[Peace-discuss] 4 May 1970: USG kills students at Kent State

[John W.]

On Mon, Apr 26, 2010 at 8:50 PM, C. G. Estabrook <galliher at illinois.edu>wrote:



> [Look at this.  It's more typical of what was happening in 1965, not 1970.
> Obama writes about the resistance to the Vietnam War in his Audacity of
> Hope and
> covertly promises that it won't happen again. His administration - and
> university administrations, police forces, etc. - have not forgotten those
> years, and they're making sure it won't happen again. --CGE]
>


Yes, the "political class" learned a great deal during the 60s and 70s about
how to control dissent and render it less effective.  The police are more
sophisticated, and "time, place, and manner" restrictions on speech are
employed to great effect.




>        Univ. of Wisc. Cancels Antiwar Forum Over ‘Security Concerns’
>        Posted: 25 Apr 2010 07:13 PM PDT
>
> An Antiwar Forum was canceled at the last minute by the University of
> Wisconsin
> (Madison) over unspecified “security concerns.”
>
> The event was expected to draw a large audience to hear Cindy Sheehan,
> Antiwar.com’s Angela Keaton, Ben Manski of the Liberty Tree Foundation,
> Christina Tobin of the Free and Equal Elections Foundation, and local
> activist
> and elected official Sean Scallon.
>
> The practice of canceling or prohibiting events based on “security
> concerns” is
> not new, but hasn’t been used much recently. The U.S. Supreme Court has
> made
> clear, in its Forsyth County v. Nationalist Movement (505 U.S. 123, 1992)
> decision, that “Speech cannot be financially burdened, any more than it can
> be
> punished or banned, simply because it might offend a hostile mob.”
>
> Organizers of the event plan to hold it in an area outside the student
> union.
>
> Following is the press release of the UW Campus Antiwar Network:
>
>    UW Campus Antiwar Network: Antiwar panel scheduled for Monday at 7:00 at
> Memorial Union featuring activist Cindy Sheehan cancelled by union staff
> due to
> “security concerns”
>
>    4/25/2010
>
>    CONTACT: Steve Horn — (262)-705-5856, sahorn at wisc.edu
>
>    To Members of the Press:
>
>    An antiwar panel sponsored by the University of Wisconsin-Madison’s
> Havens
> Center, Campus Antiwar Network, Middle East Interest Group, and the
> Wisconsin
> Union Directorate’s Society and Politics Committee and scheduled for
> Monday,
> April 26 at 7:00 PM in Memorial Union has been cancelled by the Union
> Building/Event Management Director, Roger Vogts, due to a last-minute
> expression
> of “security concerns” that would accompany antiwar activist Cindy
> Sheehan’s
> visit. Vogts said that he could not contact security over the weekend
> because,
> apparently, phones don’t work over the weekend.
>
>    On top of that, those organizing the event would have to foot the bill
> for
> the security, even though Sheehan never requested security to begin with,
> and
> even though no organizations involved with this event had enough money to
> foot
> the expensive bill this late in the game, either.
>
>    The U.S. Supreme Court has made clear, in its Forsyth County v.
> Nationalist
> Movement (505 U.S. 123, 1992) decision, that “Speech cannot be financially
> burdened, any more than it can be punished or banned, simply because it
> might
> offend a hostile mob” (emphasis mine). Since the Union’s Central
> Reservations
> presides over a viewpoint-neutral limited public forum at the Union and
> other
> facilities, the Union is necessarily bound by the same constitutional
> demands as
> the local government in Forsyth County. In other words, it is
> unconstitutional
> for any viewpoint-neutral limited public forum to deny any organization
> their
> free speech rights on the grounds that they are unable to provide for extra
> security costs related to the exercise of that free speech.
>
>    Interestingly, these same concerns were not expressed when Norman
> Finkelstein came to Madison on April 13 and spoke at UW, a man well-known
> for
> being a strong critic of Israel’s and a man barred from visiting Israel
> until
> 2018 because the country considers him a “security threat.” Not a peep was
> uttered about him being such a thing at UW.
>
>    The panel features across-the-political-spectrum activists who believe
> it
> will take massive electoral reform to engender a sustainable long-term
> antiwar
> movement in the United States:
>
>    * Christina Tobin: chair of the Free and Equal Elections Foundation
> (www.freeandequal.org), a nonpartisan, nonprofit, public policy and
> advocacy
> organization dedicated to protecting the rights of the politically
> marginalized
> and disenfranchised, particularly third party and independent voters and
> candidates. She is also the Libertarian candidate for California Sec. of
> State.
>    * Teresa Amato: served as national campaign manager and in-house counsel
> for
> Ralph Nader in his 2000 and 2004 presidential campaigns. She’s the author
> of
> Grand Illusion: The Myth of Voter Choice in a Two-Party Tyranny.
>    * Angela Keaton: development director for Antiwar.com, the Web’s leading
> source of antiwar news, views, and activities, and the producer of the
> Scott
> Horton Show for Antiwar Radio.
>    * Ben Manski: attorney and pro-democracy advocate, he serves as
> Executive
> Director for the Liberty Tree Foundation for the Democratic Revolution, a
> think-tank and organizing center he founded in 2004. He’s also a principal
> attorney at Manski Law and Communications, LLC, and an associate follow
> with the
> Institute for Policy Studies. In 2001-2002, he was active on the steering
> committee that formed the major U.S. peace organization, United for Peace
> and
> Justice.
>    * Sean Scallon: author, journalist, blogger, and elected official in
> Pepin,
> WI. He’s the author of Beating the Powers that Be: Independent Political
> Movements and the Parties of the Upper Midwest.
>
>    Despite this cancellation, the organizing committee of this event and
> the
> panel has decided that the event will still take place at the Union, only,
> it
> will not be held in a reserved room, but instead, in one of three places:
> a.)
> the front steps, b.) the Union Lobby, c,) Lakefront on Langdon in the
> Union.
>
>    Event attendees are set to meet at the front steps of the Union at 6:45
> PM,
> and from there, the panel will either be held there, in the Union lobby, or
> in
> Lakefront on Langdon in the Union. At the time this press release was
> written,
> event organizers were still undecided as to whether they would bring a
> lawsuit
> on the grounds of a violation of the First Amendment against the Union.
>
>    For more information about the event, please visit the Facebook Event
> Page.
>
>
> On 4/26/10 12:00 PM, John W. wrote:
>
>>
>>  On Mon, Apr 26, 2010 at 11:40 AM, C. G. Estabrook <galliher at illinois.edu
>>>  <mailto:galliher at illinois.edu>> wrote:
>>>
>>>
>>> http://chronicle.com/article/The-Times-They-Changed/65192/?sid=cr&utm_source=cr&utm_medium=en
>>>
>>> I remember that evening quite well. I was in my first year of teaching at
>>> a
>>> large Midwest university. A friend, an American historian, and I we're
>>> giving
>>> a series of talks in dorms on the war and American politics.  (He was in
>>> fact
>>> the only other member of the university's history department who did not
>>> support the war in Vietnam; we were both fired within the year.)  He met
>>> me
>>> on the stairway to the basement room of one dorm between talks and said,
>>> "Have you heard? The army has killed some students at a college in Ohio."
>>>
>>> I think I responded, "That'll change everything."
>>>
>>> In fact, as Lembke explains (and I'm not sure he's mentioned all the
>>> mechanisms), the universities responded vigorously and in a few years
>>> were
>>> able to stamp out student political awareness.  They convinced students
>>> that
>>> they should beg for jobs and party in the meantime. Student politics
>>> didn't
>>> die: it was murdered like Jeffrey Miller forty years ago.
>>>
>>
>> In the shorter term Kent State DID change quite a bit.  My campus went on
>> strike for the rest of the spring 1970 semester.  Other did as well. There
>> was some partying, sure, but there were also a lot of teach-ins and
>> generally
>> raised consciousness about the war and about a government that would
>> murder
>> its own children. Unfortunately human memory is extremely short.  And as I
>> will explain in a future epistle, there are other reasons why the peasants
>> generally don't revolt to any great extent.
>>
>

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