This Week in People’s History, July 3–9
Getting War in Asia Started
45 YEARS AGO, on July 3, 1979, the Central Intelligence Agency embarked on a top-secret operation named Operation Cyclone. By doing so, the U.S. started down a road that led inexorably to a 43-year-long series of wars that killed hundreds of thousands of civilians in Afghanistan and Iraq, plus nearly 7,000 members of the U.S armed forces, and provoked the worst-ever terrorist attack on the U.S., which killed nearly three thousand civilians and seriously injured tens of thousands more.
Operation Cyclone, which provided money and weapons to Islamic guerrillas opposed to the Russian presence in Afghanistan, started out with very little risk to the U.S. But giving Afghanistan’s mujahideen thousands of tons of weapons worth several billion dollars opened the floodgates to a tide of death and destruction that still reverberates from Kabul to Lower Manhattan. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Afghan_conflict
A Rent Strike for the Ages
185 YEARS AGO, on July 4, 1839, a sometimes violent, 6-year-long revolt by thousands of tenant farmers in the Hudson River Valley and the Catskill Mountains was inaugurated at a mass meeting in semi-rural Berne, New York. The date of the meeting was no accident, because the outraged farmers proclaimed “We will take up the ball of Revolution where our fathers stopped it, and roll it to the final consummation of freedom and independence of the masses.”
What followed was a successful struggle by tens of thousands of farmers against a semi-feudal system of land ownership that had been established more than a century before the American revolution. After years of intense struggle, including a massive rent strike, the so-called Anti-Rent War forced the state legislature to amend the state’s constitution and compel the landlords of ancient, vast, New York estates to give up their centuries-old prerogatives that held their tenants in semi-serfdom.
The amended New York State Constitution added provisions for tenants' rights that had the effect of abolishing the ancient system of feudal tenures. Within a short time, the owners of the pre-revolutionary manors sold off thousands of farms to the families that had rented them for generations. It was a social and economic revolution that put an end to one of the last vestiges of a quasi-feudal system. https://granta.com/ghostlands/
Blood on the Embarcadero
90 YEARS AGO, on July 5, 1934, known as Bloody Thursday, two longshoremen were killed by police gunfire in San Francisco during a strike that shut down every major West Coast port for almost three months. The two victims were among a total of five strikers killed by police or company thugs in the course of work stoppage. Despite the repression, the strikers won a 30-hour week, time-and-a-half for overtime and the right of the union, and not the employer, to determine which workers would be assigned to which job openings. https://archive.org/details/bigstrike00quinrich/page/n9/mode/2up
Asbestos Ban on the Slow Road
35 YEARS AGO, on July 6, 1989, more than 60 years after asbestos was known to be a potent carcinogen, the Environmental Protection Agency issued regulations designed to begin the phased-in ban of almost all uses of asbestos in the U.S. by 1996.Even now, The U.S. remains one of the few developed countries to not completely ban asbestos. https://www.asbestosnation.org/facts/why-isnt-asbestos-banned-in-the-un…
When “Intelligence” Was Really Wishful Thinking
20 YEARS AGO, on July 7, 2004, the Senate Intelligence Committee published a harsh 511-page report declaring that the “intelligence” information about “weapons of mass destruction” that was used to justify the invasion of Iraq had been “overstated” so much that it was just plain wrong. The report had the unanimous support of the 17 committee members, nine Democrats and eight Republicans. https://www.govinfo.gov/content/pkg/CRPT-108srpt301/pdf/CRPT-108srpt301…
Just a Coincidence?
ON JULY 8th at precisely 5-year intervals –
In 1959: The first two fatalities among U.S. military personnel in Vietnam take place when Vietnamese freedom fighters attack a U.S. compound in Bien Hoa, 20 miles northeast of Saigon, killing a major and a master sergeant.
In 1964: United Nations Secretary General U Thant tells a press conference that "the only sensible solution" to the war in Vietnam is to reconvene talks in Geneva to negotiate peace; to which U.S. President Lyndon Johnson responds: "We do not believe in conferences called to ratify terror."
In 1969: Having reached a peak military presence in Vietnam of 543,000, the U.S. withdrawal begins when the first of 25,000 soldiers deplane at McChord Air Force Base near Seattle, Washington. https://web.archive.org/web/20150327073054/http://www.dod.mil/pubs/foi/…
Nice Try, International Court of Justice
20 YEARS AGO, on July 9, 2004, the International Court of Justice ruled that "Israel cannot rely on a right of self-defense or on a state of necessity in order to preclude the wrongfulness of the construction of the wall" between Israel and the West Bank and that "the construction of the wall, and its associated régime, are contrary to international law." The vote in favor of the decision was 14-1. The sole dissenting vote was cast by the court’s only justice from the United States.
The Boycott Divestment and Sanctions Movement, which is widely known as BDS, was founded in 2005, on the first anniversary of the International Court of Justice's ruling. https://www.amnesty.org/en/latest/campaigns/2019/01/chapter-3-israeli-s…