So, I hear it all the time. That those who are against the gaza protests are on the "wrong side of history" and how they're making the same mistakes as those who were in vietnam, and how we'll look back on them in 40-50 years and realize how wrong they are and how we're gonna look like idiots and blah blah blah.
I mean...are they getting history from the same sources as the rest of us? because that's not my conception of history at all.
First of all, vietnam. Yeah, the war itself aged badly. They went in with this domino theory about how it was gonna stop communism and we were fighting for freedom and it ended up being a really brutal quagmire that made Iraq and Afghanistan look like child play. And then we ended up leaving in disgrace a decade later and the helicopter left the embassy as the vietcong closed in and blah blah blah.
And nothing bad came out of it for Americans, we massively overreacted, and and it was a blight, blah blah blah. I mean, sure, the conflict ended badly, and it wasn't one of our finest moments. We can agree on THAT much.
HOWEVER, the issue here is the PROTESTS. The question of the vietnam protests is a lot more mixed. Is it okay to protest violently? Is it okay to protest in ways that deny people their use of private property? is it okay to smear your crap on the wall so to speak (or maybe even literally, who knows), because you have a point to make? Who knows.
I mean, that is a lot more controversial. Some people would justify the protests retroactively, while some people would cite that violating the concept of law and order is never okay. I mean, I think it's reasonable to look at history, and understand that the war was wrong, but that the protesters werent necessarily in the right.
People love to talk about MLK with civil rights protests, but in a way, he is kinda sanctified and turned into like the patron saint of the civil rights movement because he acted with certain moralities in mind. He was explicitly nonviolent, and actually relatively moderate by 60s standards. I mean, you had Malcolm X instead, you had the black panthers, and those guys advocated for violence. If anything, the mainstream narrative was constructed in a way to center around MLK as the good guy, in order to push the likes of Malcolm X and HIS methods out of the overton window, where they belong. Likewise, when we view vietnam protests these days, I think we do it with a certain sanitization. We might recognize the protests of certain people who "protested right", while kind of ignoring or pushing out of the window the kind of crap that came along with it. We kind of look back at the 1960s with rose colored glasses, but in reality it was a very tumultuous era and not everyone who protested were good guys. SOme of them WERE weirdo communists, or people who made a mess of things. And while some people retroactively justify it, i don't think, for most, that that behavior was ever "okay."
As a matter of fact, and this is what I wanna talk about, I grew up as a Reagan conservative. I went to religious school, and listened to Rush Limbaugh. And you know what? Everything I heard about the 60s during the 90s and 2000s made it sound like the worst time period ever. Like everything wrong with america went wrong in the 1960s, the 1950s were perfect, but those darned 60s were just so terrible.
The 1960s was the decade of Engel v Vitale, where those radical leftists decided to take god out of schools. it was the era where everyone wanted to smoke pot, have free love and just have sex with whomever they wanted, where everyone wanted abortions, where people militantly protested against america and demonstrated how much they HATED the country. And how they were evil communists who didnt just want to reform our institutions, but turn us into the soviet union.
And you know what? We had this image of the 1960s for around 40 years after it. And it's easy to see the evolution. Nixon with his "law and order" campaign and the "silent majority", and then stagflation, oil crises, and several foreign policy failures during the Carter years, and then Reagan came along and he destroyed the unions, lowered taxes, deregulated, the economy, he intimidated the iranians into giving up the hostages, he destroyed the USSR with his aggressive defense policies, and he basically brought hope back to America.
And then from there those evil democrats were always considered the spectre of the democrats' past of the 1960s and 1970s that no one wanted to go back to. Clinton was criticized for never serving on the armed forces and smoking pot. And the republicans spoke about "feminazis" (basically SJWs), and anti war protesters who hated america, and those darned secularists who took god out of the government, and blah blah blah, and yeah. We literally didnt start seriously challenging these narratives until THE OBAMA YEARS. Why? Because by then it stopped being just about the boomers and older and their hysteria about how the democrats wanted to bring us back to the 1960s. We literally needed an entire generation of new voters to be able to start to challenge those narratives, and that generation was that? Why, it was us millennials. Gen X kinda just sat back and did their breakfast club thing before getting high paying jobs in the 80s and 90s and turning republican, and it took all the way until 2008 for the millennials to start making their voice heard with Obama.
And by then, we just had a totally new generation of liberals, many of us growing up in conservative households and kinda realizing that our elders were kinda off their rockers. That the democrats WERENT that bad, that they WERENT all commies who wanted to destroy america, that they were actually the sane ones and that fox news was warping our parents' brains.
And it seemed, going into 2016, that we kinda were on the right side of history. Not because vietnam protesters good, but mostly because the left finally distanced itself from all of that crazy crap sufficiently that we started thinking that the boomers were making it all up or exaggerating. Clearly there arent armies of militant communist america haters and "feminazis" and stuff who just want militantly radically change america, are there? I mean, that wouldnt make sense optically, we had to have been mistaken, right?
Well, if anything in the past decade or so since then has taught me, it's that no, maybe they werent exaggerating. Like, you gotta understand, by 2012-2016ish standards, I WAS the radical. I mean, UBI? THis mass redistributionist policy where we take money from the rich and give it all to those who dont work? That's communism, right? No, actually it's not. And obviously, even if i havent been the most patriotic person since leaving conservatism, i never really HATED this country. I've been critical of wars, but I never went so bugnuts over it I'd start simping for our enemies. And clear, we secularists wanted to destroy america with...our well reasoned policies based in consequentialism. As if not wanting to run the country by the morality of a millennia old story book makes us bad people. I mean, we just wanted equal rights and liberties where they don't harm others, right?
Well, sadly, now we're at a point where the leftist psychos returned. And the SJWs really are as offputting as Rush Limbaugh's caricatures. And we're watching weirdo leftist morons push for literal communism, and anti american/western rhetoric to a fault. And they advocate for protests that disrupt, and obstruct, and vandalize, and mgiht even simp for radical terrorists organizations like hamas.
I'm not saying all protesters are like that. This ain't covered in the news, but many of the protests have been relatively peaceful, and you know what? Good on them. I'm not against all protest. But the weirdo extremists who make the news, who that subreddit i got banned from seem to be simping for? Yeah, they're psychos, and maybe we shouldn't be enabling or glorifying this crap.
All of this "leftist" crap is getting out of hand, and to any lurking conservatives, i wanna make this clear, it's not liberals doing this, it's the most radical leftists. You know the tiki torch people on your side at charlottesville? yeah, basically this is our equivalent, both sides have nuts, ya know? And these are the nuts.
But liberals, the mainstream left? We're often for law and order too. We often do want protests to be restrained to peaceful methods. We think the weirdo SJWs are annoying too. And while yes, i do have some issues with capitalism, liberals are varying levels of reformists, not communists who wanna destroy the system. I can't say those guys don't exist any more, they definitely do, but most of us don't agree with them any more than I know that most on the right don't actually support the views of the neo nazis and the KKK and THOSE people (although to be fair, we're getting concerned about you guys becoming illiberal and believing the big lie and going ride or die on the trump cult).
We both got our radicals and nuts, and we both gotta keep them muzzled and in line, right? If anything the left seems to do a better job these days at doing this than the right does. Biden supporters arent going around storming the capitol or advocating for a dictator in charge. If anything the left is TOO effective in reining in their dissenters where most of us are just stuck in a cult of learned helplessness and weaponized incompetence where most of us are too timid to fight for just and doable reforms for fear that it might alienate the right, even though if anything I've learned that the right is just gonna go off and obstruct us no matter what we do.
So yeah.
I guess what I wanna say is this. Look, those who don't learn from history are doomed to repeat it. I DONT think the most radical protesters are on the right side of history. They werent last time, and they certainly werent this time. Rather, theyre a bunch of extremist whackos who make the whole left look bad, and honestly, the mainstream left needs to disown and condemn these people and their methods if we wanna be taken seriously. We cant let these guys be associated with the left, or the current millennial and zoomer generations may end up taking a right wing turn like the boomers did in the 1970s and 1980s, and we might be the new boomers ranting about this for 40 years while shifting back to the right.
The left needs to learn that this kind of radical crap doesn;t work, it isnt effective, and you're alienating everyone. Normies are gonna run from us as fast as possible if we don't reject this stuff. And honestly? As a student of history myself, I look at it like this, we kinda blew the new deal coalition over this. We created a conservative backlash that lasted for 40 years over this. And we risk doing it again, if we can't steer this ship away from this iceberg right now.
It's amazing. In 2016, I felt like the left was ascendant. Now I feel like we're fighting for our very lives to remain relevant, because the left really doesn't know how to do politics worth a crap at all. The neolibs are too tone deaf and timid and the leftists are fricking psychos who no one wants anything to do with.
So yeah. I don't think the vietnam protesters are on the right side of history. If anything I feel like they contributed to the downfall of the left last time, and we risk making the same mistakes this time if we allow these whackos free reign to dictate the narratives.
We need to make progress within our institutions. THis doesnt mean we cant fight more effectively. The institutional left IS too timid and stuck in an even more conservative mindset than I am. I am part of that bridge millennial generation. Ya know, the ones who recognize that the right was actually wrong about everything but also realizes that we can't overdo it? And yeah. That's the problem. We're not hitting the right balance right now, and we run the risk of destroying ourselves and our entire movement optically if we don't shape up. Sorry, the radicals are and always have been on the wrong side of history. And we need to disown them or we risk being put back in the dog house for 40 more years.
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