Dead for nothing in Ohio

By Greyhawk

Or simply: "Teach your children".

Looking back at the anti war movement of the 1960s, one can see that Iraq isn't really like Vietnam on the homefront, either.

But some would have it otherwise.

Recently an odd character showed up in the comments on a MilBlogs post about protests in Seattle:

Oh, cool overtly statist assumption. Many of us are against the war, the state's war, against the war of military hardware against children and, more importantly, social guerillas who are not chickenhawks, who can actually fight against the empire, but we are not against all violence. The fight, our fight, is against the coercive authority of governments and capital, against the commodity spectacle and state-military apparatus. More and more of us are beginning to realize that self-defense (from cops, especially) is not violent in the same way as capitalism and statism. We like to call it liberation. How about you haul your overweight, white, tv-addicted [pottymouth! deleted by blog owner] out to the next anti-militarization demo in Tacoma and try to [pottymouth! deleted by blog owner] stop us. Some of us even carry slingshots loaded with epoxy studded with broken glass for patriots like you, mother[pottymouth! deleted by blog owner].

Posted by deacon at 0151Z

Those edits were mine, btw. Turns out the individual was posting from a computer at Oberlin College, "a small, selective liberal arts college in Oberlin, Ohio". (More on that idyllic spot in the comments that followed.) Shortly thereafter, the same person returned.

Time will come when you won't see protesters just laying down and taking punishment from the cops, you'll see the violence of the righteous, the truly free, the war of liberation, to end the wars of nations and postindustrial capitalist bloggers. Seriously, though, even though I am not personally in Tacoma, come on out to an antiwar protest with your protestwarrior buddies, with your flags, beer, whatever, just come on out and have a good time getting hit in the face with slings and axe hafts. This old structure you're defending is riddled with dry rot, and every blow we strike takes us closer to total collapse, which we read as total victory.
PS You should read some contemporary media theory (Baudrillard, Virilio, etc.) and then keep blogging like it even means anything. (Hint: it doesn't really mean anything. You're a [pottymouth - deleted by blog owner] moron.)

Posted by deacon at 0047Z

Now, threats of violence on weblogs really won't get too much of a rise from folks whose jobs involve the application of real violence, and who don't share your romantic illusions about combat. (You'll soon see that described as "the sort of rubbish one would expect from privileged white youth who had no experience of real violence and its effects" - read on.) But the comments from "Deacon" did prompt a couple responses from a couple concerned members of a (most likely) slightly older generation:

Seriously, Deacon - on the off chance you might actually be serious - here's some honest advice I've given before. If you're a young college student, your seniors in "the movement" would really like to see you killed while protesting - believing it could really help advance the cause. Don't fall for the line of crap you're sharing above. We've had a few chuckles here at your expense, but I'm really not kidding now.

Posted by Greyhawk at 0335Z

Deacon,

Greyhawk is right.

The shooting of four students at Kent State University by National Guardsmen was really a turning point in the anti-war movement in 1970.

But then...the protest involved more then several dozen...more like several dozen thousand.

But the shooting of the students did in fact inflame the nation.

Posted by Soldier's Dad at 0351Z

It did indeed, and it left those students irrevocably dead.

*****

Folks like "Deacon" are always around. By "Folks like Deacon" I mean young people who've convinced themselves they're willing to die for an actual pointless cause (but believe themselves invincible), and who have elders perfectly willing to facilitate the sacrifice for it's potential advancement of their own ideology. (The very myth that same faction applies to the American soldier young and old.) But the current scarcity of such is another reminder that the desire for Iraq to be "another Vietnam" is still a dream for those same elders, many of whom remember Kent State all too well and fondly, and yearn for the rebirth of a movement perhaps just a few dead protesters away.

*****

Dean Kahler was inspired by one of his professors in 1970:

"We were invading another country. I thoroughly agreed with the history and political science department at Kent who, the next day, on May 1st, buried a copy of the Constitution because they felt that he had overstepped his powers as Commander-in-Chief by sending troops into another country. The mood kind of changed on campus at that point in time."

A few days later he would be shot and paralyzed by an Ohio National Guardsman.

Perhaps it was a more innocent era:

The fact that the Guard members carried live ammunition shocked the protesters and students covering the protests as journalists, along with many people across the nation.

Perhaps that poli/sci prof believed the weapons were merely phallic symbols, too.

Or perhaps not.

*****

Philip Caputo is a Vietnam vet, USMC. He returned to the U.S. in 1966, and left the Corps to began a career in journalism, reporting for the Chicago Tribune. An early assignment to Kent State would lead - years later - to his book 13 Seconds: A Look Back at the Kent State Shootings.

In the spring of 1970, I was a 28-year-old general assignment reporter for the Chicago Tribune, three years out of the United States Marine Corps, with which I had served a tour of duty in Vietnam. In March, the paper had sent me to cover a student protest at the University of Illinois in downstate Champaign-Urbana.
<...>
Before reporting in to the city room Monday morning, I got a call from the day city editor. The disturbances in Kent had grown serious over the weekend. Store windows had been smashed in town, radicals had burned down the ROTC building, firemen had been driven off by mobs slashing hoses and throwing stones, and the Kent city police were unable to cope with the situation. The Ohio National Guard had been ordered in and were now occupying the university. The national desk wanted me to get there immediately. Evidently my coverage of the University of Illinois demonstrations the month before qualified me as the paper's campus protest correspondent.

What happened at Kent State is unintelligible without placing it in the context of the times, and Caputo does so quite thoroughly. In the book he explores the genesis of "the Movement", from the early days of Students for Democratic Society (SDS):

The New Left, as it was called, was led by the SDS, and the SDS had been hijacked by its most extreme elements. They emerged at the SDS national conference in the summer of 1969. Formed in 1960 at the University of Michigan as the student arm of an old-Left organization, the League for Industrial Democracy, the SDS had been involved in civil rights causes and in inner city community organizing projects during the early sixties. Tom Hayden, a leader of the Democratic convention protests, later a California state assemblyman and one of Jane Fonda's husbands, had been among the SDS's founders. It might have remained a small, obscure band of quasi-socialist idealists had it not been for the galvanizing effect of the Vietnam War. By 1969 it had grown to one hundred thousand members in three hundred chapters across the country.

At its national conference – another Chicago event, by the way – a factional fight erupted among the SDS mainstream, a Marxist group called Progressive Labor, and the Revolutionary Youth Movement, putative revolutionaries from middle and upper-middle class backgrounds and with long histories of student activism. In love with romantic rebels like Che Guevara, these white, disaffected undergraduates issued a manifesto called "You don't need a weatherman to tell you which way the wind blows," a title borrowed from a line in Bob Dylan's counter-cultural anthem, The Subterranean Homesick Blues.

The manifesto expressed disdain for the SDS's policies of peaceful protest (though we have seen that their demonstrations were not always peaceful), rejected Progressive Labor's call for an alliance with the white working class, which the authors considered too conservative and pro-war, and called for a campaign of "exemplary violence" by planting bombs in symbolic targets like the Pentagon, ROTC buildings, military bases, and other "imperialist" bastions.

The idea – or perhaps notion is the better word – behind these tactics was to "bring the war home," in the words of a prominent RYM leader, Mark Rudd, and to provoke a violent overthrow of the U.S. government, which in the RYM's view was the only way to change the system. Utterly divorced from political reality, they believed America was ripe for such a revolt.

Reading an account of the conference in the Chicago papers, I recall thinking that as a political theory, "exemplary violence" was the sort of rubbish one would expect from privileged white youth who had no experience of real violence and its effects – ragged bullet wounds, headless torsos, dismembered and eviscerated corpses, pain and grief.

The group changed its name to "Weathermen," and led by charismatic and photogenic figures like Bernardine Dohrn, William Ayers, Kathy Boudin, David Gilbert and Bill Flanagan, staged its first example of exemplary violence in Chicago in October, 1969. It was called the "Days of Rage."

The Weathermen's intent was to transform themselves from bourgeois kids into revolutionary street fighters by taking on the Chicago police in hand-to-hand combat, and through their actions rally others to their flag. In the event, they proved no match for Irish, Italian and Polish cops who had learned street-fighting in first grade. Things got off to a rousing start on October 6, when Ayers ( prep-school graduate, son of a utility company executive raised in the affluent suburb of Glen Ellyn) and a few others blew up a statue in Haymarket Square dedicated to police killed and injured in the 1886 Haymarket Riot.

The "official" Days of Rage protest began two days later. I was on the re-write desk and took dictation from Tribune reporters on the street. The Weathermen had expected thousands to show up, but mustered a mere five hundred. They were armed with brass knuckles, clubs, lead pipes and chains, and were garbed in goggles, gas masks and football helmets (thus turning an iconic image of the all-American jock on its head). The inversion was carried further in the stadium cheers they yelled as they ran down the streets: "Ho, Ho, Ho Chi Minh! NLF is gonna win!" and "What do you want? Revolution! When do you want it? Now!" A bank window was shattered, and that started a bacchanalia of glass breaking. The cops waded in, and in less than an hour had shot and slightly wounded six Weathermen, arrested seventy more, and clubbed an unknown number.

The next day, those Weathermen not in jail or too seriously hurt to continue tried again. This time the battle lasted only half an hour. Some two hundred were taken in, bloodied and bruised. The only casualty on the-establishment side was an over-eager city official who was paralyzed from the neck down when he dove to tackle a protestor and crashed head-first into a brick wall.

Thus ended "The Days of Rage." It was almost comic. Mike Rokyo, the great columnist for the Chicago Daily News, told me over a beer in the Billy Goat tavern that the Weathermen weren't capable "of fighting their way out of Polish wedding." He used the line in his column the next day.
<...>
In March, 1970, the Weathermen – now re-christened the Weather Underground – resurfaced in spectacular, if self-destructive fashion. One of their cells, which were called "focos," had hatched a plot to plant a nail-bomb at a dance in the officer's mess at Fort Dix, New Jersey. Had this act of exemplary violence occurred, it would have killed and injured not only army officers but their wives and dates as well. Fortunately for the intended victims, the Underground was as inept at bomb-making as it was at street-fighting. The device blew up in the Manhattan townhouse in which it was being constructed, killing Ayers' girlfriend, Diana Oughten, and two other Weathermen. Ayers, Rudd, Dohrn, et. al. ended up on the FBI's most wanted list and went on the lam.

So far they had succeeded only in killing themselves and in alienating the rest of the SDS. As one SDS member at the University of Wisconsin remarked, "You don't need a rectal thermometer to know where the assholes are." Nevertheless, their aura of outlaw glamor had drawn some flattering profiles in the press, while their violent rhetoric and actions had won them a number of admirers and copy-cats in the anti-war movement, among whom an idea, a feeling took hold that no anti-war demonstration could be authentic if it wasn't violent, that civil disobedience should be as uncivil as possible.

That backdrop created the environment in which the Kent State tragedy occurred:

Before reporting in to the city room Monday morning, I got a call from the day city editor. The disturbances in Kent had grown serious over the weekend. Store windows had been smashed in town, radicals had burned down the ROTC building, firemen had been driven off by mobs slashing hoses and throwing stones, and the Kent city police were unable to cope with the situation. The Ohio National Guard had been ordered in and were now occupying the university. The national desk wanted me to get there immediately. Evidently my coverage of the University of Illinois demonstrations the month before qualified me as the paper's campus protest correspondent.

My first question was, "Where the hell is Kent State?" I had never heard of it. Informed of its location, I booked the next available flight to Cleveland...

No problem finding a parking space. I walked to the practice field, where I'd spotted a civilian, the only one around. He was young, in a jacket and tie. Not a student, in other words. I went up to him, thinking he might be a faculty member. He turned out to be another reporter, John Kifner from the New York Times. A newspaper super-power then as it is today, the Times did not regard a regional power like the Tribune as competition. Still, I thought Kifner was quite generous to give me a thorough fill-in on what had happened. That will be described in more detail later in this narrative. For now, I'll confine myself to a summary of what Kifner told me.

Several hundred demonstrators had gathered on the Commons at noon for a scheduled anti-war rally. Several hundred more were cheering them on or merely watching them and a troop of National Guardsmen posted nearby. The Guardsmen were ordered to disperse the crowd and did so, firing tear gas canisters.

After clearing the Commons, the Guardsmen marched to the practice field. Protestors were gathered in the Prentice Hall parking lot, others stood in front of Taylor. More tear gas was fired, to which students responded by throwing stones and shouting obscenities.

The action was over in five or ten minutes. Protestors and spectators began to straggle off. An officer ordered the soldiers to return to the Commons area. As they did, some students continued to hurl rocks and four-letter words. Suddenly, a line of Guardsmen wheeled, and making no distinction among active demonstrators, bystanders and students merely walking to class, knelt and fired, killing four, wounding nine.
<...>
Kent townspeople generally supported the Guard's actions. As in most college communities, there was a "town-gown" conflict between Kent's 27,000 citizens and the university's 21,000 students, but it was warped into outright hostility by the events of the previous week and by the temper of the times. Many Kent citizens hated the students, regarding them as an alien race. You could hardly blame them for their anger – stores and businesses downtown had been vandalized for no reason.

On return to Chicago, he visited Northwestern University

I found red flags of revolt hanging from the windows of dormitories, frat houses and classroom buildings. At strike headquarters, on the third floor of Scott Hall, coeds were painting signs calling for an end to the war – as their mothers or older sisters might have painted signs urging the NU Wildcats to beat Wisconsin. Sound trucks blared rock music. In front of the Technological Institute, physics professors sold black armbands to symbolize mourning for the dead in Ohio. One, Dr. Martin Block, hawked them with a sense of humor: "Armbands. Armbands. Any contribution will do. Help a physics professor." The light-hearted pitch belied his emotions. "The protest movement in the academic community got going again with the Cambodia involvement," he told me. "The Kent State incident was like a bomb going off, and the echoes of that explosion are being heard across the country."
<...>
The scene could have been lifted from a Delacroix painting of the French revolution. A young man stood atop a barricade of furniture and cars and saw-horses, his long hair tousled by the Lake Michigan wind, one hand grasping a pole flying a red flag and an upside-down American flag (a distress signal) as he exhorted some twenty-five hundred students massed behind him to "Strike! Strike!"

Suddenly, he was interrupted by a burly, black-haired, middle-age man dressed in a workingman's khaki trousers and a flannel shirt. Mounting the barricade, he tried to wrest the flag pole from the student. "That's my flag!" he yelled. "I fought for it. You have no right to it."

The young man jerked it away and leaped into the crowd. The older man jumped after him and a tug-of-war took place, accompanied by shouts and epithets. Some dissenters threatened to break his jaw, others urged, "No, no. Don't sink to that level."

After some struggle, a few students managed to take the angry man aside to engage him in a dialogue. He said something about fighting on Iwo Jima and that he was an electrician. One undergraduate said, "We can talk to you, man. We can talk to each other." It soon became apparent that they could not. The students argued that the man, as a member of the working class, was a victim of capitalism. Students and blacks were also victims of capitalism. Therefore, he should join their movement.

The Marxist language sounded incongruous, if not absurd in that setting – Northwestern was the most affluent school in the Big Ten, Evanston an aviary for capitalists – and the member of the working class was having none of it.

"The hell with your movement," he said. "There are millions of people like me. We're fed up with your movement. You're forcing us into it. We'll have to kill you."

"Like they did at Kent!" screamed several students, almost in unison. "Like they did at Kent! You want to kill us all."

"Kent is the logical outcome of what you've been doing for the last five years," he shot back. "What else did you expect?"

I stood taking notes. If I hadn't known better, I would have thought this bit of street theater, so illustrative of the passions dividing America, had been staged for my benefit.

The electrician put his hands on his hips, shook his head, and started to walk away. Then he turned abruptly, pointing his finger at the crowd pressing around him. "It's time for action," he declared. "I'm through arguing. I came here to resist your movement."

One student opened his mouth to say something, but another motioned for him to be silent and cried out, "Oh, fuck him. You can't talk to him."

"And I can't talk to you. All I can see is a lot of kids blowing the chance I never had."

Something everyone who dreams of the glory of slings and axe hafts should read.

(An NPR interview with Caputo and additional excerpts here.)

Posted by Greyhawk / March 9, 2007 1:11 AM | Permalink