[2 articles]
Four dead in Ohio
http://socialistworker.org/2010/05/04/four-dead-in-ohio
The massacre of students at Kent State--and at Jackson State 10 days
later--touched off a period of revolt in U.S. society not seen since
the 1930s, writes Eric Ruder.
May 4, 2010
by Eric Ruder
THIRTEEN SECONDS. Sixty-seven shots. Four dead. Nine wounded.
The massacre at Kent State University just after noon on May 4, 1970,
shocked the nation.
Like the assassination of Martin Luther King Jr. two years earlier,
nearly everyone alive at the time remembered what they were doing
when they heard the news that college students protesting the war
were shot dead in broad daylight by members of the Ohio National Guard.
A few days earlier, on April 30, President Richard Nixon had
delivered a televised speech to announce the U.S. invasion of
Cambodia. The news gave the antiwar movement an immediate jolt.
Nixon had been elected in 1968 because voters turned against
President Lyndon Johnson's escalation of the war, and because Nixon
touted a supposed "secret plan" to end the war. The backdrop to the
election was the Tet Offensive in early 1968, which demonstrated to
the world that the U.S. had no reasonable hope of a military victory
in Vietnam. So the only question that remained--or so most people
thought--was what the terms of a peace settlement would be.
For this reason, it was widely assumed that the war was winding down,
and by the fall of 1969, participation in the antiwar movement
appeared to have crested. By early 1970, the Nixon administration had
withdrawn some 50,000 troops and announced plans for much larger withdrawals.
In secret, Nixon was expanding the war, authorizing B-52 bomber
strikes in northern Laos. But the public perception of the
approaching end of the war drained much of the urgency from building
the antiwar movement. The invasion of Cambodia changed all that.
The Nixon administration itself had been divided on what to do.
National Security Adviser Henry Kissinger and Nixon himself wanted to
escalate the killing in order to gain more leverage at the secret
peace negotiations they were conducting with the Vietnamese in Paris.
Nixon wanted a way to demonstrate the U.S. military's lethal
capabilities in spite the troop withdrawals. Nixon thought "that you
couldn't be completely predictable, you couldn't let the other fellow
take you for granted, you had to strike out savagely from time to
time, and certainly as we left, we were going to 'go out with our
teeth going out last,'" recalled Marshall Green, an aide to Kissinger
involved in the Paris talks. "That was one of his favorite expressions."
On the other hand, several other Nixon aides were opposed to an
escalation. Four days before Nixon announced it, National Security
Council (NSC) staffer William Watts refused to attend an NSC meeting,
and instead gave his resignation. Kissinger's military aide Alexander
Haig told Watts that he "just had an order from your
Commander-in-Chief, and you can't refuse." Watts replied, "Fuck you,
Al. I just have, and I've resigned."
Another administration official, Secretary of State William Rogers,
warned Nixon, "If you do it, in my opinion the campuses will go up in flames."
That's precisely what happened. The day after Nixon's speech, there
were "hundreds of protests and public meetings across the country,"
writes Tom Wells in his book The War Within: America's Battle Over
Vietnam. "A national student strike began to take hold; within four
days, strikes were in progress at over a hundred schools...Maryland
students launched a 'hit-and-run' attack on their school's ROTC
headquarters and skirmished with state police. At Princeton, students
firebombed an armory."
- - - - - - - - - - - - - - - -
AT KENT State in northeastern Ohio, about an hour's drive from
Cleveland, the wooden building that served as the campus' ROTC
headquarters was burned to the ground on the evening of May 2. The
Ohio governor called in the National Guard, and nearly 1,000
Guardsmen arrived in full force on May 3, armed with standard issue M-1 rifles.
The "Guardsmen occupied the campus, making it appear like a military
war zone," write historians Thomas Hensley and Jerry Lewis. They continued:
The day was warm and sunny, however, and students frequently talked
amicably with Guardsmen. Ohio Governor James Rhodes flew to Kent on
Sunday morning, and his mood was anything but calm. At a press
conference, he issued a provocative statement calling campus
protestors the worst type of people in America and stating that every
force of law would be used to deal with them.
Rhodes also indicated that he would seek a court order declaring a
state of emergency. This was never done, but the widespread
assumption among both Guard and University officials was that a state
of martial law was being declared in which control of the campus
resided with the Guard rather than University leaders and all rallies
were banned.
Further confrontations between protestors and guardsmen occurred
Sunday evening, and once again rocks, tear gas and arrests
characterized a tense campus.
On Monday, May 4, students began gathering around 11 a.m. for a
demonstration that had been called at the end of the antiwar protest
the previous Friday. By noon, some 3,000 students had assembled in
and around the Commons--across from some 100 Guardsmen, who stood
watch over the charred remains of the ROTC building.
Just before noon, Ohio National Guard Gen. Robert Canterbury made the
decision to order the protesters to disperse, but the bullhorn
announcement went unheeded. When a police officer and some Guardsmen
drove across the Commons in a jeep to tell protesters that the rally
was banned, they were met with jeers and rocks. The jeep retreated,
and Canterbury ordered his troops to "load and lock" their weapons.
The Guard fired tear gas into the crowd and began marching toward the
students to enforce the dispersal order. The students retreated, and
the Guardsmen followed. Several minutes passed, as the Guardsmen
huddled to determine their next move. As they made their way back in
the direction of the ROTC building, they suddenly stopped, turned and
fired. Some fired into the ground or the air, and some directly at
the students.
The response to the killings at Kent State among students across the
U.S. was instantaneous and furious. In a matter of days, student
strikes that had begun after Nixon's speech spread everywhere,
shutting down more than 500 campuses, 51 for the rest of the academic year.
"Protests were held at nearly 1,350 colleges and universities during
the month of May, with perhaps half the nation's students
participating in them," according to Wells. "Many were moderates or
conservatives protesting for the first time."
According to the May 6 Washington Post, "The overflow of emotion
seemed barely containable. The nation was witnessing what amounted to
a virtual general and uncoordinated strike by its college youth."
Joel Geier, a veteran of the 1960s struggles, described the period
following the massacre as "the most radical moment in the U.S. since
the 1930s." He recalls:
Kent State showed that they were treating us--the antiwar movement,
really the mainstream of society--like they could shoot us down in
the streets, like they did in the ghetto. It was a statement from
them that we didn't count--that if you protested, they could use
lethal force. It threw every institution in the country into a huge
uproar. People felt that nothing could be done to stop these people,
that democracy is meaningless.
I got a call from someone in New York City saying that they were
marching with 50,000 people up 2nd Avenue, but they later found out
about 100,000 people marching down 7th Avenue.
I was living in Berkeley at the time and a member of the
International Socialists (IS), and we called the student strike in
Berkeley, pretty much by accident, because we had the steps already
reserved for a rally that day. By the time of our midday rally, we
knew students had been killed, because it was 9 a.m. in Berkeley when
it happened.
We decided to lead people from there and go into the main campus
building to shut it down. We said, that's it, they are killing
students, and we are shutting the place down.
Then we held a meeting at the Greek Theater to figure out what to
do, and there were 22,000 people there. There were two motions, and
we had a vote by section. The right-wing motion was from the Berkeley
Students for a Democratic Society chapter. They wanted to turn the
university into a "red base"--that is, to take over the university
and use it as a platform to engage in various actions outside of the
university through our control over it.
The IS motion was to go to the working class and call for a general
strike as the only way to stop the war. We lost 12,000 to 10,000.
- - - - - - - - - - - - - - - -
TODAY, THE events of May 4, 1970, are memorialized as tragedy, an
especially horrific example of the repression used by the Nixon
administration in its furious attempt to crush all dissent against
its war policies.
But at the time, the Nixon administration tried to blame the
protesters for the lethal violence unleashed by the National Guard.
As Nixon told the New York Times:
This should remind us all once again that when dissent turns to
violence it invites tragedy. It is my hope that this tragic and
unfortunate incident will strengthen the determination of all the
nation's campuses, administrators, faculty and students alike to
stand firmly for the right which exists in this country of peaceful
dissent, and just as strong against the resort to violence as a means
of such expression.
Nixon's lip service to the notion of "peaceful dissent" was routinely
contradicted by Vice President Spiro Agnew, who served as the
administration's attack dog against the antiwar movement.
Just six days before the Kent State massacre, at a Republican Party
fundraiser in Florida, Agnew lashed out at what he called the overly
"permissive" attitude of university officials and faculty toward the
student protest movement, which he equated with Nazis and Klansmen,
and called for a showdown.
"One modest suggestion for my friends in the academic community,"
said Agnew. "Next time a mob of students, waving their non-negotiable
demands, starts pitching bricks and rocks at the student union, just
imagine they are wearing brown shirts or white sheets--and act
accordingly. It's better to have a confrontation than a cave-in."
He singled out Yale University President Kingman Brewster and called
for his termination because Brewster had said he didn't think Black
revolutionaries could get a fair trial in the criminal justice
system--a reference to the Yale faculty vote to strike in support of
the Black Panthers, eight of whose members were facing murder and
kidnapping charges in a trial in New Haven.
The Nixon administration also wasted no time in crafting various
justifications and alibis for the massacre. J. Edgar Hoover, the
notorious FBI director behind the government's infiltration and
disruption of civil rights and antiwar protesters, told White House
officials that one of the female victims was "sleeping around" and
was "nothing more than a whore."
An Ohio Guard official circulated in the media the allegation that a
sniper had fired on the Guard troops--an allegation for which no
evidence ever surfaced. The Guard commanders also defended the
killings by claiming that the troops fired in self-defense and in
fear of their lives, but the evidence flatly contradicted this story.
Though the nearest of the nine wounded students was 71 feet from the
troops, all the students killed were more than 265 feet away,
suggesting that the troops were directing lethal force at students
who posed them absolutely no immediate danger.
But the truth about sniper fire and student rioters didn't matter to
the Nixon administration, the National Guard or anyone else in the
establishment. In fact, 10 days later, another massacre of students
was carried out--this time at the predominantly African American
campus of Jackson State University in Jackson, Miss.
At Jackson State, a much smaller number of students compared to Kent
State--about 75 or 100--were confronted by 75 local and state police
bearing carbines, submachine guns, shotguns, service revolvers and
even personal weapons. The students were protesting the war, racism
on campus and in the town, and the killing of the students at Kent State.
As the cops advanced on the crowd, the students retreated,
congregating in front of a dormitory. Suddenly, the police opened
fire. An FBI investigation found that more than 460 bullets had been
fired at the students and the dormitory.
But the massacre at Jackson State has never received the same
attention as the Kent State killings. "This has everything to do with
racism," explains Geier. "At Kent State, it was white students on a
Midwest campus who were shot dead, but the killing of African
Americans in the South was a matter of course. Countless civil rights
workers had been killed by police and white racists in the land of Dixie."
- - - - - - - - - - - - - - - -
IN MAY 1970, there's no question that the potential existed for the
student movement to unite with the rest of society, in particular the
labor movement, in a broad action against the war. Organized labor,
which Nixon had relied on as a foundation of pro-war support, was
beginning to pull apart. As Wells writes:
On May 7, the American Federation of State, County and Municipal
Workers called for U.S. withdrawal from Indochina. The same day,
Walter Reuther, speaking for 1,800,000 UAW members, told Nixon of the
union's "deep concern and distress" over the invasion and
governmental repression of dissent.
The General Executive Board of the United Electrical, Radio and
Machine Workers of America called the Kent State killings "a tragic
product of an administration in Washington which has made escalation
of war abroad and repression at home its most distinguishing characteristics."
Other union leaders also spoke out. Organized labor's support for
the war was faltering. And rank-and-file workers participated in
antiwar protests in unprecedented numbers.
But the Nixon administration stepped up the pressure on its remaining
pro-war friends in the labor movement, and though administration
officials denied it, it seems likely that they played a role in
fomenting a May 8 assault by 200 construction workers wielding
crowbars and wrenches on peaceful student demonstrators in Manhattan.
According to Wells:
Seventy youths were injured, some "very brutally." Two men in gray
business suits were seen directing the "well-organized" attack, which
came from four directions. One construction worker revealed that the
workers were offered a monetary bonus by at least one contractor if
they would take time off from their work to "break some heads." New
York police were also in on the assault and cheered the workers on.
President Nixon told New York union leaders that he found their
expressions of support "very meaningful."
As weeks after May ran on, the usual summer exodus from campuses took
the life out of the student strike, but activists had big
expectations for the fall. As Geier recalls:
We assumed that in September, the campuses would open up with a
tremendous amount of radicalism. But they were comparatively quiet.
We now faced a new challenge. We had shut everything down, and the
question was no longer about winning over more people on
campuses--because everyone was already won over. But the war continued.
Students now realized how powerless they were, that they lacked the
social weight to have a real impact. The most demoralizing meeting I
ever remember was in December 1970. It was the end of the antiwar
movement in any significant way. There were still twice yearly
demonstrations, but they had a set-piece quality.
The relative calm on campuses meant that in September, when the
President's Commission on Campus Unrest issued its report on the Kent
State massacre--concluding that "the indiscriminate firing of rifles
into a crowd of students and the deaths that followed were
unnecessary, unwarranted and inexcusable"--the Nixon administration
had already regained the initiative.
May 1970 had touched off one of the most tumultuous periods in
American history, but the necessary political organization, connected
to working class people and institutions, did not exist on a large
enough scale to continue driving the opposition forward.
--------
Forty years since the Kent State massacre
http://www.wsws.org/articles/2010/may2010/kent-m04.shtml
By Fred Mazelis and Patrick Martin
4 May 2010
May 4 marks the 40th anniversary of the shootings of unarmed student
protesters at Kent State University in northeast Ohio. The Ohio
National Guard killed four students and wounded nine others at a
rally against the Nixon administration's decision to escalate the
Vietnam War by invading neighboring Cambodia.
The four students who died were Allison Krause and Jeffrey Miller,
who had participated in the antiwar protest, and two bystanders,
Sandra Scheuer and William Schroeder, who were walking between
classes when the troops opened fire. Miller was killed instantly,
Scheuer died within minutes, while Krause and Schroeder succumbed to
their wounds after several hours.
One of the students wounded, Dean Kahler, 20, was a first-semester
freshman who was a curious onlooker to the protest. A bullet cut his
spinal column, leaving him in a wheelchair to this day.
At least 67 bullets were fired during the 13-second fusillade, and
students were hit over a wide area. The closest of the victims, one
of the wounded, was 71 feet from where the troops formed a firing
line. The furthest, wounded in the neck, was 750 feet away. The four
dead students were between 265 and 345 feet distant. None of the
victims was armed or could have posed a physical threat to the guardsmen.
The Kent State Massacre was part of a wave of violent state
repression that swept the United States in the aftermath of the April
30 television announcement by President Richard Nixon that US forces
had crossed the border from Vietnam and invaded Cambodia.
The imperialist war had been raging at full force for more than five
years, amid growing popular opposition in the United States, as the
US casualties mounted into the tens of thousands and Vietnamese
casualties into the millions. The invasion of Cambodia triggered a
wave of mass protests against the war across the country. The
murderous response by the forces of the state amounted to bringing
the war home against the American people.
A week after Kent State, National Guard troops and state police shot
to death six black students and wounded dozens of others in Augusta,
Georgia, after a protest over the murder of 16-year-old Charles
Oatman, a mentally disabled black youth who was beaten to death in
the county jail. The troops and police were ordered into the city by
Democratic Governor Lester Maddox, a notorious segregationist.
Three days later, police and state highway patrolmen fired automatic
weapons into a dormitory at Jackson State University, a historically
black college in the Mississippi state capital, killing two students
and wounding nine others. Phillip Lafayette Gibbs, a 21-year-old
junior at the school, and James Earl Green, a 17-year-old student at
a nearby high school, were shot dead.
What happened in Ohio
At Kent State, about 50 miles south of Cleveland, 500 students
gathered for a protest on May 1, the day after Nixon's national
television speech. Demonstrations escalated, and on the evening of
May 2, the Army Reserve Officers Training Corps (ROTC) building on
campus was set on fire and burned down. Kent Mayor Leroy Satrom
declared a state of emergency and asked Ohio Governor James A. Rhodes
to send in the National Guard.
The troops were in the vicinity already because they had been
mobilized by Rhodes in an attempt to smash a strike by Teamster truck
drivers in Akron. They arrived in Kent within hours, accompanied by
armored personnel carriers, and immediately clashed with more than a
thousand demonstrators. The 900 troops began firing hundreds of
rounds of tear gas and threatening the crowd with their bayonets,
wounding one student. More than 100 students were arrested, the
majority for violating the 8 p.m.-to-dawn curfew imposed by the city
government.
On Sunday, May 3, Governor Rhodes himself arrived in Kent to
supervise the suppression of the antiwar protests. Hundreds of
demonstrators staged a sit-in on an intersection near the campus,
pressing demands for abolition of ROTC, a cut in tuition, amnesty for
all those arrested and removal of the guardsmen from the town. The
troops used tear gas and bayonets to break up the demonstration and
drive the students back on campus.
Rhodes told a press conference that day that the antiwar protesters
were "worse than the brown shirts and the communist element and also
the night riders and the vigilantes. They're the worst type of people
that we harbor in America. I think that we're up against the
strongest, well-trained, militant, revolutionary group that has ever
assembled in America."
He said he would ask the Ohio state legislature to make throwing
rocks at police and firemen a felony crime and require automatic
expulsion or firing of any student, teacher or university employee
convicted of participating in a "riot."
On Monday, May 4, campus officials tried to ban the scheduled
noontime rally, but about 2,000 students gathered anyway. The Guard
was ordered to disperse the students, who defied tear gas and threats
of arrest. Hundreds of students continued to confront the soldiers,
and at 12:24 p.m. the guardsmen took aim and opened fire.
The aftermath of the massacre
The Kent State massacre had a politically galvanizing effect upon
millions of young people, who reacted to the killings with outrage
and anger. An unprecedented nationwide student strike erupted,
involving an estimated 4.3 million students, shutting down or
disrupting more than 900 college campuses. The National Guard was
dispatched to 21 campuses, while police battled students at another
26. University officials closed down 51 campuses for the remainder of
the term. The Kent State campus remained closed for six weeks.
On the following weekend, well over 100,000 people demonstrated in
Washington, D.C. Nixon administration officials, huddled in their
offices, with National Security Advisor Henry Kissinger declaring
that the US capital "took on the character of a besieged city."
Following the shootings, the White House blamed the killings on the
students themselves. Nixon's press secretary Ron Ziegler, speaking on
behalf of a president whose hands were dripping with the blood of the
Vietnamese people, said that the deaths were a warning that "when
dissent turns to violence, it invited tragedy."
In a strange incident that demonstrated the isolation and
disorientation of the White House, Nixon went down to the Lincoln
Memorial about 4 a.m. on the morning of May 9, the morning of the
demonstration, and spoke with 30 students conducting an antiwar
vigil, attempting to convince them of the correctness of his decision
to invade Cambodia.
Afterwards, Nixon asked his top aide, H. R. Haldeman, to reactivate
the Huston Plan, a proposal for systematic wiretapping, break-ins and
other illegal surveillance and harassment of antiwar groups, the
forerunner of the "plumbers" group of ex-CIA operatives that
conducted the 1972 Watergate break-in.
The greatest fear of the Nixon White House was that the nationwide
student protests would intersect with the mass struggles of the
American labor movement, following in the footsteps of the events
just two years before in France, when student protests in Paris
touched off a nationwide general strike that nearly toppled the
regime of President DeGaulle.
The Nixon Administration turned to its staunchest supporters in the
trade union bureaucracy of the building trades, with New York union
official Peter Brennan, later appointed US Labor Secretary by Nixon,
organizing a counter-demonstration against protests on New York's
Wall Street on May 8, in which goons organized by the bureaucracy
savagely beat antiwar protesters.
But the mass protests nonetheless marked a significant turning point
in the conduct of the war in Vietnam. The Nixon White House was
compelled to withdraw troops from Cambodia within a month of the
invasion, and announced that the pace of troop withdrawals from
Vietnam itself would be increased.
A little more than a month after Kent State, Nixon established the
President's Commission on Campus Unrest. This body held hearings at
Kent State and elsewhere, and was given the assignment of
whitewashing the true cause and the authors of the killings, while
giving the impression of evenhandedness and concern. In a September
1970 report, the Commission acknowledged that the National Guard
shootings on May 4 had been unjustified, but drew no other conclusions.
No one paid any penalty for the police and National Guard killings at
Kent State, Augusta or Jackson State. Eight of the Ohio guardsmen
were eventually indicted by a grand jury, but in 1974 a US District
Judge dismissed all charges against them, claiming the prosecution's
case was too weak to put before a court.
The enduring significance
The 40th anniversary of the Kent State shootings will be marked, as
it has been every year, with events on the Ohio campus organized by
survivors of that day as well as other students and faculty. The Kent
May 4 Center has established a presence on the internet
(www.may4.org). One of its leaders, Alan Canfora, among those wounded
40 years ago, has claimed that a recently discovered copy of a tape
recording, archived at Yale University, shows that there was an order
to fire given before the shootings, and he has called for the
government to reopen the investigation into a coverup of the incident.
While further investigation of Kent State is certainly justified, the
real significance of the event goes far beyond the question of
whether there was an order to shoot or even whether there was a
coverup. Kent State cannot be understood apart from the economic,
political and social events of the period that produced this tragedy.
The protests at Kent State did not, of course, arise suddenly or in a
political and social vacuum. Mass protests against the US war in
Vietnam had been building since 1965. President Lyndon B. Johnson had
been forced to withdraw from his reelection campaign in March 1968.
The 1968 Democratic Convention had witnessed bloody clashes after
Chicago Democratic Mayor Daley had mobilized his police against
antiwar demonstrators.
Nor were the antiwar protests simply a student affair. The movement
that mobilized literally millions of American youth for a period of
nearly five years was part of a broader movement of the working class
in the US and all over the world.
In the US, the long postwar boom was drawing to a close. Every
section of the working class was stirring, on the issues of wages,
inequality, poverty and war. The mass civil rights movement of
1955-1965 had been immediately followed by a series of spontaneous
ghetto rebellions involving the most oppressed sections of
African-American workers and youth, who demanded that the dismantling
of Jim Crow segregation be followed by genuine social equality.
The entire working class, meanwhile, refused to pay for the costs of
the Vietnam War through attacks on its wages and conditions. The year
1970 saw the greatest number of strikes in two decades. Just weeks
before Kent State, the first-ever national postal strike had led the
Nixon Administration to call out the National Guard to move the mail.
Earlier, General Electric Co. had been shut down by a militant and
protracted strike. Later in the year, General Motors workers walked out.
The response of the ruling class to the militancy of workers and
students was immediate. It demonstrated that it was capable of the
same ruthlessness at home as that exhibited in imperialist war
abroad. Its methods included direct violence, as at Kent State,
Augusta and Jackson State, and the methods of provocation, as in the
notorious Cointelpro operations that were used to infiltrate
movements of students, minority workers and youth. Black Panther
leaders Fred Hampton and Mark Clark had been brutally gunned down in
their beds in 1969. Malcolm X was killed in 1965 and Martin Luther
King, Jr. in 1968, and there were many reasons to see the hands of
the FBI behind these crimes.
The fate of the protest movement
In marking the anniversary of Kent State, it is necessary to examine
the legacy of the protest movement against the Vietnam War. Although
it was part of a broader movement of the working class, it never
posed the decisive political question that emerged out of this
struggleč˛ hat the fight against imperialist war required a fight
against the system of capitalist exploitation that produced it. That
meant a break from the Democratic Party, and a turn by the student
fighters against war to the great untapped strength of the working class.
While the working class was held back internationally and in the US
by Stalinism and the trade union bureaucracy, the student upsurge was
confined to liberal protest and ultimately channeled into the
dead-end of the 1972 presidential campaign of Democrat George McGovern.
Those who dominated the student protests, above all the
ex-Trotskyists of the Socialist Workers Party, demanded that the
struggle against the war be separated from the class struggle as a
whole, and from the urgent need to construct a new revolutionary
leadership of the working class.
The American Trotskyists, then organized in the Workers League, the
predecessor organization of the Socialist Equality Party, fought to
turn the students to the working class. The Workers League won the
best sections of students to the perspective of building a new
revolutionary leadership on the basis of a socialist and
internationalist program.
Though defeated in Vietnam, American imperialism still possessed
enormous financial and economic reserves, and it was aided by the
treacherous policies of the Stalinist bureaucracies in both the
Soviet Union and China, and, within the next five years, launched a
relentless counteroffensive against the international working class.
Beginning with the Carter administration, then spearheaded by Reagan
and continued by all of his successors, the bourgeoisie set out to
shift the relationship of class forces and to repeal the social gains
that had been won in earlier struggles.
As part of this process, a decades-long effort to rehabilitate the
war in Vietnam was carried out. The question of Vietnam was posed not
as one of imperialist aggression, but rather one of "mistaken"
policies. More than a quarter century after the humiliating defeat of
US troops in Vietnam, the administration of George W. Bush, with the
full backing of the Democratic Party, launched new colonial wars,
first in Afghanistan, then in Iraq, wars that continue uninterrupted
under Democrat Barack Obama.
Once again, as in the 1960s, the conditions are developing for the
reemergence of mass struggles of working people and youth against
imperialist war, austerity and repression. The great difference,
however, is that the struggles now unfolding take place under
conditions of a protracted historical decline of American capitalism.
The United States still dominated the world economy in the 1960s.
Today, America is the world's largest debtor nation, with crippling
trade and budget deficits, and the financial collapse on Wall Street
in September 2008 touched off the worldwide economic crisis.
The central issue confronting working people, youth and students,
posed more urgently today than ever, is the necessity to build a new
revolutionary leadership in the working class.
.
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