On this day in 1971, according to the Massachusetts Foundation for the Humanities:
Over 450 anti-war protesters occupied the historic Lexington Green and refused to leave. The Vietnam Veterans Against the War had organized a three-day march from Concord to Boston — Paul Revere’s route in reverse. According to Lexington’s by-laws, no one was allowed on the Green after 10 PM, so the selectmen denied the protesters permission to camp there. With many townspeople supporting the veterans, an emergency town meeting was held. When no agreement was reached, the veterans and their Lexington supporters decided to remain on the Green. At 3 AM on Sunday morning, they were all arrested in the largest mass arrest in Massachusetts history. After being tried, convicted, and fined $5.00 each, they continued their march to Boston.
Hindsight has shown that the Vietnam Veterans Against the War were right — and the intolerant and reactionary Lexington selectmen tragically wrong. If the U.S. had ended its support for the South Vietnamese government in 1971, rather than waiting to be thrown out in 1975, our interests would have been better served. The same lesson applies today: instead of increasing the number of troops in Vietraq, and spending additional billions, we should begin to withdraw immediately, rather than attempt to stay until we are forced out in a bloody and expensive fiasco.
You are dondemning people for actions taken alkmost 40 years ago by people born before 1930. Children of the Depression and World WQar II .Jesus Christ.
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But then these people are not good people. They referred to the Japanese as Japs and German’s as Krouts. So they were obviously ignorant people whose past is no excuse for thewir actions. If only they were more enlightened like you and me Bob. We never had WWII or the Depressionb so we kknow more.
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Do you remmebr the opening lines of THe Great Gatsby?
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Lexington’s Shame?
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Screw You!
so true.
Ernie, a little while back:
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“I am betrayed by keeping company
With men like men, men of inconstancy.”
—The Bard
My Blogoshere memory is only 24 hours.
Anyway, I know in your heart you agree with me Ernie.
in my heart with anything you or david or charley have written. It’s my goddamn brain that’s the problem.
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peace out
minor correction: a more bloody and expensive fiasco. it has certainly already been expensive in lives & loot.
…they could be tried such a short time after having committing the offense.
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It would have been nice if Eisenhower didn’t get the US involved in Vietnam in the 1950s. If he hadn’t, it’s unlikely that JFK, Johnson, and Nixon would have increased US involvement.
fortced into witnessing and participating in rape, murder, torture, genocide and a whole host of despicable acts.
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Unfortunately many of them hadn’t even been ot Vietnam.
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As a matter of fact , I personally became privy to the fact that one Joseph B, formerly of Pennsylvania, now of Cape Cod , Massachusetts was one of those alleged war criminals who escaped prosecution. Mr. B, as I have been recently reading, is a big friend of none other than Sen. JF Kerry. As a matter of record, I have also read that Mr. B was one of the “Winter Soldiers.”
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Unfortunately, Mr. B never realized that an invention commonly known as the internet, compliments of Mr. Al Gore, would one day allow the immediate dissemination of information throughout the planet within seconds.
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Doubly unfortunate for Mr. B is that his past caught up with him. You see, Mr. B was actually an office clerk (S-3 operations) in the Marine Corps while in Vietnam, not the purported infantryman as he has led everyone to believe.
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You beat the rap this long Joe, but you are about to reap what you have sown. Your past is about to catch up real fast. I suggest you go and get yourself a few jugs and work up enough courage to do the right thing.
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Joe like the remainder of the VVAW frauds, liars, and sociopaths are just that. Delusional human waste. There is a difference between a dissenter and a treasonous liar. The Winter Soldier folks just couldn’t make that distinction. Right Joe? I heard air fare to Hanoi is real cheap—–as well as property.
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VVAW———-give me a break.
Not that I don’t believe the information that you have personally become privy to is full of crap or anything. Just wondering, that’s all.
So many soldiers deployed from Fort Lewis (WA) have been killed that the base can’t keep up with the funeral schedule. They have now scheduled one consolidated monthly funeral to honor whoever/however many bit it that month. Very sad indeed.
Over fifty thousand Americans are killed in automobile accidents EVERY year. FIFTY THOUSAND? Where is the outrage over that? Now that is SAD! Very sad indeed.
That might make a good post, get some facts together about automobile accidents and what we can do to reduce needless deaths. But what does this have to do with Iraq?
in car accidents are vets? and how many dead soldiers in Iraq ever drove cars? but you never hear about that. oh no! the outrage!
…between wars and auto accidents. Namely, use of an automobile, at least in the US, is oftentimes necessary, and hence a good thing. Going to war is usually not necessary, and hence not necesssarily a good thing.
I’ll see your fifty thousand (it’s actually between 42,000 and 45,000 each year over the last decade or two), and raise you 30,000 gun deaths.
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There, now we are comrades in outrage. Having embraced the principle of “equal outrage”, let us go forth together and confront these twin evils with equal determination!
These days, the town of Lexington looks back on this incident with bemused nostalgia. Many of us are quite proud of the fact that a significant war protest occurred on The Green. And if the protesters, including Kerry, hadn’t been arrested here, who would even remember it now?
The difference is people that get killed in automobiles either are irresponsible or the victims of chance, bad weather, other irresponsible drivers, etc. They’d be killed regardless since we will always have bad drivers, drunk drivers, and weather. All 4000 men and women who died, all 100,000-400,000 dead civillians, all 20-50,000 wounded and maimed (i.e lost limbs) would never have happened at George Bush not ordered them into Iraq. What happened to the buck stops here? It was his call and unlike an automobile accident death in war is far more gruesome and far more preventable.
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Also if liberals had compared American war dead, heroes, to petty automobile crashes, I don’t know, but as a patriotic American I think that denigrates their service, I’ve gotten chain emails from conservative friends, here Rush, etc. but when its your son or your daughter dying for a needless lost cause then you’d be just as angry or outraged. And we prosecute the drunk and bad drivers that cause it, we try and make safer cars and better road conditions, no one is being prosecuted for the lies and falsified information that led to this war, no one is giving them the armor and equipment they need to prevent their deaths, and this dishonorable denigration of their service and the willful ignorance about how it really is not helping our security is really starting to piss me off.
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Not that these men are not heroes, or have not served their country, or have not done heroic things, but honestly I wish and feel that their service, sacrifice, and heroism would have been better served either in Afghanistan fighting a fight essential to our interests, in New Orleans rebuilding levies and maintaining order, in Tsunami stricken countries, or stopping the genocide in Darfur. Not where they are now in the middle of a civil war that frankly is no longer in America’s best interest to fight.
…putting American soldiers into the middle of a civil war was–to put it mildly–counter-productive. Beirut 1982.