September 11, 1906 Mohandas Gandhi, a young Indian lawyer, began a nonviolent resistance campaign in Johannesburg, South Africa, demanding rights and respect for those of Asian descent. It was the birth of his concept of political progress through nonviolent resistance known as Satyagraha, or truth-force. He led a meeting of 3000 of the town’s Indians, protesting the Transvaal Asiatic Law Amendment Ordinance. That law required all Asians to obey three rules: those of eight years or older had to carry passes for which they had to give their fingerprints; they would be segregated as to where they could live and work; new Asian immigration into the Transvaal would be disallowed, even for those who had left the town when the South African War broke out in 1899, and were returning.
Gandhi, London, 1906 The meeting produced the Fourth Resolution, in which all Indians resolved to go to prison rather than submit to the ordinance. In Gandhi’s own words:
September 11, 1973 Chile’s armed forces staged a coup d’etat against the government of President Salvador Allende, the first democratically elected socialist head of state in Latin America. Some three thousand were held in Santiago’s national stadium where guards singled out folksinger Victor Jara as he continued to sing protest songs. Jara was viciously beaten, and his mutilated body machine-gunned in front of the other prisoners. dissidents held in the stadium Read more on Victor Jara Victor Jara plays to young supporters Victor Jara The U.S. government, through the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA), had worked for three years to foment the coup against Allende. Striking Chilean labor unions, instrumental in destabilizing the Allende government, were secretly bankrolled by the CIA. During the brutal and repressive 17-year rule of General Augusto Pinochet that followed, more than 3,000 political opponents were assassinated or “disappeared.” The U.S.-backed military dictatorship banned Jara’s music, image, name and, for a time, even outlawed the public performance of the folk-guitar. More about the coup
September 11, 2001 Suicidal Islamist terrorists, members of Al Qaeda and most of them Saudis, hijacked four commercial airliners in the eastern U.S., and managed successfully to turn three of the jet-fuel-loaded planes into missiles: two flew into New York City’s World Trade Center towers, destroying them, and a third into the west side of the Pentagon. On the fourth, passengers heroically seized back control but crashed it into an empty field in western Pennsylvania. The hijackers killed nearly 3000 that day: passengers and crew, workers in the twin towers and the Pentagon.A 911 chronology
September 11, 2002 Women In Black (WIB) Baltimore started the first Peace Path as a response to 9/11 World Trade Center attacks. The nonviolent action presented images of peace rather than war and militarism as a response to problems. Now in its seventh year, the path will extend for 12 miles through Baltimore. Others are beginning to create 9/11 peace paths in their own communities.Women in Black along the peace path in Baltimore, 2007 Participants in WIB vigils wear black as a sign of mourning for all that is lost through war and violence. The group seeks to bring together people of all races, faiths, nationalities, and genders who support positions of nonviolence and who seek peace through mutual understanding and constructive dialogue.
James Earl Jones, acclaimed actor and voice of Darth Vader, dies at 93
By MARK KENNEDY Updated 8:03 PM CDT, September 9, 2024
NEW YORK (AP) — James Earl Jones, who overcame racial prejudice and a severe stutter to become a celebrated icon of stage and screen — eventually lending his deep, commanding voice to CNN, “The Lion King” and Darth Vader — has died. He was 93.
His agent, Barry McPherson, confirmed Jones died Monday morning at home in New York’s Hudson Valley region. The cause was not immediately clear.
The pioneering Jones, who in 1965 became one of the first African American actors in a continuing role on a daytime drama (“As the World Turns”) and worked deep into his 80s, won two Emmys, a Golden Globe, two Tony Awards, a Grammy, the National Medal of Arts and the Kennedy Center Honors. He was also given an honorary Oscar and a special Tony for lifetime achievement. In 2022, a Broadway theater was renamed in his honor.
He cut an elegant figure late in life, with a wry sense of humor and a ferocious work habit. In 2015, he arrived at rehearsals for a Broadway run of “The Gin Game” having already memorized the play and with notebooks filled with comments from the creative team. He said he was always in service of the work. (snip-MORE)
September 10, 1897 Nineteen unarmed striking coal miners were killed and 36 more wounded in Lattimer (near Hazleton), Pennsylvania, for refusing to disperse, by a posse organized by the Luzerne County sheriff. The strikers, most of whom were shot in the back, were originally brought in as strike-breakers, but later created their own union. The background and details
September 10, 1963 Twenty black students entered public schools in Birmingham, Tuskegee and Mobile, Alabama. The Governor George C. Wallace had ordered Alabama state troopers to stop the federal court-ordered integration of Alabama’s elementary and high schools. President John Kennedy responded by calling out the Alabama National Guard to protect the students and to see the order enforced. President Kennedy spoke that day at American University’s commencement, saying, “Peace need not be impractical, war not inevitable . . . There is not peace in many of our cities because there is not freedom.”
September 10, 1996 Sheryl Crow’s second album was banned from Wal-Mart stores because the song she co-wrote with Tad Wadhams, “Love Is A Good Thing” opens with “Watch out sister, watch out brother, Watch our children while they kill each other With a gun they bought at Wal-Mart discount stores….” Read more about this eventand an update
September 9, 1862 Minnesota Governor Alexander Ramsey declared that “The Sioux Indians of Minnesota must be exterminated or driven forever beyond the borders of the state.” The previous month the Dakota, or Santee, Sioux, long burdened by treaty violations and late or unfair payments from Indian agents, killed four settlers and decided to attack settlers throughout the Minnesota River valley. The number killed was estimated between 300 and 800, until 9/11 the largest civilian death toll in the U.S. The number of Indian deaths was not recorded.
September 9, 1944 Religious conscientious objector Corbett Bishop was arrested after walking out of a Civilian Public Service Camp. During subsequent trials and imprisonments, he refused any type of cooperation with the government until he was released 193 days later. “I’m not going to cooperate in any way, shape or form. I was carried in here.If you hold me, you’ll have to carry me out.War is wrong. I don’t want any part of it.” – Corbett Bishop, 1906-1961
September 9, 1963 Students at Chu Van An boys’ high school in Saigon tore down the government flag and raised a Buddhist flag to protest the corrupt Diem regime in South Vietnam; 1,000 were arrested.
September 9, 1971 The Attica (New York) State Penitentiary revolt began. The interracial revolt was led by blacks but featured cooperation between prisoners of different racial and ethnic backgrounds. It was finally brutally suppressed by the state five days later, upon orders from Governor Nelson Rockefeller who refused to become directly involved. 29 prisoners and 10 guards were shot and killed by attacking state troopers in the bloodiest prison confrontation in U.S. history. The prisoners had been demanding improvements in their living and working conditions at the increasingly overcrowded facility.
September 9, 1980 Eight activists from the Atlantic Life Community were arrested after hammering the nose cones of two missiles at the General Electric plant in King of Prussia, Pennsylvania. Read about Plowshares 8 The Plowshares 8 (in alphabetical order): Daniel Berrigan, Philip Berrigan, Dean Hammer, Carl Kabat, Elmer Maas, Anne Montgomery, Molly Rush, and John Schuchardt. This action would become the first of an international movement of dozens of “Plowshares” anti-nuclear direct actions. A chronology of Plowshares actions
September 9, 1997 Sinn Fein (pronounced shin fayn), the Irish Republican Army’s allied political party, formally renounced violence by accepting the principles put forward by former U.S. Senator George Mitchell (D-Maine) who was mediating the talks between the Irish Republicans and the British Unionists on Northern Ireland’s future. Senator George Mitchell The Mitchell Principles: • To democratic and exclusively peaceful means of resolving political issues; • To the total disarmament of all paramilitary organisations; • To agree that such disarmament must be verifiable to the satisfaction of an independent commission; • To renounce for themselves, and to oppose any effort by others, to use force, or threaten to use force, to influence the course or the outcome of all-party negotiations; • To agree to abide by the terms of any agreement reached in all-party negotiations and to resort to democratic and exclusively peaceful methods in trying to alter any aspect of that outcome with which they may disagree; and, • To urge that “punishment” killings and beatings stop and to take effective steps to prevent such actions.
Barbara Gittings was a lover of books. She realized, from a young age, that she also loved girls. So when, in 1949, she left Wilmington, Delaware to attend Northwestern University, she did what any bookish young lesbian would do: research homosexuality in the school’s library. What Gittings found was not comforting. The vast majority of sources were written by medical professionals and described homosexuality as an illness or a perversion. She became so consumed with spending time in various Chicago libraries that she neglected her coursework and flunked out of school. But as a result of the discouraging information she found, an activist was born. With passion, determination, and what she would come to refer to as “gay gumption,” Gittings would spend the rest of her life working, in various ways, to correct those lies she found in the pages of books and scientific journals on the library shelves.
Gittings moved to Philadelphia in 1950 and supported herself with part-time clerical work. She continued to read everything she could find on homosexuality and, as part of her search, discovered Donald Webster Cory’s The Homosexual in America: A Subjective Approach, originally published in 1951. Gittings was particularly impressed with Cory’s arguments that gays and lesbians constituted a large unrecognized minority who deserved civil rights and his attempts to cultivate empathy in his readers by outlining the difficulties faced by American homosexuals. She wrote to Cory’s publisher and discovered he lived in New York City. The two met on several occasions, and Cory informed Gittings of a newly-formed gay organization in Los Angeles: the Mattachine Society, founded in 1950 by Harry Hay.
In the summer of 1956, when she was on vacation from her office job, Gittings boarded a plane to Los Angeles and visited the office of ONE, Inc., a homophile organization who had amicably split from the Mattachine Society in 1952. The members of ONE, Inc. informed her of the existence of a San Francisco-based organization for lesbians, the Daughters of Bilitis (DOB), founded in 1955 by lesbian partners Del Martin and Phyllis Lyon.
Gittings once again boarded a plane, this time bound for San Francisco. The DOB were, fatefully, having a meeting that very evening in a member’s apartment. The meeting was the first time in her life Gittings would interact with a group of lesbians outside of a bar setting. Two years later, in 1958, Gittings officially joined the DOB and was tapped by Martin and Lyon to start an East Coast chapter of the organization based in New York City. With her co-founder, Marion Glass, Gittings built the chapter into the largest in the country.
In 1963, Gittings, whose enthusiasm and knowledge of literature left an impression on Martin and Lyon, was tapped to be the editor of The Ladder, the DOB’s national magazine for gay women. Gittings transformed The Ladder from what was essentially a newsletter to a national magazine respected within gay circles. With the help of her partner, Kay “Tobin” Lahusen, whom she met in 1961 at a DOB picnic in Rhode Island, Gittings replaced the amateurish illustrations that typically adorned the cover of The Ladder with photographs taken by Lahusen of actual lesbians who appeared confident and happy.
Gittings began to take The Ladder in an increasingly militant direction, reporting on protests, questioning the merits of various activist strategies such as picketing, and engaging in debates with so-called “experts,” arguing that homosexuality was a social and cultural problem, not a psychological problem. The activist bent of The Ladder under Gittings’ editorship alarmed the West Coast leadership of the DOB. When Gittings, amidst her many activities on behalf of gay rights, was late with the August 1966 issue, Martin and Lyon used her tardiness as an excuse to oust her as editor.
Gittings would also find a kindred spirit in Frank Kameny, who she credited as the first person to articulate a fully coherent philosophy of gay rights. She and Lahusen partnered with Mattachine Washington, of which Kameny was a co-founder, working alongside other lesbians and gay men to directly challenge the federal government. Gittings participated in the first picket of the White House for homosexual rights on April 17th of 1965.
Gittings worked with Kameny and other activists to lobby the American Psychiatric Association (APA) to remove homosexuality as a diagnostic category from the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual (DSM). At the APA’s 1972 conference, held in Dallas, Texas, Gittings, Kameny, and Lahusen created a display entitled “Gay, Proud, and Healthy: The Homosexual Community Speaks.” The exhibit, which featured photographs of gay couples taken by Lahusen, was adorned with the word “LOVE” in bold letters and portrayed gay people as healthy and happy, not as patients who were tormented and in need of a cure. In December of 1973, the APA board of trustees voted to pass a resolution to remove homosexuality from the DSM, effectively declassifying it as a mental illness.
Gittings was a lifelong bibliophile, and though she recognized the importance of taking on the federal government and institutions such as the APA, she never lost sight of the “lies in the libraries” she discovered as a college freshman and the importance of gay representation. In 1970, she joined the American Library Association’s (ALA) newly-formed Task Force on Gay Liberation (TFGL). The TFGL, whose mission was to provide support for gay librarians within the profession and increase gay representation in libraries, was glad to have a veteran activist like Gittings join their ranks.
With the help of Israel Fishman, the first coordinator of the TFGL, Gittings organized a gay kissing booth — titled “Hug-a-Homosexual: Free Kisses” — for the 1971 ALA conference in Dallas, Texas. While the group could have created a nice display featuring gay books, periodicals, and their bibliography, they instead decided to make their presence known by showing gay love live. The publicity was better than Gittings and the TFGL could have imagined, and continued to spark discussions within the ALA over the next year.
In 1999, in honor of her contributions to create more visibility for gays and lesbians in libraries and in the profession, Gittings was awarded a lifetime membership at the annual ALA conference, held that year in New Orleans, Louisiana. The ALA also named an award after Gittings as part of their Stonewall Book Awards, sponsored by the Gay, Lesbian, Bisexual, and Transgender Round Table (GLBTRT), the contemporary iteration of the TFGL. The Stonewall Book Award-Barbara Gittings Literature Award is given annually for works of fiction that exhibit “exceptional merit relating to the LGBT experience.”
Barbara Gittings died on February 18th, 2007 at the age of 74 after a long battle with breast cancer. In a 1999 interview with American Libraries magazine, she summarized her career as a gay activist with the wit and wisdom she was known for:
“As a teenager, I had to struggle alone to learn about myself and what it meant to be gay. Now for 48 years I’ve had the satisfaction of working with other gay people all across the country to get the bigots off our backs, to oil the closet door hinges, to change prejudiced hearts and minds, and to show that gay love is good for us and for the rest of the world too. It’s hard work — but it’s vital, and it’s gratifying, and it’s often fun!”
September 7, 1948 3,000 attended a rally to publicly launch the Peace Council in Melbourne, Australia.
September 7, 1957 Barbara Gittings leading a picket in the ’60s Barbara Gittings organized the first New York meeting held for the Daughters of Bilitis, a pioneer lesbian organization. The group was founded two years earlier in San Francisco. Barbara Gittings: Mother of the Gay Rights Movement (This link requires a sign-in on Medium, so I’m going to post it in another entry on its own.)
Cover from their magazine “The Ladder”, October,1968
September 7, 1990 Two British peace activists, Stephen Hancock and Mike Hutchinson known as the Upper Heyford Plowshares were sentenced to 15 months in prison for disabling an F-111 bomber in Oxford, England. A brief History of Direct Disarmament Actions
September 7, 1992 South African troops killed at least 24 people and injured 150 more at an African National Congress (ANC) rally on the border of Ciskei, in South Africa. 50,000 ANC supporters had turned out to demand Ciskei’s re-absorption into South Africa. Ciskei was one of ten black “homelands,” so designated to keep blacks from claiming citizenship in South Africa itself. They were a legal fiction, not recognized by any other country, that was part of the racially separatist apartheid regime. News at the time BBC
September 7, 1996 Two women were arrested for trespass at the Norfolk (Virginia) Naval Base after walking into the base with a banner reading, “Love Your Enemies.”
Since 2016, I’ve felt sort of hyperaware about the potentiality of Russian disinfo because obviously, WikiLeaks and the IRA. Per the Senate Intelligence Committee, in multiple volumes, this was anything but a hoax. The claim Trump didn’t welcome it and appreciate it is more than answered by his campaign’s silence about it and even attempted cover-up. Money was funneled through Facebook and Twitter ads and RW-pressure groups like NRA. I joke that we are still living in 2016 because we are still finding out how that election was, well, weird.
I deleted a post about how weird it was that Benny Johnson was a dupe to launder Russian talking points in the Tenet exploit because I realized that his basic dopiness and right-wing credulity is a whole fucking bigger mood than I was handling at the moment. We get that RW dopey incendiaries are out here–and they are pretty well-funded domestically as it is. Like, you pick a random concern-trolling “Liberty” “Freedom” “Heritage” or “Family”-labelled group from the last 100 years, and it was probably founded by some freaky Christian billionaire bigot family like the DeVos, Wilkes, Prince, Mellon, Coors, Koch, Busch, etc. The family-tree of theocratic and Bircher-light think tankitude has been incestuous and generously endowed since forever.
But where there is money and batshit, you have a real problem–people who love the hell out of money and don’t care what degree of batshit they spew. If you wanted useful idiots for foreign actors, this is one way you could open up a path for useful idiots to wrongfully mobilize people by playing on their fears and so on. Propaganda is cheap and effective. Even when we try to sanction the fuck out of the players to try and make it prohibitively costly to shit in the US litterbox–someone will try it.
Part of the reason why is we have a great big permission-structure to lie on the GOP side of things. We talk about it, but I don’t think we talk about it as much as we need to. The media is in part at fault, but also, money has generated a whole right-wing puke funnel, just feeding viewers like baby birds. And the results of the propaganda: fear and anger–short circuit logical critical thinking pathways. Well-fed ducklings become sitting ducks.
The internet influencer thing though, is even more perverse. There’s no reason to believe these people are anything but cons. I’ve thought of it as the “Triumph of the Swill”, because it’s propaganda without even artistry or competence. It relies on people being poorly educated or getting hopped-up on the idea that contrarianism is “independent thinking”–because you are a super genius of rare qualities, you can see through Big Atmosphere’s lies since Joseph Priestly and reject climate change, or see where that shill Jenner was headed with his vaccination/germ theory nonsense. You have clearly beat the mentality of Darwin and Le Compte de Buffon regarding that evolution jazz, too.
Conspiracy theories proliferate and why not? Anything might be true once anything can be called false.
Why not DARVO Russia and Ukraine? Why not introduce a little Holocaust denial? Why not suggest civil wars are actually good and healthy, or that secession could be beneficial to a large US State?
Harmful, wrongheaded views can be pimped out to attractive or engaging morons, who speak down to controversy-curious people without the tools to resist. They’ll even have you believing education itself is a problem and suggest you do away with it.
I think it’s good it’s being addressed, but the right wing is super-great at trying to say their free speech right are denied whenever they get told to stop being shills for utter bullshit. I get the feeling the pool of people who have been Russian-cash injected and super-bullshit charged will widen. And yes to people maybe being made examples of, because the shit has to stop.
But we clearly have a problem with toxic “elements” in our political environment. Some remediation feels like a good thing. Geting people to realize and care that one side has been enabling foreign propaganda to influence us and to recognize it as a national security threat is very important–that we haven’t been screaming about it enough since 2016 feels like a failure.
Also the Feds need to do Posobiec and Flynn. because I can’t believe those asses aren’t being handled from elsewhere.
August 6, 1890 At Auburn Prison in New York state, William Kemmler became the first person to be executed in the electric chair, developed by the Medico-Legal Society and Harold Brown, a colleague of Thomas Edison.William Kemmler received two applications of 1,300 volts of alternating current. The first lasted for only 17 seconds because a leather belt was about to fall off one of the second-hand Westinghouse generators. Kemmler was still alive. The second jolt lasted until the smell of burning flesh filled the room, about four minutes.
As soon as his charred body stopped smoldering, Kemmler was pronounced dead.
August 6th, 1945 – 8:15 AM Anniversary of Hiroshima
The United States dropped the first atomic bomb used in warfare on Hiroshima, Japan. Hiroshima ruins An estimated 140,000 died from the immediate effects of this bomb and tens of thousands more died in subsequent years from burns and other injuries, and radiation-related illnesses. President Harry Truman ordered the use of the weapon in hopes of avoiding an invasion of Japan to end the war, and the presumed casualties likely to be suffered by invading American troops. The weapon, “Little Boy,” was delivered by a B-29 Superfortress nicknamed the Enola Gay, based on the island of Tinian, and piloted by Colonel Paul W. Tibbets.Voices of the Hibakusha, those injured in the bombings Hiroshima survivor Found watch stopped at the time of explosion Documents related to the decision to drop the atomic bomb On August 6, 1995, up to 50,000 people attended a memorial service commemorating Hiroshima Peace Day on the 50th anniversary of the first atomic bombing.
August 6, 1957 Eleven activists from the Committee for Nonviolent Action (CNVA) were arrested attempting to enter the atomic testing grounds at Camp Mercury, Nevada, the first of what eventually became many thousands of arrests at the Nevada test site.
August 6, 1965 The Voting Rights Act of 1965 was signed by President Johnson, making illegal century-old practices aimed at preventing African Americans from exercising their constitutional right to vote. It created federal oversight of election laws in six Southern states (Alabama, Georgia, Louisiana, Mississippi, South Carolina, and Virginia) and in many counties of North Carolina where black voter turnout was very low. Black voter registration rates were as low as 7% in Mississippi prior to passage of the law; today voter registration rates are comparable for both blacks and whites in these states. The laws has been re-authorized by Congress four times. Introduction to the Voting Rights Act
August 6, 1990 George Galloway The U.S. imposed trade sanctions on Iraq. As a result, the lack of much-needed medicines, water purification equipment and other items led to the death of many innocent Iraqis. According to British Member of Parliament George Galloway in his testimony to a committee of the U.S. Congress on May 17, 2005, these sanctions“ . . . killed one million Iraqis, most of them children, most of them died before they even knew that they were Iraqis, but they died for no other reason other than that they were Iraqis with the misfortune to be born at that time . . . .” When asked on U.S. television if she thought that the death of half a million Iraqi children (due to sanctions on Iraq) was a price worth paying, then U.S. Secretary of State Madeline Albright replied: “This is a very hard choice, but we think the price is worth it.” -60 Minutes (5/12/96) Were Sanctions Worth the Price? by Christopher Hayes
August 6, 1998 Nearly 50,000 people attended a memorial service commemorating Hiroshima Peace Day on the 50th anniversary of the first atomic bombing which killed nearly 200,000 Japanese with a single weapon. The headlines when it happened
August 6, 1998 Calling themselves the Minuteman III Plowshares, two peace activists, Daniel Sicken [pronounced seekin], 56, of Brattleboro, Vermont and Sachio Ko-Yin, 25, of Ridgewood, N.J entered silo N7 in Weld County [near Greeley] in Colorado operated by Warren AFB, Cheyenne, Wyoming. With hammers and their own blood, they symbolically disarmed structures on the launching pad of a Minuteman III nuclear missile silo.
dissidents held in the stadium
Victor Jara plays to young supporters
Victor Jara
Women in Black along the peace path in Baltimore, 2007
Senator George Mitchell
Barbara Gittings leading a picket in the ’60s
Hiroshima survivor 
George Galloway
Sachio Ko-Yin and Daniel Sicken
Scottie's Playtime 
