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Sharing this because public schools generally teach only about peaceful protest movements, so many aren't aware that the rights we enjoy as workers today were literally fought, killed, and died for, and often the US military was on the wrong side of the fight.
Also the story of Blair Mountain teaches us just how insidious US corporations will be if we let them.
But remember kids, if we get rid of one more regulation, the people owning those corporations will make us all rich!
Spoiler
They won't.
Incorrect, first airplane attack on US soil was the firebombing of Black Wall Street during the Tulsa Race Massacre, 4 months prior
The first two airplane attacks were on blacks, and then the working class.
Never forget. That's what happens when billionaires fear no repercussion. No war but class war.
What a lot of people fail to realize is that mining and other blue collar industries were traditionally very left-leaning because capitalists would take away all their rights, pay them in scrip, etc. The companies only cared about the Almighty dollar (and still do), but were way less regulated than they are now. Those regulations are the result of unions, worker uprising etc.
It's supremely. Ironic to see workers in these industries now do an about face, because Joe Rogan told them to. An over simplification, sure, but the point remains.
I feel like it started before Joe Rogan though. I’d say this started at least in the 70s, when more manufacturing moved overseas and we began buying more foreign made products. Mainly stuff from China and Japan, maybe also Mexico. So if you are losing your job, those are the bad guys. But who is advocating for equal rights? It’s the left, so they must also be the bad guys. So you go to the “other team” regardless of understanding policy, and then it’s just team politics, my team must win, pwn the libtards, etc etc.
It was Reagan, not Rogan, that caused so many I'd these issues.
Oh boy, Joe Rogan is just the newest flavor of awful. Bill O'Rielly started the whole current entertainment news by being a comedian who suddenly started being a right wing mouthpiece and any time he got called out on his shit it was "For entertainment purposes only" and he was on about the anti-left wing movements about coastal elites and unions taking workers wages.
But then the right wing even to then was building to massive corporations that donated to them, groups like the biggest anti-union propaganda machine in the world, WalMart. Notice that during the Reagan era they had "Trickle Down Economics" to fool people into thinking if the wealthy were just wealthier, then they too could be wealthier.
And the wars between groups have been speared on by the US since post civil war. Can't have former slaves having jobs, that'd take from the whites. Can't have people from overseas taking railroad jobs, that takes jobs from Americans. The big slaveowners of the American South were not the majority, so why did so many people fight for that confederacy? Because they were convinced by those wealthy that if slavery went away, there would go the economy... especially as so many people's jobs were in existence to the slavery machine.
Joe Rogan wasn't some new bogeyman who figured out how to overthrow the world. The rich has been finding ways to make poor people fight each other instead of them as a tale as old as time.
Only a hundred years ago. We can't even go 100 years without evil infesting our government.
You know what sucks about this story the most for me?
I grew up with these people’s descendants. You know what they’re doing right now?
The entire area voted more than 80% for Trump.
It bums me out so much, but then, I get it. We have NOTHING. The only means of making a living around here for regular folks is mining coal. The democrats want to end the use of fossil fuels. Of course they do, but it has turned everyone into republicans around here. Nobody is offering alternatives that truly benefit anyone but the people who are already wealthy.
The people who already had money are turning all of the land into ATV trails, and every halfwit with a camera comes to town and gawks at the poor folks for YouTube money.
My god, it all pisses me off.
You forgot to mention that most of them also have black lung.
Don't tell them or they'll start lynching their own internal organs.
I mean 90 billion dollars was set aside to teach them how to green energy but they voted to mine coal instead, I feel nothing for ignorant people, this is what they voted for
I feel for ignorant people, so I’ll let your comment slide.
The point is “nobody thinks about or cares for or helps them” is absolutely bullshit. Any attempts at help meet deaf, defeatist, petulant ears.
You spend decades starving after you had it good, being smacked in the face by people who tell you that you’re just too stupid to understand, all while knowing that drugs were tested on your people, 2/3 of your friends and family are dead from it.
At that point, you’re dealing with a defeated people who have been fed promise after promise. Schools haven’t properly educated them since the 60s. Propaganda by pretend preachers is the only hope these people had.
The only thing I had growing up was school books from the 60s and 70s, church, and a faint memory of a time when everything was clean and good.
If I hadn’t been lucky enough to have a wealthy relative with a computer and access to the internet, I’d be right there with them. Opposing whatever crap people were trying to help me with and clinging to the one thing that I know for sure works around here. I know with 100% certainty that I wouldn’t have been able to learn anything without that little bit of luck, and at exactly the right time. Most of those people weren’t so lucky. By the time the internet became something they could afford, it was too late. Now it’s a propaganda machine that uses algorithms to further brainwash people and push them deeper into their idiocy. They don’t get the information about the clean energy initiatives. They get the information that comes from the last handful of rich assholes who own the coal companies and their cronies.
Jim Justice filled paychecks with propaganda and laid off several men in 2012 in anticipation of a Democratic victory. If you could have seen the anger I seen. That jackass owes my brother money to this day, but it was easy to convince them it was someone else’s fault when everything that had happened leading up to it was another head stomp deeper into the mud.
Change isn’t going to come overnight. These people were left to die while the world went on without them and then kicked while they were down with a so called “drug epidemic”.
They don’t trust anyone. They have a damn good reason for that.
I try to keep my emotions in check, but I get so angry when I think about this shit.
When I look back at my happy childhood memories, playing Nintendo with friends, I immediately get hit with heartbreak because the only people in a room full of kids who are alive today are me and my brother. The tiny amount of privilege we had is the only reason we weren’t buried with all of our friends.
My blood boils. I know that my people are stupid, but we’ve been intentionally kept that way for a long time. If it wasn’t intentional, it sure as shit seems that way.
Not who you were replying to. I have sort of similar roots, angst, and anger. My grandparents grew up sharecroppers, entire extended family are fundamentalists.
There's nothing inherently wrong with being ignorant. It's just a matter of education. Willfull ignorance, on the other hand, is the greatest sin.
The part I still can't wrap my head around is falling for a New York, city slicker, orange ass, conman. My people used to dislike cops, hate the government, guns were just a fun tool for farm and hunting, and were suspicious of military jingoism and flag waving.
I wasn't able to get a single friend or family member to see how they were being manipulated, how they were changing. I changed some, especially when I lost the religion, but I feel like I'm closer to our roots than they are. It's profoundly alienating. I hate my own people a lot of the time. I'm so angry at them for fucking falling for such transparent bullshit. Fuck the evil bastards that lied them into it.
The US government has always been evil. What are you talking about? Maybe learn about how evil a foreign policy the US has.
See also: Ludlow Massacre, Matewan
And they don’t teach it in schools because then we’d know our power
Theres a good movie "Matewan" for the lazy
Behind the Bastards covered this. The mining company established a 'rape room' system, where wives and daughters of injured miners paid off medical debts with their bodies.
Part One: The Second American Civil War You Never Learned About
What did you think the National Guard was for?
Based.
Based... on a logical and reasonable expectation of basic human rights actually being human rights
What kind of traitorous soldiers fight against their own people?
That's a pretty roundabout way to describe regular old cops.
It's almost like there was a plan behind the right's propaganda machine that has spent decades convincing ordinary people that if other ordinary people ask for things like rights or fairness or safety then that means they are an evil enemy.
Othering is a pretty powerful tool built right into the human condition.
"March" is not the right word, though they did march. "Fight" and "battle" and "armed resistance" are more what happened.
Thousands of combatants, armed militias, airplanes literally dropping chemical weapons, and large machine guns at a time when machine guns were very new.
This is how you get change. Not through peaceful protest alone. A many-sided approach is needed, including peaceful protest, and yes one of those sides is certainly armed violent resistance.
Iirc Howard Zinn referred to this as the "second US Civil War" in A People's History of the United States
It was the biggest domestic military engagement since the US Civil War, at least.
This is why we need strong unions. Government work protections will always be rolled back because the government serves the powerful. They only capitulate to the rest of us when they feel threatened. Unions are our biggest strength.
The term "redneck" in the early 20th century was occasionally used in reference to American coal miner union members who wore red bandanas for solidarity. The sense of "a union man" dates at least to the 1910s and was especially popular during the 1920s and 1930s in the coal-producing regions of West Virginia, Kentucky, and Pennsylvania. ^Patrick Huber, "Red Necks and Red Bandanas: Appalachian Coal Miners and the Coloring of Union Identity, 1912–1936", Western Folklore, Winter 2006.^
I'm citing this because the term redneck has been mostly reclaimed by conservative Americans, but it's important that the term was used by union members who fought the cops when they were sent to break up a strike. The origin of the word was used in a far more left-leaning sense than it is today.
A similar thing happened in my neck of the woods in 1925. Sounds familiar: unionized miners go on strike, company cuts off all credit to the company stores that they controlled, things become heated, company police shoot into crowds of miners killing one and wounding others, tensions increase, the military is brought in, and the dispute finally ends after a provincial election and recognition of the legitimacy of the union. Flash forward to today and the mines are all but shut down and many are museums, but the incident is still recognized every year as a local holiday.
Songs have been written, stories told.
https://www.wboy.com/only-on-wboy-com/rednecks-and-their-ties-to-the-battle-of-blair-mountain/
According to haenfler.sites.grinnell.edu, “the term redneck has strong agricultural ties. Originally used in the latter half of the 19th century, redneck was a slur used by upper class whites to describe lower class white farmers (Huber 1995). These lower class workers would often have sunburnt, red necks from tending their fields all day; hence the name.”
However, the term would soon turn away from its prejudiced roots and instead come to represent unification. At first, the term was used on pro-union southern coal miners “due to their communist ties,” grinnell.edu said. However, the labor unions took the term and transformed it into a symbol of unity, donning red bandanas to identify themselves.
In 1921, this “Red Neck Army,” a force 10,000 strong, marched from Charleston, W.Va. to Logan and Mingo counties, “the last two non-union counties in West Virginia,” according to appalachianhistory.net. The ultimate result of this march would be the Battle of Blair Mountain, where the striking miners would face off against state, company and federal forces.
Now... beyond the wierdness of a local news outlet ... citing a website instead of a person as a source...
Uh basically, yeah, the Battle of Blair Mountain is also very much associated with the term 'redneck', yeah, whole bunch of these guys wore red bandanas or kerchiefs around their necks.
In the subsequent century, we've as a society mostly completely forgotten about this, redneck just means dumb bubba hick out in the boonies...
... not armed combatants literally shooting and fighting and dying for better working conditions and pay.
Isn't the memory hole fun?
Matewan (1987) is a good movie covering aspects of this story. Great cast and an engaging story. The cinematography won an Oscar.
Those same miners now mostly voted for trump because he promised clean coal...
Things have changed
