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Rafael Vicente, also known as "Subcomandante Marcos", a Mexican insurgent, former military leader, and spokesman for the Zapatista Army of National Liberation (EZLN) was born on this day in 1957.​


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On this day, 20 June 1967, boxing legend Muhammad Ali was convicted for refusing the draft for the Vietnam war in Houston, Texas. Ali had been a vocal opponent of the US war, saying “Why should they ask me to put on a uniform and go 10,000 miles from home and drop bombs and bullets on brown people in Vietnam while so-called Negro people in Louisville are treated like dogs?”

To try to quell the escalating resistance to the war, Ali was given the maximum sentence of five years imprisonment and a $10,000 fine. But their efforts were unsuccessful, and the anti-war movement continued to grow. Despite the Nation of Islam beginning to distance themselves from Ali, demonstrations supporting him took place around the world, from Egypt to Guyana to London to Ghana. Four years later his conviction was overturned by the Supreme Court.

Ali had no regrets: "I wasn’t trying to be a leader. I just wanted to be free. And I made a stand all people, not just Black people, should have thought about making, because it wasn’t just Black people being drafted. The government had a system where the rich man’s son went to college, and the poor man’s son went to war. Then, after the rich man’s son got out of college, he did other things to keep him out of the Army until he was too old to be drafted."

Learn more about the movement against the Vietnam war in our podcast episodes 43-46. Find it wherever you get your podcasts or on our website: https://workingclasshistory.com/.../e43-46-the-movement.../


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(Source: as stated in image)

On 22 June 1948, 1,027 passengers, the overwhelming majority of whom were from the Caribbean, disembarked
from HMT Empire Windrush at Tilbury Docks, Essex.​
 
′′ Butcher of Lyon ": Sadistic nazi criminal Klaus Barbie was sentenced to life imprisonment 34 years ago today
 
On this day, 11 July 2002, German socialist and French resistance fighter Irene Bernard died aged 94. An office clerk and mother of three, she lived in Saarland, which was independent of Germany in the early days of Nazi rule, and became home to many Germans fleeing the regime.

There she and her husband, Leander, assisted refugees. When Saarland was annexed by the German Reich in 1935, the Bernards fled to France to escape the Gestapo. There, they kept up their anti-fascist activities and helped volunteers on their way to fight general Franco's nationalists in the Spanish civil war. When the Wehrmacht occupied southern France in 1942, Irene joined Travail Antifasciste Allemand, a combat unit of the French resistance consisting of thousands of mostly German speakers.

She later went underground, fought with the National Committee for Free Germany and gathered military intelligence. After the war, Bernard took care of wounded German soldiers who were prisoners of war. Later she returned to Saarland and became involved with women's and anti-war movements, and remained involved with anti-fascism and advocating for victims of Nazism.

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Also the Red Army and Outer Mongolian revolutionaries completed their crushing of an alliance of liberals, social-democrats, monarchists and nationalists by installing Dogsomyn Bodoo as Prime Minister of Mongolia, however he was soon accused of conspiring with reactionary enemies and shot to death a year later.
 
On this day, 14 July 1896, legendary Spanish anarchist and civil war fighter Buenaventura Durruti was born.

He got a job on the railways, joined the anarchist CNT union and took part in a general strike. Durruti (pictured, centre) later helped form the Los Solidarios action group, which fought against the dictatorship governing Spain with bank robberies and assassinations of senior officials.

In 1923 he was forced to flee first to France, then later Cuba, Chile, Mexico and Argentina, before returning to Spain in 1931 when the Second Spanish Republic was declared. There he began helping organise strikes and uprisings, and was repeatedly arrested, and deported to Spanish Guinea (now Equatorial Guinea).

Durruti returned to Spain once more, and with the outbreak of civil war in 1936 he helped organise revolutionary workers' militias to fight against the right-wing nationalists of general Francisco Franco.

In an interview during the war he told the journalist: "We are going to inherit the earth. There is not the slightest doubt about that. The bourgeoisie may blast and burn its own world before it finally leaves the stage of history. We are not afraid of ruins. We who ploughed the prairies and built the cities and can build again, only better next time. We carry a new world, here in our hearts. That world is growing this minute."

He was killed on November 19 while leading an attack during the defence of Madrid. Historians differ on whether he was shot by distant nationalist gunfire or by accidental friendly fire. His funeral in Barcelona was the largest in Spanish history, with half a million people in attendance.

Learn more about the Spanish civil war in episodes 39-40 of our podcast: https://workingclasshistory.com/.../e39-the-spanish.../

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On this day, 17 July 1936, a Spanish military uprising began in Morocco as right wing generals declared war on the new Republican government.
In Barcelona workers began to respond as members of the Confederación Nacional del Trabajo union seized 200 rifles from the holds of two ships docked in the harbour and distributed them to union activists.

These events marked the beginning of the Spanish civil war. In the coming days, full-scale social revolution would break out which would set the Spanish working class, and volunteers from across the world, against the combined might of the bulk of the Spanish military backed up by Nazi Germany and fascist Italy.

Our podcast episodes 39-40 give an overview of the conflict: https://workingclasshistory.com/.../e39-the-spanish.../

Pictured: revolutionary militia fighters in Spain during the war


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The First World War began with the declarations of war of Austria-Hungary to Serbia 107 years ago today. It was also the first comprehensive propaganda war in world history in terms of the use of film and photography
 
“The First World War mobilised sixty-five million men, killed over eight million and left another twenty-one million wounded; it swept away four of the continent’s ancient empires and turned Europe into what Czech politician Thomas Masaryk described as ‘a laboratory atop a vast graveyard’.

Before the First World War there had been just three republics in Europe; by the end of 1918 there were thirteen”.

Dark Continent: Europe’s Twentieth Century.
Mark Mazower.
 
On this day, 28 July 1985, Anti-Fascist Action (AFA) was officially launched at a meeting in Conway Hall, London, attended by 250 people with representatives from Red Action, Class War, Jewish Socialists Group, Newham Monitoring Project, Workers’ Power, Searchlight and various local anti-racist bodies from across the country. Its dedication to ‘physical and ideological opposition’ to fascism would see it drive numerous far-right groups off the streets.

For example, the fascist British National Party (BNP) had been growing in confidence in Liverpool, launching violent attacks on left-wingers, including trying to burn down a bookshop run by feminist collective. Within a year the BNP had been beaten from the streets, and later admitted they "were driven underground" by anti-fascists. And in London, after the neo-Nazi record label Blood and Honour tried to organise public events in the city, they too were smashed off the streets by AFA members who took over their redirection points for shows in Marble Arch in 1989 and Waterloo in 1992.

AFA mostly wound down in the mid-1990s after the BNP had been forced to change its strategy from trying to control the streets to running in local elections.

We have some anti-fascist books and merch available in our online store which you can check out, proceeds help fund our work: https://shop.workingclasshistory.com/collect.../anti-fascist



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Pictured: the AFA logo, designed by Clifford Harper
 
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