June 20
GUEST: Robert Roth, veteran
anti-imperialist activist, former member of the SDS and the
Weather Underground, and co-founder of the Haiti Action
Committee, talks about Columbia University in the last 60s and
now.
Reflections
on SDS and Black Power
Robert Roth and I are both products of the late 1960s. He was in the Weather Underground and I was a reluctant young draftee sent overseas to occupy Korea. Both of us blamed politicians of the major parties for the mess our country was in. LBJ and then Tricky Dick Nixon were willing to kill any number of Vietnamese for an American win in Southeast Asia.
But the US could not win the "American War," as the Vietnamese call it. Yes, the US killed millions, but to no avail. Vietnam had been fighting imperial powers for generations and were willing to sacrifice anything for their freedom. What irony you say. Our country that supposedly supported democracy and freedom preferred mass killing to negotiations. There is nothing that the American Empire was not willing to do, even sending 58,000 of its sons to the slaughter.
But is wasn't the Viet Cong that the empire feared. It was its own young people who finally stopped fighting the war, and turned their attention to the streets. "Down with American imperialism" they shouted. And instead of voting for another warmongering Democrat, they simply yelled "Dumped the Hump," as Hubert Humphrey was called.
The empire is fearful again. It is plain as day that our elites are supporting the genocide of the Palestinian people. Our leaders have all been bought off by the Israel Lobby. Our colleges and universities use antisemitism to limit any debate on campuses. And our media just supports American carnage as it always has.
But making the empire fearful is all we have in this completely corrupted system. Make those Pentagon warmongers shake. Use those encampments to promote a vision of America as a just state, committed to democracy and the good of humankind. "You may say I'm a dreamer. But I'm not the only one. I hope someday you'll join us. And the world will be as one."
The opposite to dreaming is specicide. The end of the Anthropocene Epoch. America may well be the world's last empire.
