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The 1918 Spanish Flu: History’s Most Deadly Pandemic
The ongoing fight to contain the outbreak of COVID-19, the Coranavirus—now entering a new stage of transforming itself into a global epidemic—gives rise to recollection of another virus that swept the world just over one hundred years ago, the so-called Spanish Flu✺. For most of the rest of the 20th century, the Spanish Flu (sometimes known as La Grippe) was largely neglected by researchers and mainstream historians, and study confined to actuaries, specialist epidemiologists and virologists and medical historians [Laura Spinney, Pale Rider: The Spanish Flu of 1918 and How it Changed the World, (2017)].
(Credit: CNN International)
Why did such a devastating pandemic fly under the radar for so long? The timing of the outbreak goes a good way to explain this. After having suffered four long years of a unique world war, people tended to treat the Spanish Flu as a footnote to the Great War conflagration. Moreover, the war, concentrated in Europe and the Middle East, had a limited geographical focus for people, contrasting with the pneumonic influenza outbreak which was truly global [The Spanish Flu Pandemic’, (L Spinney), History Today, 67(4), April 2017]. As catastrophic events go, the two stand in stark contrast. With today’s scientific and medical advances experts estimate that the Spanish Flu killed at least 50 million people worldwide, some estimates put it as high as 100 million [NP Johnson & J Mueller 2002;76: 105-115 (‘Updating the accounts: Global mortality of the 1918-1920 “Spanish” Flu pandemic’, Bull Hist Med)]. Estimates of World War I casualties—military and civilian–—sit somewhere in the range of 20 to 22 million deaths [‘WW1 Casualties’, (WW1 Facts), http://ww1facts.net]⌖. By the late 20th century and early 2000s outbreaks of new viruses like SARS, Asian Bird Flu, Swine Flu, etc, spurred mainstream historians◙ to look afresh at the great global influenza of 1918-20.
An abnormal spike in morbidity and mortality The Spanish Flu was truly global, like the Coronavirus its lethal reach touched every continent except Antartica, both are novel (new) respiratory illnesses. Similarities have been noted between the responses to the two outbreaks, eg, the issuing of instructions or recommendations by the authorities for the public to wear masks, avoid shaking hands (part of social distancing), good hygiene, quarantine, an alarmist overreaction by the media [‘Coronavirus response may draw from Spanish flu pandemic of 100 years ago’, ABC News, (Matt Bamford), 05-Mar-2020, www.amp.abc.net.au]. The great flu of 1918’s morbidity and mortality rates were frighteningly high and far-reaching…one in three people on earth were affected by it✪. Between 2.5 and 5% of the world’s population perished, including India a mind-boggling 17M-plus, Dutch East Indies 1.5M, US (up to) 675,000◍, Britain 250,000, France 400,000, Persia (Iran) (up to) 2.4M, Japan 390,000-plus, Ghana (at least) 100,000, Brazil 300,000, USSR (unknown, but conservatively, greater than 500,000)⊞.
While densely crowded communities were thought the biggest risk of mass infection, the Flu caused human devastation even in remote, isolated corners of the world, eg, in Oceania, Samoa bereft of immunity, lost 22% of its population in two months, the Fijian islands lost 14% in a 16-day period⌀. The kill rate was something around 2.5% cf. a ‘normal’ flu outbreak a rate of no more than 0.1% would be expected [‘The Spanish Flu Pandemic’, (Spinney, History Today ; ‘The Spanish Flu’, Wikipedia, http://en.m.wikipedia.org/].
(Source: National Library of Australia)
If the Spanish Flu didn’t originate in Spain, where did it originate? No one knows for sure is the short answer…but there has been much speculation on the topic. At the time of the epidemic a popular notion was that the Flu started in China, but China experienced low rates of infection compared to other regions of the world. The explanation for this perhaps lay in that China was subjected to an initial, mild flu season which gave its citizens an acquired immunity to the disease when the more severe strain of the virus hit them.
🔺 Red Cross volunteers: caring for the sick during the Spanish Flu fell overwhelmingly on women (volunteers and professional nurses) who bore the brunt of the work at quarantine stations and camps, as well as exposing themselves to great personal risk
Influenza-ravaged Ft Riley soldiers in hospital camp 🔻 
The military, mobility and zoonosis Another theory attributes the Spanish Flu’s beginnings to the movements of the combatants in WWI. Virologist John Oxford favours the village of Étaples in France as the centre of the 1918 influenza infection. From a hospital camp here, 10,000 troops passed through every day…with their immune systems weakened by malnourishment and the stresses of battle and chemical attacks they were susceptible to the disease which was probably transmitted via a piggery and poultry on the same site. Once contracted, it’s dissemination was likely facilitated by mass transportation of troops by train.
Another view that has gained wide currency locates the Flu’s genesis in America’s Midwest. In recent times, historians led by Alfred W Crosby have supported the view that the epidemic started not in Europe but in a US Army base in Kansas in 1917 (America’s Forgotten Pandemic). According to adherents of this theory soldiers training at Fort Riley for combat in Europe contracted the H1N1 influenza virus which had mutated from pigs. The infected troops, they contend, then spread the virus via the war on the Western Front. Whether or not the virus started with WWI fighting men in France or in the US, it is undeniable that the soldiers moving around in trains and sailors in ships were agents of the Flu’s rapid dissemination [‘Spanish Flu’, History Today, (Upd. 05-Feb-2020), www.historytoday.com]. A recent, alternative origin view by molecular pathologist Jeffrey Taubenberger rejects the porcine transference explanation. Based on tests he did on exhumed victim tissue, Taubenberger contends that the epidemic was the result of bird-to-human transmission [‘Spanish flu: the killer that still stalks us, 100 years on’, (Mark Honigsbaum), The Guardian, 09-Sep-2018, www.theguardian.com].
(Image credit: Guia turístico)
Demographics: differential age groups The pattern of Coronavirus mortality points to the disease being most virulent and most fatal to elderly people (the seventies to the nineties age group). This accords with most flu season deaths, although unlike seasonal flu outbreaks Coronavirus contagion has (thus far) had minimal impact on children, in particular the under-fives (Honigsbaum). But the pattern of Spanish Flu was markedly different, the records show a targeting of young adults, eg, in the US 99% of fatalities in 1918-19 were people under 65, with nearly 50% in the 20 to 40 age bracket (‘Spanish Flu’, Wiki). Statistics from other countries on the 1918 outbreak conform to a similar trend.
🔺 Conveying the health message to the public (Source: www.shelflife.cooklib.org)
The Flu in a series of varyingly virulent waves The first wave of the Flu in early 1918 was relatively mild. This was followed by a second, killer wave in August. This mutated strain was especially virulent in three disparate places on the globe, Brest in France, Freetown in Sierra Leone and Boston in the US. There were myriad victims, some died (quickly) because they had not been exposed to the first, milder wave which prevented them from building up immunity to this more powerful strain [‘Four lessons the Spanish flu can teach us about coronavirus’ (Hannah Devlin), The Guardian, 04-Mar-2020, www.msn.com]. The second wave was a global pathogen sui generis. The bulk of the deaths occurred in a 13-week period (September to December). The lethality of the disease, and especially the speed with which it progressed, was the scariest part✧.
2nd wave curve in the US, 1918: note the different mortality peaks during Oct-Dec 1918 for St Louis (imposed a stringent lockdown) vs Philadelphia (much less restrictive approach)
(Source: Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, 2007)
The symptoms of this murderously effective strain were unusual and extreme, eg, haemorrhaging from mucous membranes, bleeding from the eyes, ears and orifices, etc. The extreme severity of the symptoms were thought to be caused by cytokine storms (overreaction of the body’s immune system) (‘Spanish Flu’, Wiki) [‘Spanish Flu’, History, 12-Oct-2010, www.history.com]. The third and last strain of the Flu, in 1919, was markedly milder by comparison to the second, but still more intense than the first.
Many parallels exist between the 1918 flu outbreak and the present pandemic – of a positive nature, the widespread advocacy of wearing masks to limit the spread of disease and mandatory lockdowns. Plenty of negative parallels too – the disregarding of science and medical expertise on how to tackle the outbreak; countries engaging in playing the “blame game” against each other rather then co-operating on a united approach to the pandemic. There was especially, but not only in the US, a repetition by some of the denial at the national leadership level to square up to the pandemic and give it the complete seriousness it demanded.
✥ ⌯ ✥ ⌯ ✥
In 1919 in the middle of the flu crisis, Irish poet WB Yeats wrote in a poem the line for which he is perhaps best remembered: “Things fall apart; the centre cannot hold; mere anarchy is loosed upon the world…”
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Footnote: The health authorities’ inability to check the juggernaut of the 1918 virus was exacerbated by misdiagnosis – at it’s onset the Spanish Flu was widely believed to be a bacterium like the Black Death, not a virus. Misreading the symptoms, the influenza outbreak was variously and erroneously diagnosed as dengue, cholera or typhoid (Spinney, ‘History Today’; ‘Spanish Flu’, History).
(Photo: State Archives & Records, NSW)
PostScript: The upside of a global catastrophe The Spanish Flu in it’s vast human decimation rammed home lessons for post-WWI governments and health practitioners in its wake. Being helpless to prevent or halt the virus once in full swing, the vital need to develop vaccines to counter pandemics was subsequently understood. Advanced countries started to restructure their public health systems to try to cope (such as the United States’ NIH – National Institutes of Health, which emerged about 10 years after the Spanish Flu) [‘The great influenza The epic story of the deadliest plague in history‘ (JM Barry), Reviewed by Peter Palese, (JCI), www.ncbi.nim.nih.gov]. And of course the 1918 flu virus had other, indirect, outcomes…it led to universal healthcare, alternative medicine, intensive care facilities and a modern preoccupation with the benefits of healthy exercise under clean, clear skies (‘Pale Rider’).
⌴⌴⌴⌴⌴⌴⌴⌴⌴⌴⌴⌴⌴⌴⌴⌴⌴⌴⌴⌴⌴⌴⌴⌴⌴⌴⌴⌴
✺ the name is a misnomer. The Spanish association came about thus: with the Great War still raging other combatant European nations such as France and Germany had imposed censorship restrictions on the reportage of the flu outbreak, whereas Spain being neutral in the war did not. When the Spanish press freely reported a serious eruption of the Flu, people outside the country unquestioningly assumed that the influenza came from Spain
⌖ to further break that down, more American troops died from the Spanish Flu than in combat during WWI (‘Pale Rider‘)
⊞ the numbers cited tend to be approximations given the paucity of adequate record-keeping at the time
◙ part of a new multidisciplinary approach to the subject including economists, sociologists and psychologists
◍ consequently life expectancy for Americans dropped by 12 years in 1918, and for the first time since Britain commenced recording data, the death-rate in 1919 exceeded the birth-rate (Honigsbaum)
✪ Pandemic: pan ⤑ all ║ demos ⤑ the people (not literally but fairly close)
⌀ although isolation did prove beneficial in some instances, such as in Australia where the virus didn’t arrive until 1919 and entry was closely monitored with a maritime quarantine program. As a result Australia’s death-rate of 2.7 per 1000 of population was one of the lowest recorded [‘Influenza pandemic’, National Museum of Australia, www.nma.gov.au]
✧ Philadelphia alone experienced 4,597 influenza deaths in a single week
Fred Harvey, Railway Hospitality Pioneer and Tourism Developer, and the Harvey House Network
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English born Fred Harvey learned the basics of good food service from a lowly station in a New York restaurant and later ran a successful cafe prior to the Civil War before entering the employ of the US railroads. Working first for the Hannibal and St Joseph Railroad and later others, Harvey was required to travel a great deal as a railroad agent. This gave him first-hand experience of how dismal railroad food and service was.
🔺 Frederick Henry Harvey (Photo: Wall Street Journal)
This was no secret to regular passengers, before Harvey came along, the railroads were serviced by local rough eateries or unscrupulous restaurant owners who would reheat the leftover dishes and serve them again as supposedly new to the next, unsuspecting train-load of hungry passengers. Some travellers wary of the dubious quality offered up, would bring their own ‘shoebox’ lunches of fried chicken and hard-boiled eggs but this didn’t prove a satisfactory alternative – after sitting in the train for a couple of days the food from home would quickly go off [‘Fred Harvey and the Harvey Girls: A Dollar, a Dream and a Dinner’, (John Koster) Historynet, www.historynet.com].
Business-savvy Harvey sensed there was a gap in the market and in 1876 he clinched a deal with the Atchison, Topeka and Santa Fe Railroad (AT&SF)ⓐ to open eating houses along the railroad. The start was modest, one small lunchroom in the Topeka (Kansas) depot of the railroad. But from these modest beginnings Harvey created a thriving railway hospitality concern and more. The prototype Harvey lunchroom has been described as “the progenitor of what (Americans) think of today as a diner” [Stephen Fried, quoted in ‘Tracing the Recipes of America’s First Restaurant Empire’, (Sara Bonisteel), Epicurious, 18-Jun-2013, www.epicurious.com].
🔺 Santa Fe railroad & Harvey hotels & dining stations
The beginnings of fast food
The key to Harvey’s success was quality of food and speed of delivery. Once the network of Harvey dining-rooms were established along the Santa Fe route, the operations were streamlined to work like clockwork…and they needed to. As the trains pulled into the stations Fred Harvey staff had 20, at most 30 minutes to feed 60 to 100 passengers. This required coordination between the train conductor and Harvey staff (to give the staff advanced warning of their impending arrival). To meet the short turnaround time, the waiting staff (“Harvey Girls”) utilised a unique signalling system, the waitress taking the order would send a signal to a second waitress, a cup turned upright on the saucer meant coffee, a cup facing down, tea. The second waitress could then immediately do that part of the order without having to wait for her colleague to return with the order [‘Watch the Cup, Please’, (Jann Bommerbach), True West, 04-Nov-2015, www.truewestmagazine.com].
🔻 Harvey’s El Tovar Hotel, Grand Canyon
No “mean cuisine”
Harvey Houses (as they eventually came to be known) were no “Greasy Joe’s”. From the start Harvey headhunted a star head chef from back east for his first restaurant. The chef prepared top-quality cuisine for AT&SF line passengers…the food was so good that travelling salesmen and other regular travellers chose the AT&SF on that basis over rival western railroads (Koster). They were getting quality food, fresh and affordable to the middle class traveller, served on spotless Blue China with white linen tablecloths [‘Classic Harvey House recipes’, 23-Feb-2019, CBS News, www.cbsnews.com/].
Value as well as quality for money
In 1888 Fred Harvey debuted the first Fred Harvey dining-car on the Chicago to Kansas City train service. The menu for the service illustrates what a bargain it was – for the middle class—for 75¢ passengers got a mains (choice of oysters, lobster, salmon roast beef or other meats) plus dessert—often prepared by world-class chefs (Koster).
🔺 Castãneda Hotel, Las Vegas, (the ‘other’ Las Vegas – in New Mexico): the first trackside Harvey House (Image: www.castanedahotel.com]
The Harvey dining empire
How extensive was the Harvey House network? At the onset Fred Harvey promises a depot restaurant every 100 miles between Kansas and California. At the Harvey high-point there was 25 Harvey hotels, 40 sit-down dining-rooms and 55 lunchrooms on the route (Koster), and the Harvey House concept was extended to other west-bound railroads. Harvey was a natural marketer coming up with advertising campaigns like “3,000 Miles of Hospitality” to promote tourism in the region [‘Fred Harvey—Branding the Southwest (Quality Fast Food)’, www.lib.nau.edu].
The Harvey girls’ uniform: looking a bit too similar to a WWI nurse’s outfit or something you might see in a nunnery! 🔻(Photo: Grand Canyon Railway and Hotel)
The Harvey Girls: Helping to civilise the “Wild West”
Because the male waiters employed by Harvey had a tendency toward drinking on the job and causing trouble in the houses, the entrepreneur in 1883 had the inspired idea of replacing them with single women (aged 18-30) shipped out from the East. The Harvey Girls (as they became known) were attired in demure, conservative feminine uniforms and required to not marry before they had completed six months of service. The women waitresses on the job set standards for cleanliness and decorum which had “a civilizing effect on the often rough customers in the territories” [‘Fred Harvey, the Harvey Houses, and the Harvey Girls’, https://abqlibrary.org/railroads/HarveyHouses]. Many Harvey Girls stayed in the West after their employment, often marrying their bachelor customers, earning the railroad restaurants the sobriquet of “Cupid on Rails”ⓑ.
Farm-to-table: “Meals by Fred Harvey”
Fred Harvey Co (FHC) entered into contracts with local purveyors to ensure fresh ingredients for his meals. Fred Harvey Co also went into the farming business itself,running it’s own dairy and cattle farms (‘Fred Harvey—Branding the Southwest (Quality Fast Food).
(Photo: www.railroadmemories.com)
Business diversification: Whisky, chocolates, gifts, etc.
With success and fame came more diversification. FHC eventually manufactured it’s own whisky, sold it’s own brand of chocolates, candy, ice cream, salad dressings, as well as take-home gifts and souvenirs to passengers. Harvey’s knack for marketing put the brand everywhere. FHC gave away cookbooks of Fred Harvey recipes (‘Branding the Southwest’). The Harvey Co, as part of the tourism package it was promoting, also entered the postcard publishing field…through the Detroit Publishing Co it produced the very popular Fred Harvey Arizona ‘Phototint’ series of cards [‘Fred Harvey (entrepreneur), The Full Wiki, www.the full wiki.org/].
🔺 Menu image from the Santa Fe dining-car (Source: www.lib.nau.edu)
Menu art of the Southwest
The railroad menus of FHC are an interesting sidelight of the company, delightfully quaint in their great diversity. Many celebrated in colourful imagery the beauty of the American Southwest or the pre-United States connexions to the region of colonial Spanish missionaries and Native American tribes (see below ‘Marketing an image of the Southwest’). The menu artwork was often of a high calibre, eg, William Deane Fausett’s humorous images. Menus like the company’s La Posada menu were instructional – including an US warplane ID chart for US servicemen using the AT&SF rail during WWII. There were menus for special occasions like Mother‘s Day and special menus for kids which doubled as clown masks (‘Branding the Southwest’).
Marketing an image of the Southwest
Fred Harvey invented a new hospitality service for railway passengers, but he also invented (and marketed) a particular image of the country’s Southwest for Americans. Harvey, together with the AT&SF Railroad, changed the perception of Americans, filling the vast unknown void of savage desert with a new, “compelling regional identity for the Great Southwest of northern New Mexico and Arizona”. The Harvey corporation “appropriated and marketed the cultures of Native Americans”ⓒ presenting them as “colourful, tamed native peoples”. Harvey to a lesser extent also did a inventive reconstruction of the cultural impact of Spanish colonial and early Anglo-Celtic settlers. Weigle suggests that FMC’s commercial innovations such as the Indian Detours program (affording railroad passengers the opportunity to visit local native communities, represented a kind of ‘Disneyfication’ of the region [Weigle, Marta. “From Desert to Disney World: The Santa Fe Railway and the Fred Harvey Company Display the Indian Southwest.” Journal of Anthropological Research, vol. 45, no. 1, 1989, pp. 115-137. JSTOR, www.jstor.org/stable/3630174. Accessed 12 Feb. 2020].
Endnote: Founder Fred died in 1901 but the business remained in the family until his grandson died in 1965. In 1968 FHC and Harvey Houses were purchased by Amfac, Inc. (an Hawaiian hospitality industry conglomerate).
🔻 Harvey House, Seligman, Ariz.
PostScript: FH Menu dishes
Not surprisingly the FHC menus included a noticeably Latino-Mexican flavour—including Bright Angel Mexican Salisbury Steak, Guacamole Monterey, Empanadas with Vanilla Sauce, Fried Chicken Castãneda and Albondigas Soup (‘Classic Harvey House recipes’).
▁______▁______▁▁______▁______▁▁______▁______▁▁______▁______▁
ⓐ the Santa Fe line ended at Needles in eastern California, where it connected with another railroad which completed the journey west to the Pacific
ⓑ it is estimated that of the approximately 100,000-plus Harvey Girls in the company’s history, perhaps as much as ⅕ of them stayed and settled down to married life in the West, ‘The Harvey Girls, a Slice of American History’, (updated 26-Apr-2012), www.hubpages.com
ⓒ Hopi, Navajo, Pueblo, Apache and other Southwestern tribes
The Luddites of Britain’s Industrial Revolution: Technophobes with an Excessively Destructive Bent or Practitioners of Last Resort Workplace Bargaining?
The Luddites of Britain’s Industrial Revolution: Technophobes with an Excessively Destructive Bent or Practitioners of Last Resort Workplace Bargaining?
We’ve all heard the term bandied round—anyone who is reluctant to embrace new technology or the world of computers is labelled a Luddite. The Cambridge Dictionary defines it as “a person who is opposed to the introduction of new working methods, especially new machines”. Many of us would also have an inkling of the term’s origins, deriving from the group of English workers in the early 19th century whose method of resisting new work technologies in Georgian factories and mills took on a very “hands-on”, destructive manner. Beginning with weavers in the textile industry in Nottinghamshire taking to the new machines with sledgehammers in protest, the movement soon spread to other parts of the Midlands and the North of England.
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Rampage against the machine provokes a repressive reaction The British government wasted little time in sending in an army of soldiers(𝓪 ) in defence of capital. Their assignment was to protect the factories and quell the workers’ revolts. Parliament enacted laws making the workers’ trail of destruction against the machines a capital offence, and many of the offenders were summarily and violently dealt with (shootings, hangings, transportation to New Holland for 14 years). Consequently, the Luddite movement lost energy and cohesion and petered out within a few years [‘The Original Luddites Raged Against the Machine of the Industrial Revolution’, (Christopher Klein), History, 04-Jan-2019, www.history.com].
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Class loyalty The ruling elite of the day viewed the actions of the workers in attacking the private property of employers as merely bloody-minded vandalism, a perspective that still held an attraction for some modern conservative historians in the 20th century… eminent historian JH Plumb for instance dismissed the Luddites’ revolts as nothing more than “pointless, frenzied industrial jacquerie”. But was that all there was to it, nihilism, the mindless, purposeless, random savagery of working class vandals?
In a ground-breaking article in the early Fifties radical historian EJ Hobsbawn took issue with the conventional “nihilistic sabotage” view of historians like Plumb. Hobsbawn places the rebellious workers’ actions in their proper context, that of the Industrial Revolution and the economic vicissitudes of the period. The machine-breaking by the weavers and other workers was a direct action form of industrial strategy initiated by labour, Hobsbawn calls it “collective bargaining by riot” [EJ Hobsbawn, ‘The Machine Breakers’, Past and Present, No 1, (Feb., 1952), pp.57-70]. EP Thompson describes Luddism as “a violent eruption of feeling against unrestrained industrial capitalism” [E.P. Thompson, The Making of the English Working Class, (1966)](𝓫).
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The threat accompanying automation Workers such as the weavers in Nottinghamshire around 1811/12 foresaw the dire implications for them of the introduction of new inventions like the mechanical loom. The economic downturn Britain experienced during the drawn-out Napoleonic Wars resulted in loss of profits for the merchants who owned the mills and factories. But it harmed working families even more…unemployment was widespread, food became scarce and therefore more expensive. Magnifying the problem, trades like the stocking knitters and the lace workers were in decline. By using the new technology, employers could increase production allowing them to engage untrained workers at lower wages. This directly and adversely affected the weavers and other artisans who had spent years learning and honing the skills of their craft. Now the new machines were being taken over by untrained workers who produced inferior work. The job security of textile craftsmen were thus imperilled, by the use of the (new) machinery in (as they saw it) “a fraudulent and deceitful manner” to circumvent standard labour practices(𝓬). The danger identified, the textile workers found themselves limited in the forms of protest available to them—they could not legally form trade unions and they could not strike(𝓭 ). Smashing knitting frames and other machines was conceivably the only effective way to protest the inevitable erosion of their economic livelihood [George Binfield, quoted in Klein; ‘What is a Luddite?’, wiseGEEK, www.wisegeek.com].
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Not technophobes of the Industrial Revolution Hobsbawn is at pains to stress that the protesting mill and factory workers bore no hostility to the machines per se(𝓮). Notwithstanding that the concept of trade unionism was inchoate and still barely nascent at this time, Hobsbawn describes the “wrecking (as) simply a technique of trade unions in the period before (and during) the early Industrial Revolution“. A more contemporary historian George Binfield concurs with Hobsbawn’s central thesis, stating that the derisory ‘technophobe’ tag is a mischaracterisation of the movement—the textile artisans were not against the new technology of the Industrial Revolution, but against the use of it to produce shoddy clothing and depress the wages of skilled workers (Binfield in Klein)(𝓯). Actually, far from being inept, many of the Luddites in the textile industry were highly skilled machine operators [‘What the Luddites Really Fought Against’, (Richard Conniff), Smithsonian Magazine, March 2011, www.smithsonianmag.com].
Poster notice offering a reward for information leading to the arrest of the frame-breakers who attacked George Ball’s Notts. workshop in 1812 🔻
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Antecedents and successors of the Luddites Luddism, as Donald MacKenzie put it, “was neither mindless, nor completely irrational, nor completely unsuccessful” [DA MacKenzie, ‘Marx and the Machine’, Technology and Culture, Vol 25, No 3, July 1984, pp.473-503]. Hobsbawn scuttles any suggestion that the Luddites’ movement was a one-off phenomena. Arguing that it’s antecedents can be traced back as far as the 17th century, he details instances of other English workers utilising the same industrial tactic as the Luddites—West of England clothing industry , 1710s-1720s; weavers in Somerset, Wiltshire, Gloucestershire and Devon, 1726/27(𝓰); rioting of textile workers in Melksham (Wilts), 1738; and not confined to the textiles business – coal miners employed the same wrecking tactic in the Northumberland coal-field in the 1740s (𝓱). Hobsbawn notes that the Luddites’ tactic of destroying the tools of production in a calculated fashion did not end with the movement’s swift demise. He cites the riots in Bedlington (Durham) in 1831 in which strikers wilfully wrecked the capitalists’ winding-gear.
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No unmitigated failure; the preventative measures tactic Although the Luddites’ revolt ended in suppression and broken dreams, Hobsbawn makes the case that there were successes in the workers’ efforts in other episodes of machine-breaking. In some instances, the mere threat from disgruntled craftsmen to wreak havoc on factories and mills was sufficient to dissuade some employers from introducing the machinery as planned, eg, this was the case earlier with weavers in Norwich and shearmen in Wiltshire. Hobsbawn concludes that “invariably, the employer, faced with such hazards” decided to delay or not implement the new technology, cognisant of the latent threat to his property and even his own life. In several of the cases cited by the historian, the threats were a successful bargaining tool to stop employers from cuttingworkers‘ wages, and in the instance of the Northumberland coal miners, their provocative action in burning the mine’s pit-head machinery actually won themselves “a sizeable pay rise”.
🔺‘Ned Ludd’ (sometimes transcribed as Ned Lud) (Image: Granger Collection, NY)
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Footnote: The eponymous ‘leader’ of the movement The Luddites’ leader was supposed to be one “Ned Ludd”, sometimes referred to as ‘General‘, ‘Captain’ or even ‘King’ Ludd. Purportedly he was an apprentice in the late 1770s who was either beaten or berated by his master and took revenge by damaging the factory’s stocking frame. It seems that in all probability Ned is apocryphal in the fashion of Robin Hood, the English personification of the mythical figure invoking social justice. Ned can be viewed as a symbolic leader for the wrongly-treated to rally round in pursuit of righting (in this instance) the workplace injustices foisted upon skilled industrial craftsmen (Ludd was even said to reside in Sherwood Forest, another nod to the inspiration of the Robin Hood legend in his invention).
(𝓪) some 12,000 troops in total were despatched, more than the number under the command of Wellington in the concurrent Peninsula War, a classic, heavy-handed overkill by the British authorities
(𝓫) one writer applies the term “labor strategists” to the Luddites as a de facto vocational appellation, [Brian Merchant, ‘You’ve Got Luddites All Wrong’, (Tech By Vice), 03-Sep-2014, www.vice.com]
(𝓬) being prevented from forming trade unions left industrial workers already behind the eight-ball when IR mechanisation came along—they were unable to establish a minimum wage, establish workers’ pensions and set standard working conditions
(𝓭) the technology the Luddites railed against did not necessarily need to be new, the stocking frame for instance had been invented 200 years earlier (Conniff)
(𝓮) nor were they “heroic defenders of a pre-technological way of life” – as romantically portrayed later in some quarters (Conniff)
(𝓯) as Binfield contends, the Luddites were in fact willing to adapt to mechanisation…it was the direction that enhanced productivity was heading—enriching the merchant owners, not the workers—that was their beef. Their objective was a share of those profits, or at the very least, a decent wage
(𝓰) their attack on the property and materials of masters and blacklegs had the positive outcome of gaining them a “collective contract” of sorts
(𝓱) workers in the East Midlands hosiery trade also resorted to frame-breaking as part of the riots in 1778 to protest wage erosion…Hobsbawn calls these hose-makers “the ancestors of Ludditism”
The Red Underground’s War on Bourgeois Capitalist Europe: Euro-terrorism in the 1970s, West Germany and Italy
From the end of the Sixties the militant Weathermen in the US rode a global wave of youth and student rebellion against “the establishment” (see blog, 17-Jan-2020). Their emergence was in part a direct consequence of the student protests and violent clashes with the police and security forces that shook the leading cities of Europe and elsewhere in 1968 (the “Generation of 1968”). That same wave that gave impetus to the first stirrings of violent resistance by the Weathermen also ushered in other paramilitary organisations in Western Europe around the same time. The two of these that gained the most publicity/notoriety are discussed below.
⫸ West Germany: Red Army Faction (Ger: Rote Armee Fraktion) AKA Baader-Meinhof Gang❉
Ideology: anti-fascist, communist revolutionary, Marxist-Leninist, Maoist, anti-Zionist
The radical student critique: The West German “fascist state”
West German youth by the late 1960s were experiencing a sense of alienation from the Federal Republic (BDR). The source of this disquiet lay in the nature of West German society and politics. The BDR that they had grown up in was now prosperous, but it was moving away from the direction of liberalisation and reform toward a polity that was increasingly authoritarian under the veneer of democracy. The postwar West German government, allying itself to the US and to NATO, and with Berlin on the front line of the Cold War, was charting an increasingly illiberal course, as the country’s politicised youth saw it—the West German Communist Party had been banned in 1956; the police had violently over-reacted to student protests killing one unarmed student activist; the Brandt government had introduced the Radikalenerlass (German for “Radical decree”) law in 1972 barring radicals (as defined by the state) and those with a ‘questionable’ political persuasion from holding public sector jobs. Many in the student left railed against what they saw as hypocrisy from Bonn—assuming the guise of an advanced liberal democracy while at the same time hosting visits from ruthless dictators like the Shah of Iran, not to mention it’s other politically uncomfortable associations [‘Red Army Faction’, (Military Wiki), http://military.wiki.org].
The Wirtschftswunder (the West German “economic miracle”) and its creator, economics minister Erhard 🔻
Students and those on the left generally viewed the postwar denazification of West Germany with justifiable suspicion, it’s outcomes were ineffective and at best incomplete. The policy was breached repeatedly, eg, Chancellor Adenauer’s appointment of a former Nazi-sympathiser to high political office; even more alarmingly, Kurt Kiesinger, a former Nazi Party member, rose to the republic’s top political post, Bundesrepublikkanzler, in 1966; and many ex-Nazis were still able to walk into government positions at the local level up. Many on the left in the BDR were convinced that the republic’s conservative media, controlled by Axel Springer, was biased in favour of the establishment, while the more liberal press in BDR was heavily censored by the government. At the same time radicals looked on aghast when the two major parties, the Social Democrats and the Christian Democrats, formed themselves into a “Grand Coalition” (‘Red Army Faction’, (Military Wiki).
As the succeeding generation, many students were left with a feeling of war-guilt as inheritors of the nation’s Nazi past. Added to this was the disillusion many Germans felt at their country being associated with a blatantly imperialist war in Vietnam. All of these dilemmas coalesced into a conviction for many on the left that the BDR government lacked legitimacy and was tantamount to a “fascist state”. Hence the collective call of West German youth for radical social change. The radicalisation of many in the republic’s student movement was partly fuelled by healthy doses of Marxist economic theory (it should be remembered that in 1966 the BDR economy had gone into recession—for the first time in 15 years) [‘German students campaign for democracy, 1966-68’, (Global Nonviolent Action Network), http://nvdatabase.swarthmore.edu].
BMG – terrorising the BDR
Student disaffection and that of other activists in the West German New Left was rife, many protested their disapproval, some turned to more violent and direct ways of voicing their opposition. Into this turbulent milieu came, among others, the first incarnation of the Red Army Faction, better known courtesy of the media’s tag, the Baader-Meinhof Gang (BMG), at the end of the Sixties. Its founders and main leaders were Andreas Baader, Ulrike Meinhof, Gudrun Ensslin and Horst Mahler.
BMG started by engaging in arson as a protest against the Vietnam War and graduated to bomb attacks on US military facilities, German police stations and media outlets controlled by the Springer press. To bankroll their terrorist activities the gang robbed banks and kidnapped VIP hostages for ransom✫ [‘The Red Army Faction and the Stasi’, TELOSscope, 24-Oct-2016, (Review of Elliot Neaman’s Free Radicals), www.telospress.com; ‘Red Army Faction’, (Military Wiki)]. Among BMG’s victims were symbols of the BDR regime (individuals from the political and economic elites), US military personnel, as well as a number of unfortunate bystanders in the wrong place at the wrong time.
Despite killing some 34 people during its urban guerrilla ‘career’, RAF managed to elicit a measure of support from within West German society. For scores of disillusioned young West Germans at the time, there was support for or at least acceptance of RAF’s actions…(as Siegel put it), owing to the (still recent) Nazi legacy many “guilt-ridden liberals saw (RAF’s) panache as a countercultural critique of West Germany’s boring bourgeois life”. There is evidence also that there was collusion between BMG and East Germany and specifically the DDR’s Stasi (secret police) (Neaman). BMG also underwent some guerrilla training from the Palestinian al-Fatah in Jordan – which didn’t go exactly to plan. Andreas Baader, the group’s leader, deliberately cultivated an outlaw image, likening himself to Clyde Barrow (of Bonnie and Clyde criminal infamy) [‘The Romance of Evil’, by Fred Siegel, City Journal, 18-Sep-2009]§. Baader, Meinhof and their close associates were arrested in 1972 and the leaders died in custody within a few years—apparently by their own hands (though some are skeptical that these were in fact suicides).
Eponymous leaders of BMG 🔻
With the founding members in prison, a “second generation” of RAF cadres emerged, sympathetic to the group’s cause, picking up the terrorist-guerrilla baton where the incarcerated pioneers left off. This “RAF 2.0” was proactive between 1975 and 1979, especially during what became known as the “German Autumn” of 1977. They held personnel hostage at the West German embassy in Stockholm, perpetrated hits on public prosecutors and bankers, kidnapped industrialists, etc. ). In the 1980s and 1990s a” third generation” of RAF materialised and was intermittently active for some years, but since 1998 RAF has been considered to be moribund.
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⫸ Italy: Red Brigades (It: Brigate Rosse)
Ideology: anti-fascist, communist revolutionary, Marxist-Leninist, Maoist
As with their West German counterpart, the Red Brigades (BR) had its antecedents in the massive-scale student protests of 1968 against the state, and the workers’ struggles in Italy in 1968-69 to bring about social and political change. The militant organisation was formed from a leftist student group at the University of Trento in Italy’s north set up by Renato Curcio and Margherita Cagol. BR claimed a membership of up to 1,000 strong at its peak (others have put it at about 400 to 500 full-time members) plus an indeterminate number of supporters [“Years of Lead” — Domestic Terrorism and Italy’s Ref Brigades’, Association for Diplomatic Studies and Training, www.adst.org ; Sundquist, Major Victor H. “Political Terrorism: An Historical Case Study of the Italian Red Brigades.” Journal of Strategic Security 3, no. 3 (2010) : 53-68. DOI: http://dx.doi.org/10.5038/1944-0472.3.3.5. Available at: https://scholarcommons.usf.edu/jss/vol3/iss3/5].
CDP-PCI’s “compromiso storico”
In Italy BR was able to tap into the prevailing student and worker discontent with the government (at first through it’s grass-root activism in northern industrial cities like Milan and Turin). Many radicalised sections of Italian workforce were disillusioned by the ‘historic’ coalition formed between the conservative Christian Democrats and the Italian Communist Party (PCI), and a belief lingered that PCI’s deal with the main bourgeois party would not ultimately represent the interests of the country’s working class (Sundquist) (cf. the CDU/SDP coalition in West Germany).
Red Brigades in “the Years of Lead”
From the early to the late 1970s BR unleashed a series of terror strikes, a chapter in what became known in Italy as “the Years of Lead” (It: Anni di piombo), which was a longer period of postwar social and political turmoil in Italy characterised by terrorist attacks from both right- and left-wing paramilitary groups. Material help for BR was forthcoming from the USSR and Czechoslovakia (weaponry). After the arrest of Curcio and Cagol in 1974, a “second generation” of radicals took up the ‘war’ against the Italian authorities. The act most associated with the BR Mach II (now led by Mario Moretti) and earning it its greatest opprobrium was the kidnapping and eventual murder of former Italian prime minister, Aldo Moro in 1978. BR’s murder of the highly popular Moro lost it much public support, including that of some sections of the left.
The assassination of Moro galvanised the national government, the Italian security forces and the Carabinieri into launching an all-out war against the leftist terrorist organisation☌. With a more concerted counter-terrorist strategy including intelligence from paid informers, the authorities were ultimately successful in capturing the leaders and a large chunk of BR cadres, effectively eliminating the threat to the country during the 1980s◎. [‘The Red Brigades’, Wikipedia, http://en.m.wikipedia.org ; ‘Years of Lead (Italy)’, Wikipedia, http://en.m.wikipedia.org; Sundquist]. Despite its eventual failure and demise, BR was lethally effective in its methods – between 1973 and 1994 the terrorist group killed 223 people in its assaults (Global Terrorism Database, University of Maryland). One academic calls it “the most menacing radical group in Italy‘s post-WWII history”, [‘Learning from the Past: Case of the Red Brigades in Italy’, Daniela Irrera, Counter Terrorist Trends and Analyses. Vol. 6, No 6 (JULY 2014]. International Centre for Political Violence and Terrorism Research. URL: www.jstor.org/stable/10.2307/26351263].
Methods of the “Red Euro-terrorists”
Both RAF and BR used similar tactics and strategies – primarily sabotage, arson, bank robberies, kidnappings and assassinations. The human targets were generally politicians (almost all right-wing), senior police, judges, industrialists and bankers, though BR also went after trade union officials in Italy which eventually helped undermine its support. Initially, BR refrained from lethal violence, often inflicting the punishment of aginocchiare (kneecapping) on its selected targets. But, as the Seventies rolled on, they were taking a more direct and extreme retribution on the capitalist state expanding the scope of terror to murder.
RAF ‘wanted’ poster (source: www.vukutu.com)
These two far-left European terrorist groups according to their pronouncements shared roughly the same broad, radical objectives as the Weather Underground – to destabilise the state and bring down the country’s capitalist regime◘. The two, also like the Weathermen, took great inspiration and more than a few tips from the Tupamaros urban guerrilla group of Uruguay. The Weather, BR and RAF all pursued a avowedly violent strategy against the authorities, but the Weathermen, when compared to BR and RAF, were “terrorism-lite”. Whereas the Weather targeted material damage only, meticulously avoiding the endangering of human life, the two European terrorist groups had no such compunctions or qualms.
Endnote: RAF and BR – red militants in a crowded field of left-wing Euro-terrorists
Neither RAF in Germany or BR in Italy were sole traders in the leftist-terrorism game in their respective countries, such is the splintering nature of ultra-left, extremist groups. There were a string of other terrorist groups operating at the same time, the most consequential of these were Prima Linea (Italian for “First Line”) in Italy and the Revolutionary Cells (Ger: Revolutionäre Zellen – RZ) in West Germany—the latter having a lower profile than RAF but actually perpetrating more bomb and arson attacks on the state than it (Military Wiki).
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❉ sometimes also called Baader-Meinhof Group. Red Army Faction was its official organisational name
✫ BR went one better in fund-raising it’s revolutionary mission, getting involved in drugs and arms trafficking which included doing business with the Neapolitan mafia, the Camorra (‘Red Brigades’, Wiki)
§ a trait shared by the Weathermen
◘ BR also had another, more specific objective of wanting to force Italy to leave NATO
☌ this did not stop BR Mach II from making one more high-profile kidnapping, that of American deputy chief of staff of NATO (General Dozier) in 1981. Italian police managed to rescue the general unharmed and Italian and NATO security forces executed successful retaliatory action again BR (Sundquist)
◎ BR though didn’t entirely disappear…after it split into two separate groups in the early 1980s, the more hardline splinter group continued into the 2000s (amounting to a third organisation claiming to represent BR)
Forecasting a Violent Reprisal on the Home Front: The Weathermen, the US’s Own Home-grown Proto-Terrorists
I remember where I first heard about the Weatherman, or as they later came to be called, the Weather Underground (Organisation). Some time during the 1970s I was thumbing through the pages of the 1973-74 edition of Pears Cyclopaedia❈ and came across an entry on this oddly named group subsumed under the section on “Ideas and Beliefs”…the meteorological sounding name triggered my curiosity. As the Pears editor noted of the name: a “rather incongruous name for the most radical and volatile of the many groups making up the so-called ‘underground’ in the United States of America“⊡.
What most struck the editor about the phenomenon was that “the Weathermen appear(ed) to be largely drawn from the highly intelligent and well-educated strata…well-to-do, academic backgrounds”, something Pears opined to be “sinister and ominous” (a hint toward class betrayal perhaps?). The entry goes on to explore a classic conspiracy theory, the “fantastic speculation, widely held in America” that “the Weathermen are in reality financed and backed by the country’s extreme right—as a means of discrediting in the public eye the slow but steady move toward socialism that seems to be developing there”(?!?). The Pears writer adds a coy reference to one of the leaders of the group (unnamed), “an attractive and dynamic woman university lecturer (who in 1970) was placed on the FBI’s notorious ‘most wanted criminals’ list”✥.
(Source: Yale University)
The origins of the Weather Underground lie in the tumultuous politics of Sixties America—the emergence of the “New Left” and the “Counterculture”, the struggle for civil rights and the growing anti-war movement of those disaffected by the growing catastrophe of Vietnam. Students for a Democratic Society (SDS) had assumed the mantle of leadership of the “youth rebellion” in America and of the anti-war movement. The Weathermen, dissatisfied with the SDS’s limited, reformist approach to curing the ills of modern capitalist society (with its emphasis on disruption and non-violent student demonstrations), split off from the SDS, who they labelled “movement creeps”, in 1969. After the Chicago “Days of Rage” riot, the Weathermen determined on a new, direct and revolutionary approach to changing a society that they avowed hatred for.
Bombed interior of Capitol (Wash DC) (Photo: Washington Post) 🔻
1970 was the year that domestic terrorism embarked on a rapid upward trajectory in the US. The catalyst for the Weathermen adopting a more extreme line was Nixon’s escalation of the Vietnam War into Laos and Cambodia and the Kent State student murders. The fringe policos went underground and turned ‘outlaws’. “Declaring war on the United States”✪, the network operating in small clandestine cells launched a series of bomb attacks on targeted sites—police stations, court houses, military installations, banks, the Capitol and Pentagon buildings in Washington DC, etc. Weather Underground attached the tag-line “bringing the war back home” to this serious switch of tactics.
1971, the assault on the “Amerikan war machine” continues
The following year brought no let-up by the Weather arsonists and incendiaries. The International Association of Chiefs of Police declared 1971 the worst year for bombings in US history. Despite causing such upheaval, the Weathermen failed abjectly to achieve any of their avowed aims [Daniels, Stuart. “The Weathermen.” Government and Opposition, vol. 9, no. 4, 1974, pp.430-459. JSTOR, www.jstor.org/stable/44482282. Accessed 14 Jan. 2020].
A giant fail
The Weather faction (WUO) failed for a multiplicity of reasons fundamentally arising out of a muddled understanding of how to effectively use political discontent to build a mass movement. The Weathermen aspired to be the revolutionary vanguard to lead the revolution that overthrew US imperialism and capitalist society. Yet it laid none of the groundwork necessary to achieve it! WUO established no popular support base for its leadership and it stayed numerically small, a “Prairie Fire” that failed to ignite!₪
Finally, in 1974, the folly of this omission was recognised within Weather and some members tried to re-orient the organisation to a policy focused on wooing the American working class. The hardliners in WUO however resisted and predictably clung to the old guerrilla war tactics, with the result of a splintering and further weakening of Weather [‘How the Weather Underground Failed at Revolution and Still Changed the World’, (Arthur M Eckstein), Time, (02-Nov-2016), http://time.com].
Rather than the Weathermen’s actions and tactics leading to a crystallisation of the (new) left in America as a cohesive force, its recourse to the nihilism of violence, the pattern of random bombings, alienated it from other sections of the far left such as SDS (Daniels). The greatest damage of the group’s bombings in fact was a self-inflicted one, when three of the Weathermen accidentally blew themselves up in a Greenwich Village townhouse in 1970⊕.
🔺 Scene of the WUO terrorists’ backfiring bomb (Source: Bettmann/Getty Images)
The middle-class dilemma
The Weathermen were essentially middle-class kids who took inspiration from grass-roots radicals and authentic working class militants like the Black Panthers. Therefore, they knew that to be taken seriously they needed to lose the bourgeois tag, to ‘declass’ themselves (to use Michael Miles’ term). Hodgdon has suggested that they were motivated partly by the “guilt arising from members’ acute consciousness of their own white privilege” [Hodgdon, Tim. Journal for the Study of Radicalism, vol. 1, no. 2, 2007, pp. 144–146. JSTOR, www.jstor.org/stable/41887583. Accessed 14 Jan. 2020]. The outcome was a resort to high focus violence by WUO which it equated with the demonstration of revolutionary commitment. Ultimately, violence became a habitual self-indulgence for the Weathermen. Fascinated with the idea of terrorism per se, their actions became more anarchic and nihilistic and only served to further isolate them from Middle America (Daniels).
Weather logo 🔺
A junket of romance and fantasy
Students of the WUO phenomena have noted how remarkably detached the group was from the realities of contemporary USA. Exhibiting a romantic view of Third World Liberation Movements, importing the urban-guerrilla tactics of the Tupamoros of Uruguay, of whom the Weathermen were only ever pale imitations. For ideological underpinnings, the Weathermen cherrypicked from Marxist political theory (Mao, Guevara, Marighella, Debray, etc) to forge a blueprint for extreme militant action. The often immature and at times infantile Weather members revelled in their status as deviants in society…and in their notoriety as politicised “bad-boy rock stars” of crime. Clearly, more than a few of the members gained a huge thrill from being publicly portrayed as fugitives, enemies of the state [‘”Prairie Fire” Memories’, (Jonah Raskin), Tablet, 18-Jul-2019, www.tabletmag.com].
🔺 The character “Mark Slackmeyer” in Garry Trudeau’s ‘Doonesbury’ comic is based on Weatherman Mark Rudd
Their ready resort to acts of violence was one manifestation of this, as was their indulgence in drug-taking (wholeheartedly embracing LSD and ‘grass’) and “free love” as integral to what they saw as liberating themselves from the strictures of a rigid and corrupt society (Daniels).
PostScript: Weather Underground, fade to black
Having failed to make the slightest dint on the fortress of the American political and economic elite, the Weathermen reduced their bombing acts after 1971 and continued to scale back through the rest of the seventies. The Weather Underground lingered on for several years before eventually petering out. This however did not stop the FBI from pursuing the home-grown terrorists long after they had ceased to be active. As Eckstein noted, the FBI’s responses to the Weather phenomena had caused the Bureau embarrassment. The FBI, the nation’s chief law enforcement organisation, continued to get them wrong…initially they underestimated Weather’s seriousness as a hostile element, then they overestimated its effectiveness. The FBI persisted with a misreading of their strength, thinking there were around 1,000 Weathermen guerrillas at large in the US, overstating the reality by a factor of ten. The FBI also illegally botched the evidence against the group so none of the Weathermen could be prosecuted for conspiring to bomb government buildings [‘The Americans who declared war on their country’, (Mark Honigsbaum), The Guardian, (21-Sep-2003), www.theguardian.com ; Eckstein, Time; ‘Bad Moon Rising’, AM Eckstein, www.yalebooks.yale.edu].
⑈⑈⑈⑈⑉⑉⑉⑉⑉⑉⑉⑈⑈⑈⑈⑉⑉⑉⑉⑉⑉⑉⑈⑈⑈⑈⑉⑉⑉⑉⑉⑉⑉⑈⑈⑈⑈⑉⑉⑉⑉⑉⑉⑉⑈⑈⑈⑈⑉⑉⑉⑉⑉⑉⑉⑈⑈⑈⑈⑉⑉⑉⑉⑉⑉⑉
❈ an annual British publication (first published 1897, now discontinued), a one-volume compendium of general and specialised knowledge in a select number of different fields
⊡ the original name, ‘Weatherman’, was taken from the lyric of a 1960s Bob Dylan song
✥ Bernadine Dohrn – who with Bill Ayers, Mark Rudd, Jeff Jones, Trevor Robbins, Kathy Boudin, Karen Ashley, Howie Machtinger and John Jacobs, founded the Weathermen. Jonah Raskin points out that a significant number of the members were, like him, Jewish (Raskin). Dohrn also headed up a Women’s Brigade within WUO
✪ a ‘symbolic’ war as Todd Gitlin described it
₪ Prairie Fire was the name of WUO’s 1976 published political statement, and a metaphor that the organisation was fond of using (eg, “a single spark can start a prairie fire”)
⊕ the three WUO bomb assemblers were the only victims of Weathermen bomb explosions as the group always forewarned the target locations so that humans could be evacuated from the spot in time
Republica Moldova, a Not Very Well Known European State in Post-Soviet Space: The Disadvantages of Being Geographically Contiguous with a Latent Russian Hot Spot
Geo-coordinates: 47°0’N 28°55’E. Area: 33,851 sq km. Pop: between 3.5 & 4 million (2018 est). Languages: Moldovan (Romanian), Russian; (minority languages) Gagauz, Bulgarian, Ukrainian. Capital: Chișinău (Rus: Kishinev)
Moldova is a small, basically flat, landlocked country situated on the Moldavian plateau, which forms a part of the Sub-Carpathian mountain system, bordered on its west by Romania and on its east by Ukraine. Most of Moldova’s territory lies between the area’s two main rivers, the Nistru and the Prut.
Moldova (or as it is formally titled, the Republic of Moldova) is one of Europe’s least known countries, it is just about the antithesis of turismo centro on the continent’s ratings board! Of the 44 sovereign countries in Europe recognised by the UN, it was the least visited country in 2016 (UN World Tourism Organisation). Historically, small and nondescript Moldova has tended to be a pawn shifted around from one competing imperial power to another over the centuries, valued only by the big power players for its geo-strategic importance in the region.
Moldavia, under the Soviet era ⇩
Pre-independence Moldova: a revolving door of designations and destinies In 1346 Moldova became the Romanian Principality of Moldavia which included the Duchy of Bukovina, eventually the territory was subsumed under the expanding imperial reach of the Ottomans. In 1812 the sultan ceded it to Russia and it became an outer-lying enclave of the tsar’s empire known as the Governorate of Bessarabia. Freed from Russian rule in 1917 as a consequence of the Bolshevik Revolution, it briefly became the Moldavian Democratic Republic before being united with the Kingdom of Romania (as a federated part of Greater Romania). In 1924 the entity’s status and name changed again, becoming the Moldavian Autonomous Soviet Socialist Republic❅. In 1940, in the wash-up of the USSR/Nazi Germany’s Molotov/Ribbentrop Pact, Stalin consolidated the territory after a land grab of parts of Romania, forming the Moldavian Soviet Socialist Republic. During the war Nazi Germany together with its Romanian ally captured Moldova and held it until the Red Army launched a successful counter-offensive in 1944. Once again in Russian (Soviet) hands, the USSR implemented a postwar process of Russification in the Moldavian ‘Republic’ (enforced socio-economic reforms, especially urbanisation and migration). The status quo persisted until 1991 and the dissolution of the Soviet Union. After this seismic political transformation Moldova along with many other Soviet SSRs gained its independence from the Russian empire [The Times Guide to Eastern Europe, (Ed. by Keith Sword), 1991; ‘Moldova between Russia and the West: A Delicate Balance’, (Eugene Rumer), Carnegie Endowment for International Peace, 23-May-2017, www.carnegieendowment.org].
Moldavia – the “Land of Aurochs” Since 1991 Republica Moldova’s path on the road to a viable and independent democracy has been obstructed by a myriad of challenges. From the start, like other former Soviet SSRs in Central Asia and the Caucasus, its long-term viability was hamstrung by the lack of a tradition of self-government and sovereignty. A major challenge has been trying to find political leaders not tainted by association with the Soviet era. The political inexperience also manifested itself in ongoing constitutional problems for the country. Economics is equally significant a hurdle for the still embryonic democracy…Moldova is a poor, agriculturally-based country, reliance on the former masters, the Russians, has come at a cost. The USSR’s legacy for the new country of a concentration of state and collective farms has made transitioning from a controlled to a free market economy a more rocky passage [‘Moldova’, (KA Hitchins, B Buckmaster, E Latham & F Nikolayevich Sukhopara), Encyclopaedic Britannia, www.britannia.com]. What pre-existing industry there was in Moldova, was concentrated in the Transdniestria corridor (see below).
Multiethnic identities and allegiances Roughly two-thirds of Moldova’s population is of Romanian descent with the remainder a mix of ethnicities…in the tiny eastern region of Transdniestria there is a block of predominantly Russian and Ukrainian speakers. Moldavia’s experience under the Soviets’ republics policy has included episodes of expulsions of native Moldovans, Gaguaz, Bulgarians and Jews, and the parachuting in of ethnic Russians and Ukrainians. One regional specialist has described it as “a product of ethnopolitical-administrative experimentation” (Rumer).
⇧ Old Orhei monastery, Moldova (Source: Calin Stan/Adobe Stock)
The challenge of stable government Since independence Moldova has managed to establish a reasonably acceptable level of political pluralism…awarded by Freedom House a rating of “partially free” (because of government corruption and deficiencies in the rule of law scoring 58 out of 100) [‘Freedom in the World 2019 – Moldova’, Freedom House, www.freedomhouse.org]. Power has tended to alternate between pro-Russian and pro-European leaders, comprising the (pro-Russian) socialist and communist parties, the centre-left Democratic Party and liberal reformists. At one point the country’s governance functioned for three years without an elected president. Regular changes of government and direction in Moldova reflects public disaffection with the inability of both sides of parliament to address the country’s problems (poor living standards, unemployment, high-level corruption especially involving a national banking scandal✪).
Transdniestria – the crux of conflict within the state (Image: www.joksankolikot.net) Transdniestria (officially Pridnestrovskaja Moldavskaja Respublika) Area: 4,163 sq km. Pop: 469,000 (2018 est) Languages: Russian, Moldovan, Ukrainian. Capital: Tiraspol
The highest profile issue undermining Moldova’s efforts to establish a stable, cohesive national entity has been the lingering problem of a separate Transdniestria. This narrow strip of land within the Moldovan state comprising significant percentages of Russians and Ukrainians□ broke away from Moldova soon after independence. A brief civil war ensued, Moldovan forces attempted to quash the Transdniestria revolt but was thwarted by the intervention of the Russian 14th Army. A cease-fire in 1992 brought the conflict to a halt and a security zone was established with a peace-keeping force (including Russian troops) in occupation. The Transdniestria enclave has continued to assert its putative sovereign independence, however neither Moldova or any other sovereign state including Russia has recognised its claims. Recently, there having been no resumption of the armed conflict, political onlookers have characterised the situation as a “frozen conflict”…some analysts in the West view it as “de facto settled”. Although the dispute remains unresolved, there is a perception that the combatants have learned over the intervening years “to peacefully co-exist” with one another (Rumer).
This is not to say that the Russian bear has relinquished its political ambitions or interest in the disputed territory, far from it! Transdniestria—and Moldova as a whole—remain geo-politically important to Russia vis-a-vis the Black Sea (more so after the aggressive Russian incursion into the Ukraine in 2014) and in its proximity to the Balkans. Russia supports a “special status” for Transdniestria (announced by then Russian PM Medvedev from Kiev). Meanwhile patterns of intent can be discerned, Moscow continues to maintain a presence in Transdniestria which it sees as a Russian outpost in that region. And there has been a clear effort to forge a new Soviet-Moldovan identity distinct from the Romanian one, eg, by the promotion of the Cyrillic alphabet in preference to the incumbent Latin script (Rumer).
A secondary separatist movement Transdniestria is not the only irredentist or ethnic breakaway movement that the government in Chișinău has had to contend with. From the late 1980s the Gagauz halki (people), a Turkic-speaking Christian minority in Russian Moldavia, experienced an upsurge in nationalist feeling. In 1990 the Gagauz, apparently concerned about the preservation of its own cultural identity within the new Moldovan state, unilaterally proclaimed itself an autonomous republic (Gaguazia, capital Comrat), followed one year later by a full declaration of independence. Intriguingly, despite this, the Gagauz are inclined to harbour a nostalgia for the old USSR [‘Moldova country profile’, BBC News, (15-Nov-2019), www.bbc.com]. The Moldovan republic has steadfastly refused to countenance independence for the Gagauz but in 1994 it did grant the region a form of autonomy (as a “national-territorial autonomous unit”) and it’s own governor (bașman) [‘Gaguazia’, Wikipedia, http://en.m.wikipedia.org].
Gagauzia ⇧
Russia’s role and influence in Moldova Heavily overlaying Moldova’s attempts to establish good governance and national viability is the gravitational pull exerted on it by both Russia and Romania. Successive Chișinău administrations have—to varying degrees—striven to free themselves from too much reliance on Russia. The relatively undeveloped nation has nonetheless had to acknowledge the economic realities of it’s situation: making a clean break from Russian dependence is something extremely difficult to accomplish. Clearly, the plan of Moldovan reformers was to move closer to the orbit of the EU and this has progressively happened after the country satisfied the EU of its willingness to make democratic and economic reforms. The outcome? Today, the EU is Moldova’s major trading partner (worth US$3.5 bn in 2016), making great strides in turning the country’s international trade matrix around [‘The World Factbook: Moldova’, (Central Intelligence Agency), www.cia.gov]. Nonetheless, economic dependence on Russia—through a complicated set of existing conditions—remains crucial and seemingly unavoidable for the time being.
Remittances, energy and wine The abysmally low GDP per capital by European standards of Moldovans (US$5,237, 2017) forces large numbers of them into becoming guest workers overseas. Many of these go to Europe especially Italy, but Russia remains the main source of external employment. Remittances by these workers back to their families in Moldova amount to about US$1.2 bn each year (15% of the country’s GDP), the third highest in the world. By far the largest portion of Moldovan Gastarbeiter, about 500,000 guest workers, rely on Russia each year for their income (Rumer; ‘World Factbook’).
Access to energy for Moldova compounds its fragile interdependence. The country is in debt to Russia’s giant Gasprom corporation to the tune of US$6 bn for it’s supply of natural gas (ironically the greater part of this debt to Moscow was incurred by Transdniestria). This energy situation persists because Romania has been able to meet at this time only a small portion of Moldova’s gas needs (‘World Factbook’).
(Photo credit: AP)
Wine-making, on the surface of it, is Moldova’s one bright light. In 2014 the small southeastern European country was the world’s 20th largest producer of wine (mainly reds). Easily it is—together with remittances—Moldova’s most important export. Again however Russia is at the core of the matter. Up to 90% of Moldovan wine goes to Russia. Good for Moldova’s export earnings sure, but the downside of such over-dependence on Russia is fraught with hazards. This places Russia in the position of being able to inflict damage on the Moldovan economy, were it to harbour a whim to do so. And this is not a purely theoretical consideration: twice this century (most recently in 2013), the Russian Republic banned the import of wine from Moldova with predictable effects on the latter’s economy. Russia offered up a pretext, alleging that the Moldovan wine was contaminated with plastic, but it doesn’t require a lot of imagination to see a thinly-veiled warning of disapproval aimed at it’s small regional neighbour [‘Why Russian wine ban is putting pressure on Moldova’, (Tessa Dunlop), BBC News, 21-Nov-2013, www.bbcnews.com; ‘Moldova country profile’].
Closer ties with Romania? Linguistic homogeneity does bind Moldova closer to Romania but the Moldovans are in no hurry to formalise the nexus through unification with it’s western neighbour. Romania does provide something of a counter-pull for Moldova against the leverage exerted by Russia and a strong Moldovan-Bulgarian nationalist movement has been fostered (Rumer). However, only between seven and fifteen percent of Moldovans have indicated that they are in favour of union with Romania✜ [‘A union between Moldova and Romania: On the cards?’, (Michael Bird), EU Observer, 05-Mar-2015, www.euobserver.com]. Moldovans, it appears, despite the linguistic cord binding them to Romania, don’t tend to possess the sort of irredentist urges that Transdniestrians do for Russia.
The murmurings of unification advocacy have been confined to some sectors on the Romanian side. Even these mostly have tended to be tentative ones. One proposal calls for Romania to reunify with the former geographical entity of ‘Bessarabia’, which is highly problematic – such a union would include parts of present day Ukraine and would exclude Transdniestria! In 2015 a group of Romanian MPs under the banner “Friends of the Union” called for closer economic and cultural ties between the two homophonic countries. Bucharest has, since 2010, started to provided significant amounts of aid to Moldova (€100 M), including for education. For the most part though, Romania’s greatest value to ordinary Moldovan citizens lies in it being a gateway to the EU…since 1991 around half-a-million Moldovans have obtained Romanian passports which allows them entry to the wider Western Europe through the prevailing Schengen arrangements (Bird; Rumer).
PostScript: Sole remaining remnant of the Soviet Union? Transdniestria is the only political entity in Europe which still bears the “hammer and sickle” on it’s flag—and the only Eastern European entity which still calls it’s secret service the KGB! Tiraspol’s “House of Soviets” proudly honours the tradition of Lenin and Stalin with busts and pictures and the enclave’s various patriotic hommages to the Soviet past lead many outsiders to not take Transdniestria particularly seriously…”a fossilised piece of the former USSR” (Lonely Planet), “a collective hallucination” shaped like a “small worm squashed between two larger creatures” [‘Hopes Rise in Transnistria of a Russian Annexation’, (Alexander Smoltczyk), Spiegel International, 24-Apr-2014, www.spiegel.de/international/]. But dieheart Transdniestrian irredentists were encouraged by Russia’s 2014 annexation of Crimea and cling to a (slim) hope that Russia will some day follow suit with Transdniestria, or at the very least, make it a non-contiguous exclave on the model of Kaliningrad (Smoltczyk).
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❅ an “autonomous republic” under the jurisdiction of Ukraine – an “artificial political creation” inspired by Moscow’s ideological rhetoric of “world revolution” [‘Moldavian Autonomous Soviet Socialist Republic’, Wikipedia, http://en.m.wikipedia.org]
✪ the failure of successive administrations to prosecute suspects of a US$1 bn bank embezzlement (‘Moldova country profile’). The scandal is known within the country as the “Great Moldovan Bank Robbery”
□ 34% and 26.7% respectively (2015 census)
✜ Romania presents a perception problem for some Moldovans for who, a less than favourable image of a backward country with a scruffy gypsy culture, persists (Bird)