Not even mentioned is Sihanouk, who had ruled neutral Cambodia since 1941 under various positions, was overthrown in a CIA-sponsored coup in the days before the US invasion of Cambodia. This had the effect of destabilizing Cambodia for the next couple of years.
“ Once you’ve been to Cambodia, you’ll never stop wanting to beat Henry Kissinger to death with your bare hands. You will never again be able to open a newspaper and read about that treacherous, prevaricating, murderous scumbag sitting down for a nice chat with Charlie Rose or attending some black-tie affair for a new glossy magazine without choking. Witness what Henry did in Cambodia – the fruits of his genius for statesmanship – and you will never understand why he’s not sitting in the dock at The Hague next to Milošević.”
Very true. Fortunately, however, there are enough reasons to want to beat Kissinger to death with your bare hands that you don't have to actually go to Cambodia. A trip to the library, or a google search or 3 ought to be enough.
It's not clear to me why Kissinger gets the blame for that, when the US was bombing Cambodia since 1965, and when increasing bombing of Cambodia was part of Nixon's own madman theory.
I remember, as a student in high school, seeing this event get barely a paragraph in our textbooks, and it made me so angry. My mother was there on that day; she was friends with three of the four people who died. She was passing by on the way to class, and a friend pushed her down and told her to run when the shooting started. On a different day, she was chased back to her dorm by guardsmen with tear gas for walking with a group of three people, who nonetheless fired it directly into the dorm after she and the other students had made it in. She had to transfer away from Kent State due to the trauma of everything, and she has struggled some degree of PTSD ever since.
Armed soldiers wheeled and fired en masse on unarmed protestors yet none of them faced legal penalty. The state of Ohio paid compensation. Because the soldiers "feared for their lives." I'm sure it was scary, but maybe we need braver national guardsmen.
Official ass covering after official violence is a long tradition.
It's as american as apple pie to use state violence on innocent and largely peaceful protestors and then just pretend it's no big deal. Remember the time unmarked soldiers were pulling people off the street in Portland? Or when peaceful protestors were disbursed with force so the president could take a picture while holding a bible upsidedown? Or Waco. Or the battle of Blair Mountain. Or the Tulsa Race Massacre. Americans constantly turn a blind eye to peaceful or innocent people getting brutally harmed by agents of the state. You will find plenty of people always willing to blame the victims.
Americans are unique in that they believe their government cowers in fear of the pistols they keep under their pillows, and that theirs is the only truly free nation in the world, where tyranny can never occur.
I just want to add Rainbow Farm to this list, because it was discussed so little in its immediate aftermath (almost certainly owing to 9/11 occurring days later).
What? All the unarmed black men killed by the police were seeking martyrdom in order to manipulate the police? Wow. If the police are so easily manipulated to perpetrate violence on the folks they are sworn to protect (and therefore should be held blameless), we really need better police. Maybe they don't cover not shooting civilians in the six weeks or training or whatever it is new recruits receive. They should also have a course on resisting the jedi mind control civilians are apparently capable of.
Any reasonable and unbiased viewing of the facts of the Rittenhouse case would conclude he acted in self-defense, which happens to be what the court decided as well. One of the people he shot admitted under oath that they had chased Rittenhouse with a mob, then pointed a gun at Rittenhouse and were preparing to shoot him prior to being shot by Rittenhouse.
That has absolutely nothing to do with what happened at Kent State.
I know this subject needs to be (and deserves to be) treated with great care, but I think this is an unfair comparison.
I was and am an ardent supporter of (and often, a participant in) the street protests of that era, and for the reforms and abolition for which they were calling. I was in the thick of the tear gas in Portland many times, hoping that our actions might lead to a greater respect for Black lives in the USA. And I wish Rittenhouse had stayed home that evening and that those protesters were alive and uninjured today.
That said, comparing his situation to this one is unfair.
Rittenhouse was in a violent and confusing scuffle and was injured immediately before engaging. He had a loaded gun pointed at him at the moment he fired at Grosskreutz. Using him as the poster boy for bogus self-defense claims, especially the extremely specious versions of them so often proffered by law enforcement when they kill dogs or humans, seems counter-productive.
These guardsmen had no comparable basis for fearing for their lives that day (or in the days prior, when they inflicted grotesque violence, including stabbing 11 people with bayonets).
Sure they had a choice. They had a choice whether to aim at the sky, the ground, or the protestors. And they had the same choice the protestors were exercising: whether or not to obey the authority ordering them to do stuff. But they weren't ordered to fire on the protestors. The guardsmen who did shoot at the sky or the ground, which was most of them, weren't prosecuted for disobeying orders. The more important choice was the first. That's the one for which they should have been charged with murder.
P.S. How rich and privileged are kids who go to Kent State in Ohio? It's not Yale. In 1970 it was pretty cheap. And regardless, why does this justify the harm they suffered? The guardsmen were right to shoot the college kids because they weren't as rich or privileged? That's a really horrifying take on the event.
That's another long tradition: portraying the victims of lethal violence as unsympathetic in some way as though this mitigates the harm they suffered.
I assume most people reading Hacker News aren't at the bottom of the economic ladder. Does this make them fair game?
The Vietnam War really wrecked America's sense of self, eh? Out in Vietnam, American soldiers were busy burning innocent people in My Lai, back home armed military were shooting students, and then to cap it all, America lost.
Absolute hammer to the national identity.
For a nation that has prosecuted so many wars before and since, it is quite interesting that this one was such a cultural blow.
Even Iraq, fought on the basis of fraudulent WMD claims, had no such effect.
The major factors after Vietnam that changed the scenario (such that, as you note, Iraq does not impact the national psyche like Vietnam and Cambodia did) are
1) Vietnam broke the back of the draft system. In the aftermath of that war, after realizing force of law had been used to force Americans to kill and be killed in an invasion for no gain, there has not been the political will to reactivate the draft for any reason other than a direct military assault on home soil. Even after 9/11, calling up a draft for Afghanistan or Iraq would have been absolute political suicide for those who tried. The consequence of this in the American psyche is that soldiers who die in our foreign campaigns are "volunteers" and "knew what they signed up for," so it puts the consequences at arm's length; nobody carrying a rifle into a war zone with an American flag on their armor is doing it despite desperately not wanting to, and Americans are sort of fine with a self-feeding military-industrial complex that generally leaves the home front alone.
(This is, of course, not entirely accurate or true, but it's true enough that most Americans sleep at night while some of their children are stationed in Iraq).
2) The US hasn't lost any subsequent military engagement nearly as badly as it lost Vietnam. Afghanistan comes closest, but the 2,400 soldiers dead in over a decade of Afghanistan operation doesn't hit the psychic shock from 58,000 pressed servicemen dead in the 8 years of Vietnam. During the whole Afghanistan campaign, the US consistently lost more troops to injury and accident (across the whole service) than to enemy action; one doesn't get the same moral outrage of "bodies sent into the meat grinder" if most servicemembers dying while serving are dying in car crashes. And the fundamental shift of rules of engagement away from boots-on-the-ground and towards air supremacy and air-to-ground strikes lowered the body count to the point where far, far fewer Americans personally know a Johnny who didn't come home.
One thing to keep in mind is that for most of the war, it had strong public support. There was a continuous defamation campaign against the anti-war movement. Days after the shooting at Kent, a poll showed 80% agreeing that it was the students' fault.
I'm speculating, but I think that the few who refused to serve were met with the same outrage that someone like Weinstein receives today. It's no surprise that most eighteen-year-old boys could not do that, even if they were strongly against the war.
I reckon I would probably have rather fought than faced the shame of being a draft dodger. It couldn't have been that obvious when the war was in the middle, that it would turn out as it did. America usually wins.
I think shadowgovt's post was quite neat: the draft and the body count.
All manner of reasons. Some legitimately felt called to serve. This is still a generation who's parents were drafted into World War II and Korea; in the psyche of a lot of Americans, the draft was still a virtuous thing that the well-chosen democratically-elected representatives of their great nation would never activate for a foolish boondoggle. They didn't know a Vietnam could happen because a Vietnam hadn't happened yet; they weren't the generation raised listening to CCR's "Fortunate Son." The pull of the mainstream is very strong.
Five years in jail is also quite a long time, and as the war dragged on I suspect a lot of folks weren't sure how long those jail sentences would ultimately be; remember, if you were drafted, dodged, were caught, and served, you'd be immediately drafted again and could go right back to jail (because the war lasted longer than 5 years). Since the goals were unclear, I suspect many served thinking the war would be over soon and a couple years in a battlefield with "the army that saved the world from Hitler" would be better than cooling your heels in jail for five years (and then being branded a coward by your family the rest of your life because your dad lost two brothers in his War and you were too chickenshit to live up to the family legacy).
Draft dodging wasn't the obvious correct choice until many years into the war; Americans had won (or at least come to a standstill on) drafted wars before.
Yea, it's hard to imagine now, but they didn't all have the benefit of hindsight that we do.
Many people were very proud of their service in WWII and Korea, and they passed that pride on to their kids. WWI was still in living memory at that time, too.
Kids were way less cynical. I think it's legitimately hard to imagine now.
Imagine for a moment that you live in a country that has fought a half dozen wars somewhere in the past century, and that every one of those was (more or less) morally justified. Your great-grandfathers, grandfathers, and father were probably drafted into those, fought and (likely, you were born after all) returned.
But the next war comes up, and everyone tells you that it's righteous too. Maybe they're mistaken or deluded. The people in charge, demanding this war, they aren't supervillains either. They believe they're fighting communism, and while they probably couldn't have known for sure at the time, history has shown it to have been horrible enough that some sort of strategy should've been employed (even if not a shooting war).
Are you going to be the one to back down? There's none of this wokeness that exists today. You'd be called worse than just a pussy for dodging it. Even those who knew of and understood shell shock only cut slack for those who had suffered it, you wouldn't get pre-emptive sympathy.
And those grandfathers and fathers who did go off and fight, you're sort of insulting them though not coming out and saying it outright. If you're morally justified in dodging the draft, should they have done the same? They didn't, so are they just amoral killers now? And this isn't going on in your own head, not entirely, you can tell they're sitting there thinking the same thing, wondering if you'll be one of the hippies that insults them by dodging.
There may be moral principles strong enough that it would demand someone dodge the draft, but those sorts of principles aren't popular or encouraged in the US. Why, if people will dodge the draft during bad wars because of this, what does it mean if the principles say "all wars in which enemies aren't landing on our beaching and dropping shells on our undefended cities are bad"? Well, it means that officeholders who will eventually want a war of their own can't have it. And all officeholders eventually want a war, even if they all can't agree on which.
That's why everyone didn't dodge the draft. Sociological pressures, psychological pressures. Ambiguous popular moralities and people not wise or strong enough to create better ones.
> Imagine for a moment that you live in a country that has fought a half dozen wars somewhere in the past century, and that every one of those was (more or less) morally justified.
The US fought in a lot more than a half dozen wars in the century before Kent State and it takes pretty interesting morality to judge them all “more or less” morally justified.
The big 3 they'd think of would be Korean, WWII, and WWI before it. I don't much think that those are the ones you're claiming were morally questionable, are they?
Sure, there were many. Find me a highschool graduate in Podunk Alabama that knew all of those "more than half a dozen", and was enlightened enough to care that natives were genocided a century earlier.
"Gee, why didn't someone in 1968 have the same sensibilities that I have?!?!"
Being alive at the time, I remember there was a lot of demonizing one's opponents, much like today in fact. I remember anti-war protestors being thought of as free love fornicating, pot smoking, communists and police and soldiers being called pigs and baby killers.
Once your opponent is dehumanized in this way, the violence that follows is easily justified, certainly in the heat of the moment. It becomes easy to throw rocks at police and burn ROTC buildings. It becomes easy to shoot protestors who are enemies of the state.
I'm sure Kent State University is searching for Accuracy here and not of any shred of possibility that it wasn't culpable for the death of four unarmed students.
Honestly, the last group I'd want to hear from about what transpired that day are modern day administrators of the institution trying to distance itself from a particularly shameful day in its history.
Very powerful. That should be the official video for Ohio, if you ask me. It was a bit on the nose that they put up the composite of the four slain students yearbook(?) pictures whenever the song came around to "Four dead in Ohio," but the rest of the arrangement is so moving, I can forgive that.
