The 1968 Chicago riots and My Lai

Gerard Jackson
BrookesNews.Com
Monday 3 March 2007

First published in The New Australian 23 March 1998

The 30th anniversary of the My Lai massacre is being selectively used by some ‘journalists’ — of which Cameron Stewart is one — as a symbol to justify their support for the communist conquest of a good slice of South East Asia. I say selectively because the My Lai atrocity was presented in a totally dishonest way.This is the same journalistic mentality that glorified the thugs who organised the Chicago riots. For those of us who are old enough to remember, 1968 was also marked by two groups of students: those in Czechoslovakia who courageously stood up to Soviet tyranny by throwing themselves at its tanks, and those Western students who rioted against democratic governments while screaming mindless left-wing slogans.

Sometime ago Peter Wilson and Cameron Stewart of The Australian harked back to those good old days when the spoiled brats of an affluent West joined the Hanoi war movement. Recalling (or should I say romanticising?) the riots that broke up the 1968 September Democratic National Convention in Chicago, this pair gave, as expected, a thoroughly dishonest account of that particularly violent event.

Wilson tells us that the Chicago police had been ordered to “crack their [rioters] skulls”. Stewart wrote of how protesters were “clubbed by police on the city's streets…” Not to be out done, Jennifer Hewitt of the Melbourne Age has written about how the protesters had been beaten back by “tear gas and batons”. There is no doubt that it was only the rioters’ support for Hanoi's communist dictatorship that still elicits support from these journalists.

The leaders of the phony anti-war movement were never against war in South Asia East. These hypocrites fully supported Northern aggression against the South. They never once uttered a word of condemnation of Ho Chi Min’s Stalinist regime, of the mass murder of peasants he ordered; nor did they protest against the Hue massacre in 1968 when thousands of Southerners were systematically murdered by communist troops. They never called for the North to hold free elections, free all political prisoners, respect human rights, etc. All they ever called for was the destruction of the South. And when it came to the final murderous consequences of the Stalinist victory, there was only arrogant silence. But for many of Hanoi’s victims it became the silence of the grave.

In short, they were liars and hypocrites — and still are. But the likes of Wilson, Stewart and Hewitt will never tell their readers that. Just how bad these journos really are can be gauged from Stewart’s claim that US “soldiers were mauled” during the Tet Offensive. This is just pure left-wing propaganda through and through. Two things are established beyond any doubt:

1. The Tet Offensive was a military disaster for the North; far from being mauled American and South Vietnamese troops destroyed the Viet Cong as an effective fighting force.

2. The North broke the Tet Truce. Stewart is either incompetent or a liar.

Another left-wing lie that has been perpetuated by some ‘journalists’ is that peaceful demonstrators were set on by Chicago police on the orders of Mayor Daley. As is invariably the case with the Left, the truth turns out to be the very opposite of what they state. These so-called protestors went to Chicago for the sole purpose of provoking a riot. It was Tom Hayden who said:

We should have people organised who can fight the police, who are willing to get arrested. No question, there will be a lot of arrests. My thinking is not to leave the initiative to the police....We don’t want to get into the trap of violence versus passive action.