If you haven't seen this post before (it was posted on this day last year and this day the year before that), it's a reminder that protesting a wrong your government is doing is legal - it is part of our democracy. And when 100,000 people do it, as they did on this day in 1970, it sends a message.

As an outgrowth to the violence that met the anti-War protests at Kent and Jackson State Universities only a few days earlier, a mass demonstration and protest to the Vietnam War and our incursion into Cambodia on April 30th was organized and a march on Washington was held on May 9th.

It was the biggest demonstration of its kind, and the most peaceful. This was the demonstration made somewhat famous by the presence of President Nixon, walking through the crowd unannounced and without Secret Service in the middle of the night, talking with protesters.

News reports remarked Nixon thought the exchange with the demonstrators was "interesting". At a time when the word "interesting" could either mean enthusiasm, revulsion or the Chinese Curse - it was hard to pin down exactly what Nixon meant. But suffice to say, this demonstration brought mass opposition to the Vietnam War very much to the forefront.

Here is a special broadcast as presented by NBC News on May 9,1970.

I am always fascinated to listen to assessments of dissent from the past. How much it resembles the present, how often it was distorted in the past - how spot-on or miles-off the observations were.

Marya Mannes, a name that's all but forgotten now, was a writer, journalist and social commentator who mixed caustic with clever, often with keen insights and sometimes mixed results.

In this commentary, which came from the same Newsfront broadcast as yesterday's Milton Friedman entry (May 5,1968), she talks about the then-current state of dissent in our country. The peaceful versus violent protests that were sweeping the U.S. at the time (end destined to get much worse as the year went on), and where youth was fitting into the picture.

Bear in mind that Mannes was born in 1904, and at the time of this commentary she was 64. So there is a goodly amount of "generation gap" to sift through. But the thing that I noticed, and something many people were concerned with at the time, was the seeming co-opting of peaceful anti-war protest by a violent minority.

Sound familiar? This was something that plagued the Peace Movement in the 1960's, and something which has confronted just about every movement of this kind throughout history. The strong desire to keep the Occupy Movement peaceful has been in large part a desire not to fall into the patterns of the past - breaking with the protest movements that have gone on before and trying something new. Which is why OWS has been successful and continues to gain momentum - not because of it's violence on the parts of the protesters, but because of the peace and non-violence of the protesters. The violence has been perpetrated by the Police, and not a reaction of the police to violent actions. Of course, our mainstream media has chosen to focus, as it always has, on violence because it largely feels that chaos is more attractive to viewers.

Every movement has had its fair share of malcontents, chaos merchants and infiltrators. There are people who simply want to disrupt and destroy for no other reason than that they can.They have been largely isolated and shunned by the peaceful majority and that most likely will continue in the coming weeks and months.

But it hasn't always been that way. And this commentary by a respected member of the Fourth Estate gives some idea of what people were thinking at the time.

Reference points are always good to have now and then.

In May 1970, with our invasion of Cambodia, the protests and deaths at Kent and Jackson State, opposition to our involvement in Southeast Asia hit an all-time high, and calls for ending our seemingly endless and pointless military engagement in Vietnam grew very loud.

On May 12, NBC aired a broadcast of a discussion with five Senators who were in support of Amendment Number 609, of The Amendment To End The War.

The Senators taking part in the discussion were: Sen. George McGovern (D- S. Dakota), Sen. Harold Hughes (D-Iowa), Sen. Mark Hatfield (R-Oregon), Sen. Frank Church (D-Idaho) and Sen. Charles Goodell (R-N.Y.).

Interesting that it took this long to get to the point where an Amendment was introduced. Even more interesting that it was so popular on both sides of the isle.

Yes, those things did happen in the old days . . . .

Here is the complete broadcast as it happened on May 12, 1970.

Even though the fundraiser is over and the emergency has been met, your support is always needed. So if you haven't yet and feel inclined, I cannot thank you enough to help keep the Archive and Newstalgia up and running.

So ending up this Memorial day, it only seems fitting to have it close with Robert Wyatt and his unforgettable version of the Elvis Costello Classic, Shipbuilding, written in response to the Falkland Islands War in 1982.

Wyatt, founding member of The Soft Machine and the primary force behind a number of other groups from the 1960's onwards, was one of the key figures in the early Progressive Rock movement. Owing to an accident which left him unable to play drums, he has continued to write, produce, sing, play keyboards and has a string of great albums to his credit, in addition to numerous collaborations with everyone from Bjork to Roger Waters.

It's this version of Shipbuilding that is so poignant and the one that ranks as probably one of the best Anti-War songs of the last 30 years. The sentiment is timeless.

And so is Robert Wyatt.

In the wake of Anti-War demonstrations which saw the arrest of numerous protesters and the jailing of many notable figures in the Peace movement, Dr. Martin Luther King took time from his schedule to lend support to the protesters and to address a crowd staging a vigil outside Santa Rita Prison on December 14, 1967. This tape was part of a broadcast narrated by Colin Edwards of Pacifica Radio and was aired on January 14, 1968.

Dr. Martin Luther King: “There can be no justice without peace and there can be no peace without justice.”

King saw injustice as injustice, not as a list of fashionable protests to sample; one from column A and one from column B. It was Dr. King who introduced people to the fact that conscience was universal. It's often fallen on deaf ears, but it hasn't been forgotten.

(What got Kent and Jackson State started - Invasion of Cambodia, 1970)

When Richard Nixon campaigned for President in 1968, he loudly and repeatedly asserted he had a plan to end the war in Vietnam. When news came out that we had invaded Cambodia, with no warning, no knowledge and no press on April 29th of 1970, it was largely seen as a betrayal of a pledge to end the war in Southeast Asia (they didn't call him Tricky Dick for nothing) and we were doomed to stay in an endless war forever.

It was, for all intents and purposes, the straw that broke the camel's back. We were lied to again, and it wasn't going to wash.

Read statement from The Pentagon: “The action is a necessary and effective measure to save American and other free world lives and to strengthen the Vietnamization program”.

This clip comes from the initial news reports of the invasion on the 29th. Nixon's statement would come a day later on the 30th.

But by that time the damage had been done and the series of events that led to Kent State (and Jackson State a week later), would begin their inevitable gallop towards destiny. Contrary to what revisionists may say, this was an act of anger from betrayal by people, for whom it was the majority, wanted a pointless war to end.