Quote:
Originally Posted by craigs
Kent State made the news in 1970 (six years after Berkeley first blew up) because the Ohio National Guard opened fire on student anti-war protesters and killed four people on May 4, 1970. But it was not the only college where students were killed by authorities (South Carolina's Orangeburg campus in 1968 and UC Berkeley in 1969 come to mind).
The history of early May 1970 in the US is a really fascinating and mostly unknown story. After Nixon announced his expansion of the Vietnam war into Cambodia, students on over 400 college campuses went on strike, the largest such action in America before or since. That's when Kent State students protested and were shot. After that, there were protests, sit-ins, takeovers, riots, bombings, and widespread arson (especially against campus ROTC buildings) on campuses and in city centers nationwide. Kent State had the highest death toll, but the chaos there was not unique at that time. Governor Reagan shut down every public college and university in the state one day after Kent State happened. That also happened in numerous other campuses throughout the country, and many stayed closed for the academic year because authorities didn't want students gathering and organizing. "Kent State" specifically refers to four dead protesters, but more generally it is shorthand for what happened on just about every campus at that time. The widespread chaos in the aftermath of Kent State was comparable to what we saw in the US in May and June of 2020. |
The Kent State Massacre is generally seen as a bookend to the whole 1960s student activism era (the other bookend being the Free Speech Movement at UC Berkeley in 1964, of course). And somehow, Kent State happening in 1970 kind of cements it as the literal "end of the (optimistic) 1960s." It was a very interesting time period for sure, in terms of young people actually getting involved, and calling attention to racism, not being able to exercise free speech, US foreign policy, etc. The US was becoming a global power and throwing its weight around with its zealousness for being anti-communist. People say the Cold War wasn't bloody, but it was very bloody. The Vietnam War wasn't to "defend freedom and the US," it was basically an involvement in Vietnam's civil war, with the US supporting the government of the south---
which was a military dictatorship. The US only supported it because it wasn't communist, but it still wasn't democratic. Which is why I find it ironic that in Orange County's Little Saigon, many Vietnamese people there have this weird nostalgia for South Vietnam, even though people from there were living under a dictatorship.
And of course during the Cold War, the US supported a lot of undemocratic right-wing governments/dictatorships all because they were anti-communist/anti-left-wing---Chile, the Philippines, Taiwan, South Korea, etc. Particularly in Chile and the Philippines, the Cold War was bloody... Let alone what happened in Central America during that period.
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