Behind the Bastards covered this. The mining company established a 'rape room' system, where wives and daughters of injured miners paid off medical debts with their bodies.
Part One: The Second American Civil War You Never Learned About
this post was submitted on 01 Sep 2025
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Well. That goes on the list of things I really didn't need to know. What the fuck, humanity.
What kind of traitorous soldiers fight against their own people?
That's a pretty roundabout way to describe regular old cops.
It's almost like there was a plan behind the right's propaganda machine that has spent decades convincing ordinary people that if other ordinary people ask for things like rights or fairness or safety then that means they are an evil enemy.
It’s almost like there was a plan
There's definitely an ideology. And there are certainly a number of plots and schemes executed at a high level.
But so much of the modern condition of American policing is just state sponsored stocastic terrorism. It's less a coherent plan as an unchecked filibuster. Thousands of idiots and assholes told "do as thou wilt" so long as they do it to the underclass.
Probably harder to find examples where they wouldn't.
Othering is a pretty powerful tool built right into the human condition.
I would be curious how true that would be in a post-scarcity egalitarian society. How much does our impulse to create out-groups depend on resource insecurity?
Obviously in capitalism having an out-group makes it easier to exploit everyone by creating division. Since exploitation is the key to profits, capitalists are incentivized to create out-groups. But if you take away these conditions, is it really human nature to create an enemy out of whole groups of people?
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The arrival of the military deescalated the conflict. The miners were rightly hostile toward gun thugs, capitalists, and cops, but had a favorable view of the military. The miners did not view the soldiers as their enemy, and as far as I know, peacefully surrendered.
I'm sure there were exceptions, but that was my understanding from the great history, Thunder on the Mountain: West Virginia Mine Wars of 20, 21
Armies have historicly been used just as much to keep the local population in line as to wage war.
I'm sure they had their own families to feed. Desperation is a powerful tool
If someone tells you to put a gun to a guys head for trying to feed his family, on pain of not being able to feed your own family, that's a good sign to turn the gun on the guy giving the orders.
Because he might as well have a gun pointed at them.
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The kind who are there to get paid.
Only a hundred years ago. We can't even go 100 years without evil infesting our government.
You know what sucks about this story the most for me?
I grew up with these people’s descendants. You know what they’re doing right now?
The entire area voted more than 80% for Trump.
It bums me out so much, but then, I get it. We have NOTHING. The only means of making a living around here for regular folks is mining coal. The democrats want to end the use of fossil fuels. Of course they do, but it has turned everyone into republicans around here. Nobody is offering alternatives that truly benefit anyone but the people who are already wealthy.
The people who already had money are turning all of the land into ATV trails, and every halfwit with a camera comes to town and gawks at the poor folks for YouTube money.
My god, it all pisses me off.
You forgot to mention that most of them also have black lung.
Don't tell them or they'll start lynching their own internal organs.
I mean 90 billion dollars was set aside to teach them how to green energy but they voted to mine coal instead, I feel nothing for ignorant people, this is what they voted for
I feel for ignorant people, so I’ll let your comment slide.
The point is “nobody thinks about or cares for or helps them” is absolutely bullshit. Any attempts at help meet deaf, defeatist, petulant ears.
You spend decades starving after you had it good, being smacked in the face by people who tell you that you’re just too stupid to understand, all while knowing that drugs were tested on your people, 2/3 of your friends and family are dead from it.
At that point, you’re dealing with a defeated people who have been fed promise after promise. Schools haven’t properly educated them since the 60s. Propaganda by pretend preachers is the only hope these people had.
The only thing I had growing up was school books from the 60s and 70s, church, and a faint memory of a time when everything was clean and good.
If I hadn’t been lucky enough to have a wealthy relative with a computer and access to the internet, I’d be right there with them. Opposing whatever crap people were trying to help me with and clinging to the one thing that I know for sure works around here. I know with 100% certainty that I wouldn’t have been able to learn anything without that little bit of luck, and at exactly the right time. Most of those people weren’t so lucky. By the time the internet became something they could afford, it was too late. Now it’s a propaganda machine that uses algorithms to further brainwash people and push them deeper into their idiocy. They don’t get the information about the clean energy initiatives. They get the information that comes from the last handful of rich assholes who own the coal companies and their cronies.
Jim Justice filled paychecks with propaganda and laid off several men in 2012 in anticipation of a Democratic victory. If you could have seen the anger I seen. That jackass owes my brother money to this day, but it was easy to convince them it was someone else’s fault when everything that had happened leading up to it was another head stomp deeper into the mud.
Change isn’t going to come overnight. These people were left to die while the world went on without them and then kicked while they were down with a so called “drug epidemic”.
They don’t trust anyone. They have a damn good reason for that.
I try to keep my emotions in check, but I get so angry when I think about this shit.
When I look back at my happy childhood memories, playing Nintendo with friends, I immediately get hit with heartbreak because the only people in a room full of kids who are alive today are me and my brother. The tiny amount of privilege we had is the only reason we weren’t buried with all of our friends.
My blood boils. I know that my people are stupid, but we’ve been intentionally kept that way for a long time. If it wasn’t intentional, it sure as shit seems that way.
Not who you were replying to. I have sort of similar roots, angst, and anger. My grandparents grew up sharecroppers, entire extended family are fundamentalists.
There's nothing inherently wrong with being ignorant. It's just a matter of education. Willfull ignorance, on the other hand, is the greatest sin.
The part I still can't wrap my head around is falling for a New York, city slicker, orange ass, conman. My people used to dislike cops, hate the government, guns were just a fun tool for farm and hunting, and were suspicious of military jingoism and flag waving.
I wasn't able to get a single friend or family member to see how they were being manipulated, how they were changing. I changed some, especially when I lost the religion, but I feel like I'm closer to our roots than they are. It's profoundly alienating. I hate my own people a lot of the time. I'm so angry at them for fucking falling for such transparent bullshit. Fuck the evil bastards that lied them into it.
They voted for him as a kind of "fuck you" to the system that's been fucking them over for so long. So many people voted for him because he seemed to be from outside of that system. I personally know people that would have voted for Bernie instead, because he was also a kind of outsider from our "normal" politicians.
They voted for him as a kind of "fuck you" to the system that's been fucking them over for so long.
The irony in this is that all the social policies that democrats voted into law to help these people were sabotaged by the republicans they voted for. Both in the federal government and their state government. And yet they still vote for those same republicans every time. Part of that, I suspect, is due to the pulpit politics of their church leaders keeping them in line for the GOP by hammering those bullshit "woke is evil and they're coming for your children" talking points every sunday morning.
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That was a forgiveable mistake the first time around. Howver, the insanity and utter bullshit I saw during COVID was not so forgiveable. And then, electing him a second time? I don't think there's any way back.
It's such transparent propaganda, it will probably always astound me that people were so easily fooled. Pepple I thought were intelligent, wise, and that I respected. The Qanon stuff, the COVID conspiracy stuff, antivax, climate change. They have ended up in a false reality that most will never escape, and it was so obviously a lie. I'm still in a mild state of shock from time to time, I still grieve it.
Intellectually I know how it happened, but my gut cannot make sense of how they fell for it.
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The US government has always been evil. What are you talking about? Maybe learn about how evil a foreign policy the US has.
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Y'all are still living under an evil infested government.
Can't even go 4 years
I used to be evil. I still am, but I used to be too
Iirc Howard Zinn referred to this as the "second US Civil War" in A People's History of the United States
It was the biggest domestic military engagement since the US Civil War, at least.
I guess that depends on how you read KKK activity after Hayes ended Reconstruction.
But you could also attribute it to the same beast. Jim Crow was as much about crushing black labor power as it was state sponsored white nationalist terrorism.
I'd read it as on-duty vs off-duty labor repression.
What did you think the National Guard was for?
They didn't get their start shooting college students!
First they came for the trade unionists, and I did not speak up..
Fun fact, if you mix dirty engine oil and sand in a water balloon, you could completely blind any vehicles that might be nearby.
Motor oil and sand just does not come off when it's all over motor vehicle windows.
Completely impossible to see through.
Just gonna leave that there
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A similar thing happened in my neck of the woods in 1925. Sounds familiar: unionized miners go on strike, company cuts off all credit to the company stores that they controlled, things become heated, company police shoot into crowds of miners killing one and wounding others, tensions increase, the military is brought in, and the dispute finally ends after a provincial election and recognition of the legitimacy of the union. Flash forward to today and the mines are all but shut down and many are museums, but the incident is still recognized every year as a local holiday.
Songs have been written, stories told.
The term "redneck" in the early 20th century was occasionally used in reference to American coal miner union members who wore red bandanas for solidarity. The sense of "a union man" dates at least to the 1910s and was especially popular during the 1920s and 1930s in the coal-producing regions of West Virginia, Kentucky, and Pennsylvania. ^Patrick Huber, "Red Necks and Red Bandanas: Appalachian Coal Miners and the Coloring of Union Identity, 1912–1936", Western Folklore, Winter 2006.^
I'm citing this because the term redneck has been mostly reclaimed by conservative Americans, but it's important that the term was used by union members who fought the cops when they were sent to break up a strike. The origin of the word was used in a far more left-leaning sense than it is today.
Those same miners now mostly voted for trump because he promised clean coal...
Things have changed
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