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Our 1975 trial ended in defeat after Wfteen weeks in federal court. We won a retrial on appeal, and returned to Cleveland with high hopes of prevailing, but before the trial got under way we were urged by both the judge and our lawyers to accept an out-ofcourt settlement. The proposal angered us; the case wasn’t about money. We wanted to clear our children’s names and to win a judicial ruling that the governor and the National Guard were responsible for the deaths and injuries. The defendants o¤ered to issue an apology. The wording was debated for days, and the Wnal result was an innocuous document stating that “in retrospect, the tragedy . . . should not have occurred” and that “better ways must be found to deal with such confrontations.” Reluctantly, we accepted the settlement when we were told this might be the only way that Dean would get at least some of the funds to meet his lifelong medical expenses. He was awarded $350,000, the parents of each of the dead students received $15,000, and the remainder, in varying amounts, was divided among the wounded. Lawyers’ fees amounted to $50,000, and $25,000 was allotted to expenses, for a total of $675,000. Since then we have lived through Watergate and Richard Nixon’s resignation, crises in the Middle East and in Central America, and the Iran-contra a¤air. To most people, Kent State is just one of those traumatic events that occurred during a tumultuous time. To me, it’s the one experience I will never recover from. —Elaine Holstein is the mother of Je¤ Miller, who was killed by the Ohio National Guard at Kent State. Not a Just War, Just a War Erwin Knoll june 1991 Last fall, when the U.S. government was assembling more than a half million U.S. troops in Saudi Arabia for what was sure to be a bloody war against Iraq, I participated in a panel discussion of the Persian Gulf crisis at a small church-aªliated liberal arts college. The speaker who preceded me was the school’s chaplain, who delivered a learned and, it seemed to me, interminable disquisition on the theory of just and unjust wars. He quoted Thomas Aquinas and other sages, and concluded, after much rumination, that American military intervention in the Persian Gulf would not meet the traditional criteria of a just war. I was impatient because I could have been marching that very night, back home, in a militant street demonstration against the coming war. I wasn’t at all sure that I had done the right thing by leaving town to add my comments to an abstract, academic discourse. The situation called for protest, not chatter. Knoll / Not a Just War, Just a War 255 What’s more, I was simply bored with the whole “just-war” argument, having rehashed it so many times, over the years, in my own mind. So when it came my turn to speak, I heard myself saying in a tone verging on incivility, “There’s no such thing as a just war,” and adding for good measure, “Never has been. Never will be.” To my surprise, nobody in the college audience—not even the chaplain—challenged my summary dismissal of centuries of “just-war” doctrine. But when a frontpage editorial in the March issue of The Progressive repeated the assertion that “there is no such thing as a just war,” there was swift and angry reaction from many readers. One irate correspondent characterized the statement as “mush” and asked, “What about the Vietnamese, the Sandinistas, the nations victimized by the Nazis? Weren’t their wars just?” Another asserted, “I do not remember seeing before in your magazine such a statement of a principled paciWst position. For example, you have not adopted this position in regard to wars waged by progressive forces against the United States and its allies in El Salvador, Southern Africa, and Vietnam. . . . Your new-found paciWsm has the ring of inconsistency.” One letter-writer demanded to know how I could tell a Salvadoran teenager that he had no right to take up arms against his government’s oppressive army. Still another found the renunciation of the just-war concept “self-righteous, condescending, and imperious,” and urged me to “tell it to the countless number of thoughtful people who, through the ages, have agonized over the question of just war. Or . . . to the fallen black soldiers of...

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