25, 50 and 75 Years Ago

February 10, 2025

February 7, 2000

CHARLESTON, South Carolina — Cops in full riot gear attacked an early morning march to the waterfront by hundreds of members of the International Longshoremen’s Association Jan. 20. Eight of the unionists are now facing frame-up charges of inciting to riot.

The action was called to protest the use of nonunion labor on the docks. The police “blocked off the streets. There were blue lights everywhere. They were on the roofs, horseback, there was a helicopter and they had the National Guard on alert,” stated Kenneth Riley, president of ILA Local 1422. The cops ensured the unloading of a ship by nonunion dock workers.

The eight facing charges are scheduled to appear in Municipal court Jan. 25 for preliminary hearings. “The show of local support from other unions has been good,” Riley said. “Everyone has been waiting for us to tell them how they can help.”

February 7, 1975

Maria Joffe, the widow of the Left Oppositionist Adolf Joffe, won exile in Israel Jan. 12. “I have little time left but I have a commitment to humanity to write so people will know what happens in the Soviet Union,” the 75-year-old Bolshevik veteran said on her arrival at Tel Aviv airport.

There was no indication of why Joffe’s widow chose Israel as a place of exile. Every Jew has a right to Israeli citizenship.

Maria Joffe was held in a concentration camp from 1929 to 1956, from the Stalinist bureaucracy’s consolidation of its dictatorial regime until the post-Stalin “thaw.” She was in the Trotsky home on Jan. 17, 1928, when the revolutionary leader was seized and sent off to exile in Soviet Central Asia. It is not clear whether Maria Joffe was arrested then, or decided to remain working in Russia and was arrested later.

February 6, 1950

In 1900, world politics was European politics. The great European powers had divided the globe among themselves and as supreme rulers determined the fate of four continents. In 1950, European politics has become world politics. Europe is divided between American imperialism and the Stalinist bureaucracy who as supreme rulers determine its fate.

In 1900, the fervent knights of European civilization put their brand on the African brush and the Pacific islands, the Arab oases and the towns of China. Everywhere famine, opium, syphilis and forced labor followed in the wake of the generals, the traders and the missionaries.

In 1950, barefoot children are to be seen on the highways of Europe. Jews, Germans, Ukrainians, Balts have been transplanted, deported, driven to forced labor. And hunger’s emaciated face is to be seen in every European city.