Bernardine Dohrn and Bill Ayers : Looking Back at Kent State and Jackson State

President Richard Nixon, pointing to a Cambodian map, announces the entry of American soldiers into Cambodia, on April 30, 1970.
Kent State and Jackson State:
Looking back / leaning forward

Richard Nixon and the political class had denounced students as thugs and subversives for their resistance to the pervasive U.S. war crimes.

By Bernardine Dohrn and Bill Ayers / The Rag Blog / May 8, 2012

Again and again we learn that war and empire abroad will find a way home.

On April 30, 1970, Richard Nixon announced the U.S. invasion of Cambodia, a sovereign nation the U.S. had been secretly bombing for several months. It was a saturation campaign involving 120 strikes a day by B-52s carrying up to 60,000 pounds of bombs each.

But in the common doublespeak of war, the president claimed: “This is not an invasion of Cambodia… once enemy forces are driven out of these sanctuaries and once their military supplies are destroyed, we will withdraw…”

Nixon’s aggression against Cambodia was accompanied by a verbal assault on those inside the U.S. opposing the war: “we live in an age of anarchy, both abroad and at home,” he intoned.

The next day, Nixon went to the Pentagon to clarify the point: “you see these bums…blowing up the campuses…burning up the books, I mean storming around about this issue... you name it, get rid of the war, there’ll be another one.”

On the rolling spring lawns of Kent State in the American heartland, students continued to press against an illegal, immoral war of occupation. The first entering classes of Black students formed themselves into what was to become a growing wave of Black student unions, even at Kent State. Returning veterans were throwing their medals back at the warmongers, and themselves becoming students.

Two days after the official invasion of Cambodia, 900 National Guardsmen amassed on the Kent State campus. M-1 rifles were raised, and within 13 seconds, 61 shots were fired on unarmed students -- four were dead, nine wounded. It was, the official Presidential Commission on Campus Unrest later found, “a nation driven to use the weapons of war upon its youth.”

The outright murder of (white) college students engaged in peaceful protest at Kent State University, and the lesser-recognized but equally tragic murder of (Black) unarmed college students at Jackson State University that same week, were shocking although forewarned. Richard Nixon and the political class had denounced students as thugs and subversives for their resistance to the pervasive U.S. war crimes in Viet Nam, to the secret wars against Laos and Cambodia, to the flagrant arming and supporting of tyrants throughout Latin America, and to the lavish funding of apartheid and colonialism in Africa.

Invasion, lawlessness, military occupation and counter-insurgency, displacement, and systematic violence visited on others necessarily created its domestic corollary: a militarized national security state promoting heightened cruelty and callousness at home, the shredding of constitutional liberty and rights, and the unleashing of armed violence on its own citizens. The 10-year war against Viet Nam and the murderous (secret) assault on the Black freedom movement were blood cousins, Kent and Jackson State its offspring.

Today the permanent wars carried out by the U.S. military and its NATO spawn bring home their own violence and tragedy. Witness the mass killings at Fort Hood, astronomical suicide rates for returning veterans, widespread rape and assault on women in the military by their fellow soldiers, attempted assassinations of politicians, and the galloping arms race among ordinary citizens and residents who are increasingly arming up and carrying concealed weapons to work and play.

Add to that the quiet violence of a 20% child poverty rate in the richest nation in history, a prison gulag of mass incarceration sweeping up 2½ million people, harsh economic “austerity” resulting in severe slashing and degradation of education, health care, housing, public transportation and jobs at home -- all of it hitting people of color disproportionally.

Empire and constant military wars not only squander the public wealth and directly destroy the lives of millions, they inevitably bring about a Panopticon-like national security state and a militarized domestic life at home.

At Kent State, students met with state violence and terror previously directed almost exclusively at the Black and Latino freedom movements. In response, 80% of U.S. colleges and universities called for some form of strike. Four million students were involved in protests, willing to face being beaten, gassed, or even shot. The National Guard was called out at 21 colleges and universities, 500 campuses cancelled classes, and 51 did not reopen until the fall. In Washington, D.C., 130,000 students mobilized against war and repression.

It was all merely prelude: greater repression and disintegration at home will accompany the long wars in Iraq, Afghanistan, Yemen, Bahrain, and Pakistan; Occupy, Madison, Trayvon, and inevitable resistance will surely follow.

[William Ayers is Distinguished Professor of Education and Senior University Scholar at the University of Illinois at Chicago. Bernardine Dohrn is Clinical Associate Professor of Law and director and founder of the Children and Family Justice Center at Northwestern University. Both Ayers and Dohrn were leaders in SDS and the New Left, and were founders of Weatherman and the Weather Underground. Find more articles by and about Bill Ayers and Bernardine Dohrn on The Rag Blog.]

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David McReynolds : Egypt, Beyond the Pyramids

Image from Mystic Journey.
Egypt, Beyond the Pyramids

Now we are seeing one of the rarest of things -- a moment when the people lose their fear of the State.

By David McReynolds / The Rag Blog / February 2, 2011

This is not really about Egypt but about revolution, something we have just seen in Tunisia and are certainly seeing in Egypt. Revolutions are baffling things because while we can “explain them” after the event, we can’t predict them before they arrive.

They have uncertain beginnings, and uncertain endings. I remember, in high school, reading Lincoln Steffens' autobiography (which is probably still in print). In it he discussed the Mexican Revolution and the Russian Revolution. (Steffens is remembered for his quote, after his return from the Soviet Union in the early days of the revolution, when he said “I have seen the future and it works.”)

He was concerned with the issue of “Thermidor," a term that comes from the French Revolution, when on July 27, 1794 -- “9 Thermidor” under the revolutionary calendar -- the deputies, weary of mass executions (1,300 in June of that year), ordered the arrest of Robespierre and other members of the “Committee of Public Safety," and had them guillotined, marking the end of the Revolution and the consolidation of at least part of the old order.

The revolutions in the United States, Russia, and Cuba share one thing in common -- those against whom the revolt was carried out generally were driven out of the country. In the U.S. the loyalists (perfectly decent folks, for the most part) fled to Canada, the British West Indies, or back to the home country. In Russia the Civil War killed a great many of the White Russians, and those who did not die, fled into exile.

Cuba wisely permitted dissenters to leave -- the Mariel boatlift being an example of how the regime nonviolently eliminated a chunk of opponents. In France, despite the violence of the revolution, most of the opposition survived and in some ways France has suffered from this division to the present day.

We shall see, certainly, a longing in Egypt for order. Revolutions are great fun during their early days. (Despite the violence, there is an extraordinary exhilaration to them. Those who have seen Before Night Falls, which is generally seen as an anti‐Cuban film, as it tells the story of the poet, Reinaldo Arenas, will have to concede that it captures the early excitement of the revolution very well.)

Then food runs short, there is disorder (as we see in Egypt), travel is disrupted, the economy grinds to a halt, and there is a longing for a return to a sense of order. Even Lenin had to reverse course early in the Soviet Revolution, introducing his New Economic Policy (NEP) to save a foundering economy.

But for now we are seeing one of the rarest of things -- a moment when the people lose their fear of the State, when, as the Chinese say, “the mandate of heaven has fallen” and it is only a matter of time before the old regime must yield. We saw this for a few days in France in 1968, when it seemed as if a true revolution was about to sweep the country. Those my age who were active in the Vietnam anti‐war movement saw it for a brief moment after Kent State.

I remember being at a meeting of the anti‐war leadership at Cora Weiss’ house in Manhattan when the news broke that the U.S. had invaded Cambodia. We knew we had to make an immediate response, there was no time for a mass demonstration, and so we decided to go to Lafayette Park in front of the White House where, even though we could only rally a few hundred people, we would be sure to be arrested under the rules then in place, which limited the number of demonstrators.

We sent out the call to our networks. But between the time we met, which I think was on a Friday, and May 4th, which was Monday, the students at Kent State were shot dead by the National Guard.

This led to a general strike of students all across the nation. Campuses simply closed down spontaneously. So, on that Saturday we didn’t have a few hundred people -- we had close to 100,000 in Washington D.C., rallied in a week’s time.

We were nervous, not knowing if Nixon would give the order to shoot. He was nervous too -- Lafayette Park was ringed with buses, nose to nose so that no one could get in. But Nixon permitted the demonstrators to gather on the great lawn behind the White House for a “legal rally." The end of the war was still five years in the future, but in a sense that day marked the end of the legitimacy of the war in the eyes of the majority of Americans.

In Vietnam there were open revolts within the armed forces. It was an exciting time to live through... but of course it was not a revolution. Nixon was allowed to resign and Henry Kissinger is still able to appear on TV news channels as a foreign policy adviser, when he belongs in prison.

A far more important and genuine revolution was that in Iran, where a general strike in October of 1978 led, first, to efforts to control the people by firing live ammunition into crowds of youth surging the streets (those youth wore sheets of white, symbolic of death, meaning they were prepared for burial), until the police finally abandoned their posts, and in January the Shah had to flee for his life.

The violence of the Iranian Revolution was almost entirely on one side -- the Shah’s military. Ironically, despite massive U.S. military aid, the Shah had few of the standard crowd control weapons, such as tear gas. So secure did the regime feel, that the last place it expected a revolt was in the streets of Teheran.

The Russian Revolution is called the October Revolution, because the Bolsheviks took power on October 25 of 1917, but it actually began in April of that year. We may expect the Egyptian Revolution -- if, as I expect, it succeeds -- to follow a similar uncertain path.

To sum up thus far: no one knew in advance that Tunisia, Yemen, and Egypt would be swept by revolutionary fervor this winter. And no one can be sure, at this writing, what is going to happen in North Africa and Egypt. We can, however, note several things. One is that the U.S., while it doesn’t know which way to turn at the moment, had been pressuring for change -- some of the U.S. aid funds had been going to pro‐democracy contacts in Egypt.

This doesn’t mean the U.S. favors democracy in Egypt; it doesn’t. It means that at least some in the State Department and the CIA knew that Mubarak’s situation was not stable. U.S. policy, not only in the Middle East but around the world, has been to favor “stable” regimes, which has meant military dictatorships. Egypt has been notorious for its authoritarian ways, its lavish use of torture (as was the Iran of the late Shah). But the U.S. has been happy to pour billions of dollars into Egypt to buy a secure alliance.

Israel has also had a strong interest in discouraging democracy in Egypt -- since Mubarak has kept the Muslim Brotherhood under control, and acted to establish peace with Israel.

Democracy has never been a favored choice of the U.S. leaders. During the Cold War we were happy to support Franco, the Fascist dictator in Spain. We engineered the overthrow of the democratically-elected government of Iran in order to install the Shah. We, and Israel, had urged democratic elections in the Gaza strip, on the assumption the Palestinian Authority would win; unhappily, Hamas won and Gaza has been on the shit list of both the U.S. and Israeli governments ever since.

I remember the painful lesson I got in how “liberals” view free elections during the struggle of the Vietnamese. Robert Pickus, who had had financial backing from the War Resisters League to set up a group in Berkeley in 1958 called “Acts for Peace," before Vietnam was on the agenda, opposed those of us who called for unconditional withdrawal from Vietnam, on the grounds this wasn’t fair to the Vietnamese, because it would leave them “at the mercy of the Communists."

We pointed out that it was the U.S. that had blocked the free elections Vietnam had been promised in 1956. Pickus argued that we had to insist on a peace settlement which would guarantee not one, but two free elections. He knew that Ho Chi Minh would win the first; he hoped that with time and U.S. funding of the opposition, the Communists might lose the second.

The Establishment is never in favor of free elections if it thinks it might lose. If one looks back at the U.S. policy (and that of Israel) in the Middle East for the past 50 years it has been a series of gambles that did not pay off. In Israel’s case, the invasion of Lebanon in 1982 lead directly to the creation of Hezbollah, which is currently taking control of the government of Lebanon, thus extending Syrian influence further into Lebanon.

The U.S.managed to block Iranian control of Iran, but in the end lost out to the radical Muslims, who now play a key role in Iraq (the invasion of which was among the most remarkable blunders the U.S. has ever made).

We do not know what will happen tomorrow or next month. But we do know that the map of the Middle East is going to be very different by the end of the year. The U.S. is almost certain to lose its long‐term alliance with Egypt. It is very uncertain what will happen in Tunisia or Yemen, but in all cases U.S. influence will be greatly weakened. In Iraq the latest political developments insure that Iran will have more influence there than the U.S. In Lebanon, Syrian influence has been strengthened.

Whether any of this will induce Israel to make peace is hard to say. But a look at the range of events in the past six months strongly suggests that, once more, the brightest and best can win many short‐term victories but achieve major long‐term losses.

The most serious question is what we do here -- since neither you nor I have any influence on the events in Egypt. And what we need to do is to give our strong public support to the democratic forces in Egypt, even though we cannot know how long they will be democratic. One thing, however, is quite certain: we cannot determine the policies of those nations. We can only wish them luck, and reach out to them now.

[David McReynolds is a former chair of War Resisters International, and was the Socialist Party candidate for President in 1980 and 2000. He is retired and lives with two cats on the Lower East Side of Manhattan. He can be reached at dmcreynolds@nyc.rr.com.]

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Paul Krassner : Kent State Anniversary Blues

Reaction from students at New York University after the Kent State massacre. Photo from NYU Archives Photograph Collection.
Four dead in Ohio:
Kent State Anniversary Blues

By Paul Krassner / The Rag Blog / April 17, 2010

See gallery of photos, Below.

In my book, Magic Mushrooms and Other Highs: From Toad Slime to Ecstasy, Freddy Berthoff described his mescaline trip at a Crosby, Stills, Nash and Young concert in the summer of 1970 when he was 15. “Earlier that spring,” he wrote, “the helmeted, rifle-toting National Guard came up over the rise during a peace-in-Vietnam rally at Kent State University. And opened fire on the crowd. I always suspected it was a contrived event, as if someone deep in the executive branch had said, ‘We’ve got to teach those commie punks a lesson.’”

Actually, President Nixon had called antiwar protesters “bums” two days before the shootings. While Freddy was peaking on mescaline, CSNY sang a new song about the massacre:

Tin soldiers and Nixon coming
We’re finally on our own
This summer I hear the drumming
Four dead in O-hi-o...

Plus nine wounded. Sixty-seven shots -- dum-dum bullets that exploded upon impact -- had been fired in 13 seconds. This incident on May 4, 1970 resulted in the first general student strike in U.S. history, encompassing over 400 campuses.

Arthur Krause, father of one of the dead students, Allison, got a call from John Ehrlichman, Assistant to the President for Domestic Affairs, who said, “There will be a complete investigation.” Krause responded, “Are you sure about that?” And the reply: “Mr. Krause, I promise you, there will be no whitewash.”

But NBC News correspondent James Polk discovered a memo marked “Eyes Only” from Ehrlichman to Attorney General John Mitchell ordering that there be no federal grand jury investigation of the killings, because Nixon adamantly opposed such action.

Polk reported that, “In 1973, under a new Attorney General, Elliot Richardson, the Justice Department reversed itself and did send the Kent State case to a federal grand jury. When that was announced, Richardson said to an aide he got a call from the White House. He was told that Richard Nixon was so upset, they had to scrape the president off the walls with a spatula.”

Last year, Allison Krause’s younger sister, Laurel, was relaxing on the front deck of her home in California when she saw the County Sheriff’s Deputy coming toward her, followed by nearly two dozen men. “Then, before my eyes,” she recalls, “the officers morphed into a platoon of Ohio National Guardsmen marching onto my land. They were here because I was cultivating medical marijuana. I realized the persecution I was living through was similar to what many Americans and global citizens experience daily. This harassment even had parallels to Allison’s experience before she was murdered.”

What if you knew her
And found her dead on the ground
How can you run when you know?

Now, 40 years later, Laurel, her mother and other Kent State activists have been organizing the 2010 Kent State Truth Tribunal, scheduled for May 1-4 on the campus where the slaughter of unarmed demonstrators originally occurred. The invitation to participate in sharing their personal narratives has been extended to 1970 protesters, witnesses, National Guardsmen, Ohio and federal government officials, university administrators and educators, local residents, families of the victims. The purpose is to uncover the truth.

Laurel Krause.
Laurel was 0nly 15 when the Kent State shootings took place. “Like any 15-year-old, my coping mechanisms were undeveloped at best. Every evening, I remember spending hours in my bedroom practicing calligraphy to Neil Young’s ‘After the Goldrush,’ artistically copying phrases of his music, smoking marijuana to calm and numb my pain.”

When she was arrested for legally growing marijuana, “They cuffed me and read my rights as I sobbed hysterically. This was the first time I flashed back and revisited the utter shock, raw devastation and feeling of total loss since Allison died. I believed they were going to shoot and kill me, just like Allison. How ironic, I thought. The medicine that kept me safe from experiencing post-traumatic stress disorder now led me to relive that horrible experience as the cops marched onto my property.”

She began to see the interconnectedness of those events. The dehumanization of Allison was the logical, ultimate extension of the dehumanization of Laurel. Legally, two felonies were reduced to misdemeanors, and she was sentenced to 25 hours of community service. But a therapist, one of Allison’s friends from Kent State, suggested to Laurel that the best way to deal with the pain of PTSD was to make something good come out of the remembrance, the suffering and the pain.

“That’s when I decided to transform the arrest into something good for me,” she says, “good for all. It was my only choice, the only solution to cure this memorable, generational, personal angst. My mantra became, ‘This is the best thing that ever happened to me.’ And it has been.” That’s why she’s fighting so hard for the truth to burst through cement like blades of grass.

[Paul Krassner’s latest book is an expanded edition of his 1993 autobiography, Confessions of a Raving, Unconfined Nut, available at paulkrassner.com. This piece was also published in High Times magazine.]


Mary Ann Vecchio kneels over the body of Jeffrey Miller after the Kent State shootings, May 4, 1970. Pulitzer prize winning photo by John Paul Filo / Valley News-Dispatch. Filo was a journalism student at Kent State at the time.
The Guard takes aim. Photo by Howard Ruffner / Picasa.
Four dead in Ohio: Allison Krause, William Shroeder, Jeffrey Miller, Sandy Scheur.

Allison Krause. Image from Mendo Coast Current.
Photo by Mr. Baggins / Democratic Underground.
Kent State Protest Poster, 1970. NYU Archives Collection.
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Neda and the Kent State 4 : Heartbreaking Then and Now

(Above) Neda Agha-Soltan, 27, who bled to death on the streets of Tehran, Saturday, June 20, 2009. Still shot from video taken with cell phone and posted to YouTube. (Below) Mary Ann Vecchio, a fourteen-year-old runaway, kneeling over the dead body of Jeffrey Miller after he was shot by the National Guard during demonstrations at Kent State, May 4, 1970. He was one of four students killed. Pulitzer Prize-winning photo by John Filo from Wikipedia.
Four dead in Ohio...
Heartbreaking then and now

Just as it is unlikely anyone will ever be prosecuted for the murder of Neda Agha-Soltan, no one has ever been prosecuted for the murders at Kent State or Jackson State.

By Jay D. Jurie / The Rag Blog / June 25, 2009

President Obama responded to a question at his June 23 press conference that he was “appalled and outraged” by the violence following the controversial electoral outcome in Iran.

Asked specifically about Neda Agha-Soltan, 26, a bystander at the protests whose shooting death on a Tehran street has been blamed on Iran governmental forces and is the subject of a widely-circulated video, Obama responded it is “heartbreaking.” He went on to say “I think that anybody who sees it knows that there’s something fundamentally unjust about that.”

This eminently reasonable assessment can be contrasted with official opinion in the wake of the fatal shooting of four students at Kent State University on May 4, 1970. None of the four students killed by the Ohio National Guard on that day, Allison Krause, who had just turned 19, Jeffrey Miller, 20, Sandy Scheuer, 21, or William Schroeder, 19, were armed. Two, Scheuer and Schroeder, like Neda Agha-Soltan, were not participants in the demonstration, they just happened to be at the wrong place at the wrong time.

Then-President Richard Nixon expressed no sense of fundamental injustice. According to his official statement, “This should remind us all once again that when dissent turns to violence, it invites tragedy.” Characteristically, then-Vice President Spiro Agnew went even further, assigning blame to a “calculated, consistent, and well-publicized barrage of criticism against the principles of this nation.”

These statements are not wholly inconsistent with what Iranian Supreme Leader Sayyed Ali Khameini had to say about the protests in his country: “I have insisted and will insist on implementing the law in issues related to the presidential election, and the Islamic system and people will not give in to pressure at any cost.”

On May 15, 1970, two African-American students at Jackson State University, Phillip Gibbs, 21, and James Green, 17, were shot and killed in similar circumstances. Again, these slayings elicited no official sense of fundamental injustice.

Let us hope we now have an administration more attuned to injustice than that of Nixon and Agnew. Will the spotlight be fixed on injustice in Iran while turning a blind eye to injustice at home or elsewhere?

Just as it is unlikely anyone will ever be prosecuted for the murder of Neda Agha-Soltan, no one has ever been prosecuted for the murders at Kent State or Jackson State.

Nor are there any indications that any indictments for crimes against humanity in the “war on terror” are likely.

We must insist there be no double standard. Accountability applies to our own government as well as others.

President Obama concluded his remarks about the murder of Neda Agha-Soltan with the observation, “While this loss is raw and extraordinarily painful we also know this: those who stand up for justice are always on the right side of history.”

[Sources: alancanfora.com; Charles A. Thomas Papers -- KSU May 4 Collection; Helen Kennedy, “President Obama Calls Iranian Martyr Neda’s Death ‘heartbreaking’,” NY Daily News, June 23, 2009; I.F. Stone, The Killings at Kent State: How Murder Went Unpunished, NY: New York Review of Books, 1970; “Leader Says People Won’t Yield to Lawlessness,” Tehran Times, June 25, 2009.]

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