Posted on 11/02/2018 8:01:39 AM PDT by Borges
SATURDAY, IN Pittsburgh, a Sabbath celebration at the Tree of Life synagogue became the site of the largest mass murder of Jews in U.S. history. Eleven worshipers were killed by a racist gunman.
Friday, we learned the identity of the crazed criminal who mailed pipe bombs to a dozen leaders of the Democratic Party, including Barack Obama, Hillary Clinton and Joe Biden.
From restaurants to Capitol corridors, this campaign season we have seen ugly face-offs between leftist radicals and Republican senators.
Are we more divided than we have ever been? Are our politics more poisoned? Are we living in what Charles Dickens called “the worst of times” in America? Is today worse than 1968?
Certainly, the hatred and hostility, the bile and bitterness of our discourse, seem greater now than 50 years ago. But are the times really worse?
The year 1968 began with one of the greatest humiliations in the history of the American Navy. The U.S. spy ship Pueblo was hijacked in international waters and its crew interned by North Korea.
A week later came the Tet Offensive, where every provincial capital in South Vietnam was attacked. A thousand U.S. troops died in February, 10,000 more through 1968.
On March 14, anti-war U.S. Sen. Gene McCarthy captured 42 percent of the vote in New Hampshire against President Johnson.
With LBJ wounded, Robert Kennedy leapt into the race, accusing the President who had enacted civil rights of “dividing the country” and removing himself from “the enduring and generous impulses that are the soul of this nation.” Lyndon Johnson, said Kennedy, is “calling upon the darker impulses of the American spirit.”
Today, RFK is remembered as a “uniter.”
With Gov. George Wallace tearing at Johnson from the right and Kennedy and McCarthy attacking from the left — and Richard Nixon having cleared the Republican field with a landslide in New Hampshire — LBJ announced on March 31 he would not run again.
Four days later, Martin Luther King, leading a strike of garbage workers, was assassinated in Memphis. One hundred U.S. cities exploded in looting, arson and riots. The National Guard was called up everywhere and federal troops rushed to protect Washington, D.C., long corridors of which were gutted, not to be rebuilt for a generation.
Before April’s end, Columbia University had exploded in the worst student uprising of the decade. It was put down only after the NYPD was unleashed on the campus.
Nixon called the Columbia takeover by black and white radicals “the first major skirmish in a revolutionary struggle to seize the universities of this country and transform them into sanctuaries for radicals and vehicles for revolutionary political and social goals.” Which many have since become.
In June, Kennedy, after defeating McCarthy in the crucial primary of California, was mortally wounded in the kitchen of the hotel where he had declared victory. He was buried in Arlington beside JFK.
Nixon, who had swept every primary, was nominated on the first ballot in Miami Beach, and the Democratic Convention was set for late August.
Between the conventions, Soviet Premier Leonid Brezhnev sent his Warsaw Pact armies and hundreds of tanks into Czechoslovakia to crush the peaceful uprising known as “Prague Spring.”
With this bloodiest of military crackdowns since the Hungarian Revolution of 1956, Moscow sent a message to the West: There will be no going back in Europe. Once a Communist state, always a Communist state!
At the Democratic convention in Chicago, the thousands of radicals who had come to raise hell congregated nightly in Grant Park, across from the Hilton where the candidates and this writer were staying.
Baited day and night, the Chicago cops defending the hotel, by late in the week, had had enough. Early one evening, platoons of fresh police arrived and charged into the park clubbing and arresting scores of radicals as the TV cameras rolled. It would be called a “police riot.”
When Sen. Abe Ribicoff took the podium that night, he directed his glare at Mayor Richard J. Daley, accusing him of using “Gestapo tactics in the streets of Chicago.” Daley’s reply from the floor was unprintable.
Through September, Democratic candidate Hubert Humphrey could not speak at a rally without being cursed and shouted down.
Describing the radicals disrupting his every event, Humphrey said, these people “aren’t just hecklers,” but “highly disciplined, well-organized agitators. ... Some are anarchists and some of these groups are dedicated to destroying the Democratic Party and destroying the country.”
After his slim victory, Nixon declared that his government would take as its theme the words on a girl’s placard that he had seen in the Ohio town of Deshler: “Bring us together.”
Nixon tried in his first months, but it was not to be.
According to Bryan Burrough, author of “Days of Rage, America’s Radical Underground, the FBI, and the Forgotten Age of Revolutionary Violence,” “During an eighteen month period in 1971 and 1972, the FBI reported more than 2,500 bombings on U.S. soil, nearly 5 a day.”
No, 2018 is not 1968, at least not yet.
I guess we’ll know if the Left turns violent over Tuesday’s result.
Rather interesting that the label the Synagogue shooter as a “racist”.
Yes, becaause THEY have had 50 years to turn our children against us and to embrace Marxism.
My copies of The Objectivist which includes the years 1968 - 1971 includes many statements about the civil war in America
RELATED (from different source):
Is This Worse Than ‘68?
Townhall.com ^ | October 30, 2018 | Pat Buchanan
Posted on 10/30/2018, 8:03:24 PM by Kaslin
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http://www.freerepublic.com/focus/f-news/3701376/posts
Happy Birthday Pat! After the staggering losses the RATs will suffer next week, expect bombings, assaults and verbal harassment to increase.
The press is worse now..there were riots in 1968..
“THEY have had 50 years to turn our children against us and to embrace Marxism.”
YES! So true.
Our pubic schools have been anti-God, anti-America, anti-capitalist, pro-homo, pro-abortion, pro-socialist indoctrination centers since then.
Same for our MSM and more recently social media.
There are many aimless, angry young men (and now angry young women) looking for a fight.
Around that time the ambush attacks on police began too. Black Panthers; Black liberation Army and a few others claimed credit.
A huge loss for the Left was the fall of the USSR in 1991. Their last major hurrah were the Gulf War protests earlier that year.
Their funding now comes from Soros rather than the Soviets, but there isn’t a single socialist society they can point to as superior to ours, that doesn’t have glaring faults of its own.
No Vietnam War and world communist movement this time, either. The only dangerous world movement now is Islam.
Are we in worse times than 1968?
It’s like late Sept.1987 .......
Proud to have voted for Pat over the globalist GHW Bush in the primary.
Yes, me too, and I am sorry that I did not vote for him against GWB in 2000 too.
Foolishness
Pat was never more than a wannabe
Much worse. The details aren’t the best measure.
In 1968, liberals and conservatives agreed on most principles (still true today but very few liberals are involved/influential in politics or media now). No matter how much we disagreed on application of those principles, party leaders in 1968 could, if/when they wanted, go back to principles and and move forward. And they could explain things to the governed and get our consent. And the media would report in good faith on the good faith negotiations/compromises/way-forward.
We have no agreed on principles today. R & D leaders can’t find a way forward on anything because there’s no common starting point (principles, constitution, laws, etc). If leaders were to come to agreement on principles, they wouldn’t be able to get consent from a large percentage of the country. Much of the media would attack anything that doesn’t involve a complete change in principles.
Unlike liberals, progressives, BLM, ANTIFA, and other leftist groups do not accept the principles our country was founded on. They’ve also redefined language to a point we can’t even understand each other to discuss a way to agree on a starting point for fixing things. And they’ve accepted that incivility and violence are acceptable in order to move their ideas forward. Some nuts on the right also accept violence but conservative leaders are not advocating violence and large groups of conservatives are not turning into violent mobs the way left groups do.
The principle of “consent of the governed” is one example we’ve lost. Neither party cares about that principle. And, just as bad, a large percentage of the population will not consent to the elected government simply because it was the wrong party, not because of any specific actions or policies.
No matter how bad 1968 was, there was a way forward. We can’t even talk, much less agree to starting principles and move forward on disagreements. And violence is accepted as a principle by the left.
The Left today isn’t just opposed to whatever national founding principles we have shared. They are anti-Western. Even supposedly sacrosanct touchstones like Renaissance humanism, the Enlightenment, the scientific method etc. are seen as sexist and gendered movements based on colonial oppression. There is video of a press conference at some university where a woman claimed Newton’s ideas about gravitation could not be trusted because he had never been to Africa.
Yes, pretty good analysis. in 1968 (I was graduating from high school) the times were way more tumultuous than they are now.
The times are not worse but the hate is worse and the incivility is far worse.
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