Current Events > Kent State Massacre: college students armed with rocks killed by military

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May 4th, 1970.

https://youtu.be/WXBV8OQPrzA

Students protesting their country's invasion of Cambodia in the greater Vietnam war, shot dead by their own country's military. Belligerent and angry, sure - but some armed with rocks, threatened by an armed presence who proceeded to throw tear gas at them and force them up a hill, seeing face to face the embodiment of what they were against.

When the National Guard opened fire, four students died. Two of them weren't even participating in the protest, going back to the dormitories after class. Even if you think the students deserved to get fired on by the military for inciting violence, 50% of the casualties were entirely innocent of any wrongdoing.

The armed forces of their country killed them in a fit of anger.

They were murdered.

The National Guard initially said that they opened fire after sustaining sniper fire first. Then they said that they didn't know why they opened fire. Richard Nixon defended the use of live ammunition being used on American citizens by calling the protestors - and the casualties - "campus bums".

On May 4th, it will be 52 years since this massacre occured. Live ammo, tear gas and bayonets used on university students by their government.

Four people dead, ten injured. And we call it a massacre, because that's exactly what it was.

And you know what the students did?

They picked up the tear gas cannisters, and they threw them right back. Because they were under attack by an institution that should not have had the means or authority to maim or kill them. They protested the soldiers, and the soldiers came to them with guns, and they fucking opened fire.

Remember when the police fired rubber bullets - shells the size of a lemon, metal body with a rubber coating - directly into the faces of protestors less than five years ago?

We called the Kent State Massacre a massacre for a reason. It is a national travesty for a reason. And some stupid, sick motherfuckers will defend the same force from the police to this day when people are justifiably outraged over the unlawful killing of innocent people.

And the excuse of "they're the police, not the military" doesn't cut it when the police today have more deadly equipment in their possession today than even the National Guard of the 70's had. They have it because it's been handed down to them directly from the military.

Like the people who were murdered by their government in 1970, Black Lives Matter protestors copped tear gas, live ammunition to the face and chest and herding by law enforcement into a smaller area to better brutalize them. They protested armed occupation on behalf of their country, and they faced the exact force they were protesting in response. They saw the embodiment of what they were protesting, and the tools of war were pointing directly at them.

In that first report, you can see protestors throwing tear gas back at the National Guard. And it looks shockingly modern, less than five years removed from where we are. Back then, we called it a massacre and a travesty. Today, we say they were looters disrupting the peace who deserves the full might of American law enforcement stomping down on their neck.

You protest war, you get shot by the military. You protest police violence, you get cops firing lightly rubber-coated metal shells in rubber directly into your face. And when the left call it an egregious act of political violence? The right calls them bums and says they deserved to die.

Fifty two years later, nothing has changed - short of the same violent, war-mongering fucks justifying armed suppression of protestors attacking their own seat of government to overturn an election because of Satanic pedophile cannibals. Again - I see these news reports, and the modernity of them truly shocks and fascinates me. America truly does make me sick, and the four students of Kent State University died for this stagnant swamp of a country to repeat the same violence unto its population tenfold.

The two protestors who died should have never died for their cause, and the two innocent people who died should have never been exposed to that violence by their own countrymen. I'd like to at least say that I commend them for dying for a just cause, willingly or not. I would say their sacrifice led to greater change. But I can't even say that because every part of the war machine that killed them all exists to this very day, and some stupid motherfuckers continue to let armed forces leverage violence and power over civilians in the same way these students were murdered by their own government.

Did Nixon really never admit that 2 of them weren't even protestors?