Can The Demands Of History Resolve the Kent State Massacre Controversy?

[Judi Lynn]

February 1, 2016
Can The Demands Of History Resolve the Kent State Massacre Controversy?

by Howard Lisnoff



Bums, vigilantes, Brown Shirts and getting what they deserved, were the varying ways, all incendiary and untrue, that the protesters at Kent State (and those like them in the peace movement at that time) were categorized by top officials of both the US government and the State of Ohio before the massacre there on May 4, 1970. The top law enforcement officer in the U.S. government, J. Edgar Hoover, told White House lawyer Egil Krogh that, “the students invited (the shootings) and got what they deserved.”

May 4, 1970 stands out as a defining moment in the minds of those who worked for peace in those years. It shaped much of the politics of the generation born following World War II who had come of age.

May 4, 1970 was the day the Vietnam War came home to the campus of Kent State University and just days later to the campus of Jackson State in Mississippi. But an issue gnaws at the truth of that day in May of so many years ago and has left the idea of justice as an unsettled question.

The issue is whether or not the National Guard that had been called out to Kent, Ohio, and later to the campus of Kent State University, acted in unison and upon an order or orders to shoot powerful rifles at demonstrators who posed no real threat to them while protesting the Vietnam War.

More:
http://www.counterpunch.org/2016/02/01/can-the-demands-of-history-resolve-the-kent-state-massacre-controversy/

[ErisDiscordia]

1. Even if they had acted in unison and on orders, it was WRONG

and all the perps are dead. Let them burn in hell for eternity. We have to raise up leaders that won't ever go there again, today and every day.

[Nitram]

2. I believe the OP agrees with you.

My take on the Kent state Massacre is that some poorly-trained guardsmen under poorly-trained leadership were given loaded guns to deal with a campus protest. It was a tragedy waiting to happen.

[malthaussen]

3. Props to Mr Lisnoff for actually remembering Jackson State.

In media terms, Kent State stepped all over Jackson State's lead, and many are those who deplore the former while forgetting the latter.

This analysis seems to suggest that the slaughter was ordered, and not, as I have always thought most probable, the spontaneous action of a group of pissed-off Weekend Warriors. Interesting, if true.

-- Mal