re: #349 realwest

Hey zombie - please see my #302 above. In point of fact, the mass demonstrations against the Vietnam war did as much as anything to bring that war to an end. Street demonstrations (which, unlike the one you cited at the ‘68 Dem convention) that are more or less peaceful or are at least covered as peaceful by the MSM can have an ENORMOUS impact on public thinking. Let the Left run wild in the street is ceding to the Left that which ALSO belongs to us (I am, of course, talking about non-violent protests of which there were many, with hundreds of thousands of people in attendance during the Vietnam War).

Again, it comes back to how they were protrayed.

About ten years ago in Berkeley there were a photo exhibit about the anti-war protests of the ’60s and early ’70s. It featured many rare and never-before-seen photos — hundreds and hundreds of them.

I attended and look very carefully at many of the photos. And I was pretty shocked: The messages on most of the signs were as virulent, hateful and anti-American as any of the signs in my “Zombietime Hall of Shame.” Extremist communist and Maoist rhetoric, calls for violent overthrow of the US, calls for race war, hopes for US soliders to get killed, etc. etc.

But almost none of that was ever portrayed by the MSM. Just as now, they cherry-picked the one photo of the pretty girl with face paint putting a flower in the barrel of a national guardsman’s gun, etc.

If the American public had seen what these protests were for the most part really like, perhaps their reaction would have been different.

It always comes down to who moderates the message: the mainstream media.

And lastly: The very notion that the street protests caused the end of the Vietnam War is itself a lie promoted by the Left. We won’t delve into all the historical details here, but there were other reasons which brought our involvement in the war to an end.