JANUARY 9 in History

January 9th is a special day in history. It marks (at least) two landmark moments in which the oppressed stood up at the gates of the most powerful. In both cases, the response of the ruling forces was bloody repression, and in both cases the repression set fire to the passions of the people, fomenting insurrectionary resistance on a national scale. While we look back upon history, though, let us use what we learn to inspect issues of democracy, oppression and struggle at contemporary junctures in the developments of lands like Iraq, Palestine, and the United States of America.

Russia, 1905

This January 9th, according to the Julian Calendar which Russians used at the time, we celebrate the centennial anniversary of the march on the Winter Palace in St. Petersburg, Russia. Russia had gone through some moderate reforms in recent decades, most of which had failed to come to fruition, while Czar-supported porgroms against Jews and dissidents and a failing war against the Japanese continued to tear at the average person's faith in the monarchy. A massive strike had begun in the capital, and George Gapon, a priest and an agent of the Czarist secret police, called for a march to the Winter Palace. On that Sunday, between one and two hundred thousand Russian workers marched on their capital and the Czarist version of the White House, with demands for Czar Nicholas II.

Imperial troops fired on the non-violent crowd as it approached, and estimates of dead range from 1,000 to 4,600. As news spread around the country, strikes sprang up amongst workers, and a failed revolution engulfed all of Russia, complete with mutinies amongst soldiers and sailors, worker and peasant councils taking local political power, general strikes, industrial sabotage, peasant risings, and urban revolts.

The parallels of this should not be lost on any resident of the United States of America. With the persecution of immigrants and activists, brutal and unpopular occupations of Iraq, Afghanistan, and else where, the lack genuine representative democracy (much less any other form of democracy), and the exploitation of workers and elimination of jobs, all encapsulated in the world's last real Empire, we should have at least a little bit of an understanding of what the martyrs of Bloody Sunday had been through. While no one would hope for a replay of Bloody Sunday at the upcoming protests against the Inauguration of George W. II, we might hope for the reverberations of that event to galvanize oppressed peoples around the country, and, indeed, the world.

Panamá, 1964

By 1964, the US had maintained some form of military occupation and politico-economic domination of Panamá for about one hundred and fifteen tumultous years. Uprisings were common and spontaneous in the semi-colony, and a bitter feud had begun between Gringos who lived on US-owned land in the Canal Zone, most of which was used as a military base and was home to military families, and Panamanians who lived in their adjacent capital. The wealthy Gringos regularly harassed locals, and the Panamanians conducted militant protest against their occupiers.

On that day, a couple of hundred Panamanian high school students marched across what was then called Fourth of July Avenue (and later renamed the Avenida de Las Martires), to replace a US flag up with the Panamanian one. As they began to climb the pole, Zonian students attacked, singing the Star Spangled Banner, ripping the flag and beating the Panamanian youth. The police joined the Gringo kids, pushing the Panamanian students back. They responded by setting up barricades and smashing windows. Ascanio Arosemena was the first to be shot dead by the police.

National insurrection had been ignited for the next three days. Anti-Imperialism, a basic element of Panamanian consciousness, came out in every part of the country as the rioting ensued. By the end, dozens lay dead and hundreds injured, while the Panamanian president actually (but very briefly) broke ties with the United States. This was the last great rebellion that pushed the US over the edge, forcing it to enter talks that eventually ended with the 1977 Panama Canal Treaties, which called for the full US military pull-out by 2000 and the hand-over of the canal. Only Panamá's Mothers Day rivals la Dia de los Martires as a national holiday in that country, beating out both its independence day from Spain and its independence day from Colombia.

The Struggle for Democracy

The day that Panamanians will celebrate the 41st anniversary of that watershed moment in their struggle against US occupation, Palestinians will participate in a most imperfect experiment in representative democracy in the elections for the Palestinian National Authority. But while Palestinians do have a right to vote, that right is restricted to those living within the occupied territories, disenfranchizing over four million people in the Palestinian diaspora. The vast majority of such elections include refugees and emmigrants who live far from their homelands, including elections in the US, Israel, Mexico, Venezuela, and even in the upcoming elections in Iraq. The Palestinians have also had to cope with the same plight of the people of Panamá, Iraq, Afghanistan, Haiti, Nicaragua, and countless other lands during ventures into republicanism- foreign brutal occupation.

And Iraq's elections appear to be in an even sadder state, as most of the candidates appear to be collaborationists with the occupying forces, and a similar violence rips through people's daily lives. Meanwhile, in Russia, authoritarian despotism appears to worsen the woes of a poverty-stricken people, and in Panamá, US troops are returning to exploit a country already devastated by neo-liberal colonialism. Whether we, the people within the Empire, choose to march on our own Winter Palace on January 20th, our actions against the economic, political, and social system of this country will ripple throughout the world.