Nothing in the present is by accident or happenstance. Past events continue to shape our world whether we like it or not. To quote the book and movie, Cloud Atlas…

“Our lives are not our own. We are bound to others, past and present. And by each crime and every kindness, we birth our future.”

As activists and informed citizens of the world we must be aware of our history and highlight moments in time that have brought us to our current situation…

*Information thanks to the 2019 Verso Weekly Radical Diary* 

 

2/04 – 2/10

February 4, 1899 – Philippine-American war begins after the Philippine government objects to being handed over to the U.S. from Spain.

“The North Americans have captured nothing but a vessel of water, nothing that our sun will find dificult to empty with its rage.” – Alfredo Navarro Salanga

February 7, 1948 – Tens of thousands of silent marchers in Bogotá memorialize victims of Colombian state violence. 

“Señor Presidente, our flag is in mourning; this silent multitude, the mute cry from our hearts, asks only that you treat us… as you would have us treat you.” – Jorge Eliécer Gaitán, Leader of the Colombian Liberal Party

February 8, 1677 – Andrew Marvell, English poet and parliamentarian during the Anglo-Dutch Wars, publishes his last known work.

“There has now for divers years a design been carried on to change the lawful government of England into an absolute tyranny.” – An Account of the Growth of Popery and Arbitrary Government in England

February 8, 1996 – John Perry Barlow publishes “A Declaration of the Independence of Cyberspace” in responce to an anti-pornograpghy bill passed by the U.S. Congress that would have chilled speech dramatically.

“On behalf of the future, I ask you of the past to leave us alone.”

February 10, 1883 – The Russian revolutionary Vera Figner is arrested for her role in Tsar Alexander II’s assassination. She received a death sentence that was later commuted.

“My past experience had convinced me that the only way to change the existing order was by force.” – Memoirs of a Revolution 

 

 

1/21 – 1/27

January 21, 1935 – The Wilderness Society is founded by conservationists; it would become one of the most radical U.S. environmentalist groups into the 1970s.

“Our bigger-and-better society is now like a hypochondriac, so obsessed  with its own economic health as to have lost the capacity to remain healthy.” – Society Founder Aldo Leopold, A Sand County Almanac

January 22, 1936 – Burmese student union leaders Aung San and U Nu are expelled for criticizing British rule of Burma, leading to a national student strike.

“Escaped from Awizi a devil in the form of a black dog… Will finder please kick him back to hell.” – Nyo Mya, “A Hell Hound at Large”.

January 22, 2006 – Evo Morales, first indigenous president of Bolivia, is sworn into office.

January 23, 1976 – Paul Robeson, the African American singer and civil rights campaigner, dies.

“I stand always on the side of those who will toil and labor. As an artist I come to sing, but as a citizen, I will always speak for peace, and no one can silence me in this.”

January 24, 1911 – The anarcho-feminist Kanno Sugako is hanged for plotting to assassinate Emperor Meiji.

“In accordance with long-standing customs, we have been seen as a form of material property. Women in Japan are in a state of slavery.” – ‘Women are Slaves’

January 27, 1924 – Lenins funeral takes place in Red Square. In attendance was the poet Vladimir Mayakovsky, who went on to pen the epic poem, ‘Vladimir llyich Lenin.’

“Just guzzling… snoozing… and pocketing pelf,

Capitalism… got lazy and feeble.”

 

 

1/14 – 1/20

January 15, 1919 – Rosa Luxemburg, founder of the Spartacus League, is murdered by the German Social Democratic government.  

“The madness will cease and the bloody demons of hell will vanish only when workers in Germany and France, England and Russia finally awake from their stupor, extend to each other a brotherly hand, and drown out the bestial chorus of imperialist war-mongers.” – Junius Pamphlet

January 17, 1893 – Queen Lili’uokalani, Hawaii’s last monarch, is overthrown by American colonists.

January 17, 1961 – Patrice Lumumba, Congolese independence leader and first prime minister of independent Congo, is assassinated by the Belgian government. Six months earlier, he had been deposed in a CIA-backed coup.

“They are trying to distort your focus when they call our government a communist government, in the pay of the Soviet Union, or say that Lumumba is a communist, as anti-white: Lumumba is an African.”

January 20, 1973 – Amílcar Cabral, a communist intellectual and guerrilla leader of the Guinea-Bissau’s anti-colonial movement against the Portuguese, is assassinated. Guinea-Bissau became independent just months later.

“Honestly, in a political context, is total commitment and total identification with the toiling masses.”

January 20, 2017 – Hundreds of protesters are arrested in Washington, DC as Donald Trump is inaugurated as US president, and the following day, an estimated 470,000 people rally for the Women’s March on Washington.

“Pussy Grabs Back!” – Protest Slogan 

 

 

1/07 – 1/13

January 7, 1957 – Djamila Bouhired, the ‘Arab Joan of Arc’ and member of the National Liberation Front, sets off a bomb in an Algiers Café, precipitating the Battle of Algiers, a pivital episode in the Algerian struggle for Independence against the French.

“It was the most beautiful day of my life because I was confident that I was going to be dying for the sake of the most wonderful story in the world.”

January 9, 1959 – Rigoberta Menchú Tum, indigenous revolutionary and Nobel Peace Prize winner, is born in Chimel, Guatemala.

“My cause wasn’t born out of something good, it was born out of wretchedness and bitterness. It has been radicalized by the poverty in which my people live.”

January 10, 1776 – Thomas Paine who participated in the American and French revolutions, publishes the pamphlet Common Sense, which argued for American Independence from Britain.

“Society in every state is a blessing, but government even in its best state is but a necessary evil; in its worst state an intolerable one.”

January 11, 1894 – Donghak Rebellion begins in Mujiang, Korea, over local corruption, eventually growing into an anti-establishment movement.

“The people are the root of the nation. If the root withers, the nation with be enfeebled.” – Donghak Rebellion Proclamation

January 11, 1912 – Workers in Lawrence, Massachusetts, walk out over a race-based pay cut in what would become known as the ‘bread and roses’ strike. Soon an Industrial Workers of the World-organized strike shuts down every textile mill in the city.

“As we come marching, marching, we bring the greater days. The rising of the women means the rising of the race.” – Lawrence Strikers Chant 

 

 

12/30 – 1/06

January 3, 1961 — Angolan Peasants employed by the Portuguese-Belgium cotton plantation company, Cotonang, begin protests over poor working conditions, setting off the Angolan struggle for independence from Portugal.

“Tomorrow we will sing songs of freedom when we commemorate the day this slavery ends.”

-First President of Angola and leader of the movement for the Liberation of Angola, Antonio Agostinho Neto, Farewell at the Hour of Parting

January 5, 1971 – Angela Davis – black feminist philosopher, and prison abolitionist – declares her innocence in a California court over the kidnapping and murder of a judge.

“Prisons do not disappear problems, they disappear human beings. And the practice of disappearing vast numbers of people from poor, immigrant, and racially marginalized communities has literally become big business.” – Masked Racism

January 6, 1977 – Charter 77, a document criticizing the Czech government for its human rights record is published; it is violently suppressed.