Anti-War Demonstrations: Are They Moral?

May Day 1971. Public domain.

When we lived in the Twin Cities back in the early 80s I used to read a publication called Vital Speeches of the Day, which I'd check out from the Roseville Public Library. Occasionally I would photocopy certain speeches so I could keep them as reference materials and mental fodder for freelance writing. Last week while organizing a filing cabinet I found a folder titled Sixties with photocopies of a number of these speeches, including this one here titled Anti-War Demonstrations: Are They Moral?

The speech was delivered by a student named Mark Arnold at Oberlin College on May 22, 1967. (Trivia: I did a piano recital at Oberlin four or five years earlier when I was 10 or 11.)

Several things struck me about the speech, which opens with the sentence, "I am opposed to the war in Vietnam." The first paragraph itself outlines a number of reasons why we ought not be in this war. Later in this paragraph he states, "I believe it imperative for the United States to withdraw from South Vietnam as soon as it possibly can."

What's strange, however, is the follow up to this opening. "And it is for that reason (because I believe it is wrong) that I today urge you and your fellow students to end the antiwar demonstrations. I repeat, I urge you and your fellow students to end the antiwar demonstrations."

May Day 1971. Public domain.

His argument for having the antiwar demonstration stop is based on his conviction that they won't work. Demonstrations didn't stop World War I or WWII. The only thing they will accomplish is to have the war be prolonged because it will give North Vietnam the false hope that they can win. (Emphasis mine.)

Any honest assessment of the situation in Southeast Asia shows that the war was already lost. From the vantage point of the future, it's apparent that the ones holding tight to a false hope were the American leaders prosecuting the war.

After his opening salvo Mark Arnold proceeds to essentially mimic parrot-like all the reasons why we have to finish the war and win. First, our government is good and so, by extension, are the intentions of our troops. Second, the Viet Cong are taking advantage of an unstable South Vietnam government. Third, the superiority of our air, naval and ground forces is self-evident. And fourth, most importantly, the thousands of anti-war protests in the U.S. are confirming that we do not have the resolve to win.

He then, mistakenly, asserts that "such demonstrations have not and cannot significantly alter the American policy in Vietnam."

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I've spent much of my adult life wrestling with how to write about my experience of having been part of the biggest antiwar protest in U.S. history-- and the one with the most arrests--in May 1971. After much reading and research, I've gained many insights. Here are a few.

1) The war was built on a foundation of lies and an incorrect understanding of the motivations of Viet Cong. Our leaders lied to the American people in order to gain the support it needed to justify sending their children to the other side of the world.
(See: The Cold War Killing Fields by Paul Thomas Chamberlin.)

2) For several years most of the media was complicit, accepting the "party line" being doled out by the Pentagon and the president.

3) Mass movements don't "just happen." They are usually organized and orchestrated by people with agendas. The May Day demonstration in Washington D.C. 1971 had been envisioned and executed by the same cast of characters who organized the 1968 protests during the Democratic Convention in Chicago.

4) Protesting is actually written into our U.S. Constitution. The First Amendment in the Bill of Rights states: Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof; or abridging the freedom of speech, or of the press; or the right of the people peaceably to assemble, and to petition the government for a redress of grievances.

5) The biggest mistake presidents Johnson and Nixon made was to write off these marches and sit-ins because they believed they were being directed by the Soviet Union.

6) A Lesson from the Bent Penny Brigade
There are people who looked like protestors who were agents of the government. They were fakes. At the May Day rally in 1971, 200 posers mixed in with the crowd with bent pennies in their pockets to identify them if arrested. (See story link below.)

In light of the above, this question comes to mind: Was the student who gave this speech earnest in his antiwar rhetoric? Mark Arnold lays out the very arguments that LBJ and other government officials used when denouncing the antiwar movement. Did his audience accept everything he said at face value? Was he himself a shill?

In the past half century there has been an immense decline in public trust. According to a Nick Gillespie article in Reason this week, 77% of Americans trusted "the government in Washington always or most of the time." Last year this was 17%. According to Gillespie, "When it comes to the presidency, trust has toppled from 73 percent in 1972 to 45 percent. For Congress, the drop is even worse, plummeting from 71 percent in 1972 to 38 percent in 2019. Trust in the Supreme Court has followed the same general trend."

It's possible Mark Arnold is still alive today. I'd be curious how he feels about his Oberlin speech today.

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Related Links
Two Days In October: PBS Documentary Points to Fall 1967 as the Vietnam War’s Turning Point
May Day 1971: A Lesson from the Bent Penny Brigade.

May Day 1971: Correcting the Narrative

For more than three decades Ken Burns has provided a remarkable look at American history by means of themed documentary film series. Some of his best known work includes The Civil War, Baseball, Jazz, Prohibition and The Vietnam War. The remarkable achievement of these histories, in my opinion, is the manner in which the American Negro experience is woven into the narratives.

It would have been so easy to tell the "white" story. Ken Burns' inclusiveness is wonderful, and completes these significantly American narratives.

In 2017 Burns released a ten-hour documentary about one of the most divisive events in our history, The Vietnam War. This series covered every aspect of the war, from the withdrawal of French colonialists to the abandonment of South Vietnam by American troops from Saigon.

I believe it was the 7th segment of this series that dealt with the anti-war movement, which included footage and details about the May Day protests of 1971 in Washington D.C., an event that I experienced first hand. I have spent decades desiring to write about this, not entirely sure how to approach it.

According to the documentary there were more people arrested in a single day than in any day in U.S. history, more than 7000. Though I was aware that there were more arrests that day than any other, the number of arrests that I recalled was over 14,000. This discrepancy interested me, and as I began researching, to write about what I saw and heard and felt, I discovered a whole range of discrepancies in some of these stories, many of which I found most bizarre, some of which were useful, though, correcting a narrative in my head based on rumors.

What surprised me was how little was written about the event in the aftermath. A few articles but little else. Did the government put the kibosh on the media lest there be a national uprising? Was the press ordered to downplay what they saw?

I plan to write my story, but here wished to pick apart one article that I found online while researching for my own narrative. The photos are accurate, and you should follow the link at the end to check them out. The HannahBHist390 Wordpress story has a useful opening quote by Jim Morrison: "Whoever controls the Media controls the mind."

My responses are in maroon.

1971 MAY DAY PROTESTS (RIOT) AGAINST THE VIETNAM WAR

The 1971 May Day Protests took place in Washington D.C and the Georgetown area. The people who took part in this three-day protest from May 1st through 3rd were members of the MayDay Tribe which were made up of “yippies” (radical youth-orientated anti-war individuals) .

I went because it was an anti-war protest. I was not part of any "tribe" or organization. To my knowledge the 64+ students from Ohio University were not members of this tribe and I am guessing that the majority of protesters were citizens and students who came out of a groundswell of interest in representing their viewpoints about the war. 

It is useful to keep in mind that the Kent State shooting had been just the previous spring. Many of us who went to college at Ohio U were aware that the 1970 school year ended early due to protests that erupted after that dark event. Several times during the following couple years I experienced a tense vibe from the campus police, stories for another time.

Starting on May 1st, 35,000 protestors camped out and gathered in West Potomac Park to listen to rock music and plan the protests.

This is a hilariously bogus number. When I was there my guess was 300,000 people were gathered in that park. The entire Washington Mall from the Lincoln Memorial to the Washington monument was full of people. Wikipedia repeats this same absurdly low number. A New York times story stated that there were 200,000, which is probably closer to the truth. 

As for the "rock music and plan" ... There was indeed rock music. The Beach Boys were playing on stage when I arrived, perhaps around noon or shortly after noon. The Jefferson Airplane were slated to perform, but were a no show. (Rumor was that they were pressured to withdraw.) Phil Ochs did a set sometime after midnight. There were speeches, but I do not recall any planning. How do you "plan" with 200,000 people facing a stage? The planning took place on Sunday.

These protests aimed to shut down the nation’s capital to show that they were against the war in Vietnam.

OK, so we have two groups of people in this crowd. A portion of the crowd did indeed have this larger mission in mind, to shut down the government. The May Day organizers had actually orchestrated this over a period of two years. But many, if not most of us, were sheep. We were there on Saturday, May 1, to stand in alliance with the mission of letting our government know that there were citizens who did not approve of the war. 

On May second the U.S Park Police and Washington Metropolitan Police raided the park and fired tear gas to drive the protestors away.

Really? Total bunko. Here is what happened. As the speakers droned on into the wee hours, many if not most were falling asleep under the stars. At 4:00 a.m. there was an announcement made from the stage, followed by bullhorns from police, that we did not have a permit to remain in the park and we had to leave. 

I woke from my slumber to see the entire park surrounded by police, as many as four or five thousand, spaced to completely surround Washington Green/Potomac Park. Half awake we rolled up our sleeping bags and trudged through the dark following whoever was around us to wherever they were going. I ended up at Georgetown University. Some buildings were opened and I found a section of floor space to unroll my sleeping bag and return to my slumbers.

There was no tear gas required. I saw no tear gas and no pushback. It was a parade of half awake sleepwalkers who headed to three university campuses that welcomed the tired masses.

This stirred up violence and started a riot which caused many protestors to abandon this demonstration of civil disobedience.

Huh? I saw no riots. I smelled no tear gas. Not at this point in time. That would come later, on May 3 when there would be more than enough to tear gas go around, both on the streets of D.C. and on the Georgetown campus.

Those individuals that stayed took refuge at various churches and more specifically at Georgetown University, setting up tents on its athletic field.

It was a big crowd, and there were other places people went because I know they did not all go to Georgetown U.  

By Monday, May 3rd troops and police were prepared, filling up every traffic circle, park, monument and street in the DC area.

What I remember from Saturday May 1 were several speakers who late in the day were saying, "You didn't come here just for a party. You came to shut down the government." Those were pretty incendiary words, which on Sunday were presented in this manner: "We are shutting down the government for one day by blocking off the city. Government employees are on our side and will go home for the day." Well, hardy har har.

Sunday May 2 was a training day. We were trained in the rules of engagement for non-violent civil disobedience. Monday May 3 was to be the action day.

The training went down like this. The leaders broke us up into groups of 100. An instructor with a bullhorn would present the rules of non-violent protest. During the Q&A period, one question

that was asked had to do with "how do we respond if the cops start beating us." The bullhorn leader, for our group a young woman with dark har in her 20s, said, "Don't worry. This is a non-violent protest. They won't hit you."

To which someone else replied, "Yes, but what if they do start hitting us?" And the training seemed to fall apart at that point because she didn't give a satisfying answer.

What we were unaware of was how many National Guard troops were being flown into D.C. that day, a plane-load every three minutes at one point.

Another piece of this action included knowing where to go. All the key intersections and bridges were to be blocked so that there could be no traffic flow into D.C on Monday. The organizers had divided us up based on what state we were from. Everyone from Ohio was to block the Teddy Roosevelt Bridge.

On Monday morning, May 3, the day of the civil action, I overslept. I fell asleep on the basement floor of a room with more than 100 people. I woke by myself, hastily rolled up my sleeping bag and threw it in the corner. As I left the Georgetown campus I headed in the direction of the Mall and noticed that on all four corners of every single intersection there were four uniformed police standing, talking to one another or watching. I asked the first officer I encountered which way was the Teddy Roosevelt Bridge. He smiled and pointed. A few blocks later I asked another. I think they got a good laugh at my expense. Eventually I neared the bridge...  

When the protestors entered, the police attacked and started to arrest anyone and everyone that was protesting.

This sentence is confusing. "When the protesters entered..." Entered what? As I drew near, standing about a half block away, the bridge traffic was stopped because of the protesters seated and standing at the end of the bridge. In the distance I could hear sirens approaching. 36 squad cars came flying across the bridge at what looked like 60 miles per hour, coming in on the outbound lanes. As they approached the protesters they never slowed down. The hippies, students and others scattered.

The protesters rushed back into their positions, continuing to block traffic. Some were handing out leaflets to the cars backed up on the bridge. Meanwhile, the squad cars must have made a circular return because they were now coming back from the other way, once again dispersing the crowd by not slowing down. On their third passage the cop cars all stopped and began the engagement, striking protesters with clubs. Buses arrived and the rest of this morning would be officers clubbing people and throwing them onto buses, transporting them to a makeshift concentration camp at RFK Stadium because the jails were so quickly filled.

It was at this point tear gas began to fly. Helicopters flew about, shooting tear gas down into any crowd larger than 100 people.

The yippies engaged in hit and run tactics, causing more chaos in the streets. Tear gas was being fired everywhere and the riot continued to build. The city’s prisons were full and an emergency detention center had to be set up next to the RFK stadium.

This part is accurate, though disconcerting. Seeing protesters attacking police, and protesters throwing barricades in front of moving vehicles (See the Ling video below) so as to cause accidents seemed contrary to the purported intentions of the civil action. This is why to this day when I hear of a protest being organized somewhere I totally anticipate that there will also be violence or vandalism while some of the media interviews the naive in order to paint a totally innocent picture.

As the afternoon of the third day approached, many were drawn away from protesting. This was the largest mass arrest in US history, with arrests close to 12,614 people. Later the conspiracy charges against the MayDay tribe leaders were dismissed. Overall, this act of civil disobedience that led to a chaotic riot and mass arrests got the anti-war message across very clearly to Nixon and his administration.

It's hard to say what message was actually communicated. It's my understanding that the bombing in Southeast Asia accelerated, that tens of thousands of innocent civilians continued to become the "collateral damage" of our misguided policies.

Here is the link to the origin of the above account.

Here are a pair of YouTube videos with footage that captures a sense of the times. The sound track is odd on this first one but the footage is real. Looks like a lot more than 35,000 people to me. At 3:30 into this first one there is a guy with a red and black checked jacket that may have been me. That was the jacket I had worn as I hitchhiked to D.C. for the long weekend.

William Ling film (below)

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0dTEzIBcHfo

No sound? Don't worry. The pictures tell the story.

https://hannahbhist390.wordpress.com/2014/09/13/1971-may-day-protests-riot-against-the-vietnam-war/

What's All This Buzz About Yellow Jackets? Here's the Straight Dope from France.

May Day Protests 1971

This past month I made a decision to finally get around to writing about my experience as part of the May Day 1971 anti-war protest. To some extent it was traumatic due to all the violence I witnessed. In another sense it was uniquely my own, inasmuch as I approached it with my own unformed and uninformed personal perspectives, with also contributed to some of my inconclusive conclusions along with a few personal lessons that I've carried with me to this day.

One of these lessons is a total distrust as regards mob violence being something that "just happens." In DC 1971 there were organizers who spent 2 years orchestrating the main event that served to draw people to the Capitol for that weekend.

To this day I am suspicious when I hear that a mob has risen up in concert to protest this thing or that. Or that a "caravan" has organized itself spontaneously to "break in" to America.

Two weeks ago a friend from France who lives here in the States asked if I'd been following the news regarding the "Yellow Jackets." I had not. And if you're like I was two weeks ago, then you may wish to read a few links at the end of this article.

Basically, the past four weekends now tens of thousands of people have been putting on yellow vests and protesting. The gathering masses have become mobs who are burning cars, smashing windows, looting. If you are on Twitter you can do a search for >Yellow Jackets< and follow the story.

Photo by Randy Colas on Unsplash

To gain more insight on the Yellow Jacket uprising, I contacted Pedro H. Albuquerque, Associate Professor of Economics at the KEDGE Business School (Bordeaux and Marseille) and asked if he would provide more insight for American readers.

Pedro Albuquerque: So you saw all this mayhem about the Yellow Jackets, yep, quite impressive news. New phenomenon on that scale in a rich country. We had Tienanmen Square, Arab Spring and Occupy Wall Street as precedents, but this scale is totally new.

EN: Is there a "leader" of the Yellow Jackets?

PA: NO and YES. If you are thinking in terms of traditional political leaders, according to the established laws and practices of the French Republic, the answer is NO. Many tried to appropriate this social movement and become their leaders, for example, extreme left, extreme right and conservative political leaders, union leaders, celebrities etc. but none had any success. It's a movement driven by irrational feelings of anger and hate against the "system" and against "globalization," with very little common ground and values otherwise. The carbon tax was just a convenient trigger. So no, they have no leaders. But still, YES, they have a leader, in the sense of new politics driven almost purely by social media, and his name is Mark Zuckerberg. We just do not know to which extent Zuckerberg is a willing or accidental leader. As in the recent case of Brexit, this is yet to be found out.

EN: Is it mob rule?

PA: Again, the answer is NO and YES. NO, because there's an endogenously arising order determined mostly by the usage rules of Facebook, and also by the usage rules of Twitter and YouTube to a lesser extent. And YES because once groups of people in this movement converge on the streets towards the forces of law enforcement, the result is almost inevitably mob rule.

EN: If the government can't cover the cost of necessities, what does the public intend to see as outcome?

PA: I don't think this is really a question of necessities, most of the Yellow Jackets, by the standards of poor and middle income countries, would be considered well-off. Studies show that most did not enjoy reductions or significant reductions in purchasing power, it is mostly about perceived realities than it is about economic realities. But their perceptions are real for two reasons: compared to other regions of Europe, people living in rural or far suburban areas of European metropolitan centers know that their incomes have been progressing much less fast than those of people living in cities, and they also know that their infrastructure of services does not see the same advancements which can be seen in urban centers, and in some cases they have even seen the collapse of public services. They also get the feeling that some global industries, like tech, finance and upscale services like movies, have accumulated most of the wealth creation of the last 30 years. This has created an enormous anger towards government and sometimes also towards rich, highly educated, or foreign people living in advanced countries, meaning, anger towards any group that succeeded or have benefited from the social and technological developments of the last 30 years.

I do not think that the government will have any problem offering the Yellow Jackets financial and political "gifts" as it promised, After all,  some have estimated that active participants in this movement represent only 0.8% of the population. The real problem is that the socially destructive and politically chaotic dynamics created by social media platforms, as seen during the election of Donald Trump, the Brexit referendum in the UK, the election of Jair Bolsonaro in Brazil, and now the Yellow Jackets in France, are going to become only more disruptive and more pervasive around the world. We should expect then to see the same happening in any other country, at any moment, triggers and timing depending mostly on the decisions made by the top management of social media megacorporations. Only time will tell if, as a result, democracies will fall or will learn and adapt by curbing the power and socially destructive effects of social media megacorporations on society.

EN: Thank you for this perspective on recent events in France. 

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Related Links
BuzzFeed's In Depth Overview
Yellow Jackets on the Twitterfeed
Ramifications of the Riots

Fun House Centrifuge

One of the fond memories of my childhood was the Fun House at the now defunct Geauga Lake Amusement Park. My recollections may be murky, since they come from experiences 50 years ago, but as I recall it there was a spooky dark portion with moving floor boards and strange sounds that you had to go through either to enter or exit the place. Then you came upon a wall of mirrors which distorted you in hilarious ways so your legs were super-short and neck elongated, and many other variations. Eventually you were inside, and for kids it was a blast because you could stay as long as you liked.

I'm not sure what all was in there now as I think back. Maybe this is where the penny arcade was, I don't know. What I remember most is the slide and the circular wheel ride.

The slide was made out of wood, had multiple lanes and as kids we would run up a long flight of stairs to the top where you grabbed a gunny sack and sat on it like a sled, zoom. The slide was wax polished like the lanes of a bowling alley and must have been steep enough to give you a good rush without being scary. There were humps and contours to make it interesting so that it was not just a straight chute.

The circular wheel was like a centrifuge, something like a flat merry-go-round except run by a rotor beneath the floor. You did not see anything except the circular polished wooden board. Even a small child could grasp the principle of the thing. As the wheel was set in motion and went faster and faster, all the kids would try to hold on but with nothing to hold onto they would be flung in all directions.

As we got older we understood that the best way to stay on for the longest time possible would be to get into the precise center. Even then, one's irregular body mass distribution would lead to the inevitable, being discharged out of control from the whirling surface. Perhaps even worse is getting really successful at finding that center spot so that you get dizzy and sick from being on there too long. But you seldom got that center spot because there was a line and you were competing with a couple dozen other kids who crammed themselves onto it as densely as able.

This image of the wheel flinging kids off in all directions came to mind as I have been reading about and observing some of what is happening in America today. Protests are one thing, but total chaos makes people insecure. At a certain point mobs can only be subdued by excessive authority. Nobody wants that, but they do not want the chaos of the mob either, and no one wants rampant guillotine bloodletting. So we have to figure out how to get along.

The problem is with the wheel spinning faster and faster we're all being thrown in a variety of directions and the things that once unified us (the American dream and confidence of a better future for our children) has flung us into the sideboards. There's no doubt that a lot of people are frustrated. We don't know what's true. We don't know who we can trust. We distrust those who tell us to "trust the process." But then what?

In the Fun House you don't have to get on all the rides. It can be entertaining just watching the expressions of those having fun. And even watching the Occupy Wall Street antics can produce some entertaining images, but it is my recollection of the May Day riots in Washington that not everyone there has the same agenda. Some are opportunists whose only aim is to make trouble. As I hitch-hiked back from the antiwar protests of May Day 1971 I was picked up by two students from Antioch and an older fellow whose only aim that day was to "get cops" and do some damage. The cops were brutal, and the violence terrifying for a young innocent, but the protesters were also naive. And this time around I'm not hearing anyone offering a sensible solution because the center of the maelstrom this time around is an undulating abstraction, an emotion, a loss of hope, a rage against the machine.

I guess we'll see where it all leads but to be honest, I've been in mobs and I'm not really sure how much problem solving a mob can really do.

In the meantime, just a little something to think about.

Party Time

A New York Times headline caught my eye this morning: "Europe Set to Party for Inauguration." The Alan Cowell story notes that this is not only an American event. It is a global event.

Former Vice Presidents and Presidents, and dignitaries from the four corners of the world are present. Movie stars and other luminaries are likewise present. And an amazing mob of well wishers and seekers desiring to be part of the celebration.

I'm on the West Coast at the moment. Having just finished breakfast I'm able to watch the unfolding drama on a large screen TV. It's amazing.

The last commercial that played before CNN went uninterrupted was a Pepsi spot featuring the Who's "My Generation." The commercial is superb, positioning Pepsi as the choice for every generation.

I have no idea how many people are gathered on the lawn that stretches from the Lincoln Memorial to the Capitol, but it is quite a contrast from May Day 1971 when I stood in that same crowd as part of an anti-war statement many made in my generation. This crowd is waving American flags like crazy. I don't see anyone today throwing rocks at the police.

Perhaps the numbers are a positive, too. There may be millions here today. I stood in the midst of several hundreds of thousands.

Today, seven of the Supreme Court justices are present to participate in this extraordinary experience. In contrast, it was rumored that President Nixon had set up machine guns at the top of the steps in front of the Supreme Court Building lest the building be assaulted by the demonstrators.

I know that a lot of people have seen the Bush presidency as highly divisive, but my sense is that the past eight years was only the culmination of a polarization that began during the Viet Nam era.

Barack Obama's presidency may be a defining moment in American history. Based on the Times story cited above, and because our nation has such influence today, my prayer is that President Obama's reign will be a defining moment in the future history of the world.