@Pluto's Republic

It really should be something that everyone reads to understand how the powerful people have been determined to keep their profits intact no matter what it costs everyone else.

Here's the article on the Palmer raids.

100 Years Ago, the First Red Scare Tried to Destroy the Left

The first Red Scare that began a century ago with the Palmer Raids wasn’t rooted in irrational hysteria. The government agencies that carried out the raids had an unambiguous goal: to destroy the radical left in the United States.

On November 7, 1919, raiding parties in twelve US cities, composed of federal agents and a motley assortment of local police and American Legionnaires, descended on the offices of the Union of Russian Workers, an organization of leftist immigrants. The raids coincided with the second anniversary of the Bolshevik Revolution and rounded up for arrest as many as one thousand people. Over the next two months, the onslaught continued, as leftists of various stripes were targeted all over the country. The largest assault came on January 2, 1920, with raids in some thirty-three cities aimed mainly at Communist groups. But this sustained attack on the Left would persist through the middle of February.

Dubbed the Palmer Raids after the man in charge of them, Attorney General A. Mitchell Palmer, this operation is widely regarded as the definitive event in the nation’s first great Red Scare. Coming only a few months after the Communist movement’s emergence in the United States, and capping off the most tumultuous year of social conflict the country would see all century, the raids were conducted with little concern for constitutional norms. All told, they resulted in the arrest of some ten thousand leftists, hundreds of whom were ultimately deported or criminally prosecuted.

The one-hundredth anniversary of this extraordinary series of events is an apt occasion to reflect on the Red Scare’s significance in US history. But in doing so it is crucial to go beyond the conventional wisdom and consider more carefully what the Red Scare was really about.

Perhaps the most important thing to recognize is that the Red Scare was only partly a “scare” at all — if by that one means, as many scholars and civil libertarians clearly do, an event deeply rooted in “hysteria,” xenophobia, or other irrational motives. The Red Scare was a sprawling enterprise, marked by all these tendencies. But at its center was a clear purpose, one that gave it considerable rationality and focus and sustained it from 1917 — where some historians locate its beginning — well into the 1920s.

That purpose was simple: to destroy the Industrial Workers of the World.
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Progressives, for instance, were instrumental in the enactment and enforcement of the federal Espionage Act. Adopted in the early summer of 1917, the law was used to imprison about two hundred IWW members, most of them in three mass trials in 1918 and 1919. The prosecutions — initiated by a series of raids in the fall of 1917 — were premised on the claim that the union had conspired to undermine war production, using sabotage and strikes to do the bidding of Imperial Germany. The historical record not only confirms that these charges were utterly false. It also makes clear that the prosecutions were the work of big capitalists in the West, who conspired with the region’s Progressive politicians and the Wilson administration to make criminals of much of the union’s top leadership, including crucial figures like William “Big Bill” Haywood and Ralph Chaplin.

This is just a little excerpt of it. I have to read it more than once to truly get it. I'm not sure who the "progressives" were though. And then to read Debs' speech put it more into perspective. This tells me that Bernie does have a snowballs chance to win the primary. Or if democrats throw us a bone they will make sure that he doesn't win the general. And if they do rig the primary again what will people do? They were easily handled at the convention. And most people refused to believe Tulsi when she said that she was stepping down from the DNC because of how they rigged the primary against him. This is when she became a pariah of the centrists. Idiots to not believe the truth just because of who they were supporting.

Heh..someone posted a tweet saying that Hillary's a witch. I tweeted this.

#4.1.2

I looked at the references you mention, and they do tell part of the story of what happened to make Americans the sheep that they are. It helps explains how they came to be so cowed by their own government. In the course of things, I came across a video of Mark Ruffalo reading excerpts from Eugene Debs' speech. He teased out meanings that I had missed in my own reading. What courage! I post it below for anyone interested:

.

From Eugene v. Debs's Canton Speech. 1918.

The serfs had been taught to believe that when their masters declared and waged war upon one another, it was their patriotic duty to fall upon one another, and to cut one another's throats, to murder one another for the profit and the glory of the plutocrats, the barons, the lords who held them in contempt.

That is war in a nutshell. The master class has always declared the war; the subject class has always fought the battles; the master class has had all to gain and nothing to lose, and the subject class has had nothing to gain and all to lose--including their lives.

They have always taught you that it is your patriotic duty to go to war and to have yourselves slaughtered at a command. But in all of the history of the world you, the people, never had a voice in declaring war.

The working class who fight the battles, the working class who make the sacrifices, the working class who shed the blood, the working class who furnish the corpses, the working class have never yet had a voice in declaring war. The working class have never yet had a voice in making peace. It is the ruling class that does both. They declare war; they make peace.

"Yours not to ask the question why; Yours but to do and die."

That is their motto, and we object on the part of the awakened workers.

If war is right, let it be declared by the people--you, who have your lives to lose; you certainly ought to have the right to declare war, if you consider war a necessary.

@travelerxxx

Or what it'd be like to watch your friends die doing something that in a 100 years won't matter. I was reading JekyllandHide's diary on the Xmas truce and saw some photos of the men who fought in WWI. What did they accomplish? For months they would fight over a piece of land that no one cares about today. Then there's all the troops that died in Iraq and other theaters. Just what did they accomplish? The ones that survived the wars will bear the scars of them for the rest of their lives.

I wish there was a way to get Butler's book and Debs' speech out to every person who thinks about joining the military. This is one thing Tulsi could do. But that takes lots of guts. The people who do speak out against the wars are made invisible.

#4.1.2

Always I am reminded of the demise of "Jim" in John Steinbeck's In Dubious Battle.

The last thing migrant farm strike worker "Jim" sees is two bright flashes.

"Suddenly Mac reached for Jim. “Jim! Drop, for
Christ’ sake!” There was a roar, and two big holes ot
light. Mac had sprawled full length. He heard several
sets of running footsteps. He looked toward Jim, but
the flashes still burned on his retinas. Gradually he made
Jim out. He was on his knees, his head down. “You sure
got down quick, Jim.”

Jim did not move. Mac scrambled over to him, on his
knees. “Did you get hit, Jim?” The figure kneeled, and
the face was against the ground. “Oh, Christ!” Mac put
out his hand to lift the head. He cried out, and jerked his
hand away, and wiped it on his trousers, for there was no
face. He looked slowly around, over his shoulder."

This is how TPTB operate. They did it to Debs in the WWI time, Steinbeck wrote of it in the 30s, and they'll do it to us now and in the future. I don't think greed has any bounds.