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May Day Radicals Go Back to their Roots

As I mentioned in my last post, the left wing and Marxist overtones of various May Day demonstrations are getting to be too obvious for the media to cover up. The Occupy-Whatever-City movement has made a point of emphasizing the historical significance of the day while organizing its various protests. This year mainstream news organizations like CBS News are using the words “May Day” to describe May Day demonstrations, whereas in past years they generally didn’t.


Also coming out of the closet this year is the misanthropic hostility of many leftists. In that sense, the extreme left is harkening back to it’s roots. Violence and vandalism were a hallmark of the Socialist and “Anarchist” movements of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries.

The reason leftists rally on May 1st dates back to that date in 1886, when union thugs and Anarchists gathered in Chicago to beat up strikebreakers and protest capitalism. When police tried to break up the mob the leftists threw a bomb that killed seven policemen, and the cops returned fire, killing four protesters.

In 1892 an Anarchist named Alexander Berkman shot and stabbed a business executive named Henry Clay Frick to protest Frick’s use of strike-breakers to keep a steel mill in operation. (Then as now, the “Anarchist” movement ironically advocated bigger and more powerful government, while fighting against capitalism.)

In 1919 and 1920 Anarchists set off bombs on Wall Street and other places, generally targeted at big business. According to biographer Ron Chernow, there are a couple old buildings on Wall Street that still show scars from a 1920 bomb blast.

Things were different on the left between the early 1920’s and 1991. The Communist Party and its various front groups played a role in virtually every left wing movement in the US during that time, although most of the participants in the various movements were generally not aware that they were being led by Communists.

During this period pointless violence and vandalism disappeared, as the movement leaders tried to stay on task and attract public support for the political positions they cared about (opposing American entry into WWII before June 22 of 1941, for example, and then demanding American entry to the war after that date).

Today’s lefties, without a central organizing force behind them, are trending back toward the old ways of pointless, mindless vandalism and violence.

This year there was a mock Anthrax attack on several banks, with the envelopes mostly being opened on April 30 after the Post Office delivered them a day earlier than the leftists had expected.

In Cleveland a leftist group tried to blow up a bridge in honor of May Day, but the FBI foiled the attempt.

May Day thugs vandalized buildings in San Francisco.

In Oakland police had to resort to tear gas when a mob tried to keep the cops from arresting vandals.

Leftists in Seattle offered some comic relief to right wingers like myself. Not content to just smash the windows of businesses and parked cars, the protesters attacked the federal courthouse in Seattle. Seattle is part of the infamous Ninth Circuit (or “Ninth Circus,” as conservative critics like to call it), the most liberal appeals court in the nation. When leftists attack the Ninth Circuit, they are attacking the best friend they have in the entire American judicial system!

I guess no one ever said they were smart.