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    An-My Lê: The War in Vietnam Still Holds America’s Attention

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    Re-enacting battles from Vietnam demonstrates how war can be mythologized.This personal reflection is part of a series called The Big Ideas, in which writers respond to a single question: What is history? You can read more by visiting The Big Ideas series page.I was born in Saigon in 1960, and I experienced the war in Vietnam firsthand. When the war ended and Saigon fell to the Communists in 1975, the U.S. government evacuated me and my family in a C-130 cargo plane. We ended up in California. Now, 50 years later, I work as a landscape photographer, viewing my medium not only as a tool for witnessing past and present conflicts, but also as a space suited for contending with the paradoxes that define history itself.One particularly pivotal experience shaped my approach.It began in 1999, when I contacted a group of war re-enactors based in North Carolina and Virginia. I worked with and photographed them over several summers, and the images eventually became a series titled “Small Wars.” This small group of young, conservative men was dedicated to recreating key U.S. military operations and battles from the war in Vietnam on one member’s 100-acre wooded property. Among them were a product manager at Thomson Financial, a former National Guard driver, a mortician and a carpenter. Too young to have served in the conflict, none of these men had ever experienced real combat. Yet they were obsessively committed to the authenticity of their “impressions” — meticulous in their attention to equipment, clothing, food and supplies, whether portraying the Vietcong, the North Vietnamese Army or American soldiers. Participation was by invitation only.“Cots,” from the series “Small Wars” (1999-2002).Courtesy of the artist and Marian Goodman GalleryTo engage with multiple perspectives, I alternated between the role of a Vietcong fighter and that of a Kit Carson Scout — an N.V.A. soldier who defected to assist the Americans. Armed with an AK-47 loaded with Hollywood blanks, and clad in either Vietnamese-made black pajamas or an N.V.A. khaki uniform, I walked the trails and immersed myself in the dense bamboo thickets the re-enactors had planted. This vegetation — an obvious signifier for Vietnam and other Asian landscapes — was incongruously situated in an area that once witnessed the U.S. Civil War, on a site densely populated by pines, spruce, horsetails and kudzu. The result was a striking conflation of histories: theirs, shaped by vicarious experiences filtered through news footage, literature and myth; and mine, formed by personal memory, family lore and ambivalent feelings about a devastating war — one perpetrated by a government that ultimately saved my family and me from Communism and granted us a new life.The re-enactors and I spontaneously connected through a shared fluency brought on by the popularization and retelling of the Vietnam War in popular culture. We bantered back and forth, testing one another’s knowledge of classic war films, as well as fiction and nonfiction books. One-time participants from other states occasionally joined us, and the organizers would disclose my participation only at the last minute as a “reveal” for the unsuspecting visitors.We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More

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      JD Vance threatened to deport him. The ‘menswear guy’ is posting through it

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      Derek Guy was a relatively unknown menswear writer with 25,000 followers on Twitter in 2022. Now, in 2025, Guy has 1.3 million followers on the platform, now called X, where this week both the vice-president of the United States and the Department of Homeland Security posted threats to deport him from the US – the country he has called home since he was a baby.“Honestly didn’t expect this is what would happen when I joined a menswear forum 15 years ago,” Guy quipped on X on Monday. “Was originally trying to look nice for someone else’s wedding.”The threats targeted at Guy, a fashion writer known for lampooning the sartorial decisions of rightwing figures, including JD Vance, marked another alarming escalation in the White House’s ongoing project to mass deport millions of immigrants – raising the prospect of an administration wielding deportation as a weapon of retribution against its critics.But Guy’s story also laid bare the transformation of X. In a few short years, the platform has become a place where Maga and other far-right influencers not only rule the roost, but can see their trollish posts perhaps dictate policy. X may now be a sincerely dangerous place for some users to post their thoughts.It all started with Elon Musk. After taking over Twitter in 2022, the world’s richest man oversaw the implementation of an algorithmic “for you” tab that pushed content from a bizarre array of influencers on users. Through a fateful quirk in the algorithm, Guy was among the platform’s new main characters, his incisive commentary about men’s fashion suddenly ubiquitous on people’s feeds. Guy, who got his start years earlier commenting in menswear forums before launching a blog called Die, Workwear!, was suddenly being profiled in GQ and interviewed by Slate. Everyone started calling him the “menswear guy”.Musk later rechristened Twitter as X, further loosening moderation on the platform, and restoring the accounts of users previously banned for bigotry or harassment. X became even more of a far-right haven, with white supremacist and neo-Nazi accounts risen from the dead. Meanwhile Guy was frequently going viral, namely for posts teasing prominent Maga figures for their ill-fitting suits – bringing attention to the wrinkles on Trump’s trousers, and the “collar gaps” on Stephen Miller’s suit jackets.By 2025, of course, Trump and Miller were back in the White House, pursuing a campaign promise to “remigrate” millions of everyday people out of America. In recent weeks they appeared to ramp up this ethno-nationalist project, with disturbing footage emerging online of masked, heavily armed Ice and DHS agents abducting Latino people from schools and courthouses, or kidnapping them off the streets, often separating them from their children.Guy felt compelled to stand up and be counted.In a long post on X, he recounted his family’s harrowing story of escaping war in Vietnam, a journey that ended with his mom carrying him across the US border while he was still an infant. Guy revealed that he was one of millions of undocumented people living in the US.“The lack of legal immigration has totally shaped my life,” he wrote. “It has made every interaction with the law much scarier. It has shaped which opportunities I could or could not get. It has taken an emotional toll, as this legal issue hangs over your head like a black cloud.”He was sharing his story to “push back against the idea that all undocumented immigrants are MS-13 members”, he wrote. “I know many people in my position and they are all like your neighbors.”Guy’s post sent far-right influencers on X into a feeding frenzy. “JD Vance I know you’re reading this and you have the opportunity to do the funniest thing ever,” a user named @growing_daniel wrote about Guy’s announcement. (@Growing_Daniel appears to be the founder of a tech startup called Abel, that uses artificial intelligence to help police write up crime reports.)Vance did see the post, replying with a gif of Jack Nicholson from the movie Anger Management, slowly nodding his head with an intense, menacing look. A short time later, the official account of the Department of Homeland Security joined the fray. The federal agency quote-tweeted a post from another far-right account, which noted Guy’s undocumented status, with a gif from the movie Spy Kids, showing a character with futuristic glasses that can zoom in on a subject from a great distance.The message to Guy was clear: we’re watching you. Vance and DHS did not respond to the Guardian’s requests for comment about the posts.Prominent far-right figures were ecstatic. “IT’S HABBENING,” posted Jack Posobiec, a Maga operative with more than 3 million followers on X. Michael Knowles, the prominent Daily Wire pundit, posted a photo of El Salvador’s president, Nayib Bukele, wearing a blue-and-white sash over his suit jacket. “Hey @dieworkwear,” Knowles wrote to his one million followers, “what are your thoughts on this outfit?” The subtext of Knowles’s tweet was also clear: Bukele has partnered with the Trump administration to hold immigrants deported from America, with no due process, in El Salvador’s most notorious gulag.Guy was aghast at the response. “The cruelty in today’s politics feels horribly corrosive,” he wrote. “Bringing up that hard-working immigrant families — undocumented, yes, but not violent criminals — are being ripped apart based on immigration status doesn’t bring compassion or even pause, but gleeful cheers.”Longtime critics of X pointed to the deportation threats as evidence of the platform’s perils. “…It’s been turned into a political weapon for people who wish to use it to harm others,” noted journalist Charlie Warzel, the author of a recent Atlantic essay arguing for people to abandon X. “It’s not the marketplace of ideas – you do not have to participate in this project! very simple!”For now, Guy – who politely declined to comment to the Guardian about this week’s saga – is still on X, using all of this week’s attention for what he sees as good causes.“ICE raided a downtown LA garment warehouse, arresting fourteen garment workers,” he wrote. “Many of those detained were the primary breadwinner for young children and elderly relatives. Would you consider donating to help these families?”He also took time to taunt those calling for his deportation. When an account belonging to a luxury wristwatch dealer chastised him for “disrespecting” immigration laws, Guy responded with a one-thousand word history of how the flow of immigrants and refugees across borders over the past two centuries led to the creation of Rolex, among other luxury watch brands.He also replied directly to Vance’s post threatening to deport him. “i think i can outrun you in these clothes,” Guy wrote, posting a photo of the vice-president seated at a political conference, his ill-fitting suit pants riding up to his calves. “you are tweeting for likes. im tweeting to be mentioned in the National Archives and Records,” Guy added.Guy then told the vice-president where immigration agents could find him: “Here is my house,” the “menswear guy” wrote, posting an image of a Men’s Wearhouse storefront.

      This article was updated on 14 June 2025 to correct that the movie the gif of Jack Nicholson was from was Anger Management, not The Departed. More

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      Who Took the ‘Napalm Girl’ Photo?

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      Questions about the credit for a famous photograph from the Vietnam War have divided the photojournalism community for months.The photo is indelible, and its importance unmistakable: a Vietnamese girl burned by napalm, naked and screaming, her arms outstretched in despair. It drove home the consequences of the Vietnam War to readers in the United States, where it won a Pulitzer Prize.But who took the photo, widely known as Napalm Girl? That is the question dividing the photojournalism community 53 years after it was taken.The image, from a road in the village of Trang Bang, Vietnam, has been credited to Nick Ut, a photographer who worked for The Associated Press. In the decades since, Mr. Ut has repeatedly talked publicly, in interviews and elsewhere, about his role in capturing the photo and his later friendship with its subject, Kim Phuc Phan Thi.Yet a documentary that premiered early this year, “The Stringer,” set off investigations into the creator of the image. The film argues that a freelance photographer took the image, and that an Associated Press photo editor misattributed it to Mr. Ut.On Friday, the World Press Photo Foundation, a prominent international nonprofit, weighed in. It said a monthslong investigation had found that two other photojournalists “may have been better positioned to take the photograph than Nick Ut.”Mr. Ut’s lawyer, James Hornstein, has repeatedly disputed the film’s claims and called them “defamatory.” He said in a statement that the World Press Photo decision was “deplorable and unprofessional” and “reveals how low the organization has fallen.” Mr. Hornstein declined to make Mr. Ut available for an interview.We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More

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      Naval Academy Censors Ryan Holiday’s Lecture on Censorship

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      For the past four years, I have been delivering a series of lectures on the virtues of Stoicism to midshipmen at the U.S. Naval Academy in Annapolis, Md., and I was supposed to continue this on April 14 to the entire sophomore class on the theme of wisdom.Roughly an hour before my talk was to begin, I received a call: Would I refrain from any mention in my remarks of the recent removal of 381 supposedly controversial books from the Nimitz library on campus? My slides had been sent up the chain of command at the school, which was now, as it was explained to me, extremely worried about reprisals if my talk appeared to flout Executive Order 14151 (“Ending Radical and Wasteful Government D.E.I. Programs and Preferencing.”)When I declined, my lecture — as well as a planned speech before the Navy football team, with whom my books on Stoicism are popular was canceled. (The academy “made a schedule change that aligns with its mission of preparing midshipmen for careers of service,” a Navy spokesperson told Times Opinion. “The Naval Academy is an apolitical institution.”)Had I been allowed to go ahead, this is the story I was going to tell the class:In the fall of 1961, a young naval officer named James Stockdale, a graduate of the Naval Academy and future Medal of Honor recipient who went on to be a vice admiral, began a course at Stanford he had eagerly anticipated on Marxist theory. “We read no criticisms of Marxism,” he recounted later, “only primary sources. All year we read the works of Marx and Lenin.”It might seem unusual that the Navy would send Stockdale, then a 36-year-old fighter pilot, to get a master’s degree in the social sciences, but he knew why he was there. Writing home to his parents that year, he reminded them of a lesson they had instilled in him, “You really can’t do well competing against something you don’t understand as well as something you can.”At the time, Marxism was not just an abstract academic subject, but the ideological foundation of America’s greatest geopolitical enemy. The stakes were high. The Soviets were pushing a vision of global Communism and the conflict in Vietnam was flashing hot, the North Vietnamese fueled by a ruthless mix of dogma and revolutionary zeal. “Marxism” was, like today, also a culture war boogeyman used by politicians and demagogues.We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More

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      The ‘Iron Mountain’ hoax: how anti-Vietnam war satire sparked today’s conspiracy theories

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      We live in a ­blizzard of fake news, ­disinformation and ­conspiracy theories. It’s tempting to blame this on social media – which does indeed ­exacerbate the problem. And AI deepfakes promise to make the situation even worse. But at root this is not about technology: it’s about how humans think, as an astonishing case that long predates the internet reveals. This is an amazing story – about the perils of amazing stories.In November 1967, at the height of the war in Vietnam, a strange ­document was published in New York. Report from Iron Mountain was the work of a top-secret “­special study group” recruited by the Kennedy administration to scope out what would happen to the US if permanent global peace broke out. It warned the end of war, and of the fear of war, would wreck America’s economy, even its whole society. To replace the effects, extreme measures would be required – eugenics, fake alien scares, pollution, blood games. Even slavery. The report was so incendiary it had been suppressed, but one of the study group leaked it, determined that the public learn the truth. It caused a furore. The worried memos, demanding someone check if this document was real, went all the way up to President Johnson.View image in fullscreenIn reality, as the White House eventually realised, Report from Iron Mountain was a hoax. It was the brainchild of leftwing satirists: Victor Navasky, editor of a magazine called Monocle, his colleagues, and a fellow satirist, Leonard Lewin, who wrote it with the help of luminaries like the famous economist and former US ambassador to India, JK Galbraith. Their goal was to expose what they saw as the insanity driving the intervention in Vietnam, and the whole of the cold war. By presenting their fake report as a real leak, they aimed to make people ask if this insane document might be real – and what that said about the people running the US government.And it worked. To young Americans living under the shadow of conscription, Report seemed all too plausible. Officials whispered to journalists that some of their ­colleagues really did think like this. Once the hoax had its satirical impact, Lewin came clean. But his work was so convincing it began to take on a life of its own.In the late 1980s, Report from Iron Mountain was discovered by the extreme right, which was convinced it was real. It was republished by a company called the Noontide Press, part of a network of fringe organisations that were among America’s primary promoters of Holocaust denial. These ­people were convinced they had found the smoking gun, confirming their darkest suspicions about the government’s secret plots to start wars and control the ­public. A ­horrified Lewin embarked on a long legal battle to take back control of his work and its true, meaning.But meanwhile, the militia movement spreading across the US seized on Report from Iron Mountain, as fuel for its paranoid visions of imminent oppression at the hands of the ­one-world government and its black helicopters. And Lewin’s creation found its way to Hollywood. In JFK, Oliver Stone’s 1991 movie about the Kennedy assassination, the great revelation about why the president was assassinated hinges on a character repeating the hoax’s claims in the belief that they were disturbing truths.View image in fullscreenReport even spawned a secondary hoax: Silent Weapons for Quiet Wars. This ­purported to be the operations ­manual that helped the elite control its ­sheeple-civilians. This strange text was first popularised by the pioneering conspiracist Milton William Cooper, who ­published it in Behold a Pale Horse, his influential compendium of ­conspiracy theories. Cooper also included extracts from Report from Iron Mountain itself (and, horrifyingly, another hoax: that notorious antisemitic forgery The Protocols of the Elders of Zion). Silent Weapons has often been cited by arch ­conspiracist Alex Jones and has been invoked by “Q”, the ostensible government insider revered by the QAnon movement.Lewin and his colleagues had contrived their hoax so expertly that they inadvertently created “evidence” for a host of conspiracy theories. It could be used to explain everything from why wars end to the real reasons behind lockdown, from environmental regulations and terrorist attacks to the fiery end of a cult in Waco, Texas.The reasoning at work here is revealing. If something in Report chimes with what is really happening in the world, the conspiracist’s logic runs, that cannot be a coincidence. Rather, it exposes the secret motives that caused that reality. The ­principle here – a ­consistent fallacy of ­conspiracy theory – is that “nothing is accidental”. One online ­analysis of Report from Iron Mountain in 2014 even decided the fact Lewin later wrote a novel was an attempt to ­retrospectively create a cover ­identity so he could pretend Report was fiction too.And yet the fate of this all-too-successful hoax also suggests what we might need to do to ­counter this kind of thinking. In a political ­climate roiled by conspiracy ­theories and disinformation, the tale of Report from Iron Mountain is a warning about the ­consequences of taking your eye off the line between compelling stories and what we know to be true.Phil Tinline is the author of Ghosts of Iron Mountain: The Hoax That Duped America and Its Sinister Legacy, which will be published by Head of Zeus on 27 March. More

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      Trump’s USAID Cuts Halt Agent Orange Victims Program in Vietnam

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      Nearly 40 years after she was born with a malformed spine and misshapen limbs — most likely because her father was exposed to Agent Orange, the toxic chemical that the American military used during the Vietnam War — Nguyen Thi Ngoc Diem finally got some help from the United States.A project funded by U.S.A.I.D. gave her graphic design training in 2022 and helped her land a job. Even when the company closed a few months ago, she stayed hopeful: The same program for Agent Orange victims was due to deliver a new computer, or a small loan.I was the first to tell her that the support may never come; that President Trump had frozen U.S.A.I.D. funding and planned to fire nearly everyone associated with the humanitarian agency.“It makes no sense,” Ms. Diem told me, her tiny body curled into a wheelchair, below a crucifix on the wall. “Agent Orange came from the U.S. — it was used here, and that makes us victims,” she said. “A little support for people like us means a lot, but at the same time, it’s the U.S.’s responsibility.”Ms. Diem had been expecting a small U.S. loan to help her buy a more modern computer for her graphic design work.Linh Pham for The New York TimesMs. Diem uses a computer from 2011. It often freezes and shuts down unexpectedly.Linh Pham for The New York TimesWe are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More

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      ‘The world is watching’: 1968 protests set stage for Democratic convention

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      Sean Wilentz was in the convention hall when someone handed out copies of a news wire report. “I remember the first line,” he says. “It said, ‘The lid blew off of this convention city tonight.’” The article went on to describe chaos and bloodshed in Chicago as police clashed with protesters against the Vietnam war.Just 17 at the time, Wilentz and a couple of friends raced to the scene in downtown Chicago. “It was horrible. The cops were angry and didn’t like the kids and the kids were angry and didn’t like the cops. I saw a motorcycle cop go on a sidewalk and pin a kid against the wall. I was very scared.”View image in fullscreenMore than half a century has passed since a police riot scarred the Democratic national convention of 1968. On Monday Democrats return to Chicago with a spring in their step as they prepare to anoint Kamala Harris their presidential candidate. Yet some comparisons with the events of 56 years ago are irresistible.Just as in 1968, a would-be assassin has sought to change the course of political history. Just as in 1968, an incumbent president has stepped aside and a vice-president will gain the Democratic nomination without winning a single primary vote. And just as in 1968, protesters will gather to demonstrate their anger over US involvement in an unpopular war.Democrats are praying that the similarities end there. When the teargas cleared in Chicago, Hubert Humphrey, a self-styled “happy warrior”, emerged as the standard-bearer of a bitterly divided party. He went on to lose the election to Richard Nixon who, like fellow Republican Donald Trump, pushed a “law and order” message to exploit white voters’ fears and prejudices.View image in fullscreenMuch has changed since Trump secured the Republican nomination at the party’s own convention in Milwaukee last month. With 81-year-old Joe Biden fading in opinion polls, the Democratic campaign had come to resemble a death march. But his decision to quit the race and throw his weight behind Harris triggered an explosion of relief, self-belief and surging enthusiasm.Next week’s Democratic convention will put the capstone on the dramatic turnaround. Harris and running mate Tim Walz, who have been drawing huge crowds at rallies and millions of dollars in donations, will be formally nominated and deliver the most important speeches of their careers – probably resulting in a further polling bump.But the carefully stage-managed event – also featuring Biden, Barack Obama, Bill Clinton and A-list celebrities – could yet go off script. Thousands of pro-Palestinian protesters are expected to gather outside to demand that the US end military aid to Israel amid the ongoing war in Gaza, where the death toll has surpassed 40,000, according to the healthy ministry there.The March on the DNC, a coalition of more than 200 organisations from all over the US, plans to hold demonstrations on Monday and Thursday, the days when Biden and Harris are due to speak. Its website brands the president “Genocide Joe Biden” and warns: “Democratic party leadership switching out their presidential nominee does not wash the blood of over 50,000 Palestinians off their hands.”Although a sprawling security plan has been drawn up by federal, state and city governments, some activists have vowed a replay of 1968, when years of unrest over the American misadventure in Vietnam came to a head in Chicago. Then, as now, students took up the anti-war cause with campus protests, including at Columbia University in New York, where Hamilton Hall was occupied in both 1968 and 2024.View image in fullscreenThere was already political uncertainty after President Lyndon B Johnson closed a speech about the Vietnam war with the stunning announcement that he would not seek another term. Biden has similarly dropped out of the election race, albeit later in the cycle and for very different reasons.America was further shaken by the assassinations of Martin Luther King Jr and Robert Kennedy, who was running for the Democratic nomination, and by cities burning in protest at racial injustice. Last month Trump narrowly survived an attempt on his life at a campaign rally in Pennsylvania but one of his supporters was killed.Wilentz, now 73 and a history professor at Princeton University, recalled: “The thing about Chicago: this is the culmination of a crisis that had been building in American politics for five or six years and it was also feeding off the civil rights movement. There was a real feeling of desperation, that this disaster is going to continue. The politics were very fraught and furious and one was not necessarily thinking strategically.”In late August more than 10,000 protesters opposing the Vietnam war and assorted other causes held huge demonstrations near the convention site. Some threw red paint to simulate blood and occupied major roads to block traffic. The official response was brutal with widespread use of teargas, beatings and arrests by the police and national guard. The carnage was broadcast live on television and demonstrators chanted: “The whole world is watching.”View image in fullscreenEyewitness Taylor Pensoneau, 83, who was reporting for the St Louis Post-Dispatch newspaper, recalled: “The protesters were doing a lot to taunt the Chicago police. They were throwing bottles and stones at the police and they were calling them pigs and confronting them. It was a very incendiary situation.“It seemed inevitable that at some point the Chicago police were going to respond and eventually they did in a very forceful manner, swinging billy clubs and pushing protesters to the ground. A lot of people were getting hurt. It was a riot.”skip past newsletter promotionafter newsletter promotionThere was even mayhem inside the convention hall, including assaults on journalists. Supporters of anti-war candidates such as senator Eugene McCarthy clashed with supporters of Humphrey, who won the nomination with the backing of party elites and dared not defy Johnson over the war until much later.At first glance Humphrey appears to have little in common with Harris. But there is tonal echo. Humphrey had “The Happy Warrior” painted on his plane and, when first declaring his candidacy, remarked: “Here we are the way politics ought to be in America, the politics of happiness, politics of purpose, politics of joy.” Terms such as “happy warriors” and “politics of joy” have been widely applied to Harris and Walz.Such an upbeat approach could come over as tone deaf as children are dying in Gaza, according to Norman Solomon, national director of the progressive group RootsAction. He said: “I was 17 in 1968 and I remember it was like, what are you talking about, the politics of joy? Maybe you’re happy but the administration that you’re part of continues to massacre people on a large scale in Vietnam.“Harris is on an upswing with Walz and in terms of defeating Trump that’s good but the disconnect with people in Dearborn [home of the biggest Arab American community] or people who will be in the streets in Chicago next week is pretty severe. She’s talking politics of joy and Congress is voting the billions more for weapons. The US keeps helping to kill people in Gaza and she dispatches her national security adviser to say she’s absolutely against an arms embargo. It’s almost split screen.”Harris’s acceptance speech on Thursday night will be watched closely for clues that, unlike Humphrey at the convention, she is ready to put some clear daylight between herself and Biden, an ardent Zionist, on the Gaza issue. That could be crucial in persuading Arab American, Muslim and young voters to give her the benefit of the doubt.James Zogby, the founder and president of the Arab American Institute in Washington, said: “She was the first one to call for a ceasefire. She was the first one to call for Palestinian self-determination. She was the first one to use very powerful language about the devastation of Gaza and the suffering of the people there.“She’s been about as clear as you could be that there is a difference in her outlook on this. I’m not going to let you in on all of them but there are indications we’re getting that they do want to turn corners here. They’ve opened a door already in terms of language and policy will follow.”Zogby also doubts that there will be any repeat of the mayhem inside the 1968 convention hall. Of more than 4,000 delegates, only 30 are “uncommitted”, representing a grassroots voter coalition that has opposed Biden’s Gaza policy. This is “nowhere near what you would require to have any kind of floor demonstration”, he said.View image in fullscreen“If there’s a disruption, it would be a handful of people in sea of other delegates. It would not be 1968. Outside, on the other hand, is a different story because, even though many of the groups demonstrating intend to keep it civil and constructive, anytime you get something that large, it develops a dynamic all of its own.”The parallels with 1968 are undoubtedly striking. But the difference may prove more important. The Vietnam war and its draft affected far more Americans than the current conflict in Gaza. Few analysts believe that Gaza will have as much electoral significance, except perhaps in Michigan. Nixon would become embroiled in the Watergate scandal but did not threaten democracy as Trump does.Wilentz commented: “1968 was a very different time than anything I’ve ever seen in this country. There’s certain similarities between this year and that year in the sense that you have events happening very quickly and they seem traumatic. But nothing in comparison to what 68 felt like.” More

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      I remember the 1960s crackdowns against war protesters. This is a repeat | Robert Reich

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      I’ve been spending the last several weeks trying to find out what’s really going on with the campus protests.I’ve met with students at Berkeley, where I teach. I’ve visited with faculty at Columbia University. I’ve spoken by phone with young people and professors at many other universities.My conclusion: while protest movements are often ignited by many different things and attract an assortment of people with a range of motives, this one is centered on one thing: moral outrage at the slaughter of tens of thousands of innocent people – most of them women and children – in Gaza.To interpret these protests as anything else – as antisemitic or anti-Zionist or anti-American or pro-Palestinian – is to miss the essence of what’s going on and why.Most of the students and faculty I’ve spoken with found Hamas’s attack on October 7 odious. They also find Israel’s current government morally bankrupt, in that its response to Hamas’s attack has been disproportionate.Some protesters focus their anger on Israel, some on the Israeli government of Benjamin Netanyahu, some on Joe Biden for failing to stand up to Netanyahu, for giving Israel additional armaments, and for what they perceive as Biden’s patronizing response to the protests.Like any protest movement, the actions have attracted a few on the fringe. I’ve heard scattered reports of antisemitism, although I haven’t witnessed or heard anything that might be interpreted as antisemitic. In fact, a significant number of the protesters are Jewish.To describe the protesters as “pro-Palestinian” is also inaccurate. Most do not support Palestine as such; they do not know enough about the history of Israel and Palestine to pass moral judgment.But they have a deep and abiding sense that what is happening in Gaza is morally wrong, and that the United States is complicit in that immorality.Many tell me they are planning not to vote this coming November – a clear danger to Biden’s re-election campaign, which in turn increases the odds of a Trump presidency.When I tell them that a failure to vote for Biden is in effect a vote for Trump, they say they cannot in good conscience vote for either candidate.Quite a number tell me that “the lesser of two evils is still evil”. I tell them Trump would be far worse for the world – truly evil. Many remain unconvinced.I have sharp memories of the anti-Vietnam war demonstrations, in which I participated some 55 years ago.I remember being appalled at the unnecessary carnage in Vietnam. I was incensed that the first world, white and rich, was randomly killing people in the third world, mostly non-white and poor. As an American, I felt morally complicit.I was angry at college administrators who summoned police to clear protesters – using teargas, stun guns and mass arrests. The response only added fuel to the flames.The anti-Vietnam war movement became fodder for rightwing politicians like Richard Nixon, demanding “law and order”. The spectacle also appalled many non-college, working-class people who viewed the students as pampered, selfish, anti-American, unpatriotic.I vividly recall the anti war demonstrations at the 1968 Democratic convention in Chicago, and the brutality of the Chicago police and Illinois national guard – later described by the National Commission on the Causes and Prevention of Violence as a “police riot”.As the anti-war protesters chanted “The whole world is watching”, network television conveyed the riotous scene to what seemed like the whole world.I had spent months working for the anti-war presidential candidate Eugene McCarthy. The convention nominated Hubert Humphrey. That November, the nation voted in Richard Nixon as president.History, as it is said, doesn’t repeat itself. It only rhymes.The mistakes made at one point in time have an eerie way of re-emerging two generations later, as memories fade.
      Robert Reich, a former US secretary of labor, is a professor of public policy at the University of California, Berkeley, and the author of Saving Capitalism: For the Many, Not the Few and The Common Good. His newest book, The System: Who Rigged It, How We Fix It, is out now. He is a Guardian US columnist. His newsletter is at robertreich.substack.com More

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      Chuck Mawhinney, 74, Dies; Deadliest Sniper in Marine Corps History

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      He put the experience behind him after he returned from the Vietnam War. But fame finally caught up to him in the 1990s.Chuck Mawhinney, whose ability to creep through the dense jungle and looming elephant grass of South Vietnam and then wait for hours with his scoped rifle to pick off an enemy soldier made him the deadliest sniper in the history of the Marine Corps, died on Feb. 12 in Baker City, a town in the northeastern corner of Oregon. He was 74.His death was announced by Coles Funeral Home in Baker City. No further details were available.Mr. Mawhinney, who served in Vietnam from May 1968 to March 1970, had 106 confirmed kills and another 216 probable kills, averaging about four a week — more than the average company, which comprised about 150 soldiers.Among American military snipers, only Chris Kyle, a Navy SEAL who served in Iraq and had 160 confirmed kills, and Adelbert Waldron, an Army sniper during the Vietnam War with 109 kills, had higher numbers than Mr. Mawhinney.As a sniper, Mr. Mawhinney filled a number of roles. He would stay up all night with his rifle and night scope, watching the perimeter of an encampment for incursions. He would go out on patrol with other Marines, ready to support them if a firefight broke out. But mostly he and his spotter, a novice sniper who helped him identify targets, went out alone, looking for individual targets to kill as a way of sapping enemy morale.Most of his kills came slowly, a single shot from his bolt-action M40 after hours of waiting. But some came in bursts: On the night of Feb. 14, 1969, Mr. Mawhinney watched as a column of North Vietnamese soldiers crossed a shallow river near Da Nang, making their way toward a Marine encampment. He started firing, quickly but methodically, and in 30 seconds he had killed 16. The rest retreated.He claimed no special talent as a sniper, just the willingness to put in endless hours of practice. But he also demonstrated an unusual ability to tolerate grueling hours of stillness hiding in the jungle, alert for targets while bugs and snakes crawled over him.We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More