Posted on 10/30/2018 5:03:24 PM PDT by Kaslin
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 worshippers 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?
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 Senator 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 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.
In a word, “no”.
well, much of the extreme left loves to use violence and intimidation... to scare the rest of us
... to force their way into power
... to keep power
any study of the National Socialist party in the 1930’s bears this out
also many communist dictatorships have been pushed into power this way
Not even close.
I truly enjoy Pat Buchanan‘s take on things. I was but a boy, only 10 years old in 1968. But I remember the events that occurred that year. We were living in Washington DC, at least in the suburbs, in 68. I still remember why we had to be afraid of going into DC.
I still remember my older brother coming home and announcing “They shot Martin Luther King! They shot Martin Luther King!”
And now? Despite the organized chaos and violence brought to us by leftists, Democrats, and the media I find that life in the US is better than it was 50 years ago.
I remember RFK shot.
I disagree in a sense. That was a pretty good list for 1968, but we are in different times now. So much of what happened in 1968 was in great part due to opposition to the Vietnam War.
What we have here is total opposition to the election of Trump and the ensuing rise of violence against Republicans, Conservatives and anyone else the Left hates.
Make no mistake the Left and the MSM are colluding to push the meme of Hate and Violence.
What we are seeing right now is the beginning, the election cycle of 2020 is where we will see all the Leftist elements in full force and there will be violence, a lot of it.
I fully believe that if the Left and the Democrats lose next Tuesday, as I think they will, the extreme elements will see violence as the only alternative to opposing Trump, Republicans, Conservatives, Independents, and anyone else that doesn’t support the Progressive Agenda.
The next two years may be as terrible and messy as anything we have seen since 1968, a throw back to the unstable times as observed in Western Europe in the 1960’s a 70’s.
We will all have to vigilant.
“I knew 1968; and 2018, you are no 1968.”
I was in my late 20s,30s during the sixties——and remember everything.
It all turned me into a conservative.
.
What we have here is total opposition to the election of Trump and the ensuing rise of violence against Republicans, Conservatives and anyone else the Left hates.
For that very reason, it's a smaller group.
In 1968 students were up in arms about the possibility that they'd be sent to Vietnam.
You don't get that many people getting upset about more purely political questions.
Yes, I know that not all college students were radicalized back then, but still, those who were were, proportionately, a larger part of the population than today's leftists.
The next two years may be as terrible and messy as anything we have seen since 1968, a throw back to the unstable times as observed in Western Europe in the 1960’s a 70’s.
It could be like America back then, but not Europe. What you see on the left now is mostly negative - they hate Trump. In that regard, it's like American leftists hated Johnson or Nixon. European radicals in the '70s and '80s thought that they were going to remake the world through violent action. Left-wing radicals were more of a problem there than they were here. While you do hear more about socialism now than in the recent past, I don't think you have that kind of strong faith in it that there once was.
We are going to have to wait and see how this goes. The real problem as I see it is the MSM, if they are really going to go full tilt boogie and promote violence as a credible reason to oppose Trump, Republicans, and Conservatives.
The real Hate is coming from the Left and the MSM. If I had to blame someone for the Jewish killings I would have to start with them. They have pushed a 90% Negative atmosphere on Trump since his election as if we are in the last days of the Weimar Republic.
While I was driving home from work today, I had a rather sad, but unfortunately true line of thought.
Given the utter hatred out there concerning ideology, political belief, and the like, the opportunities for violence seems to be escalating to levels I’ve never seen before. One of these days, someone’s bound to have it up to ‘here’ with someone else’s views on whatever, and they’re gonna act out. I dare say, someone’s going to get killed.
Piss off the wrong person....
Worse in the sense that the republic has shifted much further to the left in the last 50 years. As for the level of current disruption...compared to then...NO.
MAGA
The murders,threats, and other criminal activities in '68, were against the police, armed guards, and just regular folks. So was about 99% of the IN YOUR FACE attacks on people.
Yes, MLK was murdered, as was RFK.
OTOH...today, GOP office holders, those in this administration, the president and ALL of his family members, and even someone just put up to be a Justice have been harassed, confronted, smeared,condemned, sent Ricin through the mails, hounded 24/7 in every kind of media, and worse.
It's difficult to say just WHICH year is "worse"; though '18 isn't over yet.
One thing to keep in mind, AMERICA WAS STILL AMERICA in '68, as that was the year that the damned STINKING COMMIES began their slow destruction of this nation's traditions, culture, manners, morals, education system, and the accepted meaning of many simple English words.
The radicals of 1968 are now the establishment and they know better than to allow the type of dissent they participated in 50 years ago. They learned their lesson well and are fascists that will kill those that partake in that type of protest and lawlessness all those decades ago.
I can see why this was a question. In 1968, many institutions that were held in reverence failed. Government forcing youths to fight a war with no existential threats, political and racial assassinations, loss of religion.
Today, we are seeing many institutions held in high regard fail. Examples: FBI, news media, NFL, ESPN, Facebook, medicine corrupted by pharmaceutical influence, pedaphile priests, biased scientists, Supreme Court justice vetting, fake Nobel prizes, ineffective UN, mass shootings twice per month.
Luckily we’re not as violent as 1968.
“You don’t need a weatherman to know which wsy the wind is blowing” Bob Dylan
bump
You obviously STILL don’t understand the Nam War; sadly, nor what ‘68 was REALLY about.
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