I know it’s not hard to point out reactionaries hypocrisy when it comes to like safe spaces or hug boxes or whatever but genuinely how much of an echo chamber do you have to exist in for you to think this is a reasonable thing to say
reblog if attacking fascism is really the hill you want to die on
this is literally like one of the most justified and honorable hills you could die on??? lol??
On this day, 26 March 1969, the famous reclusive anarchist and working class novelist B Traven died. He is best known for writing The Treasure of the Sierra Madre, which later became an Oscar-winning film starring Humphrey Bogart.
As a young sailor, known as Ret Marut, he took part in the German revolution in 1919, before being sentenced to death and escaping to London. There, he was arrested and interrogated, gave several false names, and tried to seek refuge in the US, claiming to be a US citizen whose documents were destroyed in the San Francisco earthquake of 1906.
This was unsuccessful, and he eventually moved to Mexico. There he wrote texts including The Cotton Pickers, about Mexican migrant labourers, and The Death Ship, about a sailor stranded in Europe after World War I, when all of a sudden strict national borders began to be erected. Meanwhile, back in Germany, his books were burned by the Nazis after their takeover, and they declared him a “disgrace to Germany”.
When the film adaptation of The Treasure of the Sierra Madre began shooting, executives asked Traven to be a paid advisor on set. He declined and instead sent his literary agent, Hal Croves, in his stead. It much later transpired that Croves was in fact Traven himself.
Some journalists managed to track him down but he always denied everything, and it was only after his death that researchers managed to piece together who he was. While it is firmly established that he was the same person as Marut, another pseudonym, his true identity is still disputed. The most likely possibility is that he was born Otto Feige in Swiebodzin, now Poland, in 1882.
He is remembered as a great author of working class literature, but he acknowledged the shortcomings of merely writing. While masquerading as Croves, Traven once said: “Life is worth more than any book one can write”.
Sources, more information and map: https://stories.workingclasshistory.com/article/9848/b-traven-dieshttps://www.facebook.com/workingclasshistory/photos/a.296224173896073/2238333583018446/?type=3
On this day, 4 February 1924, around 175 radical Industrial Workers of the World union members took on the Ku Klux Klan, patrolling the streets of Greenville, Maine, after the KKK tried to threaten IWW union organisers.
Logging workers in the area were organising for better pay and conditions when around 40 Klansmen had visited a boardinghouse where IWW members (known as Wobblies) were staying and ordered them to leave. Local wobbly organiser Bob Pease charged that the KKK was doing the bidding of lumber companies, and told the local Press Herald that they opposed the IWW “because we want good wages, eight hours a day in the lumber camps and clean linen on our bunks".
The IWW was also ordered to leave the town by local authorities, but they defied both the government and the KKK, and instead organised and took to the streets, declaring “We are going to stick, and if the Klan wants to start something, the IWW are going to finish it”.
Learn more about the IWW in our podcast series: https://workingclasshistory.com/tag/iww/https://www.facebook.com/workingclasshistory/photos/a.296224173896073/2202503223268149/?type=3
