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How America Fractured in 1968

nytimes.com

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Re: How America Fractured in 1968

#41

Post by ptr »

coldtea wrote: post #34
Clubber wrote: post #30

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The US? Because if Europe gets overrun by Soviets, like they got overrun by Germany, guess who's next? Could you imagine Soviet Europe for the last 60 years? My uncle was drafted in Vietnam, except he didn't go to Vietnam, he went to West Germany. He spent his time waiting for the Soviets to roll their tanks over the border.

> The US? Because if Europe gets overrun by Soviets, like they got overrun by Germany, guess who's next? Again, that's not their business. Besides half of Europe wanted to be socialist -- and I'm speaking of the support for such parties in Western Europe. > Could you imagine Soviet Europe for the last 60 years? Many wished exactly that at the time. Again, not the business of a foreign power to meddle.

Sweden is seen as a democratic-socialist country, but the guns were definitely aimed east. This was probably the case for most countries in Europe. Why would anyone want to be part of the Soviet union? Not even the Soviet members did.

I think the "foreign power meddling in our business" needs to be nuanced -- I'm personally happy the US decided to spend taxpayer's money to keep us safe.

Re: How America Fractured in 1968

#42

Post by 0d311 »

hueving wrote: post #22
Moto7451 wrote: post #20

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Do you mean the would-be push notifications? That’s the same level of quality as what they do for current events. The push notifications are in the top three reasons I pay for the Times. I can’t recommend a subscription enough.

Do you have a sample of what the current ones contain?

“No one is bombing Hawaii”

Re: How America Fractured in 1968

#43

Post by dominotw »

cryptozeus wrote: post #2

As side note: gif with nytimes article headlines are totally useless on phone, not readable at all

Side note to the side note: I remember reading here that someone had a scriptlet that removes nytimes stories from hackernews. If someone has such a thing, would you mind sharing it?

Re: How America Fractured in 1968

#44

Post by jhbadger »

xenadu02 wrote: post #16
balance_factor wrote: post #10

> It was also the year of the Tet offensive, an enormous attack by North Vietnamese forces, and of more than 16,000 American deaths in the Vietnam War, more than in any other year. Sigh...half a century later the Tet offensive is called "an enormous attack by North Vietnamese forces". How about an enormous attack by "South" Vietnamese forces, like the National Liberation Front? Who took over the American embassy in S…

The strangest thing to me was how pro-US Ho Chi Minh was and how strongly we ignored that, largely for a policy of colonialism that everyone already knew was dead. France doesn't catch near enough crap for that. We should have told France to stuff it.

Well, his pro-US sentiments are somewhat exaqggerated. Ho Chi Minh was yet another alias for Nguyễn Ái Quốc/Nguyễn Sinh Cung who lived for a time in the Soviet Union and founded one of the several competing Vietnamese Communist Parties in the 1920s. He always was pro-Soviet, but he was willing to work with the US because he believed that the US wanted to break up the French Empire after the war.

Re: How America Fractured in 1968

#45

Post by paulddraper »

interfixus wrote: post #11

I was eight in '68, and remember it well. The shootings, especially the Kennedy one, the strange Mexican olympics, the Czechoslovakia debacle, the American election, TV of longhaired protesters, and of course Apollo 8, which at the time I considered by far the most monumental event of the year- and still do. The Vietnam war made no great impression. It was a constant stream of background noise in my European childhoo…

> let alone any idea what the whole sorry thing was about.

Like the Korean War before it, to stop the spread of communism. Domino theory and such.

Re: How America Fractured in 1968

#46

Post by [deleted] »

ethbro wrote: post #31
badpun wrote: post #26

I've recently read an account of that time by UC Berkeley professor and it was terrifying: young men terrorizing and using violence towards students and professors during classes, setting fire and planting bombs/dynamite on university buildings, openly calling to killing policemen on radio stations. It seemed like their program was pure anarchy and destruction.

One of the more interesting pieces of open media I've found: a documentary produced at the time of the Columbia student protests of 1968. (49 min total) https://archive.org/details/Columbia1969 https://archive.org/details/Columbia1969_2 There's a lot revisionist history on both sides, but it ultimately boiled down to young people attempting to assert their visions of the world, while entrenched, older power structure…

[deleted]

Re: How America Fractured in 1968

#47

Post by oreo81 »

badpun wrote: post #26

I've recently read an account of that time by UC Berkeley professor and it was terrifying: young men terrorizing and using violence towards students and professors during classes, setting fire and planting bombs/dynamite on university buildings, openly calling to killing policemen on radio stations. It seemed like their program was pure anarchy and destruction.

Not much different than antifa...

Re: How America Fractured in 1968

#48

Post by jancsika »

I'm seeing a body of growing evidence that the long-term fracture was due to the War in Vietnam:

* it created anti-government groups like the Weathermen

* it spurred activist groups on campuses around the country to stage admin building take-overs, sit-ins, and attempts to disruption to the war draft

* it created a group of Veterans-- like John Kerry-- who came back and described for the general public horrific war crimes committed by U.S. servicepeople

* it created an even larger group of veterans who came back and described a war which-- even if the serviceperson believed in the aims of the U.S. gov't-- was clearly unwinnable

All of those things led to the use of federal resources domestically to try to quell the growing anger and violence against the war.

There is just no other way the national guard would be deployed and end up firing on students without the war.

Without that war, you would have had an older population who thought the younger generation was naive, wrong, lude, and in some cases immoral.

With the war you had one side thinking the other was becoming a growing existential domestic threat to the country.

Sound familiar?

edit: clarification

edit 2: Don't forget that toward the end of his life, MLK Jr. spoke out against the war and ended up splitting his own base. (Oddly the article doesn't mention that.)

Re: How America Fractured in 1968

#49

Post by cafard »

jancsika wrote: post #48

I'm seeing a body of growing evidence that the long-term fracture was due to the War in Vietnam: * it created anti-government groups like the Weathermen * it spurred activist groups on campuses around the country to stage admin building take-overs, sit-ins, and attempts to disruption to the war draft * it created a group of Veterans-- like John Kerry-- who came back and described for the general public horrific war c…

> There is just no other way the national guard would be deployed and end up firing on students without the war.

Oh? The Michigan National Guard did quite a bit of shooting during the Detroit riots of 1967.

Re: How America Fractured in 1968

#50

Post by Mediterraneo10 »

coldtea wrote: post #34
Clubber wrote: post #30

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The US? Because if Europe gets overrun by Soviets, like they got overrun by Germany, guess who's next? Could you imagine Soviet Europe for the last 60 years? My uncle was drafted in Vietnam, except he didn't go to Vietnam, he went to West Germany. He spent his time waiting for the Soviets to roll their tanks over the border.

> The US? Because if Europe gets overrun by Soviets, like they got overrun by Germany, guess who's next? Again, that's not their business. Besides half of Europe wanted to be socialist -- and I'm speaking of the support for such parties in Western Europe. > Could you imagine Soviet Europe for the last 60 years? Many wished exactly that at the time. Again, not the business of a foreign power to meddle.

> Besides half of Europe wanted to be socialist -- and I'm speaking of the support for such parties in Western Europe. [...] Many wished exactly [Soviet Europe] at the time

While there was support for socialism in Western Europe, after 1956 it was not necessarily support for Soviet-style socialism, since the invasion of Hungary appalled many Communists and led them to denounce the USSR. Then, the uproar of 1968, the USSR was mocked by many as a spent force politically and no friend or guide to future actions, so the Situationists or Maoists proposed instead their respective takes on Communism. So, plenty of Western European socialists appreciated the USSR staying far, far away.

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