A dreadful sense of deja vu: Gaza protests look a lot like the ones during Vietnam
The "March for Peace" at the Michigan State University in East Lansing, Mich., on Oct. 15, 1969. This copy was saved and kept by participant and Montana columnist George Ochenski (Photo courtesy of George Ochenski).
The current protests sweeping college campuses nationwide against the slaughter of Palestinians by Israel with U.S. weaponry brings a dreadful sense of deja vu of the protests against the Vietnam War. And once again, the powers that be are doing exactly the wrong thing, having learned nothing from the foolish, authoritarian mistakes they made more than 50 years ago.
For those who came of age during that turbulent era, the images of cops in full riot gear with helmets, clubs and shields beating unarmed, helpless college students brings a visceral and bitter reaction. In a nation founded on the rights of free speech and dissent against the government’s actions what we are seeing now is a wholesale betrayal of our democracy.
As in the ’60s, today’s politicians readily mimic the phony propaganda of what was then called “the Establishment.” In the meantime, national news networks have painted one-sided perspectives that claim Israeli “self defense,” but gives short shrift to the horrifically lopsided toll of death and destruction wreaked on Palestinians.
To put it in perspective, from 1961 to the “Fall of Saigon” in 1975, the US lost 58,200 men and women in Vietnam. As of today, more than 110,000 Palestinians have been killed or injured by Israel in just six months — and among the 34,200 killed, three-quarters of those were women and children.
Yet, only now, when the Israeli actions in Gaza have become so undeniably inhumane, has our mainstream corporate media slowly moved to admit Israel has long passed the “self defense” stage into genocide.
Yet our politicians excoriate the student protestors, wagging their fingers and pontificating about how students should simply get back to their classes – as if none of this is actually happening on the world stage and as if the U.S. is not fully complicit.
But now, as it was 50 years ago, those students on the college campuses across our country are appalled at the actions of their own nation…the nation in which they are preparing to lead their generation into the future. They have every right to be outraged that Congress and the president just sent Israel another $26 billion to continue the slaughter.
Now, as a half century ago, the concept of “patriotism” is not defined by who waves the biggest flag or spouts the loudest condemnation of the protestors. True patriotism requires being brave enough to stand up to the government and the deeply embedded interests of the military-industrial complex when the result is massive death and destruction of other humans. That’s called humanity — and true patriots have every right to demand humane policies and actions from their own government.
Nor will clubbing, gassing, and arresting students work any better now than it did 50 years ago. In fact, it will backfire and actually increase the resistance. Likewise, the phony propaganda being spewed by politicians will fail to disguise the grim reality that what we’re witnessing is genocide aided and abetted by the U.S.
By the late ’60s, even the national newcasters had to admit the Pentagon was filing false reports, we were not winning the Vietnam War, and the “domino theory” that sent our men and women to die was a phony political construct that resulted in two million civilian casualties in Vietnam — a completely unacceptable slaughter for a modern democracy that was not threatened by a tiny nation in Southeast Asia.
The parallels are undeniable — as will be the outcome. Despite the violent, iron-fist tactics of our increasingly authoritarian nation, if history is any indication the student protestors will be proved right, the lies and misrepresentations by politicians and the media proved wrong, and Israel’s genocidal war on the Palestinians will come to an ignominious end — as did ours in Vietnam.
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