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When Property's On The Line, Response To Dissent Turns Lethal
When a nation perpetrates large-scale violence abroad and calls it peace-making, as the United States has since Vietnam, it shouldn't be surprised when violence goes full circle and explodes at home, where it was at least partially seeded. This reasoning doesn't apply only to Sept.11 or the next attack, which is a matter of time.
Thirty-seven years ago last Friday, Ohio National Guard troops on the campus of Kent State University pointed their bayoneted M-1 rifles at anti-war protesters and fired, killing four students: Allison Krause, 19; Sandy Lee Scheuer, 20; Jeffrey Glenn Miller, 20; and Bill Schroeder, 19. Eight others were wounded. The Guard claimed they'd heard a sniper shot. They were under orders to return fire. The Ohio Guard's commander found "no evidence" of sniper fire the day after the killings. Alan Canfora was shot in the wrist that day. Last week, he produced a recording of the shooting that he claims pins blame on the Guard as one or more voices are heard saying, "Right here!" "Get Set!" "Point!" and "Fire!" The 13-second volley of gunfire follows.
The recording proves less than Canfora claims. But whether it proves that the Guard was ordered to fire is irrelevant. The original crime was sending the Guard, armed and bayoneted, on a university campus to start with -- even a campus where, three days before, the ROTC building was burned to the ground. The original crime was, as James Michener wrote in his book on the killings, "the obvious obsession with property values as opposed to human life," an obsession that threads through American history since well before the Constitution enshrined it as an inalienable right. Western standards of living being measured primarily by the accumulation and preservation of property, it's property value, in the end, that's being fought for in Iraq (if it was democracy and human rights, we'd also be in the Sudan, in the Congo, in Saudi Arabia and in almost every country within a thousand-mile radius of the Persian Gulf).
The sacredness of property isn't a crazy idea. John Locke believed (and the Founding Fathers agreed) that one's property is an extension of oneself hardly different from one's limbs: If you worked hard enough for your house, losing it is like losing a limb. But all property isn't created equal, least of all when life is subordinated to it, as it was at Kent State. Students there had been protesting Richard Nixon's broken promise of de-escalating the Vietnam War. He had just announced invasion plans into Cambodia and the resumption of the bombing of North Vietnam. That was the real, murderous violence. By destroying the ROTC building on campus (at night, when it was certifiably empty) students, many of whom were being drafted, gave action to anger. The public building most symbolic of the military devouring theirs and others' lives was burned. The act immediately paled compared to the Guard's fire.
And yet even that wasn't the end of the worst of it. The most startling aspect of the Kent State killings is the enormous outpouring of hatred for the students that followed, filling the local paper's letters page day after day. "Hooray!," one housewife wrote. "I shout for God and country, recourse to justice under law, fifes, drums, martial music, parades, ice cream cones -- America, support it or leave it." An attorney -- an attorney! -- wrote, "If the troublemaking students have no better sense than to conduct themselves as they do on our university and college campuses . . . they justly deserve the consequences that they bring upon themselves, even if this does unfortunately result in death." Letters supported a vigilante movement to fight students. Letters called them "creeps," "mobs of dissidents," "so-called educated punks."
Memorials, like last week's at Kent State, don't reflect those hatreds. If only the solemnity of memorials inspired policy. But they don't. The atmosphere of the moment does, and in the moment, even Nixon had called the Kent State students "bums," while Spiro Agnew, his vice president, had the stupidity to call the killings "predictable." How familiar it all sounds in a country where dissent is ceremoniously ennobled when there's nothing to dissent about and loathed, repressed and sometimes shot, when there is, all in the name of that "love it or leave it" ideal that belittles Camus' maxim: "I should like to be able to love my country and love justice, also." As one student wrote in the Kent State paper, a rare voice of reason amidst the din of hatred, "You people with the 'mow 'em down' philosophy, can you love God without loving Jeffrey, Bill, Sandy and Allison?"
Pierre Tristam is a News-Journal editorial writer. Reach him at ptristam@att.net or through his personal Web site at www.pierretristam.com .
© 2007 The Daytona Beach News-Journal
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20 Comments so far
Show AllA very good article, and 1970 doesn't seem so long ago to me since we're back in it again with a vengeance. The Bush Regime is a manifestation of the continuing backlash against against students (or anyone else)who challenges authority in this country. What Nixon practiced in his career as a politician is "the politics of resentment," and this poisonous strategy eventually unravelled his presidentcy and as we can only hope unravels this one, or at least derails the next radical statists (not conservatives!!!) seeking to pick up where this administration left off. It is well to remember that they never give up and that they want it all!
One expects ones government to use its forces, whether they be police, national guard or ones armed forces, to protect its citizens. When they start killing their own citizens then one has to wonder about the credibility of the government that sent them. The police are there to protect property and ones person but still one hears of trigger happy cops and of being pulled over for driving while black. One gets the impression from time to time that ones guvmint is the enemy of the majority of citizens, certainly it strains the imagination to believe its the government of the people, by the people, for the people.
The future looks dim for a government by the people for the people because of the amount of power corporations display on capitol hill and in the mass media. The military industrial complex is so vast that its influence is beyond national politics and it affects the global economy. Even the energy sector is in bed with the military as we see in Iraq. The patriot act, the Supreme Court, the new structure to the spy agencies, more mergers for media outlets, have all attributed to making us a police state.
Nothing but mass protest and civil disobendience all accross this country can change the direction this country is going in. Time to leave the TV unplugged and join a local group for change!!!
I remember talking with a clergyman who was a chaplain at Kent State. He spoke of the anger and the hurt of the students, shocked as they were over what had transpired: first Nixon's decisions to ramp up the violence and second, the horror of the shootings. We forget the leadership of the students and (some) condemn them for their actions, but would it mot be more advisable to really hear what it is that they are saying? If you have not seen the video of Keith Olbermann - Olbermann: the beginning of the end of America on Youtube, I commend it to you. Such straight talk!
If you take away "Their" remote what would "They" do?
When corporate profits are on the line life becomes worthless.
This part of the above article is awesome to me:
"The sacredness of property isn't a crazy idea. John Locke believed (and the Founding Fathers agreed) that one's property is an extension of oneself hardly different from one's limbs: If you worked hard enough for your house, losing it is like losing a limb."
IAH,
buffalo_ken
The outpouring of hatred can best be summed up by Eric Hoffer:
"To wrong those we hate is to add fuel to our hatred. Conversely, to treat an enemy with magnanimity is to blunt our hatred for him"
Another thing about the difference when property's on the line: you can march for social justice until your feet turn black, but when you form a union, that's when they break out the death squads.
Hey, it seems to me there must be something to this...
http://news.yahoo.com/s/ap/20070508/ap_on_re_eu/northern_ireland;_ylt=Au_F5NDtZoF0L3Zig_O.WRTMWM0F
P.S. HR333
Really!
How can I end this comment? I'd just assume not submit it. Oh well.
Peace everyone,
buffalo_ken
That the school over reacted by sending in armed people, no argument from me. The question of property rights however is a double edge sword. I was against the war in Vietnam myself. I however would not resort to arson to make my point. That is one edge. The other has to do with eminent domain. Recently the Supreme Court upheld New London's right to sieze people's homes in order for a developer to build a mall, because it would benefit the community as a whole. Many years before that, a man got the land to build the Texas Rangers' baseball stadium by eminent domain. He told the people in Black and Hispanic neighborhoods that the stadium would benefit the community by providing jobs and tax revenue. That developer was George W. Bush.
OFF-TOPIC BUT VERY IMPORTANT:
http://nationalinitiative.us/
Kent State massacre is more an indibtment of American culture than any of its government agencies. Within police and military forces, within elected office and government agency, some members of lesser or greater authority act on personal philosphies rather than mission statement, codes of conduct, oaths of office. The National Guard, who if not directly ordered to point and shoot, came prepared to do so without question. The students were made into public enemies beforehand by questionable military leaders who held no more value for them than they did for the National Guard. A soldier, whether drafted or enlisted, is a slave to causes that license murder. The American culture has a long history of wholesale licensed murder.
I figure the problem as class warfare. Millionaires establishing monopolies for the economic control of underclasses. "Let's you and them fight." We can also blame our cars as the paramount support structure for corporate control. No matter how fueled, whether Iraqi light sweet crude, french fry fat or the purest electricity, our cars are a transportation monopoly and a constitutional inequity whose perversion of the American culture can only be called nefarious.
Did everyone forget that kids who were minding their own business - going to class or lunch - were also shot? Is this just 'collateral damage' - and what we should expect?
How to put this without offending the sensitivities of the 60's generation, because I am one of them.
The firing by the national guard troops that day on unarmed students was one of the most tragic days
In the history of this country. A sad day for what this country is suppose to stand for. And a terrible
Personal loss for many.
But in this time many of the people who at that time stood with flowers in their hands instead of guns,
Are now willing to send their children off to Iraq or Afghanistan with a gun in their hands at the word of
GWB because there is supposed to be threat to our national security.
Some of these flower children, who proclaimed that living simple and revolting against the system
Was the answer. Are now I sadly say are within it's grasp.
With their SUV's and their boats in tow, they have forgotten the simple life, they preached so Long ago.
With their children now in private colleges, and comfortable middle and upper middle class Live styles. They have embraced whole heartedly the system they once so strongly rejected.
Oh, how we have changed!
But we should never become so jaded as to forget those that died that day and whose hands they died at.
They died at hands of the system we now accept.
It makes me think of that line from a Dylan song "I was so much older then ,I am younger than that now".
That in some ways we were older and wiser back then.
Now some of us would not think of putting our comfortable lifestyles at risk for a cause any cause.
We have become are parents. The parents we once so strongly rebelled against.
How did Neil Young put it then "What if you knew her
And found her dead on the ground
How can you run when you know?"
Well their are a lot dead Iraqi women and children dead on the ground.
We need to take to the streets in large numbers as we did then.
We need to stop the murder." How can you run you know!"
The German people enjoyed quite a lot of prosperity under Hitler's "National Socialism" and they didn't want to be reminded how much of it was looted from Hitler's victims. Now that we have a global economy it's even more difficult to explain how much of our prosperity has been produced in sweat shops in countries that are poor because the property rights of the shop owners are backed up by the police and military, even in "Communist" China. But now that system of extreme wage and debt slavery is coming home as millions of illegal aliens are used by the corporations to depress whatever wage gains Americans have managed to win over the many years of labor struggles and suffering. Thus, the prosperous American working class some have called the "Middle Class" is disappearing in a "race to the bottom" engineered by bought and sold politicians of both parties, the purpose being to create a global empire of corporate supremacy over billions of poorly educated victims who are misled by the corporate media to fight each other in various wars of conquest and the rape of resources. It's corporate fascism and "democracy" has become a cover-story to hook people into lifetimes loyal servitude - and they appear to be surrendering to it rather than pay the terrible cost of organized resistance to create something better that might also end up being corrupted and perverted all over again. What can be done?
I say organize continental networks of eco-tech villages that surround themsleves with miles of healthy wilderness, etc. but how can the poor oppressed do anyhting more than survive from day to day? Where is the revolutionary organization capable of such a global struggle? I sure don't see it anywhere. Instead I see a growing number of sell-outs who grab what they can and retire as quickly as they can, before the game is over in some ecocidal catastriphe or some global holocaust. Thus, my answers and solutions are moot, apparently.
Communitarian - Nicely summed
I think some good things have started. Here's for hoping they continue! I'm just trying to do my part, and I think many others are also. Nonetheless, time is of the essence.
Peace to all,
buffalo_ken