---------- Forwarded message ----------
Date: Thu, 14 Feb 2002 13:52:24 -0800
From: radtimes <resist@best.com>
Subject: Discussion: 'Fugitive Days' and movement history
From: Portside
Discussion: 'Fugitive Days' and movement history
Subject: Weather Underground
I was part of the SDS "Old Guard" of the early 60s,
socialist, if not social-democratic, pacifistic, if not
pacifist. Marxoid, if not Marxist. I have to say that I
was horrified at the time by the Weather Underground,
and I remain horrified to this day. It seemed like a
total negation of Port Huron to me.
I was never clear enough in my own thinking to decide
if I believed in nonviolence as a way of life, or as a
tactic. I sure admired the "way of life" people, but
didn't consider myself as strong or as principled. The
tactic of nonviolence, however, seemed rock-solid to
me, and certainly had to be a weapon in the arsenal of
the activist.
I have never understood how people who claimed to have
read Marx, Lenin, Che, Mao and Ho Chi Minh could have
adopted terrorism in the context of the U.S. in the
60s. It looked to me like the first five volumes of
Lenin's Collected Works were pretty much totally
devoted to denouncing and polemicising against
terrorism as totally counterproductive. Maybe I misread
Lenin, but that was the strong impression I carried
with me.
I remember when Che gave a press conference in New
York, and journalists asked him if he thought guerilla
warfare would work in the U.S. Che's surprised response
was "AQUI?"
Even Mao and Ho stressed the need for the patient
political organization of masses of people. Mao's
famous comment that "power comes from the barrel of a
gun" does not do justice to his concept of
organization.
I can't claim that I was morally superior to anybody--I
made plenty of mistakes of my own. (CPUSA membership is
still more of a blot on one's record than membership in
the Weather Underground, I discovered at an SDS
reunion.)
The Weather Underground and its camp followers could
have studied the "underground" experiences of the CPUSA
to learn what a useless expenditure of energy such
tactics were. The CPUSA to its credit, did not advocate
violence whatever else it might have done. (That did
not stop it from justifying violence, nor me, either,
from time to time.)
I think Bill Ayres and Bernadine Dorhn are fine people,
who have made exemplary careers in helping people since
they "surfaced." I am glad to know both of them. I
think, in light of 9-11, they are being scapegoated to
a certain extent. And while, I agree with vigorous
criticism, we should bear in mind that others would
gladly substitute them for Bin-Ladn.
James H. Williams
2666 E. 73 St., apt. 10E
Chicago, IL 60649
(773) 734-0155
(773) 734-0162 fax
===
Subject: Re: 'Fugitive Days'
<< Two months later state's attorney's police murdered
Fred Hampton. Of course, the Weatherpeople can't be
held responsible for this tragedy. But they helped set
the stage by provoking the cops and by backing up the
false assertion that law and order was collapsing. >>
I'll let the rest of all this pass -- but the author of
the above lines owes us an apology for strange
assertion that the Weather people set the stage for the
Hampton murder by provoking cops and asserting that law
and order was collapsing. Law and Order did collapse in
Chicago the year before the Hampton killing, during the
Democratic Convention and then again during the
Conspiracy Trial frame-up that was going on when the
Hampton murder took place. (And what better proof of
that dramatic collapse than this state sanctioned
murder?) The FBI/Chicago cop's lethal interest in the
Panthers was based on the Panthers theory and practice
and had nothing to do with the Weather people's
posturing, actions or rhetoric. Finally, the Black
Panthers were quite divided about the Weathermen and
their actions. Hampton was a critic and Eldridge
Cleaver was a booster.
Stew Albert
Stew Albert
stewa@aol.com
Visit my web page:
http://hometown.aol.com/stewa/stew.html
Stew Albert's Yippie Reading Room
===
Subject: Re: 'Fugitive Days'
I thought the weatherpeople were out of their minds in
l969, and nothing that has happened since has given me
reason to change that conviction.
Nothing they did shortened the war by so much as five
minutes or advanced the cause of social justice one
inch . On the contrary, their self-indulgent violence
and clownish antics (remember "jailbreaks,' when
weatherwomen would run bare-breasted through a high
school?) probably alienated a lot of potential support
for anti-war and left activities.
All their ideas were stupid, and so was their practice.
Following "third world" leadership in practice meant
robbing banks with black criminals, fetishizing
'action" meant guilt-tripping everyone who didn't want
to get naked or blow things up, etc., thinking the
revolution was around the corner and that they were its
catalyst was just a lot of macho posturing combined
with extreme tunnel vision. They were less a movement
than a cult, really.
They owe the left a big apology, not more protestations
of their good intentions. MOST people have good
intentions.
Katha Pollitt
===
Subject: Re: 'Fugitive Days'
Ethan,
I appreciate the honesty of your observations below. It
looks like you've come to some kind of understanding.
I remember those days well. I was active with CORE in
the early 60's, joined SDS when Paul Potter was pres.,
but was most active with The Resistance doing anti-
draft and anti-war stuff. I remember visiting Chicago
in '68 and coming away with the feeling that those
folks were just plain nuts, angry, looking for a fight.
I looked at the Days of Rage as an adolescent tantrum;
I felt the same way, of course, but America didn't
really feel ripe for any kind of revolution. Venceremos
wouldn't let me go cut sugar cane in Cuba in '69
because I was "politically unreliable." They were
right.
I left the country in '75 after doing a bit of jail
time, spent a couple of years looking around the
planet, came back with an appreciation of just how
great of a country this is, and how lucky I am to live
here. You are, too.
Politics isn't exactly a science. Whether an act is
revolutionary or adventurist, reactionary, provincial,
Custeristic (a new one on me...) or any other tortured
adjective is for history to judge, and it probably
won't speak with a single voice. But I do know that
America isn't the Enemy of the People, the Great Satan,
or any kind of monster. It's done some terrible things
in the world, much more good than any nation in
history. People all over the world listen to our music,
wear our t-shirts, eat our junk food, enjoy our movies
and tv shows, love our motorcycles, and not at the
point of a gun. Most wish they could live like us,
many, many would like to live here. For better and for
worse, it is the US that is the revolutionary vanguard.
Never has freedom and prosperity been so widely spread
as in our country today. There's a lot that needs
fixing, but to hate America is to hate the human race.
===
Subject: Re: 'Fugitive Days'
Ethan:
Your response to Crawford and your timely recap of what
the Weather folks actually said, believed and did were
right on the money.
Irwin Silber
===
Subject: Re: 'Fugitive Days' Ethan Young wrote:
> From their first appearance in June of that
> year, I was attracted to the Weatherman faction,
> first of all, because they seemed to have no designs
> on other > movement groups - unlike Progressive
> Labor, who raided and split SDS, or Young Socialist
> Alliance, who had taken over the Student Mobilization
> Committee.
Just for the record: it was the SDS leadership who
split SDS, not Progressive Labor. At the '69 convention
PL forces argued _against_ the split, while Bernadine
Dohrn and the rest led the walk-out, "expelling" those
who did not "walk" with them.
Again, not only PL, but many other groups, including
the CPUSA, IS, SWP, and others, too, joined SDS. If PL
"raided" SDS, so did all the rest. IMO, this is simply
anti-communist language.
Grover Furr
===
Subject: Re: 'Fugitive Days'
Ethan - Excellent response. I was around then and
remember well what we thought of the Weather People's
antics and how they hurt our organizing efforts (I was
in a different group then, of course, different times.)
Thanks.
Nancy Oden,
Green Party USA
===
Subject: Re: 'Fugitive Days' -- an exchange Portside-
This discussion brings back certain youthful memories.
I was a fairly early SDS member, and remember being
impressed by many of the people I met at Pine Hill (the
second national conference where they cut their ties to
LID, etc.). It seemed the organization, although beset
by many tendencies and overly loquacious individuals,
was destined to find some kind of a path to a renewed
domestic socialist movement. But later in the sixties,
tendencies divided and multiplied, some became
negative, and those trying to get at the roots came up
with both complex and imaginary results. I had left SDS
by the time most of this happened, but do remember some
antics of PL and Weatherman (and other even crazier)
splinters and factions. I (and many of the people in
the "movement" I knew at the time) considered them not
just wrong-headed, but more than somewhat suspicious.
After all, if they weren't paid to do and say what they
did and said, they certainly accomplished much mischief
for free.
Why dilate further on what developed into essentially
negative and disappointing phenomena and personalities?
Early SDS, in spite of its attempt to cut umbilical
cords to right wing social democracy, was somewhat
blinded by prevailing cold war conceptions to lessons
of the historic world workingclass movement. The later
SDS was surely the inevitable outcome to ignored
experience.
Left student movements historically have been
auxiliaries to something else much larger. SDS was an
auxiliary without the something else, a moon without an
earth to orbit.
David Ecklein
===
Subject: Fugitive Days
It is difficult to develop a useful historical
perspective, attempting to understand with backward
glances a context that has all but dissolved while
trying to restrain emotions that once shaken rise so
readily to the surface. What needs to be disrupted is
the unitary narrative imposed by those who fashion our
cultural and historical visions, distorting it to meet
their various purposes. The Weather experiment has been
caricaturized as a political rock concert gone bad, a
youthful drug fest that took its cadre into a frenzy of
mindless action; a phenomena that can only be
understood by evoking all the old totems: youthful
abandonment and rebellion, seditious liberalism and the
arrogance of privilege that produced a hiatus of
insanity in an otherwise stable and self-correcting
system. This is the 60s, now buried under layers of
conformity, distortion and self-serving ideology.
There are shards of truth in this broken vision of the
past. There were many fiascoes: Weatherman, party
building, industrializing, and vanguardism. So many
missteps often packaged in macho posturing, demagoguery
and competing formulaic recipes and submerged moralisms
and hypocrisy that decimated and demoralized the left.
One of my favorites was the RCP condemnation of Black
Panthers for seeking asylum outside the country when,
it was argued, the natural place to seek protection was
in the heart of the Black community itself. Years
afterwards the sands shifted and the RCP leader fled to
Paris.
We all stand on our piece of historical debris, painful
as well as exuberant, from which we filter our memories
and base our current interpretations of the past. I was
a member of the Worker Student Alliance that most
people relegate to the PL (Progressive Labor) political
sinkhole. Ironically, there were a number of us who
were sympathetic to Weather politics inside WSA. A
group--to which I belonged--was quietly purged in the
early 70s. Many of us in the Movement believed that the
time had come to fight the war of attrition. We were
all wrong. Student politics had not prepared us to
adopt a long view from which to build a stable and
self-generating left alternative free of dogmatism and
capable of utilizing the creative energy and resistance
that fueled the left during it best days, when it was
still relevant and spoke in a popular idiom that
captured the attention of thousands of people across
the nation.
But this is not the totality of that era. The wars of
liberation in the Third World, the brutality that was
unleashed against the left world wide, including the
deaths at Kent and Jackson State, and the machinations
of COINTELPRO, including the campaign to exterminate
the Black Liberation Movement all created a sense of
urgency that promoted a response. While the left
searched for models of resistance from other histories,
we were cut off from our own and operated without the
benefit of insight that would allow us to understand
the realities of the day and develop a strategy that
could sustain progressive movement through the next
phase.
The left imaginary of the 60s and 70s was the product
of the apocalyptic images of Viet Nam and Mississippi.
To the left's credit, it fought the fight that it felt
needed to be fought, clumsy, misguided and even tragic
though it sometimes was. Many sacrifices were made and
lives were disrupted and lost in the process. That it
was not able to create a long-term and less frenzied
foundation to build an alternative vision of social
justice was tragic, but it was not merely a matter of
wrong strategies and wrong-headed people. We were in
the belly of the beast and we were carried on a
historical wave whose momentum we did not understand or
control. History is a montage and there are many
fragments that have yet to be ordered before an
adequate reckoning with the past can be made.
Leonard
Chicago
(Hello Ethan)
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