Messaging Roundup: Famine in Ireland and Gaza, and Labor Day slogans that keep on giving

Greetings Resisters! Today we look back to look ahead, with two guest contributions from fellow resisters. First, Kate Fermoile reflects on how the famine in Gaza intersects with her sense of Irish history. Then, Mandy Keifetz provides a little Labor Day history lesson with takeaways for today.

The Great Famine and the Gaza Famine

By Kate Fermoile

As a woman of Irish descent, I grew up learning that my ancestors left Ireland because of the “Potato Famine.” You know the story. You probably learned the same in school: a blight destroyed the potato crop, the main food source of the Irish poor, and a million people starved to death while another million fled the country.

Kate Fermoile in County Kerry, Ireland

It wasn’t until I was an adult and digging deeper into Irish history, that I realized that, yes, there was a blight, but Ireland wasn’t a barren Island. The fields around the potato mounds still grew wheat, barley, oats, other root vegetables and livestock. Irish tenant farmers grew that food, but it didn’t feed the Irish people. Under colonial British rule, it was taken from the country under armed guard and shipped abroad for profit, while the Irish were left with only the failing potato crop, causing the Great Irish Famine.

The British didn’t just starve my ancestors; they rewrote the story as a natural disaster. They erased their role in creating and sustaining the famine

When I read about the famine in Gaza, I feel those echoes. Food is being blocked, people are being killed while waiting for food and children are NOT dying because the land cannot sustain them, but because food is being used as a weapon of war. Already, some are twisting this story to shift responsibility, just as was done to my ancestors.

Here in the US we are also living through a wave of historical erasure. Trump is in the process of re-writing our history. Last week he criticized the Smithsonian for its negative portrayal of slavery and announced a comprehensive review of exhibits at Smithsonian history museums. Historical erasure is never harmless. It makes oppression easier to stomach and therefore to repeat.

I think of my Irish ancestors who fled their homeland where truth was stolen along with their food. And I think of the people of Gaza who are enduring a horrific famine. We owe it to them and to history to name what is happening.

Seen on the Lower East Side; Photo by Marjorie Ingall

Workers Band Together

By Mandy Keifetz

I spent a little time today reading the local city papers. From September 6, 1882. The Sun was openly pro-labor that day and its coverage is truly granular. I recommend reading it in its entirety. The Times described the nation’s first Labor Day Parade with condescension: “The great majority smoked cigars and all seemed bent on having a good time.” The Trib vilified the Central Labor Union (the union of unions which was that first Labor Day’s organizing force) as “demagogues of the worst sort” but seemed not to want to diss the workers whom they described as “persons of no small intelligence.”

Scenes from a NYC Labor Day Parade in 1909

Mostly, I was looking for descriptions of banners. What were the messages then, and would they still resonate today, on the eve of our city’s 143rd Labor Day, in this strange global moment when the people with state and corporate power in our nation seem to be careening us backward through time to that age of unchecked worker exploitation?

LABOR BUILT THIS UNION AND LABOR SHALL RULE IT

LABOR PAYS ALL TAXES

LABOR WILL BE UNITED

THE TRUE REMEDY IS ORGANIZATION AND THE BALLOT

LESS WORK, MORE PAY

DONT SMOKE CIGARS WITHOUT THE UNION LABEL

SMOKE NO REPUBLICAN JAWBREAKERS OR DEMOCRATIC STINKERS

WORKERS BAND TOGETHER

LAND THE COMMON PROPERTY OF THE WHOLE PEOPLE

TO THE WORKERS BELONG THE WEALTH

AGITATE EDUCATE ORGANIZE

PARTY HACKS TO THE REAR

WORKERS BAND TOGETHER

I’m not sure whether to be heartened or saddened by how familiar these banners feel. What strikes me most is how absent from these slogans is any sense that the ethnic origins of the workers mattered to labor or to capital. The workers marched by industry, not nationality, or color. Capital has always depended on itinerant labor, but the labor movement hasn’t always been clear that migrant justice is their fight too.

I hope we have a functional society in 143 years, and that someone from that future moment, trawling this week’s papers for the content of our protest signs, sees something hopeful. It’s a bleak old world, but there’s so much to do. Get out there this week! Choose an action, any action! Let your slogans ring across time! (And try to steer clear of Republican jawbreakers and Democratic stinkers.)

May Day protest, May 1, 2025, NYC (Photo credit: Julie Subrin)

Amplify This

• Messaging at every level: love to see Zohran with the Herr’s potato chip bag and some wholesome organized scavenger hunt fun. And don’t forget to join our newly created BKR for Zohran Signal channel.

• Glennon Doyle quoting Michelle Alexander, urging us to “get in the boat” to fight fascism.

• Check out these resister-friendly Ten Commandments of Defiance

  

• Can we get more of this everywhere? “If you hurt my people, nothing will stop me - not time or political circumstance - from making sure that you face justice under our constitutional rule of law." IL Governor Pritzker addresses Trump’s plans to bring the military to Chicago.

• The hugely popular Humans of New York Instagram account has been posting a series on the Palestinian staff of Doctors Without Borders in Gaza.

• Get your friends together and host a Report ICE zine party

• The Human Rights Campaign asks “Who are we to fight the alchemy of posting Taylor content?

• Here’s a depressing but useful analysis of totalitarian framing.

• Join the parade and march to support labor in NYC at the AFL-CIO and NYC Central Labor Council - NYC Labor Day Protest, Saturday, September 6

• Ungovernable Creativity: Resisting Fascism One Day at a Time zine. By @sharonfrancesme

• Jess Craven and Qasim Rashid on the connection between Gaza, DC, and ICE.

• Meet the billionaires where they’re at–the Hamptons, and join a bus of activists this Sunday to take action.

• Contact your electeds with this call script for Gaza.

And as always,

‘Til Next Time,

Julie, Kate, & the Messaging Team