Portside

It may be risky politically, but Congress has a responsibility to act

50 years after the infamous demonstrations, participants and historians reflect. What lessons does the battle of Chicago have for us today? We asked three veterans of 1968 and one historian of the period to revisit this 50-year-old debate.

The Republicans stuck with their president, right up to the end.

"I would torment myself for another 20 years trying to 'reform,' never quite able to shake the voice of Billy Graham promising me eternal damnation"

On Sunday, a statue of the democratic hero, Orlando Letelier, was unveiled on Washington’s stately Massachusetts Avenue, near the spot where Letelier was killed in a 1976 car bombing — an assassination ordered by Chilean dictator Augusto Pinochet. Ronni Karpen Moffitt, a 25-year-old American co-worker whom Letelier had been giving a ride, also was killed in the attack, which became a rallying point for human rights advocates.

"To see on a piece of paper, for example, the president of the United States ordering the C.I.A. to preemptively overthrow a democratically elected president in Chile is stunning..." Documented the U.S. role to overthrow the democratic government of Chile, and to support the fascist junta.

On March 16, 1968 American soldiers murdered 407 unarmed men, women, and children in My Lai. The same day, in the nearby village of My Khe, another unit of the same division murdered an estimated 97 additional Vietnamese civilians. I and my fellow Marines routinely killed, maimed, and abused Vietnamese on a near-daily basis, destroying homes, fields, crops, and livestock with every weapon available to us, from rifles and grenades to heavy artillery and napalm.

Without exception, Trump's foreign policy picks are members of the far right: aggressive, Islamophobic, and contemptuous of diplomacy.