FORGOTTEN HISTORY LEADS TO SHAME AND DISHONOR
BY Gordon Duff STAFF WRITER/Senior Editor
Yesterday, as I so often do, I loaded into the car and drove to Detroit, where my family has lived for well over 200 years. None of us live there anymore. Detroit looks more like Hiroshima than Detroit, with open fields and burned out houses interlaced with areas of sparkling new hotels and casinos and the huge new stadiums.
My wife and I head into the older inner city neighborhoods to shop for antiques and to eat in familiar restaurants in areas now sprawling with those immigrants our presidential candidates deride so much. The hundreds of thousands of Islamic settlers and Hispanics who have turned endless miles of the burned out relics of Detroit into safe and vibrant communities are as forgotten as the half million Jews living a few miles away.
This is just a new stage in development that began with a few French families in the late 1600s. We came to Detroit from Scotland in the 1700s and joined with the French families to trade furs with the Indians (or whatever the hell we call them now). We fled Scotland as half the family sided with the Highlanders against the British invaders at Culloden in 1748. The other half joined the British and married into the Royal Family. They don’t really talk to the rest of us anymore. I am fine with that. We were all thieves, but those who ran off to America were, perhaps, more open about it. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Alexander_Duff,_1st_Duke_of_Fife
But this is not the Detroit we are going to talk of today…..
As I get off I75, the main artery splitting America in two, I cross the Rouge River. Famous for the huge Ford Plant, once largest factory in the world, the family had originally settled at the mouth of the Rouge, where it met the Detroit, building a trading post. (later moved across the river: http://www.heritagefdn.on.ca/userfiles/HTML/nts_1_8806_1.html)
Now I cross the river on an aging bridge surrounded by the relics of tugs and ferries, now little more than rotting hulks, few having been moved in 50 years or more. The neighborhoods there still have the original churches, Hungarian churches. The rest that can be seen may mean something to me, but to anyone else, it will mean little but rust, decay and ugliness.
As with much of the inner city, with the burned out neighborhoods and areas of renewal, churches tell the history. One says “Originally Built in 1701 by French Settlers”, but most are Polish, German and Hungarian, built by Europes best stone smiths and financed by rich and poor alike. In many areas they are all that is left, some abandoned relics, some magnificent, even beyond those Americans love to visit and photograph in Europe.
The people are gone now. Many of the neighborhoods are gone too. Even their stories are gone, forgotten like the graves that dot the cemeteries where generations of my fore bearers lie, beneath stones often toppled and grown over. The bridge still stands and carries a plaque from the 1930s when laborers fought gangsters and thugs paid by the auto companies in a war for fair wages and living conditions.
There were deaths that day as there were on so many others and in so many other battles, in Detroit, Cleveland, Chicago, Pittsburgh and a dozen other cities. That these deaths were as much a part of the fight for Americas freedoms as those on Lexington Common is a shame.
That battle had started in Detroit as early as the 1880s. Little is told of it today, washed from history by a press controlled by the right wing and educational institutions still living in fear that the terms “labor” and “communism” are always hand in hand. In truth, the last 50 years has seen a diminishment of freedom in America where any voice for freedom or equality is shouted down or forced underground.
Too often the only resort has been violence. This was the case in the 1960s but it was much more so in the first half of the century when military forces were used dozens of times against blacks, workers, immigrants and any freedom loving American who threatened the powerful and the totalitarians. Little is said today of how early military bombers were used in Oklahoma City to wipe out “uppity coloreds” or how the National Guard or their Nazi led clandestine death squads recruited from the American Legion were used to murder labor organizers and their families. Our history is cleansed of this, finally, and we can now live in blissful ignorance, unless you occasionally look around you. You may be walking on hallowed ground. These heroic dead are seldom interned in Arlington and, if possible, are forgotten even more quickly.
Everything America has, from public schools, clean water and food, voting rights, safe neighborhoods (for some) and affordable health care (for the few) is entirely the result of trade unions, once branded “Communist” and subversive. Any honest study of history will show you that our lot was destined to be little but serfdom and “wage slavery” except for people like Walter Reuther, John L. Lewis and Jimmy Hoffa.
Reuther was one of the founders of the United Auto Workers. Unions came to the auto industry only after Reuther and his “Flying Squad” went to open war with the criminals and gangsters hired by Ford, Chrysler and General Motors. Eventually, the UAW occupied the main GM assembly plant in Flint Michigan (1937) forcing a settlement. Without that, few workers in America would be making over 2 dollars an hour even today and their would be no heath insurance, something currently disappearing with the loss of unions and decent paying jobs to the “sweatshops” of Mexico and Chinese slave labor.
Today we read about J. Edgar Hoover of the FBI and how he was planning to protect America from Communism in 1950 by sending 12,000 Americans to concentration camps. Number ONE on his list was Walter Reuther, someone Detroit has named one of her main highways after and seen by most as the savior of millions. Many on the Hoover list should be allowed a place in Arlington, if they aren’t already there. Being an enemy of J. Edgar Hoover, could very well mean you were a heroic fighter for freedom and decency.
To Hoover, Reuther was another enemy. Hoover, drag queen, homosexual, degenerate gambler and partner in organized crime, ran the FBI as a private police force and death squad for decades, murdering many, including at least one US President, Kennedy, his brother Robert, Martin Luther King and many many others. Some see this as conjecture. Ask around. People unaware of Hoover and his insanity and hatred for American freedom will be people you should keep your children away from. They may not only be ignorant, but they may also hold dear some of his values.
Under Hoover’s watch, Russians stole the Atom Bomb, gangsters took over much of our nation and churches were burned thru the south. Every day, Hoover and his boyfriend, Clyde, would hit the racetrack with top gangster cronies and live the high life while Hollywood praised his glories. Little has changed.
The warfare that carried on in Detroit between the Fascists, Black Legion, the Klan, the American Legion, Purple Gang, auto Barons like Ford, Chrysler, Dodge and workers looking for decent wages, safe food and good schools is little more than an afterthought. That we have been doomed to relive this era as issues of lowered living standards, inadequate healthcare, unsafe food and immigration come, again, to the forefront is testimony to the damage done by allowing history to be revised by the powerful and mean spirited.
Driving thru Detroit with its history of German, Hungarian and Polish immigration and the struggles for real freedoms begun in 1776 carrying forward to battles between a new class of American heroes and a newer class of “Tory sympathizers” set the stage for Detroit, for a short few years, becoming the center of the known universe. The abandoned plants and empty fields were once the “arsenal of Democracy”, with the majority of the wartime weapons production of the Allies centered around Detroit. The skills “our Germans” brought with them along with the “Honkies” and “Poles” and the tens of thousands of “hillbillies” and “southern blacks” who swelled the labor force of Detroit into a juggernaut that would overwhelm the Axis powers in World War Two is another forgotten story. We remember the “Merlin” engine that powered the Spitfire and P51, but we forget that it was the “Packard Merlin Engine”, from Detroit, home of nearly every truck from the “Red Ball Express”, every Sherman tank, every B24 Liberator, and a thousand other weapons that kept the world free.
Those forces that fought against the labor unions in the 1920s and 30s heralded the new world offered by Mussolini and Hitler as the answer to America’s problems. In the 20’s Legionnaires marched for Mussolini as, during the 30s and even early 40s, factory owners organized Americans behind their Fascist friends. That same city and the workers meant to be kept as slaves were the greatest force defeating the Axis partners of Detroit’s factory owners. The humor in this, of course, is that the Fascist factory owners got rich supplying both sides in the war.
Today, Communism is only a memory. Yet, still, we have the puppets of a new generation of Fascists, our Limbaughs and Bushes, putting their boots on the necks of our few remaining workers in a nation of closed factories and endless war. Another generation of Americans is being thrown out their homes by the banks much like the “dust bowl Okies” of the depression this time thru a “foreclosure crisis”. New year, new people but really the same bankers and same thieves behind it.
70 years ago we were the light of freedom. Now the world sees us as the inheritors of the Axis, the soulless military juggernaut choking the breath out of their dreams. Neither we nor Germany were really the savior or the enemy then, nor was Russia the “savior of the working man” with its millions dying in prison camps at the hands of the Stalinist dictatorship.
We still have a memory. We still have history alive around us. We can still have common sense, though I see so little of it nowadays. Now the revisionists are busy selling 9/11 and our Global War on Terror as something other than a project concocted by the powerful to keep oil and weapons money flowing while Americans trade their rights and freedom for fear and hate.
Those that can afford it, are walling themselves in or simply leaving America by the thousands. Those that understand, live for a better day they doubt will ever come. Those too stupid to live, are looking for Rudy Guiliani, John McCain, Hilliary or some other phony to save them from their own stupidity.
I tend to repeat my same message. Stupidity is not harmless. When you fight against freedom, even when that fight is in support of hate mongers who have bought our media and stolen our government, you are a traitor as much as though you were carrying a gun for an enemy during a “declared war”.
If you feel safe, bask in that safety knowing that you, in truth bask in the joy of knowing America and its hope for the world is dead. Some of us live to prove you wrong.
GORDON DUFF IS A MARINE VIETNAM VETERAN AND REGULAR CONTRIBUTOR ON POLITICAL AND SOCIAL ISSUES
Gordon Duff posted articles on VT from 2008 to 2022. He is a Marine combat veteran of the Vietnam War. A disabled veteran, he worked on veterans and POW issues for decades.
Gordon is an accredited diplomat and is generally accepted as one of the top global intelligence specialists. He manages the world’s largest private intelligence organization and regularly consults with governments challenged by security issues.
Duff has traveled extensively, is published around the world, and is a regular guest on TV and radio in more than “several” countries. He is also a trained chef, wine enthusiast, avid motorcyclist, and gunsmith specializing in historical weapons and restoration. Business experience and interests are in energy and defense technology.
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