Photo Review – May Day 2017: Workers celebrate their achievements and set their direction for the coming year

Calgary

Across Canada and Quebec
• Workers Celebrate Their Achievements and Set Their Direction for the Coming Year
United States
• Revitalized May Day Actions Defend Immigrant Rights and the Rights of All
Around the World
• Militant Affirmation of Rights and Sovereignty

This day. The Chinese people have stood up!

The land force of the Chinese People’s Liberation Army marches through Tiananmen Square during the People’s Republic of China’s nation founding day parade on October 1, 1949.

For your information: Opening address by Mao Zedong at the First Plenary Session of the Chinese People’s Political Consultative Conference, September 21, 1949 (excerpts) –

… It is because we have defeated the reactionary Kuomintang government backed by U.S. imperialism that this great unity of the whole people has been achieved. In a little more than three years the heroic Chinese People’s Liberation Army, an army such as the world has seldom seen, crushed all the offensives launched by the several million troops of the U.S.-supported reactionary Kuomintang government and turned to the counter-offensive and the offensive. At present the field armies of the People’s Liberation Army, several million strong, have pushed the war to areas near Taiwan, Kwangtung, Kwangsi, Kweichow, Szechuan and Sinkiang, and the great majority of the Chinese people have won liberation. In a little more than three years the people of the whole country have closed their ranks, rallied to support the People’s Liberation Army, fought the enemy and won basic victory. And it is on this foundation that the present People’s Political Consultative Conference is convened. […]

Facts about US aims at Hiroshima and Nagasaki

Protest against Japanese Prime Minister Abe’s new security laws at the Peace monument in Hiroshima August 6, 2015.

One of the controversies about how the atrocities at Hiroshima and Nagasaki are remembered concerns the U.S. aims in dropping the bombs. History as written by the victors declared that this act was necessary to force the surrender of militarist Japan and bring an end to the war. The death and destruction was a tragedy but the Japanese people themselves bore responsibility for their own suffering, so the story goes. To this day the U.S. refuses to apologize for these war crimes and on a visit to Hiroshima on May 27 U.S. President Obama did not even acknowledge that the U.S. perpetrated the crimes or why, merely stating that “death came from the sky.”

‘Little Boy’ – a macabre irony

Panoramic view of the monument marking the hypocenter, or ground zero, of the atomic bomb explosion over Nagasaki | Dean S Pemberton, Wikipedia

By LILI CHI*

Tom Ferebee opened the hatches that protected Little Boy. At 8:14 a.m., the Enola Gay gained in altitude and began the 158° turn. At 8:15 a.m, Ferebee activated the hatches. He dropped the “atomic baby.” The rotation put space between the apparatus and the blast. The 20,000-kiloton, 4-ton, 3-metre long bomb blew up at 600 metres in the air, levelling 75 square kilometres of downtown Hiroshima with its heat and the shock waves. The flash gave way to a gigantic mushroom cloud of smoke and fire that rose many kilometres in height. Some 200,000 Japanese people died, melted, in less than 5 minutes. It was the morning of August 6, 1945.

A historic countdown to the US nuclear attack on Hiroshima and Nagasaki

To this day the United States claims that its actions on the morning of August 6, 1945, when it dropped an atom bomb on Hiroshima and on August 9 when it dropped a bomb on Nagasaki, were righteous, moral and proper. The following is a compilation of articles that create a historical countdown from Pressing Issues which looks at the behind the scene events of the days leading to the US nuclear attacks on the Japanese cities of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, respectively on August 6 and August 9, 1945. These unprecedented war crimes had nothing to do with the fight against Japanese militarism, which was suffering defeats everywhere and whose surrender was imminent. Examining the nuclear attacks on Japan, it is worth quoting General Eisenhower that ”the Japanese were ready to surrender and it wasn’t necessary to hit them with that awful thing.”This mass murder of civilian populations at Hiroshima and Nagasaki was instead meant as a threat to the peoples of the world, especially the Soviet Union, showing the depths of depravity and criminality to which the U.S. was willing to sink to establish its domination.GREG MITCHELL* provides a day-to-day chronology.

159th Anniversary of the First War of Indian Independence

By JASPAL SINGH, May 10, 2016

Engraving from the 1860s of scene from the First Indian War of Independence (Click to enlarge)

Today is the 159th anniversary of the great Ghadar or the first war of India’s independence. On May 10, 1857, soldiers in Meerut Cantonement revolted and marched to Delhi to overthrow the colonial rule. This spark from Meerut soon engulfed the whole country as a prairie fire with the slogan of Firangi Ko Maro. I have visited these sites in Meerut Cantonement many times and one can not help but be in awe of these fighters, listening to their tales of valour. The freedom fighters raised the slogan Hum Hain Iske Malik, Hindustan Hamara (we are the masters of India, it belongs to us). It expressed the demands and aspirations of farmers, artisans, intellectuals, patriotic Zamindars who vowed to throw the British in the sea and establish a new political power which would be people-centric.

This day. 41st anniversary of the defeat of US aggression and intervention in Vietnam

Victory monument in Xuan Loc, Vietnam

On April 30, 1975, 41 years ago, the U.S. imperialists had to flee Vietnam as their puppet regime in Saigon collapsed and their armed aggression and intervention in Vietnam was defeated.

This war of intervention and aggression by U.S. imperialism goes down in the annals of aggressive wars as one of the most brutal. It left more than 3 million Vietnamese dead, millions more wounded and homeless and the entire country and its economy in ruin. The devastation caused to the country and the people almost reached the level of that in Korea where U.S. imperialism had intervened in the early fifties and which was the first place the U.S. had to be satisfied with defeat.