Holy mackerel! We've been cast back to 1968. More violence to come.
Protests. Turning into violence. Mayhem. Death.
Mob action at the Democratic National Convention in Chicago
That’s what the late 1960s turned into and that’s where we are heading today.
Only the elderly like me were around in the ‘60s to experience and recall the havoc that wrecked the country. The protestors seem proud of their ignorance. I’m not guessing where we are heading—other than it’s going to be bad.
There are some similarities and differences between the ‘60s and now:
Both sprang from and were engineered in college classrooms by self-satisfied utopians who thought they knew better than everyone else and tolerated no dissent.
Naive mobs were manipulated by radial leftists, reflecting their belief that stupid Americans needed to be “educated.” Many joined the “movement” because their friends had and they didn’t want to be left out. Uncounted numbers of men/boys joined in because they thought it was an opportunity to meet girls. And to enjoy the benefits of the sexual revolution. (Contemporaries think that they invented “friends with benefits?” Ha.)
The mess is rooted in the stupid belief that Marx had the answers. Many had or have no idea what Marx, Engels, Lenin and Stalin had in mind. Many had no clue—and today they still don’t have any idea—about how goofy, stupid and ignorant they are.
They refuse to acknowledge the deep, destructive and fatal consequences of their actions.
One of those consequences was the election of Richard Nixon as president. The convention riots ensured the defeat of the Democratic candidate, Hubert Humphrey. He was linked to Lyndon Johnson as his vice president. For the “peace activists” that meant he was a war criminal, just like LBJ.
See any similarities here? Joe Biden has stepped into LBJ’s role as the horrible of horribles. The evil anti-semitic and rioting goofballs are doing their best to hand Donald Trump a victory. LBJ decided not to run for a second term, as certain as he was of defeat. Will Biden drop out of the election, saying he was doing it for the good of the Democratic Party and the country? Will Kamala Harris will be left wearing the jacket, just like Humphrey was?
What followed in the ‘60s was anarchy. Mobs rushing through Chicago’s downtown in the so-called Days of Rage, breaking windows and injuring the innocent. Setting of deadly bombs.
The ‘60s spawned the radical “progressives” who are responsible for today’s anarchy. Because they weren’t good for much else and because they felt the moral obligation to hammer their credo into America society, they ended up in higher education, fashioning the anti-history, anti-science, anti-peace, anti-ethical and pro-violence blockheads who are spinning America into today’s turbulence.
Bernardine Dohrn and William Ayers were the essence of that era, having been accurately described as “two of the most notorious — and unrepentant — figures from the violent fringe of the 1960s anti-war movement.” For that they escaped serious incarceration and were welcomed as professors in two Chicago universities—Northwestern and Illinois at Chicago.
Here a side note: They were part of the Baby Boomer generation. The ones who said never trust anyone over 30. Now that they are twice that age, you’ve got to wonder if they’ve ever had any remorse.
Today they’re doing it better, with the Black Lives Matter riots that grew far out of control.
There’s one important difference: In the ‘60s and ‘70s, the mob’s hatred was directed at the military. Today it is directed at Jews, which is worse.
I was in the military then and thankfully wasn’t spit upon. Others were. Wearing your uniform in public didn’t get any “thank you for your service” greetings. Hostility was that day’s greeting. It took ten years for Chicago to figure out that it owed something to the combatants, and staged a large veterans parade downtown.
As a reporter for the Chicago Daily News and a veteran I was assigned to cover a celebration of Jimmy Carter’s pardon of all the draft dodgers. They were so full of their righteousness. It made me sick.
Some might think that what I’m writing here confirms my hated of Arabs and more specifically Palestinians.
Not so. As an op-ed columnist for the Chicago Sun-Times, I told the story of the conflict from the Palestinian point of view. I described how they were driven or frightened off their land by the creation of Israel state. I described some of the terrorist actions by Zionists, such as the bombing of the King David Hotel.
I got the newspaper and myself into a heap of trouble. The Chicago Israeli consulate demanded a meeting of the paper’s editorial board (including myself) to hear me called something close to an anti-semite. I received an award from a local Arab organization.
I still can see the world from their viewpoint. But that doesn’t mean I have to accept the genocide of Hamas, Iran and the rest of that axis of evil. And it certainly doesn’t put me on the side of today’s mobs.
Their blocking of Jewish students from entering classrooms. Their take-over of campuses and more are the harbinger of worse things to come. A Kristallnacht (The Night of Broken Glass)? Attacks against Jewish businesses? The labeling of Jews?
The protestors want more than a “two-state solution,” something that I have always supported. These bloodthirsty protestors want “from river to sea,” meaning the complete destruction of Israel. What do they plan to do with the Jews who are there? Expulsion? Something worse? We never hear. Because for all the protestors’ claims of caring about the “victims,” they don’t give a fig for people who for millennia have been hated, driven from place to place and murdered en masse.
In this, “Progressives” have morphed into “Regressives,” hurtling us back to when hated was an acceptable agenda, directed now at Jews as it was directed at black people. Is there a way to halt this descent into hell? I hope so, but I don’t see how.