. soldiers rioted at the military penal stockade at Fort Dix over barbarous conditions and the tortures being inflicted on them by the US military state. The majority were in prison for going AWOL, resisting the draft, or as conscientious objectors. Many were being held without trial. Their grievances included overcrowding, starvation, beatings, being chained to chairs, forced confessions and participation in an unjust war. 38 of them were charged with inciting to riot. (Note the sign over the entrance to the prison: “Obedience to the Law is Freedom.” The photographer, David Fenton, called it Mussolini-like. It reminds me of the slogan over Auschwitz: “Work Sets You free.” Embarrassed, the military removed the sign soon after the photograph was published).
Today in Writing History June 4, 1917: Laura E. Richards, Maude H. Elliott, and Florence Hall won the first Pulitzer prize for biography. They wrote about their mother Julia Ward Howe, the feminist, abolitionist, pacifist author and poet. You can read the biography here.
Howe not only wrote the lyrics to The Battle Hymn of the Republic; she also wrote the pacifist 1870 Mother’s Day Proclamation. Also known as the Appeal to Womanhood Throughout the World, the proclamation called on women to unite worldwide for peace. In 1872, Howe called for a Mother’s Day for Peace to be celebrated each year on June 2. Yet today, women throughout the U.S. and Europe (along with the men) are calling for ever more heavy weaponry and NATO troops to be sent to the Ukrainian killing fields, where over 200,000 Ukrainians have already lost their lives, and where this now direct NATO involvement risks precipitating WWIII between nuclear-armed powers, neither of which show any indication that they are willing to back down or negotiate an end to the slaughter. Where is the peace movement today? Or, is some slaughter justified in the name of capitalism (er, I mean against despotism)? And, if that is true, where are all the people screaming for war against India? Philippines? Italy? Saudi Arabia? El Salvador? Egypt? Sudan? And Israel?
Today in Labor History May 22, 1968: New York police broke through the barricades at Columbia University, busting the student occupations there. As a result, 998 were arrested and over 200 injured. Students were demanding a black studies program and an end to military recruitment and ROTC on campus. Sound familiar? However, today’s student protests are bringing back the worst of 1960s-‘70s police brutality and university intolerance for Free Speech along with McCarthy era firing, blacklisting and doxing of academics for the crime of criticizing the Israeli government, under bogus claims of antisemitism.
Today in Labor History May 16, 1918: Congress passed the Sedition Act against radicals and pacifists, leading to the arrest, imprisonment, execution and deportation of dozens of unionists, anarchists and communists. The law forbade the use of “disloyal, profane, scurrilous, or abusive” language about the U.S. government, its flag, or it military. The mainstream press supported the act, despite the significant limitations it imposed on free speech and of press freedom. In June, 1918, the government arrested Eugene Debs for violating the act by undermining the government’s conscription efforts. He served 18 months in prison. Congress repealed the act in 1920, since world War I had ended. However, Attorney General, A. Mitchell Palmer, lobbied for a peacetime version of it. Additionally, he continued to round up labor activists, communists and anarchist for seditious behavior, particularly Wobblies, or members of the IWW. For example, they convicted Marie Equi for giving a speech at the IWW hall in Portland, Oregon after WWI had ended.
Today in Labor History May 14, 1970: State police confronted anti-war demonstrators at Jackson State University, Mississippi. Shortly after midnight, they opened fire, killing two African-American students and wounding twelve others. No cops were ever arrested or indicted. This occurred eleven days after the massacre at Kent State. A repeat seems eminent today, with the ongoing pro-Palestinian protests on college campuses and the violent assaults against them by police and Zionist vigilantes, and the calls by several politicians for the National Guards, and Donald Trump’s calls for student protesters to be deported.
Today in Labor History May 15, 1872: Julia Ward Howe declared the first Mother's Day as an anti-war holiday. Howe was an abolitionist and a feminist who wrote the lyrics for the Battle Hymn of the Republic. However, despite her disgust with slavery, she never thought black and white people were equal. She wanted to create a "Mother's Day For Peace," where mothers would ask that their husbands and sons to no longer get killed in wars. In 1870, she called upon mothers of all nationalities to promote the "amicable settlement of international questions, the great and general interests of peace." In 1907, Anna Jarvis held the first official Mother’s Day at an Episcopalian Church in Virginia. She wanted to honor Howe’s original vision, and to set aside a day to honor all mothers because she believed a mother is "the person who has done more for you than anyone in the world."
Guitar icon Eric Clapton releases new song accompanied by #Gaza imagery
Titled Voice of a Child, video features images of extensive destruction in Gaza, the life of palestinian children images from and pro-Palestinian/Anti-Wad protests around the world.
It's really sad that YouTube have decided to age restrict the video even though it doesn't have anything violent or graphic to disturb the younger generation, and much less than what they see on TV shows, movies and Video games
Today in Labor History May 8, 1970: About 200 construction workers in New York City attacked a crowd of Vietnam war protesters. As a result, over 70 people were injured, including four police officers. Peter Brennan, head of the New York building trades, was honored at the Nixon White House two weeks later, eventually named Secretary of Labor.
#US / The Most Influential Protest You’ve Never Heard Of: May Day, 1971
[…] Fifty years ago today, on May Day 1971, thousands of #antiwar protesters descended on Washington, DC, to protest the Vietnam War. The ensuing three days of disruptive actions directly confronted the Nixon administration — and resulted in the largest civil disobedience–related detentions in US history.
Today in labor history April 28, 1967: Muhammad Ali refused to be drafted to fight in Vietnam. Consequently, he was stripped of his boxing title and threatened with jail. His justification for refusing to go: "No Viet Cong ever called me nigger.”
Today in Labor History April 22, 1996: Peace activists Tom & Donna Howard-Hastings celebrated Earth Day 1996 by cutting down three power poles in Clam Lake, Wisconsin, preventing the launch of the U.S. Navy's first-strike nuclear submarine. They stapled an indictment against nuclear war to one of the poles and signed it "with disarming love, Tom & Donna." The district attorney charged them with criminal damage to property and sabotage. However, a jury found them not guilty of sabotage. This was just the fourth time in 16 years that members of the Plowshares antinuclear movement were acquitted of such charges. From 1980-1995, there had been 57 trials of antinuclear activists on sabotage charges. In northern Wisconsin, these direct actions focused on Extremely Low-Frequency transmitters, known as ELF, used to communicate with submerged nuclear submarines.
Today in Labor History April 14, 1917: IWW sailors went on strike in Philadelphia and won a ten dollar per month raise. Ben Fletcher, an African-American IWW organizer, was instrumental in organizing the Philadelphia waterfront. Fletcher was born in Philly in 1890. He joined the Wobblies (IWW) in 1912, became secretary of the IWW District Council in 1913. He also co-founded the interracial Local 8 in 1913.
In 1913, Fletcher led 10,000 IWW Philly dockworkers on a strike. Within two weeks, they won 10-hr day, overtime pay, & created one of the most successful antiracist, anticapitalist union locals in the U.S. At the time, roughly one-third of the dockers on the Philadelphia waterfront were black. Another 33% were Irish. And about 33% were Polish and Lithuanian. Prior to the IWW organizing drive, the employers routinely pitted black workers against white, and Polish against Irish. The IWW was one of the only unions of the era that organized workers into the same locals, regardless of race or ethnicity. And its main leader in Philadelphia was an African American, Ben Fletcher.
By 1916, thanks in large part to Fletcher’s organizing skill, all but two of Philadelphia’s docks were controlled by the IWW. And the union maintained control of the Philly waterfront for about a decade. At that time, roughly 10% of the IWW’s 1 million members were African American. Most had been rejected from other unions because of their skin color.
Fletcher also traveled up and down the east coast organizing dockers. However, he was nearly lynched in Norfolk, Virginia in 1917. And in 1918, the state arrested him, sentencing him to ten years for the crime of organizing workers during wartime. He served three years.
Again you are ignoring that the populations in the east were targeted by bombings and raids by Banderites.
Russians were extremely willing to settle for just Crimea and Donetsk and Luhansk even in 2023. It is literally too late to negotiate now, especially since Patriot missiles are being diverted to Israel. Most likely Ukraine will be turned into a rump state on the extreme west end by Kiev, or that will be absorbed into Poland.
Each of the points I just made can, again, be backed up by links if you have the time to read them. Links which cite Washington and Kiev's own words. I'm happy to explain why I hold what I see as the correct deescalatory antiwar position.
We can't just overlook indiscriminate bombing of civilians and terrorist attacks deep into Russia with long range weapons and ignore the immediate escalation Russia takes to show their level of cost investiture has risen in accordance with the risks of inaction (ESPECIALLY WHEN WE SEND LONG-RANGE WEAPONS AND WHEELED ARTILLERY).
Pacifist argumentation itself is folly. Pretending other people will submit to pacifist arguments is insanity. United Russia party follows well-understood realpolitik.
Time to consider what the neocons really wanted out of all this. Want to see a Children's Hospital on auction by Blackrock? Might still be up.
Frank Little was a Cherokee miner and IWW union organizer. He helped organize oil workers, timber workers, and migrant farm workers in California. Frank Little also participated in free speech fights in Missoula, Spokane and Fresno, and helped pioneer many of the passive resistance techniques later used by the Civil Rights movement. He was also an anti-war activist, calling U.S. soldiers “Uncle Sam’s scabs in uniforms.” He also referred to World War I as a “rich man’s war and a poor man’s fight.”
In 1916, he was active in the Mesabi Range strike, in Minnesota, along with Carlo Tresca, Joe Ettor and Elizabeth Gurley Flynn. And in 1917, he went to help organize the Speculator Mine strike in Butte, Montana, where 168 men had died. However, on August 1, Vigilantes broke into his boarding house, dragged him through the streets while tied to the back of a car, and then lynched him from a railroad trestle.