James Earl Jones. The younger years. Love it.

Tags for this video have been changed from 'Matewan, West Virginia, Coal War, Labor, Racism' to 'Matewan, West Virginia, Coal War, Labor, Racism, chris cooper, james earl jones' - edited by kronosposeidon

Tags for this video have been changed from 'Matewan, West Virginia, Coal War, Labor, Racism, chris cooper, james earl jones' to 'Matewan, West Virginia, Coal War, Labor, Racism, chris cooper, james earl jones, union' - edited by kronosposeidon

Anecdote:

My dad was fairly old (53) when I was born. He was born in 1913, so he was alive during the Great Depression (he rode the box cars) and World War II (he served in the Navy, in the Pacific). Anyway, he was a union man his whole life, BUT he was racist. Not KKK, cross-burning racist, but racist all the same. And what was depicted in this video was very real, even in the first half of the 20th century. I'm not at all proud of his racism, but he was my dad, and he was a loving father, and I still loved him. So sue me.

Back in the '30s it wasn't unacceptable to be a Communist. Though my dad wasn't a Communist, he knew and socialized with some. One time he went to a Communist gathering, mainly because there was free beer. (My pappy also enjoyed his drink.) However there were black people there too (because the dirty commies were (gasp) NOT racist), and he didn't want to share his table with them, so he left. Again, I'm not proud of this, but unfortunately that is how he was, and how many other Americans were at the time.

It's sad how we divide amongst each other for whatever reason. Whether it's race, nationality, religion, or what have you, it's all sad.

"There ain't but two sides to this world: them that work, and them that don't."

The more things change, the more they stay the same.

Incidentally, a lot of political analysts pointed to this era as the reason why West Virginia voted so heavily against Barack Obama; they had a long-term problem with African Americans taking their jobs in the mines. Most West Virginians didn't realize that shunning them from their Union wasn't helping the situation for either party.

It's sad we divide ourselves, but it's sadder still that the world is run by people who're masters at exploiting those divisions. They advance themselves by getting people to blame a convenient scapegoat rather than taking on the real roots of the problem.

The whole conservative movement is one giant Jedi mind-trick on people; since corporations always get away with bribing government into doing things against people's interests, people's interests should be to deprive government of power over corporations.

Never mind that the end result is that the corporations get more power that way; they were always the good guys here. All the bad stuff you think they did was really just some government regulation somewhere that forced them to be evil.

This fairy tale about how unregulated free markets always lead to equality and freedom for all flies in the face of what history has taught us.

*politics
*money

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What I get from this clip (love the movie, has an awesome shoot-out scene which I couldn't find) and from the two comments is that it's in our own disinterest to divide ourselves, and thereby dissolve what little influence we have.

Hey, aren't we supposed to be in a socialist revolution now? Let's get with it!

*quality *equality

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Adding video to channels (Equality) - requested by burdturgler.

All right... we'll take the niggers and the chinks. But we don't want the Irish! -Olsen Johnson