From Kent State to Pro-Palestinian Protest |
John Paul Filo, who was a journalism student at Kent State University at the time – © 1970 Valley News-Dispatch – Fair Use
When I interviewed Stuart Allen a few years after his forensic audio investigation (Stuart Allen was both a forensic audio and video engineer.) of the Kent State May 4, 1970 massacre’s Strubbe tape, he said something both significant and prescient that has stayed with me for over a decade. Stuart Allen said that he wanted his investigation and conclusions to get the history right about the Ohio National Guard’s massacre that day. The protest at Kent State followed four days of protest in response to Richard Nixon’s expansion of the Vietnam War into Cambodia, purportedly to stop the flow of weapons from North Vietnam into South Vietnam. Nixon had campaigned on a peace platform in 1968, and he said he had a “secret” plan for peace. He had defeated a fractured Democratic Party torn apart by the war and the hapless candidacy of Lyndon Johnson’s vice president, Hubert Humphrey. The Vietnam War also included a massive bombing campaign in Laos, part of the anticommunist campaign of the US and a few of its allies. People continue to die in Southeast Asia today from unexploded ordnance from the Vietnam War era and recent cuts in aid programs by the US have stymied, to some degree, those programs. It has been almost 55 years since the Kent State massacre.
The Strubbe tape is a recording by a student in a nearby dormitory of some of the events of May 4, 1970 at Kent State University and in particular captures what seems to be a direct order for the National Guard troops to fire on unarmed students below and on Blanket Hill on the campus that is easily recognizable for its pagoda structure. A........