Shannon Love (angrily) cites Richard Cohen’s recent “vile little diatribe” as an example of leftist hagiography. It addresses the 1970 Kent State shooting:
Bullets had killed those kids, sure — but they were fired, in a way, from the mouths of politicians. The governor of Ohio, James Rhodes, demonized the war protesters. They were “worse than the Brownshirts and the communist element…. We will use whatever force necessary to drive them out of Kent.”
There are two things that are delusional, Love says, about Cohen’s perspective on Kent State:
First, he assumes that the National Guard opened fire because they hated the college students’ ideology and not because they feared violence. Second, he leaves out the fact that the protesters were actually acting like Brownshirts and were protesting in de facto support of totalitarian communist superpowers. Indeed, many of leaders of the Kent State and other protests considered themselves to be communists fighting for world revolution.
In the leftists’ hagiography, the Kent State protesters were completely peaceful. They “performed a sit-in” in college campus buildings and were singing and putting flowers in the barrels of the Guardsmen’s guns when the Guardmen’s ideological hatred of the pure and noble leftists finally overwhelmed the Guardmen’s humanity and they brutally opened fire. All those killed at Kent State are martyrs to the evil of the American right. Therefore, Cohen argues by implication, since the left is so good, wonderful and infallible in all things, anyone who argues with leftists today is just as evil and hate filled as the governor and the Guardsmen were back in 1970.
Unfortunately for Cohen and his hagiography, the shootings at Kent State were preceded by a month of increasing violence. The “peaceful sit-in” of the ROTC building was violent with doors kicked in, desks and filing cabinets destroyed, burned or tossed through windows. ROTC officers and students as well as school officials were physically attacked. All this culminated in a riot the night before the shootings in downtown Kent, that resulted in broken windows, arson, stonings and beatings that overwhelmed the Kent police force. That pattern of increasing violence and destruction, not the governor’s ideological opposition to the protesters’ support of communist goals, caused the governor to call out the National Guard. The violence continued the day of the shootings with rock throwing and shouts of “kill, kill, kill”. The Guardsmen were on edge because of the violence, not the ideology.
Cohen and other leftists always dehumanize non-leftists such as the Guardsmen, turning them into caricatures. In the minds of Cohen et al, the Guardsmen are evil Nazis salivating to kill the pure and noble leftists. In reality, the Guardsmen felt exposed and frightened. They did not have full anti-riot gear or support and could not have withstood the human wave attack of an enraged mob. They were all too aware of how easy it would have been for the mob to overwhelm part or all of the Guard’s line and pull out and beat to death individuals. Worse, they all knew they were tightly bunched together making them an easy target for anyone with a firearm in the crowd or surrounding buildings. Given the previous pattern of escalating violence and the frothing anger directed at them, they had every right to expect they might be attacked with lethal force.
The Kent State shootings should have never happened but the moral onus for the deaths ultimately lies upon those who initiated the violence in the first place. Had the protesters not tried to impose their will on the governance of the university by force, had they not attacked people and destroyed property, the Guard would have not have been called out in the first place and would have never been in a position to overreact and make a mistake.
In the end, the idea that the Guard opened fire out of ideological hatred of all that is good and pure is really just a manifestation of the left’s own narcissism and megalomania. They are so convinced not only of their rectitude but of their critical importance to the world that they convince themselves that they are actually important enough for non-leftists to want to kill them. The thought that the Guard saw them not as world changing revolutionaries but just as spoiled, violent children just doesn’t play into the self-hagiography of the individual leftists.
In the end, the real story of Kent State was that of radical leftists directing violence on their fellow citizens in order to advance and inflate their own egos, and as a side effect to advance the interests of totalitarian, communist superpowers. Their egoism, moral blindness and self-delusion caused them to create circumstances in which lethal mistakes where probable. That is the reason, and the only reason, that five people died at Kent State.