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| Home Front: Politix |
| Overrate Â’68 |
| 2008-08-27 |
| Why is the Left glorying in its worst hour? Forty years ago this week, radical activists descended on Chicago to protest the Democratic National Convention. In the ensuing chaos, hospitals treated 192 policemen, more than 650 people were arrested, and one demonstrator was killed. This week, a group calling itself "Recreate 68" has converged on Denver to protest the 2008 Democratic National Convention. Its name to the contrary, Recreate 68's organizers insist that they aren't paying homage to the '68 protestors. Not that they believe that the protestors did anything wrong: echoing the words of the federal government's Walker Report, Recreate 68 contends that "what happened in Chicago in 1968 was not a violent protest, but rather a 'police riot.'" Numerous histories from participant-memoirists unsurprisingly second the "police riot" verdict. Cathy Wilkerson, whose cadre unleashed stink bombs and phoned bomb threats to local hotels, notes in her recent memoir that the "rampant brutality" of Chicago mayor Richard J. Daley "was exposed for all the world to see." For Tom Hayden, the coordinator of the Chicago protests who was arrested for deflating a police car's tire, "rioting police" exhibited "brutal behavior" and "mindless sadism." Bill Ayers, who brags of pelting Chicago cops with marbles fired from a slingshot, decries the "violent police assaults" and police "rioting." But far from political innocents clubbed into reality by sadistic policemen, the activists who squared off with cops were generally movement veterans who went to Chicago looking for a fight. As Jeff Jones and Mike Spiegel of New Left Notes wrote six months before the convention, "to envision non-violent demonstrations at the Convention is to indulge in pleasant fantasying." By 1968, the movement had moved from mere protest to open confrontation. Leaving for Chicago, Terry Robbins--who, 18 months later, would blow himself up while constructing a bomb intended for a soldiers' dance--told comrades: "Let's go kick some ass." |
| Posted by:tu3031 |
| #1 But why would left-wing activists want to replay the beginnings of their movement's downward spiral? Cause for the left, feelings are far more important than facts. 100 million dead in the 20th Century was not enough. |
| Posted by: Procopius2k 2008-08-27 16:08 |