Imperialist arrogance. Someone should tell the White House to stop ruining Guatemala first
The United States aided and abetted a full-scale genocide in Guatemala for much of the second half of the 20th century, which it has never acknowledged or atoned for.
Ronald Reagan called Ríos Montt, the primary architect of the Guatemalan Genocide, “a man of great personal integrity and commitment.”
Super7 has released a new ReAction Figure of Motorhead frontman Lemmy Kilmister. The 3.75" retro-style toy has five points of articulation and comes with bass guitar and amp head. Priced at $18, it features backer card art by Ed Repka.
This edition represents Lemmy’s later years. Another ReAction Figure based on his younger appearance was released last year and is still available.
On this day, 8 June 1961, a group of Freedom Riders were arrested in Jackson, Mississippi, including Kwame Ture, Gwendolyn Greene and Joan Mulholland (pictured, l-r). Freedom Riders fought government non-enforcement of the ban on segregation in public transport in the US South by riding in multiracial groups. They faced intense violence from local police and white supremacists, including the Ku Klux Klan, until eventually winning in December that year.
Ture (born Stokely Carmichael) became a central organiser in the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee, and later the Black Panther Party. He was targeted by the FBI’s COINTELPRO operation, and “bad jacketed” – falsely painted as a CIA agent and expelled from the SNCC.
Greene (who later changed her name to Britt) had also been arrested in 1960 for refusing to leave the segregated Glen Echo Amusement Park in Maryland. With others, she confronted counter-protesters from the American Nazi Party and continued picketing until the end of summer. The park then agreed to abolish segregation before reopening the following year.
Mulholland, then aged 19, had participated in numerous civil rights sit ins, for which she was disowned by her family. In 1963, she was travelling with four other activists in Mississippi when their car was attacked by the KKK, who had orders to kill them, but they managed to escape. Mulholland remains active to this day.
Image from the excellent @ZinnEducationProject https://www.facebook.com/workingclasshistory/photos/a.296224173896073/1734414666743676/?type=3
On this day, 8 June 2017, after a 10 month-long campaign including seven strike days and two occupations, cleaners at the London School of Economics became the first outsourced workforce in the UK to make a university bring them back in-house. The workers, all migrants and people of colour, organised themselves in the grassroots union United Voices of the World, which achieved numerous other victories for similar subcontracted workers across London after taking sustained strike action.
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Picture courtesy UVW https://www.facebook.com/workingclasshistory/photos/a.296224173896073/1734210370097439/?type=3
On this day, 7 June 1954, British mathematician and pioneering thinker in the field of artificial intelligence Alan Turing died of cyanide poisoning at the age of 41. Turing had also helped the Allies win World War II by decoding encrypting Nazi communications, and after the war helped develop some of the earliest digital computers.
In 1952, he was convicted of “gross indecency” for homosexuality and sentenced to chemical castration by the state as punishment. His death was officially ruled a suicide, in response to the persecution he had been suffering.
However, the police investigation of his death was entirely inadequate. And while they concluded he deliberately ingested cyanide from an apple, they failed to test the apple for the presence of cyanide. Alternative explanations for his death were that he could have accidentally inhaled cyanide from an experiment, or that British security services killed him to prevent state secrets being passed on to the Soviet Union, which was a common fear held about LGBT+ people whom they typically considered a security risk.
Years of campaigning against the legacy of UK state homophobia eventually resulted in Turing receiving a posthumous pardon in 2013, as well as the passing of the so-called Turing’s Law, which granted posthumous pardons to nearly 50,000 other men convicted of “gross indecency” for same-sex relations.
This Pride month, learn more LGBT+ history in our podcast series: https://workingclasshistory.com/tag/lgbtq/https://www.facebook.com/workingclasshistory/photos/a.296224173896073/1733471816837961/?type=3
