Submitted by: Mike Spindell, guest blogger
This blog post is the result of our well known regular contributor Blouise sending me a link, sent to her by one of our other long time contributors GBK. I thank them for not only the vital information they shared with me, but also for the inspiration it gave me. When people ask me what kind of blog to I write for, I explain to them that it is the creation of the well-known Constitutional Law Professor and Civil Rights Advocate Jonathan Turley. The common thread that links most of us here is our support for Jonathan’s work and our belief in upholding the Constitution. The topic raises is vital to all of those purposes.
On May 4th, 1970 I was twenty-six years old. I worked for NYC’s Department of Social Services (welfare) as a caseworker in Brooklyn. Was active in the Peace Movement and had in the last year lost in my bid for the Presidency of the radical welfare caseworkers union. Long haired, full bearded and habitually wearing shirts open to almost my waist, with tight-fitting bell bottom jeans. I was a happy and carefree imbiber of psychedelics and had a great social life. I had failed my Draft physical four years prior due to high blood pressure, which would later turn into severe heart trouble requiring me to have a transplant, but back then I was just grateful that I didn’t have to make the choice between my ideals and the Selective Service Law. So many young men whose lives were drastically changed for the worse by being drafted into that conflict, were less lucky than I because they were my contemporaries, I felt I needed to help bring them home.
Even with the 60’s decade of assassinations, Civil Rights protests ending in violence, Nixon’s election and the Viet Nam escalation, I was still hopeful that my generation would really change things for the better in this country and that the future would bring great changes in economic freedom and social justice. So hopeful was I, that I was attending my first year of Law School at night and envisioned myself becoming a Legal Aid attorney in the future. Then I heard the news about Kent State, the murder of four students and shooting of nine during what was a relatively peaceful protest. Suddenly, this brought home to me the reality of what we were facing in our country. My optimism for change died that day, but not my commitment to fight for it.
As the news proliferated the story just didn’t add up. Supposedly the young National Guardsmen heard sniper shots and in a panic returned fire. That the students shot were at a distance of at least three hundred feet and the ammunition was armor-piercing rounds. It was claimed that there was no order to fire given and that the young National Guardsmen thought they were firing in self defense. As it turned out these were lies and propaganda foisted to cover the fact that those in power in the administration and their follower, the Republican Governor of Ohio, wanted to send a message to those opposing the War, that we were in mortal danger if we dared to try to thwart their murderous rampage in South East Asia.
“The killing of protesters at KentState changed the minds of many Americans about the role of the US in the Vietnam War. Following this massacre, there was an unparalleled national response: hundreds of universities, colleges, and high schools closed across America in a student strike of more than four million. Young people across the nation had strong suspicions the Kent State massacre was planned to subvert any further protests arising from the announcement that the already controversial war in Vietnam had expanded into Cambodia.
Yet instead of attempting to learn the truth at Kent State, the US government took complete control of the narrative in the press and ensuing lawsuits. Over the next ten years, authorities claimed there had not been a command-to-fire at Kent State, that the ONG had been under attack, and that their gunfire had been prompted by the “sound of sniper fire.” Instead of investigating Kent State, the American leadership obstructed justice, obscured accountability, tampered with evidence, and buried the truth. The result of these efforts has been a very complicated government cover-up that has remained intact for more than forty years.”
You will find the article the paragraph above is quoted from if you follow the link below. The link will lead you to an article entitled: “Kent State: Was It about Civil Rights or Murdering Student Protesters?” This was written by: Laurel Krause with Mickey Huff and is from a forthcoming book: Censored 2013: Dispatches from the Media Revolution. “Laurel Krause is a writer and truth seeker dedicated to raising awareness about ocean protection, safe renewable energy, and truth at Kent State. She publishes a blog on these topics at Mendo Coast Current. She is the co-founder and director of the Kent State Truth Tribunal. Before spearheading efforts for justice for her sister Allison Krause, who was killed at Kent State University on May 4, 1970, Laurel worked at technology start-ups in Silicon Valley.”
By the way, my Law School was one of the schools shut down in response to the Kent State Massacre and I was active in the movement to shut it down for the semester as a memorial to those dead and wounded students. Then as now, I saw these killings as premeditated murder in the service of stifling dissent in our country. I urge you to take the time to read this article linked below and its proofs that these murderous shootings, were done under orders and with malice aforethought. As much as our Presidential contenders extol America’s unique status in the world, they are mute to the barely hidden agenda that is destroying what we purport to be our ideals of freedom and justice. The article below gives lie to one wicked truth of our history and should be a sobering reminder of the way things really are:
http://www.projectcensored.org/top-stories/articles/kent-state-was-it-about-civil-rights-or-%E2%80%A8murdering-student-protesters/
Submitted by: Mike Spindell, Guest Blogger
http://jonathanturley.org/2012/03/17/a-real-history-of-the-last-sixty-two-years/
http://jonathanturley.org/2012/04/01/defending-our-freedoms/
http://jonathanturley.org/2012/05/05/what-the/
http://jonathanturley.org/2012/06/23/missing-the-point-when-the-point-is-obvious/
Inadvertently left off the song. Here it is.
I was on the campus of the University of Missouri at St. Louis one fine afternoon. I was taking a couple of evening grad school classes. I think it was during the 1967-68 school year. The university was building a new library and they had one of those tall temporary construction fences around the building site. Some graffiti artist had painted in big block letters on the fence: “Lee Harvey Oswald, where are you now that we need you.”
I was shocked by the sign and still am, but given the sentiments of the times, I should not have been surprised. I was one of those who never had any trouble separating the warrior from the war, but all too many of my friends and classmates could not make that distinction. Maybe it was because I knew some of those who died in those stinking jungles and rice paddies.
One of my good friends who holds several decorations, including the Distinguished Flying Cross and other hero medals is now an Alzheimer’s patient in a nursing home. He is only 70 years old. His wife showed him a photo of his old plane, and he had no idea what it was, The horrible disease will take him soon and I cannot help but wonder if the disease was accelerated by some of the things to which he was exposed.
I would like to share a song by former Green Beret Chuck “Jeep” Rosenberg. This was performed on PBS’ Austin City Limits about twenty years ago. I get choked up every time I listen to this.
The interesting thing here is something I learned from years of activism in a different movement, not the anti-war movement, although that’s where I cut my teeth. I learned that they ignore you until and unless you are really able to make some inroads against them. Someone asked me in about 1992, wasn’t I scared because there was an FBI investigation into me and there were folks following me for a while (a short and very silly while). I said, “Hell No. If they thought I was able to do anything with all my carrying on, they’d have killed me already and it would be down on the books as an accident or a stroke or something.” I realized that all the activism I engaged in was utterly useless because nobody in power bothered hurting me. When there starts to be a critical mass of protest, they haul off and kill a bunch of people so folks up and take notice. That was Kent State. That was what Kent State was about.
The “unwashed long-hair hippies” were getting somewhere, so they had to gun down a bunch of kids to make their statement. And they made it in unmistakable terms: the grammar of the “SHUT-UP” bullet.
Mike
thanks for the first person insight into the anti-war/civil rights movement of the late 60’s early 70’s. as a preteen military brat at that time most of what i heard about the movement was that they were just a bunch of hippies who didn’t bathe or cut their hair. the idea that they were citizens with a legitimate gripe against the government never came up. most of what i learned of it later came from books or documentary’s.
thanks again and keep the faith
KF,
No, no. That’s not squirming. I’m wiggling with joy over another scree that’s more sound and fury than substance. That I’m unwilling to dissect every point of your “argument” such as it is and instead focused on one item that reveals a critical structural flaw – namely a statement presented as fact that was nothing of the sort – illustrating a flaw by example and not a full formal critique. Why? Well 1) I’ve done that with you before and its tediously unproductive given that your style has no changed one iota from the first time I read your presentations and 2) I’ve been drinking, had an abnormally long day and have a bit of my lazy on.
But if you can’t understand the validity of criticism of form and the weakness of factual error dressed as zealous hyperbole, you’ll never learn to play guitar.
Carry on.
You forget that the US has always had kill lists under GOP regimes. I can list lots of US citizens who have been murdered on the orders of US agencies like the CIA, DoD, White House, etc..Unfortunately most of these people murdered were NOT engaged in armed combat against the US or the regimes it supported. The kill lists of Obama, are geared at those who ARE engaged in armed combat and outright terrorism. Sorry, but when any person engages in that kind of thing even in the US, you get shot at and killed if they cannot take you in any other way. Outside the US and other governmental entities, the capture option is not available, nor is a trial. To ask for that is absurd and means that we cannot act in self defense.
There are so many factual errors in Fks post it is worthwhile to debunk them since they are commonly held ones by some on the left. The US Congress passed a bill to provide for vaccination of US citzens in 1828, but only did that for Indians four years later, not only out of concern for them,but because the Indians were in constant contact with US folks and it made no sense to have infectious Indians walking around being in contact with those who were not vaccinated.
The Dresden bombings were not just done on a wihm of mass murder, but because the Russians asked for it to stop an SS Division that was on its way to the Eastern Front. We learned that just recently with the declasification of British archives. It succeeded too, even though we missed out in directly nailing the division, but they were engaged in recovery efforts for weeks after it.
The Japanese did NOT surrender before the A bombs were dropped, In FACT, the peace cabinet that was formed after Tojo resigned in disgrace, refused to surrender even after the Soviets declared war, the US invaded Okinawa, and TWO A bombs were dropped. According to the Privy Seal Diaries, there was still no desire to surrender, until the Emperor himself broke all tradition and spoke in favor of it. THAT broke the logjam. Then the Cabinet asked that th Emperor be retained in his post, as part of their surrender. Truamn’s reply was that the Emperor would be just another Japanese citizen and subject to the orders of McArthur. Hirohito could call himself any name he wished, but he was no better than any other Japanese and had no right to any consideration. With that statement, the Japanese agreed to surrender..
There you go squirming again Gene. A side point about germ warfare against Native Americans hardly undermines an entire thesis about the long history & intractability of American violence — the Kent State tragedy being one of its unfortunate but unsurprising outcomes.
Karl, Lack of health insurance can be tantamount to a death sentence.
KF,
Actually, pointing out a factual flaw (one among many) of your rants does undermine your presentation. Arguments are like houses. The foundations are facts and the structure is logic. A house built on sand will wash away.
Also, randyjet was right about infection vectors. The vast majority of the diseases the Natives caught from the Europeans were from direct contact; simply being here was enough. Yes, sure the Army gave them dirty blankets, but the soldiers handing them out were a far more dangerous infection vector than the dry goods.
But you keep on your strang und drum as usual. I’ve seen you do it many times. You take what could be a solid cogent argument and undermine it yourself by your presentation style and often tenuous facts.
It’s like the thread some time ago when you came in and told everyone they basically sucked and then tried to garner support for your position. If what you are going to say isn’t going to be on rock solid fact? You better be one helluva salesman. And although you’ve got a lot of zeal – I have to give you that – your problem is your style runs off the customers before you can seal a deal.
Carry on.
On the contrary SMom: the legions of activist women I know from 40 years immersed in both the Feminist Movement & Trade Unionism know that Obama has only exacerbated the very real war on women by behaving like a gutless turd when bowing before the Republicans with his hat in hand on virtually every important issue facing working people.
He let the insurance companies type every word of the health care bill for crying out loud! Sure, people with prexisting conditions have the right to insurance now but that was a tiny concession insofar as the insurance companies have the right to gouge them based on their prexisting conditions.
Moreover, plenty of smart women understand that the war on civil liberties like Obama’s “kill list” is inextricably linked to the war on women because they’ll never be free at home so long as women abroad in places like Pakistan can be incinerated by drones on their wedding day.
Res ipsa loquitur
Thanks to Obama and the health care bill, my wife now has health insurance when we could not get it before. As some folks might know, I am a party to a lawsuit which Prof Turley is litigating on behalf of older pilots who were kicked out of our jobs when we turned age 60, despite the age limit being raised after we had just been fired. That meant that I could not find a job in my field with health insurance since the company I work for now does not provide it. So my wife was uninsured until the bill passed since she is a cancer survivor and no insurance would take her.
Fortunately, we had the insurance in force when she got a fractured vertabrae, so we were able to afford the operation to fix that problem. Without it, we were out of luck since we could not afford the operation. It is the government sponsored plan which is not great with a $2500 deductible, but it works for us.
So far Obama saved my job with the Cash for clunkers, and the auto bailout, and got us affordable health insurance. This is a President who has most directly affected my life since LBJ, and this influence is FAR better than LBJs.
Good for you Randy. Just hope none of your loved ones get on his “kill list” because there is no appeal process.
Sure Gene: The idea that Romans may have used a form of germ warfare to spread diseases long before Uncle Sam’s genocide of the Indians totally undermines my thesis doesn’t it, just as a potential discrepancy on when Kuwait was founded demolishes the facts of the 1st Gulf War.
Surely my entire line of thought is just “ignorant” as Randyjet has proclaimed since minor debatable side issues surely destroy my whole argument.
Sidestepping knit pickers who dodge the real issues and instead shriek about the irrelevant is a sure sign of intellectual squirming & wounded ideology.
Karl, And I don’t think that anyone that is on the wrong side of the war on women such as yourself will attract any female followers now or in the future. You can keep your white guy movement.
Karl, Glen supported Bush and the Iraq war. Ellsberg opposed the Iraq war.
SMom: You mean I’m illegit because I don’t recognize Ellsberg & Chomsky as leaders of the Left? Next you’ll be claiming Glenn Greenwald is also illlegit because he sounds too much like me?
Ellsberg is a NY Times Liberal whose always voted Democratic his entire long life, which precludes him from being any kind of real leftist leader since the Democrats prosecuted every single shooting war in the 20th century. (The Panama Invasion & the 1st Gulf War don’t count since only one side was shooting). Ellsberg’s never organized anything & has never even been on a picket line during a strike.
Chomsky is a self-confessed Anarchist who also never organized anything since anarchists don’t believe in organizations.
Chomsky’s made lots of wrong calls over the years. On the eve of the 1st Gulf War I met with him in Ohio where we had coffee after a book signing at the “Grounds For Thought” bookstore off the Bowling Green campus. I was shocked to discover he advocated “giving sanctions a chance.”
Turns out sanctions got their chance for 10 years under Clinton and the UN documented how they caused the untimely deaths of over 500,000 children and old people who suffered from malnutrition & perfectly preventable disease. Like I told Chomsky at the time: “sanctions are an act of war by other means and when it comes to starving people and cutting off their medicines it’d be more humane to just bomb them and end the suffering.”
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RM0uvgHKZe8
Ellsberg & Chomsky are at most leftist intellectuals who take correct stances in many instances but they are hardly “leaders of the Left” because the real left in America recognizes the 2 party system as a fraud, 2 sides of the same coin of a one party state that has 2 factions who bicker over the best way to screw over working people.
Just because those 2 have from time to time managed to delude themselves into unprincipled “lesser-evilism” politics (unlike myself, Gene H., and Professor Turley — to name but a few amongst millions) doesn’t mean we must delude ourselves into voting for a guy who lied about closing Guantanamo; lied about stoping torture & renditions; lied about meaningfully helping people facing foreclosures — a coward who vaporized an entire Pakistani wedding party with drone fired missiles and then goes back to incinerate the 1st responding rescuers — a man who keeps a secret “kill list” whereby he can execute without charges or trial anybody on Earth he deems a bad guy.
No thanks. Nobody endorsing that candidate will have any real leftist credentials remaining after this election.
Seems you’re gettin’ it wrong all over the place tonight, KF.
KF is incredibly ignorant. i guess he never got a smallpox vaccination as some of us older folks did. Giving Indians blankets that were used by smallpox patients does NOT transmit smallpox well at all. Also the germ theory of disease did not come about until the late 19th century which is why antiseptic procedures were so lacking back then. In FACT the means of smallpox vaccination that Washington used on his troops was to take pus from smallpox victims and CUT the skin of the recipient and smear the pus into the wound. In fact, if anything, giving smallpox blankets to the Indians would be a means of innoculating them rather than spreading the disease since the virus would be very attenuated and not as virulent. The way smallpox is spread is through living breating carriers, not incidental contact. In fact, Congress appropriated money in 1832 to vaccinate Indians, NOT kill them.
Karl Friedrich shows his lack of knowlegde and rational thinking. Kuwait existed as a seperate entity LONG before Iraq was created in 1918. In FACT Kuwait was a British Protectorate from about 1890 on and the Ottoman Emoire signed an agreement with the Brits in 1913 to acknowledge the British protectorate which the KUWAITIS ASKED for. I guess that you think that the UAE and all the other states on the Arabian penisula should really be part of Saudi Arabia too.
I am aslo appalled that you spew the crap and justifcations of Sadaam Hussein as good coin. You forget that Kuwait and the Saudis had the same problem with a nebulous border and a neutral zone which they worked out to share the oil. The US charge did not give the green light to invade, but simply said a border clash would not bring in the US. Invading and taking over the whole country was NOT the position. It is absurd to say that the US Congress voted for the Iraqi resolution largely on the testimony of one woman. You have to be crazy to believe that. They voted for the resolution because the UN had passed the authorization for the use of force in accord with the UN Charter. The Congress was simply following the rules. The reason for the vote was that the UN is required under its charter to go to the aid of a member state that is attacked and annexed by another member state. Just as the League of Nations was supposed to act against Italy when it invaded Etheopia. When it failed to do that, it lost its reason for existence and was superceded by the military alliance of the UN countries. When you have a military alliance, you MUST support it or it will be void. The UN and the US lived up to their obligations. Too bad you prefer abject surrender and appeasement as the League of Nations did.
KF,
Once again in your zeal to demonize everything American, you’ve let your hyperbole overload your a$$. “In fact the 1st documented case of “biological warfare: was perpetrated by the US Military against the Native Indians”. I got news for you sport. Biological warfare has been around a helluva lot longer than that. The Romans used to launch rotting animal carcasses into fortresses under siege. In the middle ages? Europeans did the same thing with the bodies of plague victims. Hannibal launched clay pots full of poisonous snakes on to enemy ships. Poisoning wells by dropping bodies in them (biological) and salting farm land (chemical) are tactics as old as mass organized warfare.
I’m a harsh critic of many of the things my country has done and does today, KF. But I don’t have to make shit up to do it. You shouldn’t do that. It weakens your case. It’s the historical equivalent of being a birther when you make stuff up while there are plenty of legitimate things to complain about.
With due respect RCampbell — “I can’t listen to the CSN&Y song without getting choked up at the wasteful innanity and the un-American-ness of it all — you have a frustratingly naive view of what “American-ness” is founded upon, which is first & foremost violence.
It’s not so hard for a country to thump its chest and brag “I’m the Greatest” when it had the head start advantage of free land stolen from Indians & Mexicans as well as 300 years of free slave labor to develop it and build an infrastructure — most of which was accomplished through abject violence.
In fact the 1st documented case of “biological warfare: was perpetrated by the US Military against the Native Indians who were purposely given blankets infected with European diseases, namely Small Pox, which the Indians had no immunological resistance to, and saved the Treasury lots of expenditures on lead bullets.
Estimates on the numbers are still debated but to wipe out 100 million Indians during Manifest Destiny and 100 million Africans over the Slave Trade Uncle Sam naturally honed his skills at murder, devastation & destruction.
Skip to the 20th century and the litany of violent crime is staggering. Never mind all the lynchings and other domestic hate crimes, the 1st case of bombing by air of a civilian city was not some fascist like Franco or Hitler but FDR around 1933 when in an effort to murder the union leader Sandino in Nicaragua, the capitol city of Managua was bombed by the US Air Force.
Then comes WWII. Never mind the incident at Malmedy, Dresden and the bombing of sleepy coastal villages in Italy depicted in the great movie “Catch 22” (written by US bomber pilot Joseph Heller) — but consider that Japan had already officially surrendered when an atom bomb was dropped on the city of Hiroshima in the AM precisely when all Japanese school children were going to school and then again in Nagasaki in the afternoon precisely when all the kids were leaving school.
We could talk about what we did to the Iranians with the Shah, or to Arbenz in Guatemala, or the Marine invasion of the Dominican Republic in 1965, or the CIA murder of Salvador Allende in Chile or even the murder of nuns in El Salvador, and then the Vietnam War — but why since what’s thoroughly American is VIOLENCE.
Foreign policy can only be an extension of domestic policy. After all, it’s the same people who make both policies.
The point is there’s absolutely nothing out of the American character when it comes to the murder of students at Kent State.