The Battle of Blair Mountain saw 10,000 West Virginia coal miners march in protest of perilous work conditions, squalid housing and low wages, among other grievances. They set out from the small hamlet of Marmet, with the goal of advancing upon Mingo County, a few days’ travels away to meet the coal companies on their own turf and demand redress. They would not reach their goal; the marchers instead faced opposition from deputized townspeople and businesspeople who opposed their union organizing, and more importantly, from local and federal law enforcement that brutally shut down the burgeoning movement. The opposing sides clashed near Blair Mountain, a 2,000-foot peak in southwestern Logan County, giving the battle its name.
Miners then often lived in company towns, paying rent for company-owned shacks and buying groceries from the company-owned store with “scrip.” Scrip wasn’t accepted as U.S. currency, yet that’s how the miners were paid. For years, miners had organized through unions including the Industrial Workers of the World (IWW) and United Mine Workers of America (UMWA), leading protests and strikes. Nine years prior to Blair Mountain, miners striking for greater union recognition clashed with armed Baldwin-Felts agents, hired mercenaries employed by coal companies to put down rebellions and unionizing efforts. The agents drove families from their homes at gunpoint and dumped their belongings. An armored train raced through a tent colony of the evicted miners and sprayed their tents with machine gun fire, killing at least one. In 1914, those same agents burned women and children alive in a mining camp cellar at Ludlow, Colorado.
What kind of traitorous soldiers fight against their own people?
That’s a pretty roundabout way to describe regular old cops.
It’s almost like there was a plan behind the right’s propaganda machine that has spent decades convincing ordinary people that if other ordinary people ask for things like rights or fairness or safety then that means they are an evil enemy.
There’s definitely an ideology. And there are certainly a number of plots and schemes executed at a high level.
But so much of the modern condition of American policing is just state sponsored stocastic terrorism. It’s less a coherent plan as an unchecked filibuster. Thousands of idiots and assholes told “do as thou wilt” so long as they do it to the underclass.
Othering is a pretty powerful tool built right into the human condition.
Its a circumstance that is an extension of rational dualism, it isn’t inherent to humanity. Its the way we were all taught to think, that leads to “othering”. There are other means of analysing our world, which bring people together rather than splitting and alienating each other.
What you call inherent to humanity, I call inherent to bourgeois capitalism. Humanity has other options. In a thread about worker liberation, bourgeois essentialism should not go uncriticized.
The arrival of the military deescalated the conflict. The miners were rightly hostile toward gun thugs, capitalists, and cops, but had a favorable view of the military. The miners did not view the soldiers as their enemy, and as far as I know, peacefully surrendered.
I’m sure there were exceptions, but that was my understanding from the great history, Thunder on the Mountain: West Virginia Mine Wars of 20, 21
I’m sure they had their own families to feed. Desperation is a powerful tool
If someone tells you to put a gun to a guys head for trying to feed his family, on pain of not being able to feed your own family, that’s a good sign to turn the gun on the guy giving the orders.
Because he might as well have a gun pointed at them.
Ya I agree, but I think the reality is that most people just get swept up in everything and fixate on their immediate problems.
Probably harder to find examples where they wouldn’t.
Armies have historicly been used just as much to keep the local population in line as to wage war.