Today in Labor History May 2, 1919: Soldiers of the Freikorps murdered Gustav Landauer, anarchist, pacifist, and Education Minister, in the short-lived Bavarian Workers Republic. The Freikorps were right wing veterans of World War I. Many went on to become Nazis. Landauer believed that social change could not be won solely through control of the state or economy, but required a revolution in interpersonal relations. "The community we long for and need, we will find only if we sever ourselves from individuated existence; thus we will at last find, in the innermost core or our hidden being, the most ancient and most universal community: the human race and the cosmos." Landauer’s grandson is the acclaimed film director, Mike Nichols (Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf, The Graduate, Catch-22, Carnal Knowledge, Silkwood). British writer Philip Kerr wrote the novel, “Prussian Blue,” in which Hitler is one of the Freikorps militants who murdered Landauer.
Today in Labor History March 30, 1856: The Treaty of Paris was signed, ending the Crimean War, between Russia and the victorious Ottoman Empire (allied with the UK, France and Sardinia-Piedmont). The flashpoint was a conflict over the rights of Christian minorities in Ottoman-controlled Palestine, and control of its holy sites.
The Crimean War was one of the first to utilize modern armaments, like explosive shells, railways and telegraphs. Much of these armaments came from Alfred Nobel’s family armament factory. It was also a particularly deadly war. Around 670,000 soldiers died in only four years, the majority from preventable infectious diseases (e.g., typhus, typhoid, cholera, and dysentery), not from battle wounds. Mortality rates for soldiers were 23-31%, compared with U.S. troop mortality rates of only 2% during the Vietnam War.
In the aftermath of the Crimean War, Russia sold Alaska to the U.S. out of fear that the UK would simply take it from them in their weakened military state. The last living veteran of the Crimean war was a Greek tortoise, named Timothy, who had served as a ship’s mascot during the war. He died in 2004, nearly 150 years after the war ended. Despite their victory, the Ottomans gained no new territory, and the war nearly bankrupted them, contributing to their decline as a super power. The Crimean War also helped forge the alliances and grievances that would lead to the First World War, and quite likely to the conditions leading up to Russia’s recent annexation of Crimea and its current fight with Ukraine.
Florence Nightengale became famous as a nurse during this war. Tolstoy fought in the 11-month Siege of Sevastopol. His experiences in this war contributed to his pacifism and anarchism. After witnessing a public execution in France, one year after the Crimean War ended, he wrote, “The truth is that the State is a conspiracy designed not only to exploit, but above all to corrupt its citizens ... Henceforth, I shall never serve any government anywhere.” The war also influenced his novel, “War and Peace.”
Today In Labor History March 26, 1872: French individualist anarchist Émile Armand was born. He wrote about and agitated for free love and polyamory, pacifism, and against war and militarism. He wrote for and edited L'Ère nouvelle (1901–1911), L'Anarchie, L'En-Dehors (1922–1939) and L'Unique (1945–1953).
We're the George Lansbury Memorial Trust, set up in 2012 to commemorate the life of George Lansbury; the life-long campaigner for social justice.
George started life as a radical Liberal, became a socialist in the early 1890s & joined the Social Democratic Federation, Independent Labour Party, and then finally a Labour MP in 1922, leading the Party in the early 1930s.
Today in Labor History September 9, 1828: Leo Tolstoy, Russian author and playwright was born. He is most famous for novels like Anna Karina, and War and Peace. He chose the name for the latter after reading French anarchist Proudhon’s publication called War and Peace. Tolstoy also wrote many short stories, an autobiography and many works of nonfiction. After witnessing a public execution in 1857, he wrote: "The truth is that the State is a conspiracy designed not only to exploit, but above all to corrupt its citizens ... Henceforth, I shall never serve any government anywhere." In the 1870s, he experienced a profound spiritual awakening, which led him to become a Christian anarchist and pacifist, and which he wrote about in his non-fiction work Confession (1882). He also wrote about nonviolent resistance in The Kingdom of God Is Within You (1894), which influenced Gandhi, Martin Luther King Jr. and Wittgenstein. He was repeatedly nominated for Nobel prizes in both literature and peace.
Today in Labor History, July 24, 1893: Ammon Hennacy was born. He was a Christian pacifist, anarchist, social activist, and member of the Catholic Worker Movement and IWW. He created the Joe Hill House of Hospitality in Salt Lake City, Utah, and practiced tax resistance. As a college student, he was a member of the Socialist Party of America and, in his words, "took military drills in order to learn how to kill capitalists." During World War I, he was imprisoned for protesting the draft. While in prison, the only book he was allowed was the bible. It was there that he became a pacifist and a Christian anarchist. He also led a prison hunger strike, which got him 8 months in solitary. In the 1950s, he joined the IWW, and the Catholic Worker movement, with founder, Dorothy Day, as his godmother. He continued to participate in war resistance, tax resistance and anti-nuclear protests throughout the 1950s and ‘60s. And he wrote numerous books, including “The One-Man Revolution in America,” with each chapter about a different American radical (e.g., Thomas Paine, William Lloyd Garrison, John Woolman, Dorothy Day, Eugene Debs, Malcolm X, Mother Jones, Clarence Darrow, and Albert Parsons).