25, 50 and 75 Years Ago

November 25, 2019

November 28, 1994

The trial of Canadian Auto Workers member Roger Warren on nine counts of murder is being exposed as a frame-up, even as the government presses forward with its case. One of the prosecution’s main witnesses, Royal Canadian Mounted Police Sgt. Gregg McMartin, admitted in court that he lied several times while interrogating Warren.

Warren is a member of CAW Local 2304. He and his coworkers waged an 18-month strike against Royal Oak Mines in Yellowknife, Northwest Territories. The battle ended with a union victory in December 1993. The charges against Warren stem from a mine explosion that killed strikebreakers employed by the company during the strike.

Many miners believe that it was the company’s criminal negligence around mine safety that led to the deaths and that the trial of Warren is a continuation of attempts to bust the union.

November 28, 1969

WASHINGTON, D.C. — From every conceivable city, village and town they came to participate in the most massive demonstration in American history. The roughly one million Americans who marched on Washington and San Francisco Nov. 15 were taking part in the largest political confrontation ever between masses of American people and the government that supposedly represents them.

The Nov. 15 march was a powerful refutation of the notion that a march on the nation’s capital demanding immediate, unconditional U.S. withdrawal from Vietnam, organized on a nonexclusion basis, was far too radical an action to win the support of the millions of Americans opposed to the war.

When a million citizens of the most powerful imperialist country march through the streets saying stop the war, it is a portent of things to come.

November 25, 1944

Defiantly answering the Allied-supported attempt of the counter-revolutionary Pierlot government to disarm the revolutionary fighters of the Resistance Forces in Belgium, 15,000 men and women workers marched through the streets Nov. 19 in a militant and tumultuous demonstration demanding the resignation of Pierlot’s government.

The unmistakenly revolutionary mood of the demonstrators was evidenced in their singing of the battle song of Socialism, “The Internationale,” by the red flags predominant among their banners, and by the Hammer and Sickle emblem of the Bolshevik Revolution on their armbands.

About half the marchers were women. Also among the demonstrators were a considerable number of men in Belgian army uniform. They paraded and shouted, “Down with Pierlot!”