On this day in 1912, the Paint Creek Mine War began when West Virginia miners struck, demanding formal union recognition and fairer labor practices. The incident quickly escalated into one of the worst labor conflicts in U.S. history.
The event, also known as the Paint Creek-Cabin Creek Strike, centered on the area enclosed by two streams, Paint Creek and Cabin Creek. It is considered part of the “Coal Wars”, a series of armed conflicts between workers and coal companies from the 1890s - 1930s in the United States.
The strike lasted for fourteen months, and over 5,000 workers participated. Notable labor organizer Mother Jones (shown) came to West Virginia to support the workers, organizing a secret march of 3,000 armed miners to the steps of the state capitol in Charleston to read a declaration of war to Governor William E. Glasscock.
The confrontation directly caused approximately fifty violent deaths from armed conflicts between miners and strike-breaking forces, as well as many more deaths indirectly caused by starvation and malnutrition among the striking miners. In terms of casualties, it was among the worst conflicts in American labor history.
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Saw Alex Garland’s Civil War. Thought the complaints might be overblown. I was wrong. There were a few suspenseful scenes I liked, some moments where it reminded me of the film How I Live Now which I enjoyed. But from commentary I’ve seen from Garland himself, he wanted to pretend this was an indictment of both sides of the political aisle in America. But it wasn’t. When we finally get a look at the military that is fighting the illegal President, we see a multicultural infantry. And whenever we see people aligned with the President, who is obviously Donald Trump, we see Boogaloo Boys in Hawaiian shirts and other assorted white supremacists. This wasn’t a centrist “I hate the democrat far-left and the republican far-right” movie. This was a movie about liberal multiculturalists fighting against an explicitly white supremacist faction emboldened by Trump taking a third term and disbanding the FBI.
Which, it’s probably for the best that they kept it vague and didn’t worldbuild much, because what little we do get is so stupid. There’s a brief mention of “Maoist Portland.” There was something called the “Antifa Massacre.” I doubt there are enough Maoists in this country to fill up a convention center, let alone take over a major metro area. As mentioned above, there’s a scene where guys wearing Hawaiian shirts packing carbines fight an unidentified enemy, presumably the previously mentioned liberals. It doesn’t seem like Garland, when deciding to write this film, sat down and really studied post-WWII conflicts to really determine what war in ~2020s America would look like. I don’t really see the lessons learned from, like, Mosul, Ukraine, and Gaza reflected here. Instead seems like a guy who spends way too much time in Twitter and has a terminal case of Trump-brain made a movie about Jan 6th.
Also, as ever I do not believe there can be a civil war in 2020s America, or at least not one like in Civil War, where the liberal white moderate and the conservative white moderate fight each to the death over Donald Trump or race war or whatever. They’re both entirely too comfortable to fight a war, and have no real incentive to do so. The liberal white moderate is not so committed to pluralism that they’d actually sacrifice anything for it, let alone their lives or comfort. And I doubt most of the chuds would really be willing to sacrifice anything to bring about their visions of a white ethnostate. If there was a clear economic motive I could buy it, like the actual American civil war.