Maybe. Sometimes things we’ve always known to be true turn out to be nonsense.
This is often true when it comes to stories about the hippies and the left’s golden age of the late 60s and early 70s. Take the Kent State Massacre, when evil fascist National Guardsmen were ordered by President Nixon to shoot peaceful, joyful hippies merely celebrating liberty and free love. This event was one of the central events to galvanizing the nation in opposition to the Vietnam War.
Except as it turns out, that’s not how it went down. John Mangles writes at the Cleveland Plain Dealer:
A noisy, violent altercation and four pistol shots took place about 70 seconds before Ohio National Guardsmen opened fire on antiwar protesters at Kent State University, according to a new analysis of a 40-year-old audiotape of the event.
The discovery adds new perspective to — and raises new questions about — one of the signature events of the 20th century, after four decades of spirited discussion and research.
…
Though the tussle and pistol shots, if authenticated, match some key details of a confrontation several witnesses reported seeing or hearing involving a pistol-waving Kent State student named Terry Norman, they raise many new questions.
So events aren’t as clear as people think. But… why were the National Guard there in the first place? Well Nixon didn’t send them, to begin with. Ohio Governor Rhodes ordered them in, as the National Guard is under the governors of individual states, not the president. To understand why the guard was sent to a university, we turn to the Chicago Boyz:
…the shootings at Kent State were preceded by a month of increasing violence. The “peaceful sit-in” of the ROTC building was violent with doors kicked in, desks and filing cabinets destroyed, burned or tossed through windows. ROTC officers and students as well as school officials were physically attacked.
All this culminated in a riot the night before the shootings in downtown Kent, that resulted in broken windows, arson, stonings and beatings that overwhelmed the Kent police force. That pattern of increasing violence and destruction, not the governor’s ideological opposition to the protesters’ support of communist goals, caused the governor to call out the National Guard. The violence continued the day of the shootings with rock throwing and shouts of “kill, kill, kill”. The Guardsmen were on edge because of the violence, not the ideology.
These weren’t peace-loving, kindly hippies putting flowers in guns and preaching love and non violence. They were ripping Kent State to pieces, setting it on fire and shouting violence. They were hardcore leftist, some of the leaders total communists trying to incite national revolution. The National Guard shouldn’t have opened fire, but they had a lot more reason than we’ve been told. That’s the myth that we believed: peaceful, kindly hippie kids were shot for no reason by fascist monsters, which is absolutely false.
Not all the students were violent troublemakers, but some were, and governor Rhodes saw the situation getting completely out of control. Huge protests of hundreds of students took place every day, and the campus was descending into chaos. The national guardsmen were sent to try to bring some order, and in the confusion and tension, things went horribly wrong.
The lesson we should take from all this is not that the guardsmen were totally without blame, but that both sides were to blame for the tension and how bad things got, and that we cannot trust the media for its stories about anything, particularly the fantasies about the allegedly heroic left’s past.
