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 relatively new documentary, Kent State:The Real Story aired at the 2023 May 4th commemoration of the massacre.
Kent State: The Real Story is a significant addition to the research on the Kent State massacre, but does not conclusively solve the issue of whether or not a direct order was given to the members of A and C companies of the Guard that began the 13 second fusillade of rifle bullets that killed four students and wounded nine others. My research into the Strubbe tape and interviews with the late Stuart Allen and his associate, and the late Thomas Owen, seem to confirm that a verbal command was given that allowed the troops to fire on unarmed students.
My impressions of the order to fire on students, from my own experience as a member of the National Guard, but not the Ohio National Guard, is that soldiers do not turn in unison and fire in concert without a clear and direct order. The closest I came to the kind of order to shoot was light years away from what happened at Kent State and took place as part of honor guards at monuments. But there is a connection, however tenuous, and that is even with blank ammunition that members of a honor guard carry, a person does not begin the sequence of actions that lead to the firing of a rifle without direct orders by a person in command. This comparison is imperfect, but some conclusions can be drawn from them.
The most significant revelations from Kent State: The Real Story are the many personal accounts of the massacre and some of the evidence that emerges from the vast still and film footage collected and examined for the documentary. One student standing not far from the troops as they fired says that he heard no order to fire, but others, including some Guard troops say they heard an order. Close examination of the troops’ behavior beside the pagoda shows members of the Guard acting in unison, while others appear to be behaving as if taking part in the shooting was the last thing on their minds.
Still photographs and film footage is examined in the documentary with precision and much of this evidence is compared to multiple photograph and film sources that view the protest and massacre from angles and perspectives never seen before. I found one photograph, of the slain student Jeffrey Miller, to be upsetting to the extreme showing his face partially covered. Miller was shot through the mouth with the high-powered Guard M1, the same type of weapon that was used in the honor guard described above. That photograph brings home the horror of what weapons of war can do and what they can do to innocent people who are unarmed.
The documentary seems to be missing the testimony or observations of many who may have shed additional light on the events of the days leading up to the massacre and the massacre itself. I do not know why this is the case, but I’m fairly certain that it was not an omission of the documentary makers.
An issue that was not part of the documentary, but has interested me as a longtime antiwar protester, is how protest took place up until the current wars that the US fights or supports through proxy efforts and how protest was treated both then and now. College and university campuses today have decimated protest through threats and actions against protesting students and their supporters by campus administrators and a militarized police force. Ordinary protesters on the streets have experienced similar and sometimes violent repression of protest, particularly in response to protests involving the many wars in the Middle East.
Some may say that a comparison to protest 55 years ago and today is an apples to oranges situation. If it was possible to have students and others from 55 year ago meet today’s protesters, what would a conversation about protest and the First Amendment look like?
How did this nation and government lurch so far to the right and dictatorial authoritarianism? The Red Scare during World War I was one anchor of this far-right movement. Following World War II and the incarceration of over 100,000 Japanese-Americans, came McCarthyism.
The next move was the destruction of the Voting Rights Act of 1965, years of racial gerrymandering, and mass incarceration. Mass incarceration was linked to the attacks against workers through globalization. Prison labor is a cheap source of labor.
The handing of the 2000 election to George W. Bush by the Supreme Court was eventually followed during the Obama administration with Senator Mitch McConnell’s refusal to consider Obama’s nomination for the court.
Now the right-wing solidification of authoritarianism is complete with Trump. Colleges and universities are complicit in denying students’ and their supporters’ right to demonstrate against the genocide in Gaza. If the repression of free speech and protest against the Gaza war was not enough, the Trump administration cancelled $400 million in grants and contracts with Columbia University (New York Times, March 7, 2025). Habeas corpus was lost during the Obama administration along with due process when US citizens were killed using extrajudicial actions.
The post From Kent State to Pro-Palestinian Protest appeared first on CounterPunch.org.
This content originally appeared on CounterPunch.org and was authored by Howard Lisnoff.
Howard Lisnoff | Radio Free (2025-03-12T05:55:52+00:00) From Kent State to Pro-Palestinian Protest. Retrieved from https://www.radiofree.org/2025/03/12/from-kent-state-to-pro-palestinian-protest/
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