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Last Updated: Aug 27, 2008 - 11:27:03 AM |
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.”
The figure most closely associated with the Chicago protests is Tom
Hayden, now point man for Progressives for Obama. Students for a
Democratic Society activist Gerry Long recalled to David Horowitz that
Hayden noted the benefits of firebombing Chicago police cruisers. “I
heard Tom Hayden speak, in chillingly cavalier tones, about street
actions which would run the risk of getting people killed,” Todd Gitlin
remembered in The Sixties. In a conversation with me, Mike Klonsky,
SDS’s national secretary during the convention riots, described how
Hayden plotted to scatter nails over a nearby highway. And Bill Ayers
writes in his memoir, Fugitive Days, of Hayden’s altered persona when
addressing closed audiences of radicals:
His voice took on an edge, somewhere between fanatical and giddy, as he
described bold plans and playful pranks. But you folks—veterans of the
movement and the streets—have a pivotal role to play in all of this, he
continued, the color of his face deepening, his eyes once again
blazing. He looked intently from person to person. He was the same
articulate and thoughtful speaker as before, but these were words for
only a few. This demonstration has the potential like nothing we’ve
done before to expose the face of the enemy, to strip him naked, to
force him to reveal himself as violent, brutal, totalitarian, and evil.
It will be difficult—and dangerous—taunting the monster, stabbing him
in his most exposed and vulnerable places, but it’s got to be done. And
he paused. And you’re the ones to do it.
The behind-closed-doors Hayden occasionally ventured into public view.
In Chicago, he called on activists to “avenge” the injuries of
co-organizer Rennie Davis, who had suffered a concussion battling the
police. Hayden exhorted the throngs: “Make sure that if blood is going
to flow, it will flow all over this city.” Hayden wasn’t alone among
future Chicago Eight defendants in his violent rhetoric. “If a pig
comes up to us and starts swinging a billy club,” Black Panther Bobby
Seale counseled, “and you check around and you got your piece, you got
to down that pig in defense of yourself! We’re going to barbecue us
some pork!” Abbie Hoffman called for “a huge orgasm of destruction,”
and (along with sidekick Jerry Rubin) daydreamed of poisoning Chicago’s
water supply with LSD. Hearing the reckless pronouncements of the
riot’s ringleaders, Americans—already weary from several years of
deadly urban rioting across the country—supported the Chicago police by
greater than 2–1 margins. “The whole world is watching!” the protestors
chanted, but polls showed that not everyone saw events their way.
Radicals’ vision of reality is as distorted now as it was then. Since
1968, Recreate 68 contends, a right-wing backlash has attempted to roll
back the gains of those years, to ‘recreate’ an America in which a
ruling elite of wealthy, privileged white males and large corporations
made a mockery of the promise of democracy. For the past 40 years, we
have seen increasing economic inequality, a fierce attack on
affirmative action and other programs aimed at aiding oppressed
communities, an assault on civil liberties and, most recently, an
attempt to equate political dissent with criminality or ‘terrorism.’
Under the Bush administration, the right has come dangerously close to
achieving their goal.
That the events in Chicago might have catalyzed the nation’s rightward
turn never seems to occur to such nostalgists. Instead, they blindly
celebrate an event that helped cause the political developments they
lament. Apart from the immediate effect—Democratic voters’ withholding
votes from a party that seemed unable to govern its own convention, let
alone the nation—the events of 40 years ago led to a long-term
transformation of the Democratic Party. Democratic delegate Ben
Wattenberg observed of the party’s 1972 convention: “There won’t be any
riots in Miami because the people who rioted in Chicago are on the
platform committee.” Consider the treatment of Mayor Daley, who had
opened the 1968 Democratic Convention, at the 1972 gathering. The
party’s credentials committee, steeped in George McGovern–inspired
reformist impulses, refused to seat Daley’s slate of delegates elected
by Cook County voters. Instead, the committee replaced the slate with
an unelected one led by Jesse Jackson that more closely resembled the
diversity that the party’s new quota system demanded.
This rule-or-ruin mentality ruined Hubert Humphrey’s chances of ruling,
and it continues to this day. Instead of FDR’s party of the working
man, the post-’68 Democrats have been easy to caricature as the
Abortion Party, the Blame-America-First Party, and the Soft-on-Crime
Party. In the ten presidential elections since the bloody ’68
convention riots, Democrats have won just three to the Republicans’
seven. This Republican dominance exactly mirrors Democratic successes
in the 40 years prior to 1968.
Yet the ’68 party crashers are on the convention guest list in 2008, if
not in charge of it. In the nomination of Barack Obama, a Windy City
politician whose swift climb was aided by many who made homes in
Chicago after the 1968 unrest, one sees in microcosm the story of
Democratic Party presidential politics over the last four decades.
While satisfying the vocal activist wing, the party’s presidential
nominees—George McGovern, Michael Dukakis, John Kerry—have ultimately
alienated the broader electorate. One can understand why a cynical
Republican might want to recreate 1968, a time when a fever of
political cannibalism infected the Left and resulted in a political
realignment in favor of the GOP. But why would left-wing activists want
to replay the beginnings of their movement’s downward spiral?
Source:Ocnus.net 2008
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