February 2012
1 post
Una Mulzac RIP
Una Mulzac, of the Liberation bookstore, has passed away. She will be missed.
January 2012
2 posts
Dara Greenwald Presente
We certainly didn’t know Dara well, but every time we saw her and her work, she impressed us with her sense of humor, her creative vision, her dedication to making the world a better place. We talked to her and her partner Josh at the amazing Exit Art exhibit, showcasing radical art from around the world, whether watching her videos or perusing Just Seeds who’s work covers our walls at...
New Animated Gifs
We be up in your gifs, animating them: http://www.hiaw.org/defcon5/freebradleymanning-v1.gif and http://www.hiaw.org/defcon5/freebradleymanning-v2.gif
Also, we stumbled across Why Ron Paul Sucks.
December 2011
3 posts
History is a Weapon wants your Latin American help
Hey. You! Psst.
History Is A Weapon is shadowy radical history site, but behind the curtain and deep down the rabbit hole, we have feelings, too.
And we’re feeling exhausted and overwhelmed. On the backburner, we always have a few small things we try to make the internet be a more awesome place. Besides the readings, we put up a few posters, a few interactive maps, a few beautiful things...
An Open Apology to Amy Koch on Behalf of All Gay...
Dear Ms. Koch, On behalf of all gays and lesbians living in Minnesota, I would like to wholeheartedly apologize for our community’s successful efforts to threaten your traditional marriage. We are ashamed of ourselves for causing you to have what the media refers to as an “illicit affair” with your staffer, and we also extend our deepest apologies to him and to his wife. These...
Deaths Noted
J. Lynn Helms, criminal and executor of Reagan’s attack on the 1981 Air Traffic Controller’s union, is dead. He will not be missed and is currently burning to death in a crashing plane in an endless loop for all eternity.
However, it saddens us to note that Bert Schneider has also passed. Schneider was producer of the one of the greatest documentaries of all time, Hearts and Minds,...
October 2011
5 posts
Occupy Everything
It isn’t over. Head to your local occupy. This is the part where we all get to decide if this is a blip or a new moment. There are three things to know: History is a weapon. The future is all we have. And the time to resist is now.
Fixed link to Darrow
There was a broken link to Clarence Darrow’s Crime and Criminals: Address to the Prisoners in the Chicago Jail. Someone emailed us and it is fixed now. We apologize for the mistake.
Occupy Wall St.
Okay, so things are happening quickly, we’re excited and if you haven’t gone to your local Occupy Wall St, you should get off the computer and GET. THERE. NOW.
I’m assuming the people who are still here are tired from getting back from their local Occupy Wall St, are still there and accessing the internet from some sort of smart device, or are lazy liars.
This has been an...
Occupy Wall Street: A Draft to Share.
Clicking on the NYTimes’s daily confused article on the current #occupywallst, I’m moved by how corporate media’s utter bafflement on what is happening (and spreading) is almost entirely a result, not of bad answers, but of bad questions. And it’s not a stretch to suggest that this is an indictment of several major liberal institutions.
It is apparent to anyone with a...
September 2011
2 posts
Occupy
Ok, we were wrong. If you are close to NYC, head to occupywallst. If you live elsewhere, find your local action at occupytogether and go there as soon as you can. Death to keyboard revolutionaries.
Strange places
Why no updates? We’ve been crazy busy. If you have stuff you want to submit, do so, but no complaining if we’re running behind.
As the school year started and approximately no students have money in today’s economy, History Is A Weapon has gotten a lot of visitors in the last month, and we hope you keep sharing us as a resource with your teachers, students, neighbors, and random...
July 2011
3 posts
Roadmap to Apartheid
We have a tremendous amount of respect for Ana Nogueira who is one of the people putting this film together. We can’t wait to see this film. Check it out and spread the word.
Something is happening September 17th in NYC
We don’t know what either, but all the right people seem to be talking about it, and it might involve tents and activists and shutting down wall street so start getting ready.
No cancel this. We’re sure people are well intentioned, but Sept 17th is a SATURDAY, which means NO ONE WILL BE AT WALL STREET TO HEAR YOUR PROTEST. There’s no point. You want to protest on wall street,...
June 2011
1 post
May 2011
2 posts
Added The Bridge Poem →
We weren’t lying. Today, we added The Bridge Poem. There will be more.
Radio Silence
Why haven’t we been updating? We’ve been going through crazy uproar. And we feel bad. So we’ll try to post some stuff soon.
April 2011
1 post
Orlando Bosch is dead
The terrorist Orlando Bosch is dead. Good.
March 2011
18 posts
The Master's Tools Will Never Dismantle the... →
Why are we so short on Audre Lorde material? We have no excuses. This is one of her seminal pieces, though we do have to say that we often disagree with the title of it (one of our stock lines for years has been “those who say we can’t use the masters tools to burn down the masters house don’t understand how big the plantation is.” This is not a criticism of Lorde per se,...
Added Crime and Criminals: Address to the... →
Well worth a read, especially with the recent passing of the preeminent Leonard Weinglass.
Added The Axe at the Root →
William Thurston Brown’s 1901 piece about the importance of understanding the implications of John the Baptist may be the most religious text on History Is A Weapon, but I’m sure that once you give it a good read, you’ll see why it is worthy of inclusion in the collection.
A Song to Pass the Time
I’m not a Rudyard Kipling fan, but came across this song and thought it worth sharing:
A Pict Song
Rome never looks where she treads, Always her heavy hooves fall On our stomachs, our hearts or our heads; And Rome never heeds when we bawl. Her sentries pass on – that is all, And we gather behind them in hordes, And plot to reconquer the Wall, With only our tongues for our swords.
...
Added "You Cannot Kill the Working Class" →
Wow. I’ve read excerpts from this piece before, but making the whole version web friendly forced me to really read it through and it as an amazing essay. Herndon’s positive view of Stalin-era Soviet Union notwithstanding, this is one of those essays that really made me exclaim at the end “History IS A Weapon!” The first person accounting of a black communist in the early...
RIP Weinglass
It is with great sadness that we note the passing of Leonard Weinglass, movement lawyer.
Added Big Bill Haywood's General →
“Fairy tales do not tell children the dragons exist. Children already know that...”
– -G. K. Chesterton
Added Big Bill Haywood's "General Strike" →
Staying in the vein of Labor Uprising, Big Bill Haywood shares his thoughts…..
Added Manifesto and Preamble of the Industrial... →
At some point, we’re going to win. And apropos of the fact that it’s a great song:
I dreamed I saw Joe Hill last night,
Alive as you or me Says I, “But Joe, you’re ten years dead,” “I never died,” says he “I never died,” says he “In Salt Lake, Joe,” says I to him, Him standing by my bed, “They framed you on a murder...
Added Speech to Striking Coal Miners by Mother...
Added Speech to Striking Coal Miners by Mother Jones. Honestly, the speech comes off a little worse unabridged than the version found in The Radical Reader (a book I like), but I figure we’re all adults here and we can handle it. She was a pistol and between the continued terrors of coal mining, mountain top removal, and the inspiring uprising in Wisconsin, it’s as timely as ever. ...
Added My Dungeon Shook →
Honestly, is there ever enough James Baldwin? He was like an oracle.
Restoried: What ‘Superman’ got wrong, point by... →
restoried:
While the education filmWaiting For Superman has moving profiles of students struggling to succeed under difficult circumstances, it puts forward a sometimes misleading and other times dishonest account of the roots of the problem and possible solutions.
The amped-up rhetoric of crisis and…
Oh Eight Years
I was going to write a nice blog entry about yesterday’s visit to the Left Forum, but someone pointed out this morning that while the United States was attacking Libya, it was eight years to the day after Bush declared war on Iraq.
Sometimes people have difficulty holding incongruous thoughts simultaneously in their minds (a recent example: “Wikileaks is an important, ethical, and...
Blog entry, redux
Okay, we posted an excerpt from the Times the other day, but it’s been going around in my mind and I wanted to add a note besides “cue barfing noises.”
Meet the New Boss….
“Similarly, the White House mostly has sought to stay out of the fray in Madison, Wis., and other state capitals where Republican governors are battling public employee unions and Democratic lawmakers...
DC RIP
It is with some serious sadness we note the passing of Donald “DC” Cox, former Field Marshall of the Black Panthers. He is featured in a long and wonderful interview in What We Want, What We Believe. He will be missed.
Meet the New Boss....
“Similarly, the White House mostly has sought to stay out of the fray in Madison, Wis., and other state capitals where Republican governors are battling public employee unions and Democratic lawmakers over collective bargaining rights. When West Wing officials discovered that the Democratic National Committee had mobilized Mr. Obama’s national network to support the protests, they...
Broder
Washington Beltway “journalist” David Broder has passed away. Good Riddance to Bad Rubbish.
February 2011
2 posts
Wallace Shawn: Why I Call Myself a Socialist →
January 2011
10 posts
A Year On. ¡Zinn Presente!
For the last year, on every page of History Is A Weapon, we’ve featured the above image as a memorial to Howard Zinn, the wonderful historian who passed away a year ago today.
Zinn’s impact lives on. In Amazon.com’s Democracy best sellers list, he’s ranked at #2, #3, and #5. The People Speak, the History Channel special about his Voices of a People’s History, did...
We love(d) Tumblr
We’re leaving Tumblr soon. The downtime has become to much of a nuisance. Be prepared to update your rss feeds.
Too many activists pretend they are carpenters for future cities while simply landlording over housefires.
What're the best links you got?
So recently on metafilter, there was a post about how there isn’t really a left wing blogosphere so much as a liberal blogosphere and a certain radical history website realized that it hasn’t updated its link page in about, oh, seven decades. So, have at it yall, what’re the good websites we should share? We want to update the old directory and our categories are as...
Added A Historical Survey of Organizations of the... →
Added “A Historical Survey of Organizations of the Left Among the Chinese in America” by H. M. Lai. It’s a great piece (recommended by someone at the Kasama project), but I’m adding it with some consternation because I’m sure there are some serious typos in here. (But it took a few months to get it this far….) If you see any typos, please send them along.
...
Posted Carl Wittman's Refugees from Amerika: A Gay...
Posted Carl Wittman’s Refugees from Amerika: A Gay Manifesto
Weird Research tidbit of the day
I knew Comedian Jon Stewart’s brother is the Chief Operating Officer of the New York Stock Exchange, but, in addition, the head of Conan O’Brien’s production company is David Kissinger, son of supreme war criminal, Henry Kissinger (AKA America’s Hitler).
EDIT: Okay, we have been corrected. We stated that Kissinger was America’s Hitler, but apparently, a long time...