By Michael
K. Smith
www.legalienate.blogspot.com
Mass
graves, the criminalization of dissent, systematic slaughter glorified as
self-defense, resisting students making history. Yes, the current nightmare does
seem reminiscent of 1968, the year kaleidoscopic change burst forth seemingly
everywhere at once.
On January
31, the beginning of Tet, eighty-thousand Vietnamese troops issued Washington a
formal eviction notice, attacking all the major cities and towns of colonial
South Vietnam. Blasting through the walls of the U.S. Embassy compound, they
killed two military police and held off a helicopter assault for seven
hours. Government employees arrived at work to find corpses twisted over the
ornamental shrubbery and pools of blood in the white gravel rocks of the
embassy garden.
They
shelled the U.S. naval base at Camrahn Bay and threw open the jails in Quang
Ngai city, setting thousands free. They marched nearly unresisted into the
ancient capital of Hue and raised the Vietcong flag from its Citadel. They
forced the U.S. to raze half the city to the ground at Ben Tre, which an
American officer infamously justified on the grounds that, “We had to destroy the town to save it.”
After
endless boasts of imminent victory, U.S. troops being home by Christmas, and
the proverbial light at the end of the
tunnel, the Vietnamese Tet Offensive proved beyond all doubt that a U.S.
military victory in Vietnam was not in the cards.
Wall Street
turned against the war.
In March,
LBJ discovered his Vietnam policy had left him no path to a second term. Though
elected in a landslide in 1964, four years later his “Great Society” had turned
to riot and left him a lonely prisoner of the White House. Wherever he went he
was besieged by throngs of outraged students taunting him with “that horrible
song” – “Hey, hey, LBJ, how many kids did
you kill today?” No matter how many speeches he canceled or how abruptly he
changed his travel plans he could not avoid being “chased on all sides by a giant stampede.” The people were firing
the president.
Support for
escalation in Vietnam had evaporated. Worried that fulfilling General
Westmoreland’s request for 206,000 more troops would leave Washington
insufficiently protected against the threat of insurrection at home, a Council
of Wise Men told a shocked Johnson to cut his losses and withdraw from the war
before it tore the U.S. apart.
By then
150,000 Americans were dead or injured and much of Southeast Asia had been
annihilated by a U.S. military machine that could do everything but stop. On
March 31 Johnson went on nationwide TV to announce his forced retirement: “I shall not seek, and will not accept the
nomination of my party for another term as your President.”
Four days
later Dr. King was assassinated for having publicly connected the dots between
domestic racism and imperial war. A year to the day before he was shot he was
widely condemned for a speech he gave before a crowd of three thousand at Riverside
Church in New York City, where he did not mince words about the war:
“The peasants watched as we
supported a ruthless dictatorship in South Vietnam which aligned itself with
extortionist landlords and executed its political opponents. The peasants
watched as we poisoned their water, bombed and machine-gunned their huts,
annihilated their crops, and sent them wandering into the towns, where
thousands of homeless children wandered the streets like animals, begging for
food and selling their mothers and sisters to American soldiers. What do the
peasants think as we test our weapons on them, as the Germans tested new
medicines and tortures in Europe’s concentration camps? . . . .We have
destroyed their land and crushed their only non-Communist revolutionary
political force – the Unified Buddhist Church. We have corrupted their women
and children and killed their men. What liberators!”
A year
later he was in Memphis to help striking Memphis garbage workers. The night of
April 3 an exhausted and dispirited King was already in his pajamas and ready
for bed when he received a call from Reverend Ralph Abernathy at Mason Temple,
informing him that two thousand people had braved tornado warnings and a
driving rain to hear him speak. “I really
think you should come down,” pleaded Abernathy. “The people want to hear you, not me. This is your crowd.”
Dr. King
got dressed and went out into the stormy night.
In the
blaze of lights at the podium, he appeared nervous. He told his audience that
if he were at God’s side on the dawn of creation he would ask to see Moses
liberating his people, Plato and Aristotle debating philosophy, Renaissance
Europe, Luther tacking his ninety-five theses on the church door, Lincoln
emancipating the slaves, and Roosevelt charting a path to the New Deal. But he
would not dally in those times or places, he said, preferring to move on and experience just a few years in the second half of the
twentieth century, when masses around the world rose up to say: “We want to be free.”
Dr. King,
abandoned by militants, vilified by the press, stalked by death and the FBI,
felt deeply grateful to share in the freedom struggles that heaped his life
with hardship.
With the
crowd shouting its approval, he bellowed that he had been to the mountaintop and seen
the Promised Land. Brushing aside prospects of premature death, he said
that longevity had its place, but that on that night he was not worried about any thing, not fearing any man.
A burning
passion in his eyes, his voice rising to a shattering crescendo, he declared
his last will and testament: “Mine eyes
have seen the glory of the coming of the Lord!”
The next
day as he was preparing to go out to dinner with friends a bullet exploded into
his face, severed his spine, and brought him crashing abruptly down on the
balcony of the Lorraine Motel.
Reverend
Abernathy bolted to his side, crying out to those in the parking lot below: “Oh my God, Martin’s been shot!”
Dr. King, a
look of terror in his eyes, clutched uselessly at his throat. His head lay in
an expanding pool of blood. Abernathy tried to comfort him. “This is Ralph, this is Ralph, don’t be
afraid.” Reverend King, still conscious, his magnificent voice silenced
forever, couldn’t answer. But Abernathy felt he was communicating through his
eyes.
In King’s
motel room, Reverend Billy Kyle repeatedly banged his head against the wall as
he screamed into the phone for an operator. Dashing up sobbing from the parking
lot, Andrew Young groped for a pulse, then screamed: “Oh my God, my God, it’s all over!”
Everywhere
at once riots erupted and cities burned.
Three weeks
after King’s assassination Columbia exploded in protest. President Grayson
Kirk, alarmed at the growing youth rebellion, announced that in disturbing
numbers young people rejected all forms
of authority, which was just another way of saying that all forms of
authority were increasingly recognized to have discredited themselves.
Hundreds of
students promptly took over the university, hoisting red flags, establishing
community government, and barricading themselves inside campus buildings.
They
purloined documents from Kirk’s office showing that the university was secretly
promoting classified war research and working to “clean up” the neighborhood by
moving out its Black and Puerto Rican residents. Resurrecting the spirit of the
Paris Commune, the students debated meaning and tactics, relaxed to Dylan and
the Beatles, and celebrated romance. Two students even got married, escorted to
the center of an applauding circle by a candlelight procession of fellow protestors.
Eight days
into deadlocked negotiations a thousand blue collar police were turned loose on
the defecting sons and daughters of the Ivy League. Attacking with clubs and
brass knuckles, they rioted for three hours, smashing up furniture and beating
everyone in sight while carrying out a bloody mass arrest.
One hundred
and twenty charges of police brutality were filed against the police
department, the most in its history. Echoing the recently assassinated Che
Guevara, Tom Hayden called for “one, two,
many Columbias” in romantic hopes of bringing the racist imperial state
tumbling down.
Days after
the start of the Columbia revolt, student radicals in Paris surged into the
streets chorusing “all power to the
imagination,” propelling France to the brink of cultural revolution and
setting the mighty franc to trembling.
Spontaneously
embracing and kissing in the streets, tens of thousands of students and workers
marched joyously together through the capital, waving red flags and singing the
Internationale. Demanding workers’
power, peasants’ power, and students’ power, they announced the end of
cooperation with soulless mechanization and bureaucratic arrogance.
On The Night Of The Barricades the fiercest
street fighting since Liberation (WWII) shook the Latin Quarter as thousands of
students marched in protest, overturning cars and trucks. The police attacked,
beating them with clubs and rifle butts, kicking the rebels unconscious and
dragging them through tear-gas clotted streets by the hair. The students fought back with Molotov
cocktails, filling them with siphoned gas and pushing vehicles into the middle
of the street to serve as barricades. When the police charged, the protesters
torched the cars and retreated behind sturdier lines while building residents
tossed down water and wet cloths to aid their youthful comrades fighting with
cobblestones.
A veteran
of the clash reported, “I never felt the
gas. I was never more alive.”
In 1968,
even Catholic pacifists were moved to a more aggressive style of protest. On
May 17, what became known as the Catonsville Nine entered the Catonsville,
Maryland draft board office and doused a pile of draft records with their
blood, then set them on fire with soap chips and gasoline, a homemade napalm
recipe gleaned from a Green Beret handbook. While waiting to be arrested, they
prayed and watched the records burn.
At their
trial they spoke of United Fruit Company keeping Central American land fallow
while the campesinos starved. They
told of the CIA overthrowing the elected government of Guatemala and replacing
it with a reign of butchers worthy of Hitler. Father Daniel Berrigan told of
his visit to Hanoi, of the merciless U.S. bombings, of the weaponry certified improved through tests on Vietnamese
flesh and bone. He read a statement explaining how simple humanity required the
destruction of the draft files:
“Our apologies good friends . . . for the
fracture of good order . . . the burning of paper instead of children . . . the
angering of the orderlies in the front parlor of the charnel house . . . We
could not so help us God do otherwise for we are sick at heart . . . our hearts
give us no rest for thinking of the Land of Burning Children.”
In early
June U.S. support for Israeli savagery caused Sirhan Sirhan to temporarily lose
his mind. He had been just three years old when a series of violent episodes
near his Jerusalem home scarred him for life. A dynamite bomb hurled by
Zionists blew up a line of Arab passengers waiting for a bus at the Damascus
Gate; a sudden burst of gunfire caused an army truck to swerve around a barrier
and kill his older brother before his eyes; a British soldier blown up almost
on his doorstep left behind a severed leg in a church tower and a finger in
Sirhan’s back yard.
Nineteen
years later Sirhan was living in Pasadena when Israel bombed and napalmed
Palestinian refugee camps, subjugating what remained of historic Palestine in
the Six Day Land Grab (1967), a sequel to the driving out of hundreds of thousands
of Palestinians in 1948, among them Sirhan and his family.
With his
people tasting another round of bitter injustice, Sirhan watched Senator Robert
Kennedy wearing a yarmulke on
television and promising to cut off U.S. aid to Arab states while sending fifty
new Phantom jets to Israel. Shocked, angry, horrified, he fled the television
set in tears, covering his ears with his hands.
He
scribbled in his notebook: RFK must die.
At his
trial for the assassination of Senator Kennedy, Sirhan testified to the
assassination of an entire nation:
“Well, sir, when you move – when you
move a whole country, sir, a whole people, bodily from their own homes, from
their own land, from their own businesses, sir, outside their country, and
introduce an alien people, sir, into Palestine – the Jews and the Zionists –
that is completely wrong, sir, and it is unjust and the Palestinian Arabs
didn’t do a thing, sir, to justify the way they were treated by the West.
“It affected me, sir, very deeply. I
didn’t like it. Where is the justice involved, sir? Where is the love, sir, for
fighting for the underdog? Israel is no underdog in the Middle East, sir. It’s
those refugees that are underdogs. And because they have no way of fighting
back, sir, the Jews, sir, the Zionists, just keep beating away at them. That
burned the hell out of me.”
Nobody paid
him the slightest attention. In
spite of Israel’s constant provocations and attacks, Jews were everywhere
portrayed as heroic, avenging victims, Arabs as congenital terrorists, and
Israel’s Six Day Land Grab as a glorious warding off of a second Holocaust.
Facts were entirely irrelevant.
With hopes
of a peace candidate now definitively crushed, all eyes turned to Chicago as
the Democratic Party prepared to nominate Hubert Humphrey there as its
candidate for the presidency. Eighty percent of Democratic voters had chosen to
support either RFK or Eugene McCarthy in hopes of negotiating an end to the
Vietnam slaughter. Faced with LBJ’s vice-president heading up the ticket,
anti-war protesters vowed to lay siege to the city as a prelude to what they
somehow imagined might become a revolution.
Protest was
out of favor in the Windy City. In response to the nationwide riots that
followed Dr. King’s assassination, the Chicago
Tribune opined that “Here in Chicago
we are not dealing with the colored population, but with a minority of criminal
scum,” and urged Mayor Richard Daley not to be like the “spineless and indecisive mayors who muffed
early riot control” in Newark (1967) and Los Angeles (1965). Daley obliged,
ordering his police officers to “shoot to kill.”
Loathing
“longhairs,” Daley refused to issue permits for protest marches, rallies, or
sleeping in the parks. He ordered the city Ampitheatre fenced off with barbed
wire, put all twelve thousand Chicago police on 12-hour shifts, and mobilized
six thousand National Guard troops. He posted a thousand FBI agents around the
city and placed six thousand U.S. Army troops outfitted with flamethrowers,
bazookas, and bayonets around the suburbs. With police outnumbering protesters
three or four to one, Tom Hayden told members of a New York audience to come to
Chicago prepared to shed their blood.
As summer
waned the Convention convened, and following days of dangerous cat-and-mouse
games in the streets between police and protesters, a brownshirt riot ensued.
Shouting kill, kill, kill, a squadron of
red-faced, blue-helmeted, club-wielding police charged out of a bus at
full-speed and attacked a jeering crowd of onlookers outside the Conrad Hilton
Hotel, beating, choking, kicking and macing everyone in their path, including
medics sporting Red Cross armbands. Like maddened Samurai they mowed their
victims down, charging again and again, leaving the battered bodies bleeding in
the street. Loading them onto the ambulances, they beat them once more.
Eyes
bulging with hate, they drove the crowd through the window of the Haymarket
Lounge, jumping through the glass shards to upend tables and smash everything
inside. They screamed “get the fuck out
of here,” and “move your fucking ass,”
beating even the startled patrons of the bar. Undeterred by the presence of
live TV cameras, they rioted in clouds of tear gas for seventeen long minutes
while the surrounding crowd chanted, “The
whole world is watching, the whole world is watching.”
Across the
street in his hotel shower Hubert Humphrey was briefly overcome from the
effects of the gas, which he never was from the horrors of Vietnam.
When
televised images of the bloodshed reached the floor of the Democratic
Convention, Connecticut Senator Abraham Ribicoff stepped to the rostrum to
denounce the “Gestapo tactics” of the
police. In an instant Chicago Mayor Daley was on his feet, waving his arms and
screaming in protest: “Fuck you, you Jew
son of a bitch, you lousy motherfucker go home.”
As the
ballots were being cast, footage of the police riot was beamed across the
nation. Viewers saw Hubert Humphrey, irrepressible advocate of the politics of joy, nominated for
president in a sea of blood.
Of course,
all this was but child’s play compared to the unrestrained violence being
inflicted on the slopes and dinks and
zipperheads - otherwise known as the Vietnamese people - by the U.S. war
machine in Vietnam. Two years later in Detroit, Vietnam Veterans gave chilling
testimony as to the type of crimes being committed:
“ . . . they didn’t believe our body
counts. So we had to cut off the right ear of everybody we killed to prove our
body count.”
“ . . . we threw full C-ration cans
at kids at the side of the road. Well, just for a joke, these guys would take a
full can, and throw it as hard as they could at a kid’s head. I saw several
kids’ heads split wide open.”
“The philosophy was that anybody
running must be a Viet Cong; he must have something to hide or else he would
stick around for the Americans, not taking into consideration that he was
running from the Americans because they were continually shooting at him. So
they shot down anybody who was running.”
“This was common policy. Kill
anything you want to kill, any time you want to kill it – just don’t get
caught.”
“ . . . the heads of the bodies were
cut off and they were placed on stakes, jammed down on stakes, and were placed
in the middle of the trails and a Cav patch was hammered into the top of his
head, with Bravo Company’s ‘B’ written right on the patch.”
“I saw during my tour 20 deformed
infants under the age of one . . . I thought it was congenital or something,
from venereal disease, because they had flippers and things . . . it was common
knowledge that Agent Orange was sprayed in the area.”
“Fugas is a jelly-like substance.
It’s flammable . . . they explode the barrel over an area and this flaming,
jelly-like substance lands on everything . . . people or animals or whatever.”
“You could take the wires of a jeep
battery put it almost any place on their body, and you’re going to shock the
hell out of the guy. The basic place you put it was the genitals.”
In other
words, the conduct of the United States in Southeast Asia during the war years
was nothing short of a complete disgrace. Washington dropped eight million tons
of bombs and nearly four hundred thousand tons of napalm, leaving behind
twenty-one million bomb craters. It killed over two million Cambodians,
Vietnamese, and Laotians, wounded over three million more, and scattered
fourteen million traumatized refugees throughout Indochina. It rained down
eighteen million gallons of Agent Orange and other defoliants, creating forests
bereft of trees, animals or birds, and cursing the war’s survivors with extraordinary
rates of liver cancer, miscarriages, stillbirths, and birth defects. It left in
its wake eighty-three thousand amputees, forty thousand people blinded or deaf,
and hundreds of thousands of orphans, prostitutes, disabled, mentally ill, and
drug addicts.
The total
effect was nearly permanent, as journalist Donovan Webster discovered on a
visit to Ho Chi Minh City (formerly Saigon) in the mid-1990s. There he saw a storage room stacked
from floor to ceiling on all four sides with deformed fetuses, the final result
of the Pentagon’s defoliation program begun three decades before. Some were
double bodies fused together on a single torso, others had malformed faces,
many had excess heads, fingers, and toes.
Donovan
walked out of the storage room in shock.
In a
nursery down the hall, a roomful of genetically-damaged orphans was overjoyed
to meet the U.S. reporter come to visit them from overseas.
Sources:
On Vietnam
and the Tet Offensive:
Godfrey
Hodgson, America In Our Time,
(Vintage, 1976) pps. 353-4; Frances Fitzgerald, Fire In The Lake – The Vietnamese and The Americans in Vietnam,
(Vintage, 1972) pps. 518-34; George McTurnan and John W. Lewis, The United States In Vietnam, (Delta,
1969) pps. 371-3; Douglas Dowd, Blues For
America, (Monthly Review, 1997) p. 153; Lawrence Wittner, Cold War America: From Hiroshima to
Watergate, (Holt, Rinehart & Winston, 1978) p. 289; David Harris, Our War (Random House, 1996) p. 89;
Gabriel Kolko, Anatomy of a War,
(Pantheon, 1985) pps. 308-9; Edward Abbey, Confessions
of a Barbarian, (Little, Brown, 1994) p. 214
On MLK and
his assassination:
Steven B.
Oates, Let The Trumpet Sound – The Life
of Martin Luther King, Jr. (Harper and Row, 1982) p. 435, 483-6; PBS
Documentary, 1968 – The Year That Shaped
A Generation.
On the
Columbia protests:
Todd
Gitlin, The Sixties, (Bantam, 1987)
pps. 306-8; Lawrence S. Wittner, Cold War
America: From Hiroshima To Watergate, (Holt, Rinehart & Winston, 1978)
pps. 304-5; Barbara and John Ehrenreich, Long
March, Short Spring, The Student Uprising At Home and Abroad, (Monthly
Review, 1969) pps. 125-7, 145; Tom Hayden, Reunion,
A Memoir, (Random House, 1978) pps. 276-82
On the
French student-worker protests:
Barbara and
John Ehrenreich, Long March, Short
Spring, The Student Uprising At Home and Abroad, (Monthly Review, 1969 pps.
73-102 passim; PBS Documentary, 1968: The
Year That Shaped A Generation
On the
Berrigan brothers and The Catonsville Nine:
Phillip
Berrigan with Fred. A Wilcox, Fighting
The Lamb’s War: Skirmishes With The American Empire, (Common Courage, 1996)
pps. 80, 93, 96, 101-5; Daniel Berrigan, The
Trial of the Catonsville Nine (Beacon, 1970) p. vii; William M. Kunstler
with Sheila Isenberg, My Life As A
Radical Lawyer, (Carol Publishing Group, 1994) p. 190.
On Sirhan
Sirhan and RFK:
Alfred M.
Lilienthal, The Zionist Connection – What
Price Peace? (Dodd, Mead & Co., 1978) pps. 242-3
Note: A
slightly different version of Sirhan’s mental collapse comes from the late
Alexander Cockburn, who says Sirhan was driven over the edge from reading an
account of the Phantom jets to Israel written by Andrew Kopkind in the Nation. See Jeffrey St. Clair, “Roaming
Charges: the Return of Assassination Politics,” Counterpunch, August
12, 2016
On Sirhan
Sirhan directly quoted from his trial:
Godfrey
Jansen, Why Robert Kennedy Was Killed,
(Third Press, 1970) frontispiece.
For an
honest account of the Six Day War:
Norman
Finkelstein, Image and Reality of the
Israel-Palestine Conflict (Verso, 1995).
On Mayor
Daley and protest at the 1968 Democratic Convention:
Todd
Gitlin, The Sixties, (Bantam, 1987)
pps. 320-6, Tom Hayden, Reunion: A Memoir,
(Random House, 1988) p. 297
On the
Chicago police riots:
Todd
Gitlin, The Sixties, pps. 332-4; David
Farber, Chicago, (University of
Chicago, 1988) pps. 200-1, 249; Daniel Walker, Rights In Conflict, (E. P. Dutton, 1968) pps. 255-65; Mike Royko, Boss, (Signet, 1971) pps. 188-9; Mark L. Levine et al, eds. The Tales of Hoffman (Bantam, 1970); p.
124; Lawrence S. Wittner, Cold War
America: From Hiroshima To Watergate, (Holt, Rinehart & Winston, 1978)
p. 297
On Vietnam
Veterans’ testimony about war atrocities:
Vietnam
Veterans Against The War, The Winter
Soldier Investigation (Beacon, 1972) pps. 5-114 passim
On
statistics of the overall damage done by the Vietnam War:
Michael
Parenti, The Sword and the Dollar –
Imperialism, Revolution and the Arms Race, (St. Martin’s 1989) p. 44; Noam
Chomsky and Edward S. Herman, After the
Cataclysm – Postwar Indochina & The Reconstruction of Imperial Ideology
(South End, 1979), pps. 7-9
On the
long-lasting effects of the defoliation campaign in Vietnam:
Donovan
Webster, Aftermath – The Remnants of War
(Pantheon, 1996) pps. 214-17
