In the middle of all the propagandist furor over Bill Ayres, maybe a little background wouldn’t be amiss.
Martin Luther King, Jr. and Bobby Kennedy had been assassinated. Chicago police had brutalized demonstrators and media at the Democratic Convention. Black Panthers Fred Hampton and Mark Clark were murdered in a Chicago police raid. George Jackson was shot by prison guards. The war dragged on with hundreds of thousands of young Americans being shipped out to the jungle as Cong-fodder. The Weathermen formed as a splinter group believing that only violent action would grab the nation’s attention to the ongoing horror. Later, after a nod and a wink from Richard Nixon in a speech referring to anti-war protesters as “campus bums”, Ohio National Guardsmen opened fire on unarmed demonstrators on the Kent State campus, killing four, while two more were slain at Jackson State. The Weathermen – named for Dylan’s line, “You don't need a weatherman to know which way the wind blows," formed as a splinter group, believing that only violent action would grab the nation’s attention. In contrast to the official body count – which, in addition to those already mentioned, included tens of thousand of Vietnamese civilians killed in saturation bombing raids in which John McCain participated – the Weather Underground caused no fatalities, except when three Weatherpeople blew themselves up in the basement of a Manhattan townhouse. While not wholly supported by the counterculture, their actions were at least understandable to many of us in those terrible times when it seemed that Nixon was prepared to prolong the Vietnam war as long as it suited his historical vanity. As Weatherperson Naomi Jaffe put it…
“We felt that doing nothing in a period of repressive violence is itself a form of violence. That's really the part that I think is the hardest for people to understand. If you sit in your house, live your white life and go to your white job, and allow the country that you live in to murder people and to commit genocide, and you sit there and you don't do anything about it, that's violence.”
Ultimately, after nearly two decades underground Bill Ayers turned himself in 1980, Charges were dropped, and he was rehbilitated.
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12 comments:
At last, some fucking perspective!
This may be a terribly wrong thing for me to say, but I always thought that the Weather Underground were pretty cool (take a look around, see which way the wind blow). Seem to remember they changed their name from 'men' to 'Underground' in recognition of their large number of female members.
"This may be a terribly wrong thing for me to say." Could that in itself be a miserable bloodsy sign of the time we're living through?
"It had to be the rulers
They wanted law and order
And they got rich on wanting protection for the status quo
They wanted junkies
They wanted attica
They wanted kent state
They wanted war in indochina....
It had to be capitalism...."
Ginsberg
But when capitalism fails and bellicosity don't pull you through...
"Candidate Sarah
The peasants call her the goddess of doom
She speaks bad English
And she denies access into her room
And you're so disgusted
And careful not to go to her too soon
And she steals your vote
And leaves you howling at the moon"
But seriously, I was going through the lyric and here's what iI found:
"You must pick up one or the other
Though neither of them are to be what they claim"
The Weather Underground caused no fatalities only because they were incompetent.
Ominous words from the past - in a Mike Wallace interview, Aldous Huxley talks about the "enemies of freedom" with eerie precision considering today's world (and the political anxieties of the coming election):
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QFj62ugl2DE
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YW6nu0Iy9-4
Why isn't TV like this anymore..
what lefty said. thanks, mick.
Re: "This may be a terribly wrong thing for me to say" - Haaxd is right to take me to task for this apparently craven remark, but it isn't what I meant.
Mick says that Weathermen / Underground didn't kill anyone, and Mr Winkler says that this was because they were incompetent. I think that this is arguable, and that Mick is approaching the subject witn somewhat rose-tinted specs.
The Weathermen may not have killed anyone during their 'Days of Rage' period, but the spirit seems to have been willing. Remnants of the Weathermen did indeed prove to be killers subsequently, shooting three dead in the October 1981 robbery on a Brinks truck in Nyack.
Is it right to fully support any revolutionary group prepared to set off bombs and kill third parties? I personally don't think so - it may indeed be "terribly wrong". That's what I was cack-handledly trying to get across in my earlier scribbling, which Haaxd commented upon.
This is the debate that went on all through the Vietnam era.
Gandhi or Che?
MLK or The Panthers?
Unfortunately it tended to absolve-by-ignoring an adversary – the US government under LBJ and Nixon – that was prepared kill tens of thousands of American kids and million or more Vietnamese of all ages in support of nothing more than their capitalist ideology and the pathetic domino theory.
Cheers, Mick - glad you're still listening, and I appreciate what you're saying. But I stand by what I said, and still don't think it's too great killing security guards and (unwitting) police officers. But I'm just back from the pub and ain't thinking too straight anyway. G'night.
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