The US military invaded Grenada on this day in 1983. The invasion toppled the Caribbean Island’s socialist government which had come to power four years earlier.
Under the pretense of evacuating US medical students, ‘Operation Urgent Fury’ was an imperialist intervention designed to crush the Grenadian liberation movement and any threat it posed to US influence.
In 1979, the New JEWEL Movement (NJM), led by Maurice Bishop, overthrew the repressive regime of Eric Gairy. Taking inspiration from Marx’s writings, Black Power movements, and anti-colonial struggles, the NJM had formed years earlier and established an armed wing.
The NJM’s People’s Revolutionary Government immediately embarked on an agenda which would transform material conditions for the Grenadian working class.
Bishop’s government administered free medical care, school meals and secondary education. Land was reformed and redistributed while 30% of the poorest Grenadians were exempt from income tax.
Women were given maternity leave, equal pay for equal work was introduced and co-operatives were established in agriculture and fishing. The unemployment rate fell from 50% to 14%.
The NJM’s mass organisations of women and young people guarded against counter-revolution by raising class consciousness through political education.
In 1979, months after coming to power, Maurice Bishop addressed the United Nations.
Bishop’s new government took up a leading role in the NAM, condemning US attempts to expand its influence in the Caribbean.
The NJM also began to construct Grenada’s first airport. As with many infrastructure projects, this was only possible because of support provided by Cuba. The prospect of an international airport terrified Reagan because of “the potential that it offered to the Soviets”.
On 19 October 1983, Maurice Bishop was executed in a coup after the emergence of serious tensions within the NJM’s leadership. By the end of that month, the US invaded, the Grenadian Revolution was quashed, and a military junta took control.
After the invasion, the CIA airdropped a comic book over the island. ‘Grenada: Rescued from Rape and Slavery’, quoted Grenadians thanking “President Reagan and their freedom-loving neighbours”. The comic portrayed US soldiers as white saviours ‘liberating’ the people of Grenada.
Today we salute the achievements of the Grenadian Revolution and remember the crimes of those determined to crush it.
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The Guatemalan army, under the command of General Efraín Ríos Montt, launched Operation Sofia on 8 July 1982.
Supported by the Reagan administration in Washington, the goal of this brutal counterinsurgency campaign was to “cleanse” indigenous Maya areas of alleged communists.
Alongside a series of other scorched earth missions, Operation Sofia encapsulated what Ríos Montt referred to as a “war without limits.” More than 600 villages were destroyed, thousands of people were massacred, and thousands more were displaced.
Ríos Montt was later convicted of genocide and crimes against humanity in Guatemala City for his role in the attempted extermination of Guatemala's indigenous population. This was the first time a former head of state had been prosecuted for genocide in a national court.
President Harry S. Truman signed a bill authorising $400 million of "military and economic assistance" for Greece and Turkey on this day in 1947, inaugurating an age of destabilising US interventions around the globe.
The bill formalised the Truman Doctrine and committed the United States to the Cold War — a war so far-reaching in its implications that some historians described it as a Third World War, which revealed that the US was prepared to use any and every means to defeat communism and the forces of liberation.
The doctrine would “support free peoples,” Truman said in March 1947, “who are resisting attempted subjugation by armed minorities or by outside pressures.” In reality, as Indian historian @vijayprashad notes, “the Truman Doctrine justified the US use of asymmetrical wars and hybrid wars against the process of decolonization.”
Isabel Perón’s Argentinian government was overthrown by a US-backed coup on this day in 1976, ushering in a bloody dictatorship under which 30,000 people were killed and disappeared.
For the US Ambassador in Argentina, who had already warned Washington of the plotter's plans for “military rule of extended duration and of unprecedented severity”, the coup was "probably the best executed and most civilized coup in Argentine history."
The West German ambassador in Buenos Aires was even more blunt, describing Argentina as a “cornerstone in the expanded transatlantic security framework, a market and source of raw materials, home of many German settlers and German assets.” These reactions foreshadowed US and European support for Argentina’s murderous junta.
In the immediate aftermath of the coup, Secretary of State Henry Kissinger said that he believed the junta “will need a little encouragement from us.” However, US support for General Jorge Rafael Videla’s junta went well beyond “a little encouragement”. 48 hours after the junta took power, the US formally recognized the new military government and the International Monetary Fund granted it a previously withheld loan of $127 million.
Vladimir Ulyanov, known by his pseudonym Lenin, died on this day 100 years ago. Lenin was one of history’s great pathfinders of socialism, a relentless thinker who insisted always on a “concrete analysis of the concrete situation” against the dogmatism and idealism of his peers.
Writing in 1920, Leon Trotsky called Lenin the “first worker” of the transformation of the old world.
“To be able to direct such a revolution, without precedent in the history of peoples,” he wrote, “it is most evidently necessary to have an indissoluble organic connection with the main strength of popular life, a connection which springs from the deepest roots.”
After Tsar Nicholas II abdicated in March 1917, Lenin made his way back to Russia from exile in Switzerland.
At Petrograd’s Leningradskaya Station, he delivered a historic speech. “The people need peace; the people need bread; the people need land,. And they give you war, hunger, no bread — leave the landlords still on the land…”
This was the language of the cadet seeking respite from war. It was the language of the textile weaver seeking bread for her hungry children. It was the language of the peasant toiling on the land not his own. It would produce the famous rallying cry of the Revolution: Peace! Land! Bread!
On this day in 1917, Arthur Balfour, the British Foreign Secretary, issued a public statement declaring Britain’s “sympathy with Jewish Zionist aspirations” and offering its support for what it called a “national home for the Jewish people in Palestine”.
The statement, known today as the Balfour Declaration, laid the grounds for what was to come.
In the late 19th century, a political and ideologically colonial movement called Zionism emerged in Europe. It sought to create a Jewish national home in Palestine.
The fact that Palestine was already inhabited by Palestinian Jews, Christians, and Muslims living side-by-side was dismissed as a minor stumbling block.
As Theodor Herzl had said, the colonizers would simply force “the penniless (native) population across the frontier.”