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On this day

On this day, 17th January 1928, Vidal Sassoon, dubbed the "anti-fascist warrior hairdresser" by the Telegraph newspaper, was born. Aged 17 he joined the militant anti-fascist organisation the 43 Group, formed by Jewish ex-servicemen and women, which smashed Oswald Mosley's fascists off the streets of London after World War II. Sassoon's weapon of choice? A pair of scissors.

Sassoon recounted the following about his involvement in the group to the Iranian Jewish Chronicle:

"Before the war there was quite a strong fascist party led by Oswald Mosley and he and his cohorts were put in detention [jail] during the war by [prime minister Winston] Churchill. After the war they came out and immediately started up again with their antisemitism and running through the streets and having meetings, it was quite ridiculous. Many truly brave Jewish ex-servicemen started the '43 Group'… these were tough men who had been through the war… most of my friends joined the 43 Group and there were quite a few hundred of us. Truly the fascists were smashed in the streets and yes if you were scared at times because it was scary. But after we saw the pictures that came out and the whole story of the Holocaust, there was actually no way we could allow fascists to run through the streets. I was arrested one night and put in jail, the following day the judge told me ‘to be a good boy’ and let me go. That was our life in those days, we decided that we were absolutely not going to allow what happened pre-war when Jews were just beat up indiscriminately in the streets. It worked beautifully because of mainly the tough Jewish characters that were in the British armed forces during the war, they were the people that did it. But also there were quite a few gentiles who had seen the camps, the horror of Europe and fought with us."

He once turned up to work with a black eye after a night of fighting. "I'll never forget one morning I walked in and I had a hell of a bruise - it had been a difficult night the night before - and a client said to me, 'Good God, Vidal, what happened to your face?' And I said, 'Oh, nothing, madam, I just fell over a hairpin'."

Very good short film about the 43 Group here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aSNkTnIsWho...

Libcom pages on anti-fascism in London: https://libcom.org/.../vidal-sassoon-anti-fascist-warrior...


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(From Working Class History)
 
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On this day, 23rd January 1919, racist rioting broke out in Glasgow, Scotland, as Black and white sailors gathered, hoping to be hired for work, in the mercantile marine office by the Glasgow Docks. A fight broke out between a group of sailors from Sierra Leone and white workers who objected to foreign labour competing with them for limited jobs.

Soon the white mob grew to several hundred strong, and the rioters armed themselves with guns, knives, batons, and bricks. The sailors from Sierra Leone sought shelter in their lodgings, but the white rioters surrounded building and attacked it, smashing its windows. In response, some of the Black sailors fired shots down at the crowd. Eventually, police detained 30 Black sailors in “protective custody”, then charged them with riot and weapons offences. None of the white rioters were arrested.
This was just the first of many race-related harbour riots that took place across Britain in 1919 - which left five people dead, hundreds arrested, and dozens seriously injured. But what’s remarkable about this case is how closely it’s linked to the strike for a 40-hour working week: it took place just days before the famous Battle of George Square, and some of the same people were involved.

Manny Shinwell was imprisoned for his role in the Battle of George Square, but it was also he, as local secretary of the British Seafarers’ Union, who addressed 600 white workers on the morning of the race riot demanding “action” against workers of colour. Shinwell would become the longest-serving Labour Party MP, Secretary of State for War in Clement Attlee’s government, and Chairman of the Parliamentary Labour Party. But his branch of the BSU banned Black members.

Such racism was, sadly, a feature of party-political trade unionism from its inception. The Trades Union Congress, which established a parliamentary labour party in 1899, had since 1892 been calling for a total ban on immigration, and it supported the antisemitic Aliens Act of 1905.


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(From Working Class History)
 
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On this day, 24th January 1964, a mutiny broke out amongst soldiers near Nairobi and in Nakuru, Kenya, in protest at low pay for African soldiers. The rebels seized weapons and ammunition from an armoury at the Lanet barracks, then went on sitdown strike. Kenyan independence leader and prime minister Jomo Kenyatta promised that the mutineers would be "dealt with firmly", then called in British troops to suppress the rebellion. A US destroyer also rushed to the area to back up UK forces. In the repression, one African soldier was killed, and one soldier and one passerby were wounded. It was the third such rebellion that week in East Africa: British troops also suppressed mutinies with similar demands in Tanzania and Uganda, again at the invitation of the new "anti-colonial" leaders.


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(From Working Class History)
 
1789: louis xvi issues an edict calling for the convocation of the estates-general, setting in train a chain of events that would lead to him getting his head lopped off
 
On this day, 27th January 1918, revolution broke out in Finland as workers took over Helsinki with many of the country’s other large towns following in the next few days.

Victor Serge recounted that: "the Red Flag was hoisted over the Workers' House at Helsinki. The city was rapidly captured, and the Senate and government fled to Vaasa. In a few days, almost without resistance, the Reds took over the largest towns, Abo, Viipuri and Tammerfors, and the whole of southern Finland… They introduced workers' control over production, which was relatively simple given the marked concentration of key industries: wood, paper and textiles. They were successful too in stopping sabotage on the part of the banks. Public life and production very soon resumed a practically normal existence."

The ‘People’s Republic of Finland’ instituted numerous far-reaching reforms, including women’s suffrage, workers’ control, a maximum eight-hour working day, abolition of the death penalty, abolition of the old mode of land distribution and the emancipation of domestic servants and farmhands.

However, to end conflict with the Central Powers in World War I, Finland, along with other territories, was surrendered to Germany by the Russian Bolshevik government in the March 1918 treaty of Brest-Litovsk. The following month counterrevolutionary White forces drowned the revolution in blood, slaughtering thousands of workers and socialists, and throwing tens of thousands more into concentration camps.

According to Serge, for the rich the White terror was "a historical necessity. The victorious propertied classes are perfectly aware that they can only ensure their own domination in the aftermath of a social battle by inflicting on the working class a bloodbath savage enough to enfeeble it for tens of years afterwards. And since the class in question is far more numerous than the wealthy classes, the number of victims must be very great."


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Pictured: Finnish Red guards, 1918

(From Working Class History)
 
On this day, 31st January 1919, striking workers fought police in the centre of Glasgow and the army was deployed to restore order. The strikers demanded the working week be reduced from 54 to 40 hours, to create jobs for demobilised soldiers and increase workers’ leisure time.

The strike began on Monday 27 January, and by Friday 31st, 60,000 workers had downed tools. The newspapers were outraged: The Scotsman referred to “Terrorism on the Clyde” and the Glasgow Herald claimed the workers were deploying “the methods of terrorism.” On this day, upwards of 60,000 protesters gathered in George Square and sang “The Red Flag.” The Glasgow Evening News described what happened next: “The police found it necessary to make a baton charge, and strikers and civilians — men, women, and children — were felled in the melée that followed.”

Initially overwhelmed, the workers quickly retaliated and forced the police back. A turning point in the battle came when a lorry carrying glass bottles was trapped by the crowd. As the strikers began to pelt the police with stones and bottles, many police broke ranks and fled. Led by demobilised servicemen, the workers then marched to Glasgow Green, where they were again attacked by the police. This time they uprooted iron railings and counter-charged. The violence continued until late into the night, and the Secretary of State for Scotland famously told the War Cabinet, “It is a misnomer to call this situation in Glasgow a strike — this is a Bolshevist uprising."

So the following morning, while the local regiment were confined in their barracks, 10,000 troops entered the city. With tanks and machine-gun detachments set up in key locations and thousands of soldiers patrolling the streets, the militancy of the strike was annulled.

On Monday 10 February, after the employers agreed to a 7-hour reduction in the working week, the strike was called off.


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(From Working Class History)
 
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On this day, 12th February 1945, the treaty of Varkiza was signed in Greece, when anti-Nazi partisans, most of whom were communists, agreed to surrender their weapons in return for amnesty and participation in politics. However the Right failed to hold up their end of the bargain and began mass arrests and killings of communists.

It was a key event in the buildup to the civil war, in which the Greek government, including Nazi collaborators and supported by Britain and United States, fought the Greek resistance movements. The resistance had also been abandoned by the USSR who had made their own deal with the US and UK, in which Greece was recognised as part of the British sphere of influence in return for Eastern European countries falling within the Russian sphere.

The conflict lasted for years with the eventual victory of the Right.


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(From Working Class History)
 
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2 March 1981: The Black People's Day of Action, London​
 
​


27 March 2007: Toyin Agbetu, a Pan African human rights activist, from the Ligali Organisation, paid respect to African Ancestors by challenging the (then) British monarch, Elizabeth Saxa-Coburg-Gotha (Windsor), church and government's commemorative ritual of appeasement and self approval at Westminster Abbey to mark the bicentenary of the British parliamentary Act to abolish what they disingenuously refer to as a 'slave trade'.
 
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(Source: Mirrorpix)​

2 April 1980: Members of the community in the St Pauls district of Bristol, a city which had previously been a major port in the transatlantic trade in enslaved Africans, responded to an attack by local police on the Black and White Cafe, in Grosvenor Road. Several hours later, 130 had been people were arrested, and 25 people had been taken to hospital, including 19 police and members of the press.
 
Today is Armenian Genocide Remembrance Day, which marks 108 years since the beginning of the Armenian genocide.

Around one and a half million Armenians were killed, also many Greeks and Assyrians.

The Ottoman Turks killed up to 1.5 million Armenians in the final days of the Ottoman Empire, which is generally considered to be the first genocide of the 20th century. Armenians have been advocating for the recognition of the killings as genocide for a long time.

They also killed up to a million Greeks and 700,000 Assyrians.
Click to expand...

Armenians March Through Yerevan To Commemorate Victims Of Ottoman Turkish Genocide

Here from 2015 are two survivors of the genocide speaking about their experiences:

 
49th anniversary of the Portuguese Revolution. This was the overthrow by radical sections of the armed forces of the fascist regime ( funnily enough a member of NATO) . In particular, it was the captains of the army that played a key role in the planning and overthrow of the regime and the end of the colonial war. The signal that started the revolution was the playing of the song Grandola , Vila Morena .

Salgueiro Maia is celebrated as the the most famous of the captains for his role on April 25th for his speech to his troops " Gentlemen, as you all know, there are different types of State. The socialist states, the capitalist states and the state we've reached. Now, on this solemn night, we're going to end the state we've reached! So, whoever wants to come with me, let's go to Lisbon and end this. Whoever volunteers, leaves and trains. Whoever doesn't want to leave, stay here"

It was he who led the tanks to negotiate the surrender of Marcello Caetano ( although Caetano wouldnt hand over to any rank but a General so they had to get General Spinoza to accept his surrender) , Salgueiro Maia escorted Caetano to the plane that would transport him into exile in Brazil.

 
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