Condemned To Repeat

My anthropology professor was annoyed with me. I had been charged with obtaining an accelerant for torching the barricade on our street and had returned with a jerry can of kerosene. Now, as police in full riot gear were advancing to enforce another of Governor Reagan’s illegal curfews over Isla Vista and UCSB, we were finding it difficult to ignite the piled-up furniture. "Why'd you get kerosene?" he asked through clenched teeth. I wanted to tell him I thought it would burn longer but as I glanced up the darkened street where just the night before the police had shot out all the streetlights, I could see our time was just about up. Then they were on us: shouting, pushing with their shields, and swinging riot sticks. We retreated to my girlfriend’s apartment, followed by a hulking, dark shape with a gas mask that broke the backdoor window and tossed a spinning CS teargas canister onto the kitchen floor.

Like many students, I had been radicalized gradually by the mounting atrocity that was the Vietnam War, and I had become fired-up suddenly during the first curfew when, while standing in a friend’s yard across from the beach in late afternoon sunlight, I was jumped, forced to the ground, handcuffed, taken to a prison bus and there clubbed by Los Angeles County Sheriffs. They had been sent ninety miles north by Reagan to “teach the students a lesson”; a lesson that was lost when it devolved into a police riot. Enough people witnessed my own and other beatings that day, that I was subsequently summoned to testify before a Los Angeles County Grand Jury. It was an exercise in judicial control of actions made up on the ground by a militarized force and rubber stamped by a reactionary governor; but it was an exercise that went nowhere.

Demonstrations against the war became more and more violent, as we learned that, in America, only property damage would guarantee the attention of the media. By the end of 1972, the Bank Of America in Isla Vista had been burned to the ground, a UCSB student had been shot and killed on a rooftop by police, Highway 101 had been blockaded by protestors, curfews were being enforced by squads of rifleman riding in the backs of dump trucks, students were making Molotov cocktails in their kitchen sinks, and the nights were filled with running street battles. It was a war zone; not just for a day or a week but off and on for four years from Johnson through Nixon. It was disruptive in the extreme, ruinous to many budding careers, left scars that will never be healed and, most importantly of all…it was nationwide and it worked. It drove martinets like Reagan and Nixon over the edge and revealed the malfeasance of their policies. In 1973, an increasingly polarized Nixon would be forced from office and the US military forced out of Vietnam. There’s a lesson that wasn’t lost.

Why can’t we stop discussing Vietnam now? It’s more than just the stark parallels of the Iraq War. At first it was the false pretexts of imminent threat that got us into it, the lack of a clear objective, the underestimation of troop needs and the failure to anticipate resistance from a cultural identity that had been forged in thousands of years of warfare defending a civilization based on intensified agriculture and trade routes. Now, it’s the inability to distinguish combatants from civilians, the historic odds in favor of a protracted guerilla struggle against a foreign occupying military, the mounting US casualties, the atrocious collateral damage, the American-backed regime without in-country credibility, the shocking revelations of war crimes and the imperious cover-ups that have outraged the world It’s all that and more. It’s also our second mind, that warning voice, telling us that if we don’t soon clean up the mess that we’ve made of Iraq, we face a Vietnam Era-like future of increasingly violent demonstrations here at home. And it’s going to happen whether it’s the Republican Administration that gets a mandate come November to continue their neo-conservative disaster, or the Democratic Administration that inherits it.

Before the RNC in NYC, on September 29, over 400,000 people marched non-violently against the Bush Administration’s foreign policy, an event that made news across the country because of the historic numbers. Subsequent demonstrations, arrests for civil disobedience, indiscriminate police sweeps, and the critical arguments of the ensuing week, however, were not covered outside of New York City. The media is now even more dependent and compromised than it was during the Vietnam War. Most of the mainstream media, beholden to transnational corporate owners, has been derelict in its duty to ask the hard questions of our leaders. Add to that the un-American veil of secrecy that has descended from the top, and independent newsrooms under threat from the Patriot Act to reveal their sources to the FBI without being able to notify those they’ve named, and we’re looking at a near-total collapse of serious analytical reporting. How long before protesters turn to any means necessary to be heard?