Today in Labor History February 22, 2004: Education Secretary Rod Paige called the nation’s largest teachers union, National Education Association (NEA), a terrorist organization. No teachers were killed or imprisoned for belonging to the union under the Bush administration, but the government did use the epithet to justify imprisoning citizens and non-citizens indefinitely without trial for being “terrorists.” And the 20-year “war on terror” that Bush initiated led to as many as 5 million deaths. This would put Bush up there with the top ten most murderous world leaders of the past 100 years.
Currently, the Trump administration is using the “terrorist” epithet to justify the mass deportation, imprisonment and murder of immigrants, regardless of the legal status; the kidnapping of foreign heads of state; and the imprisonment and extrajudicial execution of anyone who opposes his fascist regime or who speaks up in support of Palestinians. However, the U.S. government targeting its own citizens as “terrorists” is nothing new. They prosecuted and imprisoned numerous environmental and animal rights activists as terrorists in the 90’s and early 2000’s. In the 1960s and early ‘70s, they murdered numerous activists from organizations they labeled as “terrorists,” like the Black Panthers and American Indian Movement. And going back at least as far as the 1860s, they were falsely accusing Irish union organizers of being Molly Maguire terrorists, wrongfully executing 10 of them on June 21, 1877, in the second largest single-day mass execution in U.S. history, after the 1862 mass execution of 38 Dakota Indians. Considering Trump’s goal of abolishing, or at least gutting, the Department of Education; his hatred of unions; and the anti-union objectives of Project 2025; it is not hard to see the “terrorist” epithet again being hurled at teacher unions, and at all unions (except, perhaps, those that affiliate with a future pro-MAGA American Labor Front, like Hitler’s German Labor Front).
Or, we could just start arming teachers, as many on the right have demanded, and see where that takes us…
You can read more about the so-called Molly Maguires here: https://michaeldunnauthor.com/2024/04/13/the-myth-of-the-molly-maguires/
#workingclass #LaborHistory #terrorism #waronterror #trump #bush #civilians #massmurder #MollyMaguires #union #NEA #teachers #fascism #nazi #cia #MAGA #irish