Thursday, October 02, 2003
Former Weatherman terrorist offers peace strategy
LOOKING AHEAD by Wally Dobelis
The Weather Underground, a documentary movie by Sam Green and Bill Siegel, was opening in Great Barrington last month, and Mark Rudd, the leader of the anti-Vietnam War group Students for a Democratic Society (SDS), who in April 1968 shut down the Columbia University campus , occupied five buildings and held the Dean captive, was the spokesman. He was interviewed on WAMC, the Northeast Public Radio. Although surface repentant, his attitude, as well as those of other self-righteous American ex-terrorists, needs to be put in context.
Rudd in 1968 was 20, a revolutionary, who a year later took away the 300-plus SDS campus units from the moderate “praxis axis” Michiganite leaders and turned the organization into the “action faction” Weathermen (named after Bob Dylan’s song about not needing a weatherman to know which way the wind blows). Their politics was to turn it into a Communist National Liberation revolutionary group, on the model of Cuba, China and Vietnam, and overthrow the US government. Seriously! Rudd, who today is a pacifist remedial math teacher in a New Mexico community college, with family and kids, terms it a temporary madness, and expresses his sorrow and apologies. Although he still persists in calling the US an imperialist country, his solution for the protesters is to take the high ground, and not harm people nor property while protesting. . The Weathermen set bombs in a US Capitol mailroom and NYC police headquarters. Three of them died in a bomb-making accident in a West 11th Street townhouse, and the two survivors - Kathy Boudin (daughter of the late leftist defense lawyer Leonard Boudin) and Cathy Wilkerson - and two dozen others, including Bernardine Dohrn and Bill Ayers (both now distinguished professor in Chicago; Ayers, son of a ConEd chairman, is still proud of stealing wallets for id and setting two dozen explosions), Brian Flanagan (now NY bar owner) and Rudd spent seven years underground, living in communes, working as laborers, landscapers and dock hands (Rudd’s choices) before surrendering. The latter bunch escaped jail terms, through sheer luck, because of illegal acts committed by Conintelpro, their FBI captor, but Boudin and Wilkerson have been continuing to serve stiff prison sentences for the murders of two policemen and a guard [Boudin, an AIDS volunteer working with women, was released mid-September, after 22 years in jail, despite continuing police protests; she will continue hospital work]. The bombs they built had been to kill US army officers and their dates at a Fort Dix dance..
To put the times in perspective, 1968-9 were years of crises. The Cold War and Soviet/Chinese Communist successes had moved the US into direct counter-actions, to block the “domino effect.” We had been in Vietnam since 1955, fighting and bleeding in limited engagements, and drafting our young into a war with a no-win strategy. The Tet offensive started in January 1968, and hundreds of Americans began to die weekly in bloody battles, with 500,000 of our troops eventually committed to the war. In April came the Rudd uprising and the murder of Dr. Martin Luther King in Memphis, followed by violent demonstrations in over a hundred black neighborhoods. In June Andy Warhol was shot, and Robert F Kennedy, a presidential candidate who promised to end the war, was killed in LA. In August the democratic Presidential convention in Chicago, a Herbert Humphrey- Eugene McCarthy- McGovern face-off, brought forth demonstrations and street battles between the police and the anti-war protesters, led by SDS and Youth International Party (Yippie) spokesmen. These actions culminated with the September 1969 trials of the Chicago 7 before Judge Hoffman, reported in daily sound bites, and Dave Dellinger, Abbie Hoffman, Jerry Rubin and Bobby Seale (head of the Black Panthers, another revolutionary group) went to jail. Protesting Weathermen staged their Days of Rage, blowing up a statue and smashing stores and cars.
The1969 Prague Spring, Soviet tanks subduing Czech democracy seekers, heightened the US resolve to counter the Communists. The Woodstock and Altamont concerts provided focal points for the protesters, as did the shootout death of Fred Hammond, leader of the Black Panthers. The senseless Manson Family murders heightened the aura of violence and anger. Of the various protest groups, Lyndon LaRouche’s left-then-right (Fascist) National Caucus of Labor Committees has survived, and the leader who is spending his post-jail years in Germany, claims to be a viable candidate (Democrat!) for US Presidency in 2004. The purposeless Vietnam war was eventually ended, by our withdrawal.
The revival of the interest in the 1968 anti-war thinking should be balanced with reminders of the 9/11 events that evolved the US into the attacker role in Iraq. Once more it is noted that the thinkers of the Rudd persuasion, who use the premiere of the documentary to attribute the Iraq war to US imperialism, deliberately omit the 9/11 terrorist attack from the equation. They remind me of the so-called Socialists who called a meeting on Union Square shortly after the WTC destruction to protest US imperialism. These unregenerate relics of the 1968 terror really have to seriously look for a weatherman to find out which way the wind is blowing now, 35 years later.
The author thanks Andrew O’Hehir and Salon for research material.
The Weather Underground, a documentary movie by Sam Green and Bill Siegel, was opening in Great Barrington last month, and Mark Rudd, the leader of the anti-Vietnam War group Students for a Democratic Society (SDS), who in April 1968 shut down the Columbia University campus , occupied five buildings and held the Dean captive, was the spokesman. He was interviewed on WAMC, the Northeast Public Radio. Although surface repentant, his attitude, as well as those of other self-righteous American ex-terrorists, needs to be put in context.
Rudd in 1968 was 20, a revolutionary, who a year later took away the 300-plus SDS campus units from the moderate “praxis axis” Michiganite leaders and turned the organization into the “action faction” Weathermen (named after Bob Dylan’s song about not needing a weatherman to know which way the wind blows). Their politics was to turn it into a Communist National Liberation revolutionary group, on the model of Cuba, China and Vietnam, and overthrow the US government. Seriously! Rudd, who today is a pacifist remedial math teacher in a New Mexico community college, with family and kids, terms it a temporary madness, and expresses his sorrow and apologies. Although he still persists in calling the US an imperialist country, his solution for the protesters is to take the high ground, and not harm people nor property while protesting. . The Weathermen set bombs in a US Capitol mailroom and NYC police headquarters. Three of them died in a bomb-making accident in a West 11th Street townhouse, and the two survivors - Kathy Boudin (daughter of the late leftist defense lawyer Leonard Boudin) and Cathy Wilkerson - and two dozen others, including Bernardine Dohrn and Bill Ayers (both now distinguished professor in Chicago; Ayers, son of a ConEd chairman, is still proud of stealing wallets for id and setting two dozen explosions), Brian Flanagan (now NY bar owner) and Rudd spent seven years underground, living in communes, working as laborers, landscapers and dock hands (Rudd’s choices) before surrendering. The latter bunch escaped jail terms, through sheer luck, because of illegal acts committed by Conintelpro, their FBI captor, but Boudin and Wilkerson have been continuing to serve stiff prison sentences for the murders of two policemen and a guard [Boudin, an AIDS volunteer working with women, was released mid-September, after 22 years in jail, despite continuing police protests; she will continue hospital work]. The bombs they built had been to kill US army officers and their dates at a Fort Dix dance..
To put the times in perspective, 1968-9 were years of crises. The Cold War and Soviet/Chinese Communist successes had moved the US into direct counter-actions, to block the “domino effect.” We had been in Vietnam since 1955, fighting and bleeding in limited engagements, and drafting our young into a war with a no-win strategy. The Tet offensive started in January 1968, and hundreds of Americans began to die weekly in bloody battles, with 500,000 of our troops eventually committed to the war. In April came the Rudd uprising and the murder of Dr. Martin Luther King in Memphis, followed by violent demonstrations in over a hundred black neighborhoods. In June Andy Warhol was shot, and Robert F Kennedy, a presidential candidate who promised to end the war, was killed in LA. In August the democratic Presidential convention in Chicago, a Herbert Humphrey- Eugene McCarthy- McGovern face-off, brought forth demonstrations and street battles between the police and the anti-war protesters, led by SDS and Youth International Party (Yippie) spokesmen. These actions culminated with the September 1969 trials of the Chicago 7 before Judge Hoffman, reported in daily sound bites, and Dave Dellinger, Abbie Hoffman, Jerry Rubin and Bobby Seale (head of the Black Panthers, another revolutionary group) went to jail. Protesting Weathermen staged their Days of Rage, blowing up a statue and smashing stores and cars.
The1969 Prague Spring, Soviet tanks subduing Czech democracy seekers, heightened the US resolve to counter the Communists. The Woodstock and Altamont concerts provided focal points for the protesters, as did the shootout death of Fred Hammond, leader of the Black Panthers. The senseless Manson Family murders heightened the aura of violence and anger. Of the various protest groups, Lyndon LaRouche’s left-then-right (Fascist) National Caucus of Labor Committees has survived, and the leader who is spending his post-jail years in Germany, claims to be a viable candidate (Democrat!) for US Presidency in 2004. The purposeless Vietnam war was eventually ended, by our withdrawal.
The revival of the interest in the 1968 anti-war thinking should be balanced with reminders of the 9/11 events that evolved the US into the attacker role in Iraq. Once more it is noted that the thinkers of the Rudd persuasion, who use the premiere of the documentary to attribute the Iraq war to US imperialism, deliberately omit the 9/11 terrorist attack from the equation. They remind me of the so-called Socialists who called a meeting on Union Square shortly after the WTC destruction to protest US imperialism. These unregenerate relics of the 1968 terror really have to seriously look for a weatherman to find out which way the wind is blowing now, 35 years later.
The author thanks Andrew O’Hehir and Salon for research material.
# posted by Wally Dobelis @ 5:15 PM 
