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FROM WORLD WAR II TO GAZA:  
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Kurt Stand
April 25, 2024
The Bullet
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_ U.S. Labour Opposition to War and Fascism _

, UE

 

At a labor press conference/rally on December 14 in front of the White
House, Brandon Mancilla – child of Guatemalan immigrants and
director of United Auto Workers (UAW) District 9 – announced the
union’s call for a cease-fire in Gaza noting: “We opposed fascism
in World War II, we opposed the Vietnam War, we opposed apartheid
South Africa and we mobilized union resources in that fight.”

This was amplified in a subsequent UAW statement that added opposing
the Contra War to the precedents behind the union’s demand for a
ceasefire. That history is a reminder that when unionists call for a
ceasefire and justice for Palestinians, they are acting within a
tradition of international solidarity that links domestic struggles
against corporate greed with international struggles against war,
racism, and injustice.

To understand the growing support within union ranks for an end to
unconditional US military and financial support for Israel in its
conduct of a brutal war, it is important to look back at the legacy to
which the UAW statements refer.

World War II

For unionists in the United States and throughout the world, the
Second World War was a war against fascism, a war against the brutal
destruction of labor organization; it was a war against anti-Semitism,
against racism in its every manifestation – and it was a war to make
military aggression a crime.

While disagreements existed within union ranks about how best to
contribute to the defeat of fascism while upholding worker rights
domestically, there was overwhelming agreement around the need to do
both. For many anti-fascists inside and outside the labor movement,
victory in a war forced upon humanity by Nazi Germany, Fascist Italy,
and Imperial Japan meant overcoming greed and hunger, unemployment and
hopelessness, insecurity and fear, all breeding grounds of hatred.
This hope was embodied in the language of the Universal Declaration of
Human Rights, which proclaimed the interdependent needs for economic,
social, and political rights if peace were to prevail in years to
come. The creation of the United Nations was an attempt to give
meaning to that promise.

These initiatives came to nought. The effort by European colonial
powers – Britain, France, the Netherlands, and Belgium – to hold
onto their colonial empires and deny millions the rights to
self-determination was an early sign that the promises made during
World War II would not be kept without a struggle; so too, visions of
US corporate/political global dominance made clear that war and
militarism, not peace and justice, would dominate world politics. With
the onset of the Cold War, economic, social, and political rights were
torn asunder, becoming a source of working-class division. And far
from abolishing war, a harbinger of what lay ahead took place on
August 6 and August 9, 1945, when the United States dropped atomic
bombs over Hiroshima and Nagasaki. Victory on the battlefield can be
its own curse if what follows is the illusion that destructive
violence can be the basis of creative freedom and universal justice.

Yet an alternative vision of a world of peace, of the need for a
determined struggle to make peace a reality, remained. The need for a
different path was expressed by Turkish poet Nazim Hikmet
[[link removed]] (imprisoned throughout
the war and thereafter) in verses written in 1956 in the imagined
voice of a girl killed in Hiroshima; a poem later put to music by Pete
Seeger [[link removed]]:

_I need no fruit, I need no rice
I need no sweets nor even bread
I ask for nothing for myself
For I am dead, for I am dead
All that I ask is that for peace
You fight today, you fight today
So that the children of this world
May live and grow and laugh and play.      _

Peace or war, justice or oppression, were and remain dividing lines
domestically as New Deal ideals gave way to Cold War realities.
Normalization of a permanent war economy served as a substitute for an
alternative economic model based on democratic input. That
necessitated a lessening of internal union democracy, coincident with
the weakening of civil liberties within society.

Yet notwithstanding the path of subsequent developments, the
anti-fascist posture of organized labor during World War II, the
democratic ethos it embodied, the international solidarity at its
heart, remained a touchstone of union social justice activism and
global solidarity in the years ahead.

Vietnam

Post-World War II contradictions came to a head during the war in
Vietnam, costing the lives of nearly two million Vietnamese and tens
of thousands of American soldiers, with countless more wounded in both
countries, in addition to millions of victims in Laos and
Cambodia/Kampuchea. Throughout this time (1960s to mid-70s), the
AFL-CIO and most national unions strongly supported the bombing
campaign, the draft, the commitment to troops on the ground, and every
call to expand the scope of our military engagement. A significant
section – likely a majority – of union members and the broader
working-class similarly supported the war at first, but unlike the
dominant leadership of the AFL-CIO, opposition in labor’s ranks,
opposition among working people overall, grew as the reality of the
cost of fighting mounted.

Part of the growing cynicism about the value of killing and dying in
Vietnam was due to mounting evidence of the lies upon which the war
was based. Soldiers were being sent into combat not to defend our way
of life (as was said at the time), not to defend the Vietnamese people
or a mythical South Vietnamese democracy, but in defense of our
corporate power, our military establishment, our imperial project. The
dishonesty was put simply in a Tom Paxton song
[[link removed]] popular at the time:

_Lyndon Johnson Told the Nation
Have No Fear of Escalation
I Am Trying Everyone to Please
And though it isn’t really War
We’re sending 50,000 More
To Help Save Vietnam from Vietnamese._

Lingering realities of McCarthyism initially made it difficult to find
space – literally and metaphorically – to build an anti-war
movement; something even more difficult within organized labor where
criticism of the war was deemed “anti-labor”. Some unions in the
building trades and East Coast waterfront advocated and engaged in
physical attacks on anti-war demonstrators – with sympathetic winks
and nods from then AFL-CIO President George Meany.

Walls of repression can only hold for so long. Labor statements in
opposition to the war were initially issued by left-wing unions like
the United Electrical Workers and the International Longshore and
Warehouse Union. Leon Davis, president of Local 1199 hospital workers,
publicly condemned the war as early as 1964. District 65’s
(Distributive Workers Union) leadership of Cleveland Robinson, Al
Evanoff, and David Livingstone all took part in anti-war events, The
Packinghouse Workers issued one of the strongest denunciations of the
war by a union in 1966. Dolores Huerta of the United Farm Workers also
publicly denounced the war in 1966 – the UFW officially announcing
its opposition a few years later. Each year that list grew –
eventually, the Amalgamated Clothing Workers; the Amalgamated Meat
Cutters and Butchers Workers; the American Federation of State County
and Municipal Employees; the International Chemical Workers; the
International Union of Electrical Workers’ the Oil, Chemical and
Atomic Workers; and the UAW called for an end to the bombing,
negotiations and withdrawal of US troops from Vietnam.

Opposition to the war was rooted in local and regional unions
including the St. Louis Joint Council of the Teamsters (led by Harold
Gibbons) along with many locals from unions supporting or silent on
the war including the Bakery and Confectionary Workers, Furniture
Workers, Hotel and Restaurant Workers, Retail Workers, and Steel
Workers (including old Mine Mill and Smelter units which had merged
into the USW in 1965) to name but a few. Many UAW leaders and locals
took a stand against the war well before the national union. Amongst
the most vocal was Sam Meyer from UAW Local 259 – part of Region 9A
and so part of Mancilla’s heritage. Rank-and-file groupings formed
in unions where any dissent on the war was subject to sanctions,
including within building trades unions, and the aggressively
anti-Communist International Longshoremen’s Association. It was this
that made anti-war activism more than statements at a press conference
or buried resolutions; rather, they became the source of discussion
and mobilization. In virtually all unions, opposition to the war met
resistance from sections of the membership, just as unions supporting
the war faced membership pushback. Inner-union debate, largely
suppressed for many years, could no longer be prevented.

In other words, the rising tide of labor anti-war sentiment served as
an assertion of the need for greater democracy within the trade union
movement. This reflected a change in mood within the working-class
more widely – the vociferous support with which many working people
initially greeted the war began to lose steam as the faces of
returning veterans became visible, as the economic cost by way of
inflation and economic stasis mounted. The sense of society coming
apart could not be separated from the senselessness of a war without
meaning or endpoint. Coextensive with the growth of peace sentiment in
union ranks – though not directly linked – were outbursts of
rank-and-file militancy expressed in a growing number of authorized
and wildcat strikes.

Although support by many rank-and-file union members for the war
continued, it had lessened and became “quieter” – vigilante
attacks on student anti-war protesters, by and large, ended after
1970. Critical to growing dissension within union ranks with
“business as usual leadership,” was how unrestrained spending on
the machinery of destruction reinforced economic hardship; the “war
on poverty” – notwithstanding genuine accomplishments – was
never funded on a scale remotely comparable to the war waged on
Vietnam. Eventually, that “war” against hunger and want, against
racial inequality, was largely abandoned.

With the formation of a trade union division within the peace
organization SANE in 1966, unionists became part of the wider anti-war
movement. Broad labor participation in the 1969 Vietnam Moratorium
deepened those connections which were formalized in 1972 with the
establishment of Labor for Peace.

Yet, there was no change in the top leadership of the AFL-CIO, which
remained committed to the war. If anything, the divide over the war
– and over the growing restiveness of working people, which was
perceived as threatening to labor’s existing bargaining and
political “power” – sharpened. This revealed itself during the
1972 presidential elections when the Federation and most affiliates
refused to endorse Democratic candidate Senator George McGovern
because of his support for withdrawal from Vietnam, which amounted to
a de facto endorsement of Nixon. Top AFL-CIO leaders continued to
oppose any steps toward peace, continued to denounce efforts by people
abroad to lay claim to their own natural resources, and remained war
supporters until the final troop withdrawal.

That, however, is only part of the story. The peace movement in union
ranks marked the beginnings of a new more genuine unity below the
surface, the revival of the too-long buried outlook that had
previously united labor in the fight against fascism by making a
connection between civil liberties and civil rights and political and
economic democracy. Just as during the Second World War, there were
disagreements over how best to organize for social justice here and
overseas, but the recognition that these were linked and that labor
rights required democratic unions, commitment to equality and peace
was rising again to the surface.

South Africa

One of the hopes following the Second World War was that – unlike
after the First World War – the commitment to self-determination
would apply to countries in Asia and Africa still under colonial rule.
Not willing to rely on hope alone, popular movements grew and demands
for freedom became unstoppable. The Vietnam War, lest we forget, began
in 1946 as resistance against the attempts by France to reimpose
colonialism. So too, throughout Africa, from Ghana and Kenya to Guinea
and Algeria to the “Belgian” Congo, demands for independence
gained greater strength than ever before. By 1961/62, most of the
countries on the continent had gained their freedom. However, the
limitations of the freedom soon became evident with the murder of the
newly independent Congo’s President Patrice Lumumba.

Nonetheless, the gains made throughout Africa during the 1960s were
profound. Not everywhere, however, as Portugal held on to its colonies
while white settler rule remained in South Africa and Rhodesia
(present day Zimbabwe). Those two countries had declared
“independence” from Great Britain while retaining the structure of
colonial rule that necessarily relied on an unvarnished racism. In
South Africa this took shape as apartheid; a system which bore
striking similarities with Jim Crow segregationist South. Nelson
Mandela recounted in his autobiography a visit by a Southern
congressman in the early 1960s to the Robben Island prison where he
was being held. That congressman saw nothing wrong with the treatment
of the prisoners there, hardly surprising as it was much the same as
could have been found in Alabama or Georgia or Mississippi. That
similarity reinforced popular understanding that the struggle against
apartheid and against racism in the United States were linked.

Recognizing this, solidarity movements grew within the black community
and within sections of the labor movement from the early 1960’s on.
Notably the ILWU boycotted South African ships in 1962 and again in
1977 and 1984. Other unions that had been early opponents of the
Vietnam War, such as the Distributive Workers under Cleveland
Robinson’s leadership, added their voices in opposition to South
African apartheid especially after the 1960 Sharpeville Massacre when
69 people were killed by South African police during a peaceful
protest, Labor activism was, however, initially limited, for the
dominant leadership of the AFL-CIO viewed with suspicion the African
National Congress and the emerging broad-based independent South
African labor movement (which in 1985 took shape as COSATU: the
Congress of South African Trade Unions). This was partly due to the
Federation’s rigid Cold War mentality, which objected to Communist
participation/leadership in the South African freedom movement, partly
due to the (related) support for US corporate global expansion,
perceived as being in the interests of US trade union members. In
consequence, the AFL-CIO took the position that unions had to be
“apolitical,” concerned only with bread-and-butter issues.

This logic led the AFL-CIO to criticize South African unions fighting
apartheid as a system (for that was “political”), and instead, the
Federation supported – with funds and advisors – “approved”
segregated unions. But organized labor could not close itself off from
what was happening outside its confines – the growing militancy of
the African American community in response to the faltering civil
rights movement contributed to greater solidarity with movements for
liberation on the African continent.

This solidarity became more insistent and reached wider numbers in
1976 after South African police massacred school children in Soweto
who were protesting a law to make Afrikaans the language of
instruction. Hugh Masakela’s “Soweto Blues
[[link removed]],” popularized by
Miriam Makeba (both exiled during the years of apartheid) brought the
suffering to the wider world:

_Soweto blues – abu yethu a mama
Soweto blues – they are killing all the children
Soweto blues – without any publicity
Soweto blues – oh, they are finishing the nation
Soweto blues – while calling it black on black
Soweto blues – but everybody knows they are behind it
Soweto Blues – without any publicity
Soweto blues – they are finishing the nation
Soweto blues – god, somebody, help!
Soweto blues – (abu yethu a mama)_

Accusations that violence was “black on black,” that police
violence was designed to be “without any publicity,” spoke to the
ways the apartheid government sought to hide and isolate opposition to
their rule. The myth of South Africa as the continent’s “only
democracy,” where black Africans lived better than where they gained
self-rule could no longer stand scrutiny. South Africans, in response
to violent repression, looked to global solidarity launching a
“divestment, sanctions, boycott campaign.”

After the Soweto uprising, and following the 1977 murder, while in
custody, of Black Consciousness leader Steve Biko, the AFL-CIO changed
its position and began to sharply criticize the South African
government and support release of Nelson Mandela and other political
prisoners. The Federation, however, opposed the boycott campaign,
instead advocating for “constructive engagement” with the
apartheid government and corporations, like General Motors, which
operated factories there. The Federation’s support of efforts to
reform the system, rather than challenge its framework, however,
gained little traction, and was rejected by unions in South Africa and
increasingly rejected by unionists within the United States.

Reflecting the upsurge in workplace militancy and the growing
working-class radicalism of the Black Freedom movement, support for
solidarity with South African unionists grew. In the late 1960s and
early 70s, an emerging rank-and-file movement took shape in the
formation of factory-based black caucuses in the Auto Workers, Steel
Workers, and numerous other industrial, craft, and public-sector
unions, making the connection between the shared need to undo systemic
structures of racism domestically and globally with calls for
solidarity with South African labor. During those years, there were
relatively few unions with African Americans in national leadership or
in key staff positions;in fact, there were unions that ran hiring
halls that in practice excluded or segregated black workers.
Therefore, demands for greater black representation in local and
national union leadership and support for affirmative action hiring
practices were core issues for African American workers.

In contrast to the Federation leadership’s attempt to separate
economic and “political” demands, those caucuses, as well as
left-led multi-racial rank-and-file caucuses and progressive local and
national union leaderships tended to link demands against corporate
racism, the tolerance of racist practices in organized labor, with
community demands opposing racist practices in housing, healthcare,
education, and policing. This paralleled how issues were framed with
the political unionism of South Africa, which was rooted in solidarity
with all working for freedom on the job and beyond the workplace.

These strands of opposition to domestic racism, opposition to the
racism of US foreign policy, and calls for a more militant labor
movement came together in 1972 when over 1,000 unionists founded the
Coalition of Black Trade Unionists (CBTU). Bill Lucy, AFSCME
Secretary-Treasurer and a leader of the 1968 sanitation workers strike
in Memphis (where King was assassinated) was elected its founding
president. Other key figures were Charles Hayes (later elected to
Congress) and Rev. Addie Wyatt (a founding member of the Coalition of
Labor Union Women in 1974), both from the Meatcutters Union; William
Simon of the Washington [DC] Teachers Union, who was also a leader of
the Black Caucus in the American Federation of Teachers and later an
AFT vice president; Ola Kennedy, a steel worker, a member of the first
women’s caucuses in the USW and later a supporter of Ed
Sadlowski’s reform movement; Nelson “Jack” Edwards, an auto
worker and first African American to serve as a UAW Vice President;
Dennis Serrette who as a rank-and-file CWA member had led a successful
wildcat strike in New York; and the ever-present Cleveland Robinson.
Noting those names is to recognize how deeply rooted CBTU was within a
range of labor and community struggles.

So, it was natural that, alongside opposition to the Vietnam War,
support for ending South African apartheid was central to its program
from the beginning. Subsequently, CBTU became the first US labor
organization to call for an economic boycott of South Africa, a call
that was taken up by local unionists who formed city-wide and
union-wide action committees. By 1975, the boycott campaign had spread
far beyond the ranks of labor, especially through the work of
TransAfrica. Daily sit-ins in front of the South African Embassy were
organized, the arrests that followed keeping the anti-apartheid
struggle in the public eye, laying the basis for the formation of the
“Free South Africa” movement in 1985.

And this was transformative within organized labor. By the 1980s, the
UAW and the United Mine Workers were playing leading roles in South
African labor solidarity, and the AFL-CIO itself would completely
reverse course and fully support the ANC-led anti-apartheid struggle
and publicly support COSATU.

Contra War: Nicaragua (and Guatemala/El Salvador)

In 1979, after an 18-year armed struggle against the dynastic
military-backed Somoza dictatorship, the Sandinistas came to power in
Nicaragua and immediately commenced a land reform and literacy program
alongside other sweeping social reforms. Their aim to improve the life
of people in one of the Central America’s poorest countries was
deemed threatening to the elite in Washington DC. US opposition began
immediately after Anastasio Somoza fled the country, intensifying
after Ronald Reagan was elected president in 1980.

The US established military bases in Honduras, then financed and
helped unify paramilitary organizations to form the Contras who
launched a war of terror designed to make Nicaraguans pay for the
revolution’s victory. The Contras targeted beneficiaries of land
reform programs, literacy teachers, healthcare workers, and unionists.
This intervention was done in the guise of anti-Communism, a category
that enabled policy makers to label any attempt to redistribute wealth
in favor of the dispossessed, any attempt to assert national control
over foreign investment, as a direct threat to national security. The
contempt for international law this entailed was unambiguously
reaffirmed when the Reagan Administration defied a World Court ruling
that the US naval blockade of Nicaragua’s ports was illegal.

This assault on the revolutionary process in Nicaragua met with
opposition from anti-war and solidarity movements; the Nicaragua
Network was formed out of numerous faith-based, community, and local
union groupings to coordinate these initiatives. Although support for
US militarism and overseas corporate investment by AFL-CIO leadership
was still in full swing, the movement in union ranks for an
alternative foreign policy had gained considerable strength, building
upon the prior movement against the Vietnam War and the still on-going
anti-apartheid movement. Opposition also grew within working-class
circles that had not been part of earlier social protests. Although
Reagan’s war policies had supporters, the experience of Vietnam
considerably widened the numbers of people skeptical of official
claims that we were engaged in a struggle for freedom and democracy.
Frequently, local union initiatives against the Contra War found
support amongst veterans who had paid the cost of the illusions in
government proclamations not too many years earlier and did not want
their children to suffer the same fate.

Critical to this was a recognition that, with the Reagan
Administration, tolerance for unionism that had been a legacy of the
post-World War II social contract had come to an end. The resulting
wave of union-busting and demands for concessions by management
executives meant that the rules of the game had changed. Even Lane
Kirkland (having replaced George Meany upon his retirement in 1979)
was forced, rhetorically, even if not substantively, to respond to
this change as union membership began to precipitously drop.

Yet changes in AFL-CIO policy were limited in conception and practice.
Moreover, they were fatally flawed by the Federation leadership’s
continuing support of aggressive, militaristic foreign policy in
alliance with anti-union government and corporate leaders – as if
assaults on human and labor rights at home did not spring from the
same source as assaults on such rights abroad.

This was put into sharp relief by AFL-CIO leadership’s backing of US
intervention in the simultaneous civil wars being fought in Guatemala
(1960 – 1996) and in El Salvador (1980 – 1992). Even when the
Maryknoll sisters – American citizens – were assassinated, even
when death squads murdered two US agricultural advisors working on
behalf of an AFL-CIO reform program in El Salvador, Federation
leadership was unwilling to reconsider its uncritical support of White
House and State Department policy. If the lives of American citizens
could be taken without consequence, the murder and torture of El
Salvadoran unionists, peasant leaders, priests, and the rape and
brutalization of nuns did not lead to any change in policy. Similarly
in Guatemala, in which repression reached virtually genocidal
proportions when directed at that country’s indigenous population, a
deafening silence was the response in Washington to reports of terror.
Although the United States (like Great Britain in the years of empire)
often justifies imperial adventure by “defense of women,” violence
against women was central to the terror of the military we financed in
Central America. In all three countries, beneficiaries of US
government policies were US-based corporate investors and local
business/landholding elites; the victims were working people in the
fields and factories.

As the wars continued, refugees fled to the United States where they
became sources of exploitable labor. Immigrant communities also became
centers of resistance, grounding opposition to US intervention. CISPES
(Committee in Solidarity with the People of EL Salvador) and NISGUA
(Network in Solidarity with Guatemala) alongside the Nicaragua
Network, worked closely with union-based anti-intervention activists
such as the National Labor Committee in Support of Democracy and Human
Rights in El Salvador and the Guatemala Labor Education Project.
City-wide anti-intervention committees of local unions and
rank-and-file committees within national unions formed to organize
against US intervention. North American union delegations traveled to
Central America, meeting counterpart unions of all political
persuasions, seeking to coordinate demands for an end to US support
and weapons supplies to those aimed at destroying economic justice and
political rights.

Ultimately, the anti-intervention movement was strong enough to force
Congress to cut off funding for the Contra War. The Reagan
Administration, however, decided to add violation of US law to
violation of international law; using the combination of drug-running
and arms smuggling (while cutting a deal with our “enemy” Iran) to
surreptitiously supply weapons to the Contras. The resulting
“Contragate” scandal – little more than a decade after Watergate
–marked the increased presidential contempt for democratic
institutions. The cynicism at work was striking as the “War on
Drugs” was starting to replace anti-Communism as the excuse for
military engagement abroad (and mass incarceration at home).

Simultaneously, the internal struggle within the AFL-CIO intensified
for – unlike in the case of South Africa – the Federation refused
to change its position, continued to support the whole framework of
Reagan’s foreign policy while engaging in red-baiting to attack
those trying to develop an alternative foreign policy for labor,
independent of the government and corporations. This came to a head at
the AFL-CIO’s 1985 Convention when American Federation of Government
Employees President Kenneth Blaylock challenged Kirkland’s
pro-Contra, pro-US intervention policies from the Convention floor.

Blaylock did not stand alone – William Wipisinger, president of the
International Association of Machinists, and Jack Sheinkman, president
of the Amalgamated Clothing and Textile Workers, similarly challenged
Reagan’s (and Kirkland’s) policies. Altogether, about 1/3 of
AFL-CIO affiliates stood in open opposition to its leadership’s
pro-militarism stance as was visible in the labor presence at mass
rallies held in Washington DC and San Francisco in 1989, protesting US
Central America policies.

That labor presence highlighted the connection between domestic and
global struggles, coincident with the recognition of the importance of
immigrant workers to the labor movement. It is no accident that the
Service Employees – whose locals played an especially critical role
in building the anti-intervention movement – was the union that
embraced organizing drives amongst those workers driven from their
homes by US backed wars, initially through the Justice for Janitors
campaign. Similarly, the organizing and strike activity carried out by
the Hotel Workers (now UNITE-HERE) in Nevada and elsewhere, the
willingness of the Laborers and some of the other building trades
unions to reach out to Spanish-speaking workers, and the successful
campaigns launched by the Farm Laborers Organizing Committee in
Florida reflected a reorientation taking place within many unions.
This was the backdrop to the successful challenge to AFL-CIO
leadership a decade later that led to John Sweeney’s election as
Federation president.

Those changes in labor were real and should not be minimized. Yet they
were limited as neoliberal globalization, combined with union-busting,
decimated labor’s size, strength, and sense of power in the 1990s.
An analogous development took place in Central America. By the early
1990s, the civil wars in Nicaragua, El Salvador, and Guatemala had
ended – with conservative and right-wing forces holding the upper
hand. Yet those wars ended in negotiation, not annihilation, and the
struggle has gone on since then throughout the region, largely on a
political basis, with setbacks and advances, and a legacy of
possibility that, however frayed, remains alive.

Although those aspirations failed to be realized, not all was lost. In
both North America and Central America, the dreams that inspired
movements of resistance and affirmation of popular power remain
stronger than the nightmares of repression. The Highwomen, a song by
the group of the same name, The Highwomen
[[link removed]], (country singers Brandi
Carlile, Natalie Hemby, Maren Morris, Amanda Shires), (first performed
in 2019, decades after those civil wars) connects the dots between
sacrifice and rebirth, reminding us that defeat is never final:

_I was a Highwoman
And a mother from my youth
For my children, I did what I had to do
My family left Honduras when they killed the Sandinistas
We followed a coyote through the dust of Mexico
Every one of them except for me survived
And I am still alive._

Cease Fire: Gaza

Labor demands for a ceasefire today build upon the legacy of unionists
whose sense of solidarity crossed borders, as Mancilla noted in his
December 9 press conference. Until recently, however, criticism of
United States complicity in Israeli violations of international law
and human rights has been muted. Nothing comparable to the movement in
opposition to South African apartheid or US funding of the Contras has
emerged even though Israel was an ally of the apartheid government and
a major conduit for arms for the Contras and the El Salvadoran and
Guatemalan militaries. Israel’s establishment out of the ruins of
World War II and the horrors of the death camps, alongside a largely
unexamined racism toward Palestinians and Arab communities overall,
contributed to the silence of too many for too many years.

The depth of the current unrelenting assault on Gaza has helped bring
about a change, exposing the cynical use of the Holocaust to justify
oppression of others, exposing the lies and half-truths rationalizing
United States military and financial support of Israel. Significantly,
Palestinian-Americans have become more visible in social justice
movements, thereby amplifying their collective voice calling for
justice for Palestinians living in Palestine.

Labor’s cease fire demands build upon opposition to the 2003 Iraq
War. The US invasion of that country was “justified” by the
attacks on the World Trade Center (the “War on Terror” now
overtaking the “War on Drugs” as the main excuse for killing
people overseas), while opponents of the war were accused of being
supporters of Sadam Hussein’s authoritarianism. But labor’s
anti-war movement was not defending the attacks on the Trade Center,
nor defending Hussein; rather, it was defending working people
victimized by our guns and bombs. US Labor Against the War, organized
by local unionists, won approval for an anti-war resolution at the
2005 AFL-CIO Convention – something unthinkable in prior years.

We are seeing something similar today. The criminal assault by Hamas
on October 7 revealed the powder keg underneath accumulated
injustices; the irrationality and cruelty of that day’s attack
revealed the lack of pathways out of the oppression of occupation.
Hamas’ action was preceded and followed by brutal policies by
Israeli governments designed to control the fabric of everyday life in
Gaza with any and every pathway to self-determination closed. The war
now underway has made every resident a target; the predominance of
children, caregivers, the elderly amongst its victims, exposes its
nature as a war against a whole population.

As in the past, free speech by anti-war opponents in our country is
also under attack – university professors and students, high school
teachers, and others have been subject to sanctions for support of
Palestinian freedom, for denouncing Israeli policy. That this takes
the form of the false equation of being “anti-Israel” with
“anti-Semitic,” erases the fact of systemic and individualized
bigotry and violence directed at all Arabs, at all Muslims. So too it
ignores past usage of “anti-Americanism,” to shut down dissent.
Such attacks today cannot be separated from a broader atmosphere of
repression as seen by book banning in schools and public libraries.

In a time when the danger of a Trump re-election has heightened
awareness of the fragility of Constitutional rights, of labor rights
it has also intensified awareness of the need to confront all forms of
racism – be it directed at African Americans, Spanish-speaking
immigrants, Asian Americans, Jews, or Muslims. All this has
contributed to the rapid growth of the ceasefire movement.

When the independent United Electrical Workers helped initiate a Labor
for Cease Fire movement, it was alone amongst national unions, joined
initially only by UFCW Local 3000. When American Postal Workers Union
President Mark Dimonstein argued on behalf of a ceasefire at the
AFL-CIO Executive Council last November, his was a lone voice. The
National Writers Union, the International Union of Painters and Allied
Trades, other union locals, and individual union members added their
voices but none of the large unions. Various state labor federations
began to call for a ceasefire on their own – and were quickly
informed by the AFL-CIO that this was contrary to Federation policy
and ordered to cease doing so.

As the carnage in Gaza has continued, along with the flow of weapons
from the Pentagon, voices calling for peace and justice have grown
louder. By the beginning of March, ten national unions – including
SEIU, the National Nurses Union, the National Education Association,
the American Federation of Teachers, American Association of
University Professors, along with APWU, UE, Painters, NWU, and UAW –
representing the majority of all union members – have called for a
ceasefire. The strength of that demand has led the AFL-CIO itself to
support that call, a change that enabled state and city labor
federations to issue their own statements.

On February 16, seven national unions and over 200 local unions formed
the National Labor Network for Ceasefire (NLNC). Although ceasefire
calls have reflected a range of views, the core positions are
reflected in the Network’s central demands:

* An immediate ceasefire in Gaza between Israel and Hamas,
* Restoration of basic human rights,
* Immediate release of hostages taken by Hamas,
* Unimpeded full access for humanitarian aid,
* Our president calling for a permanent ceasefire.

We can call that solidarity, we can call that empathy, we can call
that putting human values about the values of wealth, power,
possession – whatever the term, it means recognizing ourselves in
people whose suffering is greatest, sentiments expressed by a song
Phil Ochs wrote during the Vietnam War:

_Show me the country where the bombs had to fall
Show me the ruins of the buildings once so tall
And I’ll show you a young land with so many reasons why
There but for fortune go you or I._

Today those bombs are falling on Gaza, ruins of buildings once so tall
commonplace as are loss of life, loss of home, loss of place. Arming
and supporting those dropping the bombs poses a danger for the
Palestinian victims of war, for Israeli where right-wing leadership is
an inevitable consequence of being an occupier, and for US society,
inhibiting our ability to defeat the fascist danger knocking at our
door.

Lurking Fascism

That fascist threat grows larger every day, just as our war machine
rolls on, becoming ever larger. United States financial and military
support for Israel doesn’t stem from any putative support for
“democratic values,” no more than did US support for Diem and
later Thieu in South Vietnam, for apartheid South Africa, for Somoza
in Nicaragua nor, for that matter, our support for the Saudi and
Egyptian governments. Rather, it reflects a policy concretized after
World War II that seeks to sustain US global dominance through direct
intervention in the affairs of other nations and through alliances
with countries that share strategic goals irrespective of their
political system. Israel, in that sense, carries out on a small scale
policies we carry out through military bases, arms sales, and economic
power throughout the world. This is the reason the US government has
consistently rejected UN General Assembly/Security Council votes
condemning Israeli violations of international law, just as, in
reverse, the US consistently ignores UN General Assembly votes
condemning as illegal our blockade of Cuba.

Today, we are paying a price, domestically and globally, for failing
to end the dependence of the US economy on weapons and war – a
dependence that is at the root of our inability to address climate
change, unhinged inequality, and the erosion of democratic rights. The
war economy has contributed to a culture of violence and insecurity in
everyday life, and crucially has contributed to undermining labor
strength. The war in Gaza, while it has its roots in Palestinian
dispossession, reflects the current rise of right-wing nationalism as
the means to impose the stability of oppression. Global neoliberalism
and its perpetual wars reflect the defeat of the hopes of the
Universal Declaration of Human Rights, creating the framework for the
global re-emergence of authoritarian governments and popular support
for neo-fascism. And we are not immune in the United States.

The reactionary, “anti-globalist,” anti-immigrant, xenophobic, and
openly authoritarian politics of Trump/MAGA have gained a powerful
base of support within a significant section of capital and amongst a
wide swathe of working people in response to a pervasive sense of
precariousness and instability building since the 2008 financial
collapse and intensified by the COVID pandemic. For too many these
events have been connected to the loss of power symbolized by our
perpetual wars and inglorious retreats. Trump’s demagoguery posits
simple “answers,” including unilateral US assertions of power
without moral or ideological pretentions. Israel’s slaughter of
Palestinians fits neatly in that picture, as does building the border
wall. His opposition to NATO and global alliances enables him to
project a rhetoric of “peace,” that hides the danger of greater
war, just as his “pro-worker” rhetoric hides an anti-labor agenda.

When the Biden Administration attempts to counter that by its own
assertion of the critical need to ramp up arms spending, and to
maintain NATO and the whole panoply of Cold War and international
financial institutions created to sustain US global hegemony, he both
fails to counter Trump and undermines the social reform programs that
are the only pathway to overcome the crisis in society. LBJ’s
decision to prioritize war abroad over domestic reform laid the basis
for Nixon, and later Reagan. Today we can see how support for
Israel’s war undermines the Biden Administration’s goal of
overcoming the challenge posed by the “MAGA” movement.

The images of dead bodies in Gaza bring to mind images of warplanes
dropping napalm on Vietnam, reports of school children being shot in
Soweto, of the mounting deaths strangling hope in Central America. We
can only respond by remembering that the concentration camps; the
destruction of unions, of socialist and communist parties, and
dissenting churches, as well as the mass slaughter during World War II
were overcome. As Len Chandler
[[link removed]] in a song from the era
of the Civil Rights movement reminds us:

_The seas are gettin’ stormy and the hour’s gettin’ late
If that ship starts seepin’ water you know how to bail
You can’t change the weather but you sure can change the sail
And our harbor looks much better when you’ve made it through a gale
So I guess I’ve gotta keep on keepin’ on._

Labor’s statements for a ceasefire points our ship of state in a
direction we need to travel. It is critically important to push
harder, turn words into action. We must connect that need to end war
to a broader program of structural reform to control capital
investment and recenter economic policy on public ownership rooted in
community and workplace power. We must set a course to finally end
systemic inequalities and address looming climate catastrophe.

For this to happen peace is paramount. Current realities dictate that
unions need to and will support Biden over Trump, but labor needs to
do so around its own course that challenges Biden’s limitations.
Organizing to end US support of Israel’s war in Gaza, as part of a
broader program to reduce military spending and take steps toward
negotiated peace to end wars taking place in Europe, Africa, the
Middle East is a means to recapture the hope that flickered briefly in
1945: that all people are entitled to live a life of dignity,
equality, and peace. As the ceasefire resolution issued by the
Coalition of Labor Union Women
[[link removed]]
concludes:

“The time has come again for the labor movement to speak up and act
out against the atrocities of war. We cannot become inured to the
barbarism our species still resorts to when conflicts arise. As women,
workers, veterans, and citizens of the world, we must continue to
demand a peaceful world, and work to create it.” •

Kurt Stand is a member of UFCW Local 1994, and serves as a _xxxxxx_
labour moderator.

* Labor Movement
[[link removed]]
* Anti-War Movement
[[link removed]]

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