History Is A Weapon (and a blog)

Una Mulzac RIP

Sat, 04 Feb 2012 20:56:01 -0500

Una Mulzac, of the Liberation bookstore, has passed away. She will be missed.

Dara Greenwald Presente

Mon, 09 Jan 2012 18:37:24 -0500

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 home, and tabling at the Left forum, and weren’t they there on that first morning of Occupy Wall Street.
And she was always cool, but not too cool, interesting, but also interested, and was just the bees knees. There is a special place in our hearts for the people who work behind the scenes to make the world a better place, who do so with a sense of humor, and who remind us through their work that the call is for bread, but also for roses. In that way, it is with great sadness that we note her passing, but also with some acknowledgement, no matter how bitter it may feel in this moment, that whenever change for the better blossoms, she will be with us still.
Dara Greenwald Presente!

New Animated Gifs

Thu, 05 Jan 2012 21:41:07 -0500

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.

History is a Weapon wants your Latin American help

Fri, 30 Dec 2011 19:34:00 -0500

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 to help nurture and inspire awesome activists and students, young and old.

But sometimes, we get started and we need help finishing. Well, one of these projects we started a YEAR ago, and in the last year, we’ve been really busy ~~instigating global revolution~~ doing our boring day jobs that don’t involve instigating global revolution. So we want help: writing up some copy, correcting our numbers, and looking at it and making it better. Here’s the super secret link.

There’s a limited space for copy, so we need sharp and short, not long and bloated.

Send your suggestions to thedirectorate at history is a weapon dot com and have the subject line start with HIAW Latin America.

UPDATE: We also edited our Links page. It was getting a little long in the tooth.

An Open Apology to Amy Koch on Behalf of All Gay and Lesbian Minnesotans

Thu, 22 Dec 2011 19:28:43 -0500

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 recent events have made it quite clear that our gay and lesbian tactics have gone too far, affecting even the most respectful of our society.

We apologize that our selfish requests to marry those we love has cheapened and degraded traditional marriage so much that we caused you to stray from your own holy union for something more cheap and tawdry. And we are doubly remorseful in knowing that many will see this as a form of sexual harassment of a subordinate.

It is now clear to us that if we were not so self-focused and myopic, we would have been able to see that the time you wasted diligently writing legislation that would forever seal the definition of marriage as being between one man and one woman, could have been more usefully spent reshaping the legal definition of “adultery.”

Forgive us. As you know, we are not church-going people, so we are unable to fully appreciate that “gay marriage” is incompatible with Christian values, despite the fact that those values carry a biblical tradition of adultery such as yours. We applaud you for keeping that tradition going.

And finally, shame on us for thinking that marriage is a private affair, and that our marriage would have little impact on anyone’s family. We now see that marriage is more than that. It is an agreement with society. We should listen to the Minnesota Family Council when it tells us that marriage is about being public, which explains why marriages are public ceremonies. Never did we realize that it is exactly because of this societal agreement that the entire world is looking at you in shame and disappointment instead of minding its own business.

From the bottom of our hearts, we ask that you please accept our apology.

Thank you.
John Medeiros
Minneapolis MN

Read this today and thought it was worth sharing.

Deaths Noted

Wed, 14 Dec 2011 06:56:50 -0500

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, for which he won the Academy Award. Schneider accepted the award with this brief speech:

First of all, I would like to say a special thank you to my late brother Stanley whose support and love and encouragement allowed us to make this film and all of the films that BBS made. It is ironic that we are here at a time just before Vietnam is about to be liberated. I will now read a short wire that I have been asked to read by the Vietnamese people. It is sent by Ambassador Dinh Ba Thi, who is the chief of the Provisional Revolutionary Government’s delegation to Paris, the Paris political talks. It says: “Please transmit to all our friends in America our recognition of all that they have done on behalf of peace and for the application of the Paris Accords on Vietnam. These actions serve the legitimate interest of the American people and the Vietnamese people. Greetings of friendship to all the American people.” Thank you very much.

As Schneider was also the producer of Easy Rider, we like to imagine him riding a Harley off into the sunset, happy and content.

Yeah, so there aren’t hundreds of thousands of people...

Sat, 29 Oct 2011 19:58:07 -0400

Yeah, so there aren’t hundreds of thousands of people physically at Occupy Wall St and the power was lost yesterday when the Bloomberg administration ordered the confiscation of the generators. That said, you know something is happening when you go from the Times ignoring domestic political movements of any size and now shoehorns #Occupywallst into stories tangentially related. This is a good thing.

Occupy Everything

Wed, 26 Oct 2011 21:39:10 -0400

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

Tue, 25 Oct 2011 17:38:15 -0400

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.

Sat, 08 Oct 2011 21:45:11 -0400

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 interesting one: there’s been a telling split on the advice giving front as soon as this started blowing up. People who we tend to like and listen to (not that we always agree with anyone), like Naomi Klein and Michael Moore and some of the people over at Kasama (amid the about fifteen hundred other sources we pay attention to), chose not to emphasize criticism and guidance and instead stress support and encouragement as well as observation (i.e., lefties shouldn’t regurgitate dogma, they should see what is happening and respond to that). People who we tend to ignore and hate cough cough Nicholas Kristoff cough were all ready with plans and programs, suggestions aplenty to turn this new thing into something safe and classifiable or aseptic and dead.

Guess which camp we want to be in?

That said, we couldn’t help but notice that we were featured in the Occupied Wall Street Journal as the Get Educated activity: Historyisaweapon.com. Holy smokes. So we’d suggest people read our entire site, top to bottom. Not that there aren’t some readings one might find particularly interesting in this moment.

Anyway, we’re like a lot of you: excited and interested, curious where this thing is headed, and trying to figure out how we can help. As everyone loves to point out: democracy is not a spectator sport, so we’re out participating, maybe we’ll see you out there. Spread the word.

Occupy Wall Street: A Draft to Share.

Sat, 01 Oct 2011 12:48:46 -0400

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 pulse that the American political and economic system is designed to benefit the absolute richest people. Res ipsa loquitur. Let’s look at one easy example: Candidate Obama promised much needed healthcare reform (with care being denied across the country while health insurance execs pulled in staggering salaries like UnitedHealth Groups’s Stephen Helmsley making 57,000 dollars an hour).

President Obama, however, did everything he could to stop the two proposals that would have the greatest effect of improving healthcare: a single payer system (with the government supplying all of the health insurance akin to the fire department or highway system) OR a public option (with the government allowing a non-profit government run option available to all). They put Max “gotten over a million dollars from the health insurance lobby” Baucus in charge of coming up with the senate plan (who refused to have any single payer advocates speak in front of his committee) and we got a weak “reform bill” that has led to faster health insurance spikes in real people’s wallets - as predicted by single payer and public option advocates (Dr. Marcie Angell, a Harvard medical lecturer and former editor-in-chief of the New England Journal of Medicine, stated “ it mandates that people buy these companies’ products for whatever they charge. Now that’s a recipe for the growth in health care costs not only to continue but to skyrocket, to grow even faster.”) ”The cost of health insurance for many Americans this year climbed more sharply than in previous years, outstripping any growth in workers’ wages and adding more uncertainty about the pace of rising medical costs.” wrote the Times just this week.

But Obama claimed a victory when his healthcare bill passed because that’s what Obama does: he claims victories that haven’t happened. The war in Iraq is over (tell Sgt.Andy Morales of Longwood, Florida, killed last week there). Even his claim that the US got something small done in Copenhagen to combat global climate change was met with befuddlement from other countries that said nothing had occurred.

It’s not just the executive branch, of course. The Supreme Court tosses the class-action suit targeting Wal-Mart’s treatment of women workers. Congress almost shut down the government over the idea of taxes being raised on rich people. The economy continues to tank due to massive government deregulation of the banking and financial markets, but Congressman Eric Cantor is opposed to extending unemployment benefits while more and more people hit their last unemployment check.

People are pissed. They don’t know yet what they’re working for, but they know what they’re working against. The calls to Occupy Wall St are symptomatic of this.

Yet, it’s entirely predictable: when the Democrats are in control, people are reminded that the Democratic Party is comfortable commanding top-down power and committing acts of evil. Look at the last two major upsurges in progressive activism: The “sixties” and the anti-globalization movement of the late nineties.

John F. Kennedy and Lyndon Johnson’s attacks on Cuba, the Dominican Republic, and vietnam (along with support for violent military coups in Brazil and Indonesia) shocked a lot of Americans. Millions took to the streets pushing for change.

Madeline Albright’s willingness to kill half a million iraqi children, Clinton’s wholesale endorsement and action in favor of “free trade,” (read: simultaneously shutting down high paying union factory jobs domestically while transferring the work overseas to sweatshop conditions). For a brief period, it was de rigueur for global financial negotiations taking place in the US or Canada to install a small army and inhabit a total siege mentality around their meetings in preparation for the coming hordes of well-organized affinity groups hellbent on obstructing them.

Republicans weren’t the problem, democrats weren’t the release valve of popular discontent. This is not an argument for Obama to improve or for people to go out and push for better “liberal” candidates. Not at all. This is total bewilderment that reporters for major news organizations, who presumably attended institutions of higher learning, fail to recognize this pattern and reality, both as reported in their own media and as lived in their own lives.

To be fair, there is confusion and muddied thinking at #occupywallst as well (repeated immediate rejections of any association with the left or socialism, which is unfortunate, and multiple people stating “we’re here to take wall street back,” which is hilarious). But before the mainstream corporate press hounds bray again at the confusion of the people occupying the heart of wall street, they need to deal with the occupation that wall street commands in their own minds.

Occupy

Thu, 29 Sep 2011 21:59:29 -0400

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

Fri, 23 Sep 2011 21:46:00 -0400

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 people you meet on the street. Please, do the right thing, and tell everyone you know about History Is A Weapon.

We’re media geeks and news junkies, so imagine our surprise when we started getting links in from our favorite obnoxious d.c. gossip blog, Wonkette. Whoa, we thought, some friendly stoner is linking to us from their comment. But we didn’t see it. We looked through a bunch of comments and didn’t see it. Until we looked over on the right hand side and saw History Is A Weapon listed on their blogroll. We usually look at the site on our RSS reader, so we missed this new addition. Holy Smokes. Cool.

Anyway, keep linking to us, telling your friends, and remember, if you spraypaint pictures of History Is A Weapon in twelve foot high letters on the side of your local mansion, military installation, or advertising billboard, please send us a picture. It’s why we get up in the morning.

Roadmap to Apartheid

Sun, 31 Jul 2011 16:49:00 -0400

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

Mon, 25 Jul 2011 10:00:00 -0400

~~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, you do it during the week when there is actual capitalism to disrupt.

costapobre: This is actually an amazing point about liberalism...

Sun, 24 Jul 2011 10:36:05 -0400

costapobre:

This is actually an amazing point about liberalism as a collective agenda and its fanatical opposition to all other collectivisms as “savagery.”

Whoever posted this, we love you.

Thu, 02 Jun 2011 22:18:22 -0400

Whoever posted this, we love you.

Added The Bridge Poem

Mon, 23 May 2011 22:20:53 -0400

Added The Bridge Poem:

We weren’t lying. Today, we added The Bridge Poem. There will be more.

Radio Silence

Sun, 22 May 2011 20:17:24 -0400

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.

Orlando Bosch is dead

Thu, 28 Apr 2011 12:16:20 -0400

The terrorist Orlando Bosch is dead. Good.