10 ms·

How America Fractured in 1968

125 points by aaronbrethorst 9y ago

cryptozeus 9y ago
As side note: gif with nytimes article headlines are totally useless on phone, not readable at all
- figgis 9y ago
  What gif? I only found a couple and they were at the bottom of the page in the related article stuff.
  - allenz 9y ago
    There are graphics simulating push notifications of 1968 news every few paragraphs, captioned "Photo: Associated Press". They animate only once, so try reloading? I agree that it animates a tad too quickly, and that the animation really isn't needed.
    - godot 9y ago
      I think figgis may be responding in a sarcastic way and trying to point out that those are not animated gifs, but are actual HTML page elements, animated with CSS. If you view on desktop and use a browser DOM inspector (like Chrome Dev Tools) you can verify that this is the case. To be honest I'm quite impressed that NYTimes went this length to create these technical widgets. Do they have software engineers or web developers working in conjunction with journalists on articles like these? Seems like a relatively high cost of production. Although I'm not a fan, I have to say in this case it does do its job quite well, which is to demonstrate how having twitter news would feel like back in the 1968s~ time.
      - ambrosite 9y ago
        >> To be honest I'm quite impressed that NYTimes went this length to create these technical widgets ... Seems like a relatively high cost of production. That's because the article is really just an advertisement for TimesMachine, a subscription newspaper archive. I didn't notice it at first, either.
      - juliendorra 9y ago
        Yes, they have newsroom developers and newsroom web designers. That’s how they managed to create well integrated pieces like the 2013 Oscar trailers article [1] or the many d3js interactive dataviz. [1] http://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2013/02/19/movies/awardsseason/oscar-trailers.html http://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2013/02/19/movies/awardss...
      - figgis 9y ago
        > I think figgis may be responding in a sarcastic way Was not intended, just curious. But that would be why I couldn't find it.
    - lostlogin 9y ago
      The speed is part of the effect - big news happening fast and before you have had time to digest the previous event. At least, that was my take.
- rebuilder 9y ago
  Not just that, but for me they also cause the actual article text to jump around, making reading the article quite frustrating.
- gumby 9y ago
  You had to say “a side note” because it’s technically not the semantics of the page, but thanks for making the comment. We need to call out functionally crappy design, especially when it interferes with good content
- ambrosite 9y ago
  Ironically those graphics are the whole point of the article. It is supposed to simulate what the year 1968 might have looked like if there had been a Twitter feed back then. There is very little original content in the article text itself. Edit: On further inspection, I am coming to the conclusion that the article is really a thinly veiled advertisement for TimesMachine, a subscription newspaper archive. https://timesmachine.nytimes.com https://timesmachine.nytimes.com
- dominotw 9y ago
  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?
deleted 9y ago
[deleted]
balance_factor 9y ago
> 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 Saigon, the "North Vietnamese forces"? It was a local NLF C-10 Sapper batallion. The North Vietnamese attack had its main thrust toward the Vietnamese border, the ARVN's I Corps Tactical Zone. Further south it mostly aided the NLF (and local populace) uprising. The Tet Offensive was costly to the NLF - after years of fighting the French, the Americans, and their Vietnamese collaborators, the NLF was somewhat worn down, and the Tet Offensive was kind of its last hurrah. From 1968 on, the resistance in southern Vietnam became more dependent on North Vietnamese aid. Insofar as "North" and "South" Vietnam, these themselves are created entities. In 1940, Vietnam was under the control of the Vichy French, who were somewhat hostile to the US. Then it fell to Japanese control. In March 1945, the Vichy French were completely ousted. The OSS was arming and supporting Ho Chi Minh and the Viet Minh, people like Archimedes Patti. At the end of 1945, the French wanted to take colonial control of Vietnam again (Ho Chi Minh had declared independence with a very pro-US speech and policy, seemingly approved by local American government officials). The French did not have the manpower to take over Vietnam though and asked the English for help, as French/English interests were not 100% US-aligned (see Suez crisis). The English did not have the manpower either so they sent Nepali Gurkhas to take back Vietnam. Many events took place in the next weeks and months, I can't go into it all here, including the British rearming the Japanese to fight against the Vietnamese. So years of guerilla warfare ensue between the Vietnamese and French colonialists, ending in the 1954 Geneva conference. There, a promise for elections is made. Also pledged is reunification. The US is not a party to the conference. Eisenhower says in his memoirs he could not allow elections as Ho Chi Minh would have won. So the US starts a policy against the promised elections and reunification. Like the Japanese, French and English, the US at some point invades southern Vietnam. It begins a war against the mostly southern NLF resistance, which includes not just communists but Buddhist monks, Vietnamese nationalists etc., all of these comprise the NLF. Of course, on the long war from 1954 to 1975, including things like the Phoenix Program where the CIA went around south Vietnam murdering school teachers, newspaper columnists and anyone seen as being against US forces being in Vietnam. By 1972 the US began pulling out, and was ousted in 1975. By then the southern resistance forces had been decimated (along with millions killed in the south) and the "northern" forces had become more prominent.
interfixus 9y ago
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 childhood, I don't recall one single specific episode of it, let alone any idea what the whole sorry thing was about.
- ethbro 9y ago
  If you're curious in retrospect, I found this to be the best book I've read about the entire Vietnam period. (along with historical context before and after) https://www.amazon.com/Vietnam-History-Stanley-Karnow/dp/0140265473 https://www.amazon.com/Vietnam-History-Stanley-Karnow/dp/014... Granted, there's a lot we know now that wasn't known at the time (e.g. MACV-SOG's pre-Tonkin activities and concealment of same from Congress, or the serious consideration of tactical nuclear weapons during the Battle of Khe Sanh), but if you're into history it's a good read.
- paulddraper 9y ago
  > 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.
IncRnd 9y ago
If the NYTimes' tweets had the same level of quality as their pretend tweets from the past, I'd follow them.
- Moto7451 9y ago
  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.
  - hueving 9y ago
    Do you have a sample of what the current ones contain?
    - 0d311 9y ago
      “No one is bombing Hawaii”
      - hueving 9y ago
        Not sure I need to spend $15/mo to know that. :)
badpun 9y ago
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.
- ethbro 9y ago
  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 https://archive.org/details/Columbia1969_2 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 structures attempted to avoid change. Personally? I think it's inspirational for people to get off their ass and try to effect change they believe in. Action, not anger.
  - SocialEngin33r 9y ago
    Permanent revolution! Great way to build a stable society.
  - deleted 9y ago
    [deleted]
- musage 9y ago
  Why not link that account? Mentioned in another comment: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Phoenix_Program https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Phoenix_Program > Military intelligence officer K. Barton Osborne reports that he witnessed the following use of torture: > > The use of the insertion of the 6-inch dowel into the canal of one of my detainee's ears, and the tapping through the brain until dead. The starvation to death (in a cage), of a Vietnamese woman who was suspected of being part of the local political education cadre in one of the local villages...The use of electronic gear such as sealed telephones attached to...both the women's vaginas and men's testicles [to] shock them into submission Yes, I bet a some anti-social people used the protest movement to engage in their own oppression ("killing pigs" and "killing commie charlies" is the same thing in a way), but using them as a fig leaf is blatantly profiting of their deeds to hide yet other vile deeds, and to smear the best parts of a generation that at least tried. That professor may never know even just one first-hand account of a person murdered as they looked away, and in turn may never know the life they actually lived. People don't like to hear that, but sometimes, who you think you are is just a shiny consolation price for being distracted from what you're actually serving. People can fool themselves and beyond a threshold, they're usually too weak to ever stop fooling themselves. They fell down the gravity well, let them serve as a warning. See them, see the well, and judge their words accordingly.
jancsika 9y ago
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.)
- cafard 9y ago
  > 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.
  - Feniks 9y ago
    Looters versus unarmed peaceful protest in broad daylight? And I think it was even common sense back then that breaking curfew was dangerous.
- supreme_sublime 9y ago
  > 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 Was it really "unwinnable"? I watched "Vietnam in HD" which is a fantastic series if you're into that kind of thing. It is a difficult watch at times. What I gathered from that is most people seemed to blame the "seek and destroy" tactic. This involved prioritizing destroying enemy encampments, but not actually taking territory. There didn't seem to be line advancements or attempts to create new bases further into enemy territory. I'm not a military strategist, and I have no idea the kinds of logistics required for it. I do know that it seemed to kill morale for soldiers to go take a hill, and then abandon it for the enemy to go back and take once again. Essentially taking the same ground over and over again. It seems like a lesson in futility.
dpflan 9y ago
This is related in time and U.S. Political scene: the documentary "Best of Enemies" which centers around ABC's coverage of the U.S. Presidential party conventions hosted by William F. Buckley and Gore Vidal. It also analyzes their histories and it analyzes the rise of identity politics in the U.S. And this identity politics / these debates perhaps showcase the ideological fracturing of the U.S. > http://www.magpictures.com/bestofenemies/ http://www.magpictures.com/bestofenemies/
losteverything 9y ago
It says radio tv and papers were it, then. Having lived pre internet news days i am a minority that can truly describe how it was a different world back then. Our world is so much better because tv radio and newspapers matter so much less. We have to think for ourselves and decide which topics are newsworthy:not have others coax and decide what is important. Long live the internet
- staplers 9y ago
  We have to think for ourselves and decide which topics are newsworthy:not have others coax and decide what is important. Well, most of the time people choose the convenient route of confirmation bias. The internet is certainly not providing any solutions to that problem currently..
- jonjacky 9y ago
  I graduated from high school in 1968 and I find that media and its contents including the internet are more centralized and homogeneous now than they were then. The internet did not not just add to the mainstream media, it replaced some of its most interesting parts and replaced much the underground media that existed alongside it. In those days it was not just Time/Life/Newsweek/ABC/NBC/CBS, you could also find on the newstand left- and dissident journals like Ramparts and Evergreen Review, and their right wing counterparts. And, some of the contents of the mainstream media itself were higher quality and more varied. Compare a current issue of Esquire or Rolling Stone - now mostly entertainment industry promotion and fluff - with a 1968 issue, where they had very long articles by authors like Hunter Thompson, Tom Wolfe, Joan Didion, Oriana Fallaci, and many more. Beyond that there was a thriving world of underground papers and newsletters with contents ranging from sharp and pertinent to crackpot, with odd and sometimes wonderful DIY production and design. Not just print media - the FM radio station I listened to was literaly underground, their studio was in a church basement. People organized huge demostrations using these DIY media. Yes, it is probably easier now for a random person to get their opinions in front of a lot of eyes, but most of these carry little information, they mostly just repeat what the writer has seen/read elsewhere - and it appears on the same homogeneous platform with everything else. It takes a bit more energy and ingenuity to express your opinions or self-expression in a self-published mimeographed or xeroxed newsletter, but it contributes more variety and might even make a bigger impression.
gdubs 9y ago
In a college architecture course we were asked to write a paper on 1968, with little other guidance. I remember digging in and being surprised at how pivotal that year was. In 2016 I found myself thinking about that paper, feeling like we might be living through a year that future professors would ask their students to write about.
Feniks 9y ago
The US has always been fractured, the country wasn't even created by choice as much as necessity. The whole Electoral College system is in place to keep it politically unified. There comes a point were States like New York and California are better off alone. As it stands today large parts of the US are underrepresented. A suburb in Miami is more important for the presidential election than all the votes in NYC.
cossatot 9y ago
I must be alone in thinking that times are pretty good and the US is not fracturing, and today is nothing like the late 1960s or 70s. Crime/violence: Both violent and property crime rates are way down [1]. My home region of the Ozarks (SW Missouri, NW Arkansas, NE Oklahoma) is much safer than when I was in jr. high and high school (1995-2001) when there was a huge amount of rural violence associated mostly with the meth trade. I had friends and neighbors killed both purposefully and incidentally with this, none of whom were users or involved in the trade in any way--just children or landlords or neighbors or whatever. We used to get out of school because the cops would be raiding meth labs within shooting distance of the school. This has largely subsided. There is definitely violence associated with the opioid crisis, but the deaths have been overdoses and suicides at least among the people I know. War: There are definitely some nasty and protracted conflicts abroad, but, unlike in 1968, the US is not mired in them and losing thousands of soldiers a year--Wikipedia gives 4,491 deaths for US soldiers for the entire Iraq war, for example. Not that it wasn't a horrible and unnecessary loss, and several orders of magnitude worse for Iraqis than the US, but this was also the case for Vietnam (and Cambodia, Laos, etc). While there continues to be strife in the Middle East and a few other places, and I worry about Africa being a major site of east vs. west proxy war in the coming decades, globally the situation seems more peaceful and democratic than in the Cold War or the colonial era. Societal issues in the US: There is a lot of sound and fury, but protests are largely peaceful. The protests involved with Ferguson, Charlottesville, etc. were much more mild than in the 1960s, or the race riots of Tulsa (1921, 39-300 deaths, 10,000+ people left homeless [2]), LA (1992, 63 deaths [3]), and so forth. Gay rights were granted largely peacefully as well--lots of progress here, though it wasn't frictionless. Similarly, the recent wave of defenestrations of powerful men due to sexual abuse is to me a net positive even if there are inevitable witch hunts associated. Domestic terrorism seems to be less of a concern. I don't know about rates but from what I understand there were a lot of bombings from both far left and far right sources in the 1960s and 1970s. We haven't had any high-profile political assassinations in a while. The rise in single-parent households is a concern. I have no idea how much this reduces the incidence of domestic violence as moms don't live with abusive dads. Maybe a little? Homelessness is also a major concern but is slightly decreasing over the past decade, not even accounting for population growth [4]. I have no idea how it compares to the 1960s or so. I think a lot of mentally ill people were institutionalized then, which isn't the case now AFAIK. The economy: Parts of the economy are good (stocks, general employment levels), and though there are still problems with stagnant wages for many, debt levels (particularly student loans), and housing prices in many places are terrifying (I'm living in SV on a pretty meager nonprofit salary, because my wife has a great job that pays OK). But it's a lot better than it was a decade ago, or in the 70s. There are still huge issues with medical care that need to be resolved, but at least lots of people are employed as paper pushers... Inequality is a major concern, I concede. And I worry about an upcoming stock market crash. I think it's possible that trade work will pay better and better, and as more tradespeople rejoin the middle class communities (neighborhoods, school districts etc.) some of the inequalities of social status between the higher-income blue-collar work and lower-income white-collar work will dissipate. The environment: Way better than in the mid-20th century. We have a lot more protected lands than in the 1960s, and air and water quality are much improved (thanks, Nixon!). From Wikipedia: "In the United States between 1970 and 2006, citizens enjoyed the following reductions in annual pollution emissions: - carbon monoxide emissions fell from 197 million tons to 89 million tons - nitrogen oxide emissions fell from 27 million tons to 19 million tons - sulfur dioxide emissions fell from 31 million tons to 15 million tons - particulate emissions fell by 80% - lead emissions fell by more than 98%" Without looking stuff up, I think that the broad population shifts from rural and semi-rural to urban and suburban since the 1950s are decreasing the pressure on the environment; national forests in most places are recovering from the ~1850s-1950s logging period. Climate change is bad, forest fires are bad, the decrease in insect populations are probably quite bad and may indicate a very rotten ecological foundation. However, the effects of climate change aren't directly tearing our country apart at present; the debate over it (and the underlying struggle for power and authority between science and government vs. church and business) is or did contribute. Once agriculture begins to fail in the Great Plains and CA central valley, it'll get real. --- Honestly, I don't get it. Sometimes I think things have been decent for long enough that we've forgotten what it was like when things were really bad--the Civil War, WWI, the Great Depression, WWII, Vietnam, etc. I also think that a lot more of the seeming chaos is that more voices are included than previously, particularly from marginalized communities. This aren't perfect, but are they awful? Or are we just bored and riled up about small matters such as the rhetoric of our politicians, or their seeming inability to get stuff done? [1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Crime_in_the_United_States https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Crime_in_the_United_States [2]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tulsa_race_riot https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tulsa_race_riot [3]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/1992_Los_Angeles_riots https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/1992_Los_Angeles_riots [4]: https://journalistsresource.org/studies/government/health-care/homelessness-u-s-trends-demographics https://journalistsresource.org/studies/government/health-ca...

cryptozeus 9y ago

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

figgis 9y ago
What gif? I only found a couple and they were at the bottom of the page in the related article stuff.
- allenz 9y ago
  There are graphics simulating push notifications of 1968 news every few paragraphs, captioned "Photo: Associated Press". They animate only once, so try reloading? I agree that it animates a tad too quickly, and that the animation really isn't needed.
  - godot 9y ago
    I think figgis may be responding in a sarcastic way and trying to point out that those are not animated gifs, but are actual HTML page elements, animated with CSS. If you view on desktop and use a browser DOM inspector (like Chrome Dev Tools) you can verify that this is the case. To be honest I'm quite impressed that NYTimes went this length to create these technical widgets. Do they have software engineers or web developers working in conjunction with journalists on articles like these? Seems like a relatively high cost of production. Although I'm not a fan, I have to say in this case it does do its job quite well, which is to demonstrate how having twitter news would feel like back in the 1968s~ time.
    - ambrosite 9y ago
      >> To be honest I'm quite impressed that NYTimes went this length to create these technical widgets ... Seems like a relatively high cost of production. That's because the article is really just an advertisement for TimesMachine, a subscription newspaper archive. I didn't notice it at first, either.
    - juliendorra 9y ago
      Yes, they have newsroom developers and newsroom web designers. That’s how they managed to create well integrated pieces like the 2013 Oscar trailers article [1] or the many d3js interactive dataviz. [1] http://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2013/02/19/movies/awardsseason/oscar-trailers.html http://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2013/02/19/movies/awardss...
    - figgis 9y ago
      > I think figgis may be responding in a sarcastic way Was not intended, just curious. But that would be why I couldn't find it.
  - lostlogin 9y ago
    The speed is part of the effect - big news happening fast and before you have had time to digest the previous event. At least, that was my take.
rebuilder 9y ago
Not just that, but for me they also cause the actual article text to jump around, making reading the article quite frustrating.
gumby 9y ago
You had to say “a side note” because it’s technically not the semantics of the page, but thanks for making the comment. We need to call out functionally crappy design, especially when it interferes with good content
ambrosite 9y ago
Ironically those graphics are the whole point of the article. It is supposed to simulate what the year 1968 might have looked like if there had been a Twitter feed back then. There is very little original content in the article text itself. Edit: On further inspection, I am coming to the conclusion that the article is really a thinly veiled advertisement for TimesMachine, a subscription newspaper archive. https://timesmachine.nytimes.com https://timesmachine.nytimes.com
dominotw 9y ago
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?

deleted 9y ago

[deleted]

balance_factor 9y ago

> 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 Saigon, the "North Vietnamese forces"? It was a local NLF C-10 Sapper batallion. The North Vietnamese attack had its main thrust toward the Vietnamese border, the ARVN's I Corps Tactical Zone. Further south it mostly aided the NLF (and local populace) uprising. The Tet Offensive was costly to the NLF - after years of fighting the French, the Americans, and their Vietnamese collaborators, the NLF was somewhat worn down, and the Tet Offensive was kind of its last hurrah. From 1968 on, the resistance in southern Vietnam became more dependent on North Vietnamese aid. Insofar as "North" and "South" Vietnam, these themselves are created entities. In 1940, Vietnam was under the control of the Vichy French, who were somewhat hostile to the US. Then it fell to Japanese control. In March 1945, the Vichy French were completely ousted. The OSS was arming and supporting Ho Chi Minh and the Viet Minh, people like Archimedes Patti. At the end of 1945, the French wanted to take colonial control of Vietnam again (Ho Chi Minh had declared independence with a very pro-US speech and policy, seemingly approved by local American government officials). The French did not have the manpower to take over Vietnam though and asked the English for help, as French/English interests were not 100% US-aligned (see Suez crisis). The English did not have the manpower either so they sent Nepali Gurkhas to take back Vietnam. Many events took place in the next weeks and months, I can't go into it all here, including the British rearming the Japanese to fight against the Vietnamese. So years of guerilla warfare ensue between the Vietnamese and French colonialists, ending in the 1954 Geneva conference. There, a promise for elections is made. Also pledged is reunification. The US is not a party to the conference. Eisenhower says in his memoirs he could not allow elections as Ho Chi Minh would have won. So the US starts a policy against the promised elections and reunification. Like the Japanese, French and English, the US at some point invades southern Vietnam. It begins a war against the mostly southern NLF resistance, which includes not just communists but Buddhist monks, Vietnamese nationalists etc., all of these comprise the NLF. Of course, on the long war from 1954 to 1975, including things like the Phoenix Program where the CIA went around south Vietnam murdering school teachers, newspaper columnists and anyone seen as being against US forces being in Vietnam. By 1972 the US began pulling out, and was ousted in 1975. By then the southern resistance forces had been decimated (along with millions killed in the south) and the "northern" forces had become more prominent.

interfixus 9y ago

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 childhood, I don't recall one single specific episode of it, let alone any idea what the whole sorry thing was about.

ethbro 9y ago
If you're curious in retrospect, I found this to be the best book I've read about the entire Vietnam period. (along with historical context before and after) https://www.amazon.com/Vietnam-History-Stanley-Karnow/dp/0140265473 https://www.amazon.com/Vietnam-History-Stanley-Karnow/dp/014... Granted, there's a lot we know now that wasn't known at the time (e.g. MACV-SOG's pre-Tonkin activities and concealment of same from Congress, or the serious consideration of tactical nuclear weapons during the Battle of Khe Sanh), but if you're into history it's a good read.
paulddraper 9y ago
> 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.

IncRnd 9y ago

If the NYTimes' tweets had the same level of quality as their pretend tweets from the past, I'd follow them.

Moto7451 9y ago
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.
- hueving 9y ago
  Do you have a sample of what the current ones contain?
  - 0d311 9y ago
    “No one is bombing Hawaii”
    - hueving 9y ago
      Not sure I need to spend $15/mo to know that. :)

badpun 9y ago

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.

ethbro 9y ago
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 https://archive.org/details/Columbia1969_2 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 structures attempted to avoid change. Personally? I think it's inspirational for people to get off their ass and try to effect change they believe in. Action, not anger.
- SocialEngin33r 9y ago
  Permanent revolution! Great way to build a stable society.
- deleted 9y ago
  [deleted]
musage 9y ago
Why not link that account? Mentioned in another comment: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Phoenix_Program https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Phoenix_Program > Military intelligence officer K. Barton Osborne reports that he witnessed the following use of torture: > > The use of the insertion of the 6-inch dowel into the canal of one of my detainee's ears, and the tapping through the brain until dead. The starvation to death (in a cage), of a Vietnamese woman who was suspected of being part of the local political education cadre in one of the local villages...The use of electronic gear such as sealed telephones attached to...both the women's vaginas and men's testicles [to] shock them into submission Yes, I bet a some anti-social people used the protest movement to engage in their own oppression ("killing pigs" and "killing commie charlies" is the same thing in a way), but using them as a fig leaf is blatantly profiting of their deeds to hide yet other vile deeds, and to smear the best parts of a generation that at least tried. That professor may never know even just one first-hand account of a person murdered as they looked away, and in turn may never know the life they actually lived. People don't like to hear that, but sometimes, who you think you are is just a shiny consolation price for being distracted from what you're actually serving. People can fool themselves and beyond a threshold, they're usually too weak to ever stop fooling themselves. They fell down the gravity well, let them serve as a warning. See them, see the well, and judge their words accordingly.

jancsika 9y ago

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.)

cafard 9y ago
> 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.
- Feniks 9y ago
  Looters versus unarmed peaceful protest in broad daylight? And I think it was even common sense back then that breaking curfew was dangerous.
supreme_sublime 9y ago
> 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 Was it really "unwinnable"? I watched "Vietnam in HD" which is a fantastic series if you're into that kind of thing. It is a difficult watch at times. What I gathered from that is most people seemed to blame the "seek and destroy" tactic. This involved prioritizing destroying enemy encampments, but not actually taking territory. There didn't seem to be line advancements or attempts to create new bases further into enemy territory. I'm not a military strategist, and I have no idea the kinds of logistics required for it. I do know that it seemed to kill morale for soldiers to go take a hill, and then abandon it for the enemy to go back and take once again. Essentially taking the same ground over and over again. It seems like a lesson in futility.

dpflan 9y ago

This is related in time and U.S. Political scene: the documentary "Best of Enemies" which centers around ABC's coverage of the U.S. Presidential party conventions hosted by William F. Buckley and Gore Vidal. It also analyzes their histories and it analyzes the rise of identity politics in the U.S. And this identity politics / these debates perhaps showcase the ideological fracturing of the U.S. > http://www.magpictures.com/bestofenemies/ http://www.magpictures.com/bestofenemies/

losteverything 9y ago

It says radio tv and papers were it, then. Having lived pre internet news days i am a minority that can truly describe how it was a different world back then. Our world is so much better because tv radio and newspapers matter so much less. We have to think for ourselves and decide which topics are newsworthy:not have others coax and decide what is important. Long live the internet

staplers 9y ago
We have to think for ourselves and decide which topics are newsworthy:not have others coax and decide what is important. Well, most of the time people choose the convenient route of confirmation bias. The internet is certainly not providing any solutions to that problem currently..
jonjacky 9y ago
I graduated from high school in 1968 and I find that media and its contents including the internet are more centralized and homogeneous now than they were then. The internet did not not just add to the mainstream media, it replaced some of its most interesting parts and replaced much the underground media that existed alongside it. In those days it was not just Time/Life/Newsweek/ABC/NBC/CBS, you could also find on the newstand left- and dissident journals like Ramparts and Evergreen Review, and their right wing counterparts. And, some of the contents of the mainstream media itself were higher quality and more varied. Compare a current issue of Esquire or Rolling Stone - now mostly entertainment industry promotion and fluff - with a 1968 issue, where they had very long articles by authors like Hunter Thompson, Tom Wolfe, Joan Didion, Oriana Fallaci, and many more. Beyond that there was a thriving world of underground papers and newsletters with contents ranging from sharp and pertinent to crackpot, with odd and sometimes wonderful DIY production and design. Not just print media - the FM radio station I listened to was literaly underground, their studio was in a church basement. People organized huge demostrations using these DIY media. Yes, it is probably easier now for a random person to get their opinions in front of a lot of eyes, but most of these carry little information, they mostly just repeat what the writer has seen/read elsewhere - and it appears on the same homogeneous platform with everything else. It takes a bit more energy and ingenuity to express your opinions or self-expression in a self-published mimeographed or xeroxed newsletter, but it contributes more variety and might even make a bigger impression.

gdubs 9y ago

In a college architecture course we were asked to write a paper on 1968, with little other guidance. I remember digging in and being surprised at how pivotal that year was. In 2016 I found myself thinking about that paper, feeling like we might be living through a year that future professors would ask their students to write about.

Feniks 9y ago

The US has always been fractured, the country wasn't even created by choice as much as necessity. The whole Electoral College system is in place to keep it politically unified. There comes a point were States like New York and California are better off alone. As it stands today large parts of the US are underrepresented. A suburb in Miami is more important for the presidential election than all the votes in NYC.

cossatot 9y ago

I must be alone in thinking that times are pretty good and the US is not fracturing, and today is nothing like the late 1960s or 70s. Crime/violence: Both violent and property crime rates are way down [1]. My home region of the Ozarks (SW Missouri, NW Arkansas, NE Oklahoma) is much safer than when I was in jr. high and high school (1995-2001) when there was a huge amount of rural violence associated mostly with the meth trade. I had friends and neighbors killed both purposefully and incidentally with this, none of whom were users or involved in the trade in any way--just children or landlords or neighbors or whatever. We used to get out of school because the cops would be raiding meth labs within shooting distance of the school. This has largely subsided. There is definitely violence associated with the opioid crisis, but the deaths have been overdoses and suicides at least among the people I know. War: There are definitely some nasty and protracted conflicts abroad, but, unlike in 1968, the US is not mired in them and losing thousands of soldiers a year--Wikipedia gives 4,491 deaths for US soldiers for the entire Iraq war, for example. Not that it wasn't a horrible and unnecessary loss, and several orders of magnitude worse for Iraqis than the US, but this was also the case for Vietnam (and Cambodia, Laos, etc). While there continues to be strife in the Middle East and a few other places, and I worry about Africa being a major site of east vs. west proxy war in the coming decades, globally the situation seems more peaceful and democratic than in the Cold War or the colonial era. Societal issues in the US: There is a lot of sound and fury, but protests are largely peaceful. The protests involved with Ferguson, Charlottesville, etc. were much more mild than in the 1960s, or the race riots of Tulsa (1921, 39-300 deaths, 10,000+ people left homeless [2]), LA (1992, 63 deaths [3]), and so forth. Gay rights were granted largely peacefully as well--lots of progress here, though it wasn't frictionless. Similarly, the recent wave of defenestrations of powerful men due to sexual abuse is to me a net positive even if there are inevitable witch hunts associated. Domestic terrorism seems to be less of a concern. I don't know about rates but from what I understand there were a lot of bombings from both far left and far right sources in the 1960s and 1970s. We haven't had any high-profile political assassinations in a while. The rise in single-parent households is a concern. I have no idea how much this reduces the incidence of domestic violence as moms don't live with abusive dads. Maybe a little? Homelessness is also a major concern but is slightly decreasing over the past decade, not even accounting for population growth [4]. I have no idea how it compares to the 1960s or so. I think a lot of mentally ill people were institutionalized then, which isn't the case now AFAIK. The economy: Parts of the economy are good (stocks, general employment levels), and though there are still problems with stagnant wages for many, debt levels (particularly student loans), and housing prices in many places are terrifying (I'm living in SV on a pretty meager nonprofit salary, because my wife has a great job that pays OK). But it's a lot better than it was a decade ago, or in the 70s. There are still huge issues with medical care that need to be resolved, but at least lots of people are employed as paper pushers... Inequality is a major concern, I concede. And I worry about an upcoming stock market crash. I think it's possible that trade work will pay better and better, and as more tradespeople rejoin the middle class communities (neighborhoods, school districts etc.) some of the inequalities of social status between the higher-income blue-collar work and lower-income white-collar work will dissipate. The environment: Way better than in the mid-20th century. We have a lot more protected lands than in the 1960s, and air and water quality are much improved (thanks, Nixon!). From Wikipedia: "In the United States between 1970 and 2006, citizens enjoyed the following reductions in annual pollution emissions: - carbon monoxide emissions fell from 197 million tons to 89 million tons - nitrogen oxide emissions fell from 27 million tons to 19 million tons - sulfur dioxide emissions fell from 31 million tons to 15 million tons - particulate emissions fell by 80% - lead emissions fell by more than 98%" Without looking stuff up, I think that the broad population shifts from rural and semi-rural to urban and suburban since the 1950s are decreasing the pressure on the environment; national forests in most places are recovering from the ~1850s-1950s logging period. Climate change is bad, forest fires are bad, the decrease in insect populations are probably quite bad and may indicate a very rotten ecological foundation. However, the effects of climate change aren't directly tearing our country apart at present; the debate over it (and the underlying struggle for power and authority between science and government vs. church and business) is or did contribute. Once agriculture begins to fail in the Great Plains and CA central valley, it'll get real. --- Honestly, I don't get it. Sometimes I think things have been decent for long enough that we've forgotten what it was like when things were really bad--the Civil War, WWI, the Great Depression, WWII, Vietnam, etc. I also think that a lot more of the seeming chaos is that more voices are included than previously, particularly from marginalized communities. This aren't perfect, but are they awful? Or are we just bored and riled up about small matters such as the rhetoric of our politicians, or their seeming inability to get stuff done? [1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Crime_in_the_United_States https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Crime_in_the_United_States [2]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tulsa_race_riot https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tulsa_race_riot [3]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/1992_Los_Angeles_riots https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/1992_Los_Angeles_riots [4]: https://journalistsresource.org/studies/government/health-care/homelessness-u-s-trends-demographics https://journalistsresource.org/studies/government/health-ca...