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Recent events in China are truly tragedies, but the
pious tut-tutting among American commentators is harder to
understand. The general tone is that China is a real
weird place, where government troops are killing their own
citizens, where the government might change leaders in
bizarre and unprecedented ways any time now.
The unspoken assumption in all this is that America is somehow quite different, that those things couldn't happen here.
Except they have happened here. Let us go back 19 years,
to May of 1970. Like Beijing, America was full of students
who were protesting government policies -- principally the
incursion
of Cambodia -- and getting as much
attention as possible in the process.
In response, American police and soldiers opened fire on
American citizens. At Jackson State College in Mississippi,
police used buckshot, machine guns and armor-piercing rifle
bullets to kill two students and wound nine. A presidential
commission called that 28-second fusillade an
unreasonable, unjustified over-reaction,
but the local
grand jury never saw fit to indict anybody. Certainly the
grand jury's reluctance had nothing to do with the fact
that the victims were black and the shooters were
white.
Then there was Kent, Ohio, where the mayor called in the National Guard. Over the weekend, they bayoneted three students. When that didn't deter students from assembling the following Monday, the guardsmen opened fire. Four dead in Ohio, and nine more wounded.
Even the FBI, after sending in 300 agents, concluded the guardsmen had been in no danger, and that the soldiers had conspired to blame the incident on a threatening mob which had in fact never existed. Nobody ever faced criminal charges, though. In those days, it was quite legal to shoot at students.
Purges in the leadership? Not long before that,
Secretary of the Interior Walter J. Hickel had questioned
the inflammatory rhetoric that Richard Nixon, Spiro Agnew
and John Mitchell were using to divide America (i.e., when
a construction worker beat up a peace marcher, the hard-hat
was lauded as a national hero by Nixon; Agnew observed that
the troublemakers among the younger generation are only
a bunch of hoodlums who don't deserve to bear the title of
American youth.
)
Hickel was summarily dismissed from the cabinet. Not
only that, his six senior underlings were immediately told
We want your resignation, and we want you out of the
building by five o'clock.
Later came the Saturday Night
Massacre.
Just how stable or legitimate
was the American
government in those days?
The attorney general, when he wasn't trying to censor America's leading newspapers, was routing money through Mexico in order to evade the laws concerning the reporting of campaign contributions. Some of that money went to finance third-rate burglaries and blackmail schemes. The vice-president would sit in his office and collect envelopes full of cash, paid by grateful contractors who believed they still owed for favors that Agnew had done for them when he was governor of Maryland.
And there was Richard Nixon, of course, dividing a nation, waging undeclared wars around the globe, and trashing our economy to the extent that he had to impose wage and price controls.
It was a tough time, and maybe America did lose some
legitimacy
or world standing in the process. But
eventually, Agnew and Mitchell departed, and Nixon was
deposed, to be replaced by the first unelected president in
American history.
Instead of acting pious about the horrors in China -- the war against citizens and the nation's bizarre and toppling leadership -- we ought to feel quite sympathetic. We've had our problems, too.
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