Okay, now I see why we disagree so much on the subject of the Weather Underground (I think). The person you are discussing did participate in a robbery very late in the group's history. By that time it sounds to me like it was a small, desperate organization living on the lam.
The Weather Underground committed its first terrorist act in 1969. It was founded in the aftermath of Richard Nixon's election in 1968, to protest the Vietnam War. It did indeed later become involved in terrorist acts to protest the way blacks were treated in America at the time. Worthy causes both--although most groups involved in these movements never became violent:
Weathermen
From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia.
Weatherman, also known as the Weather Underground Organization, was a US-based, self-described "revolutionary organization of communist men and women" formed by members of the Students for a Democratic Society (SDS), splintering that organization in the process. The group was originally called the Revolutionary Youth Movement. The group advocated the overthrow of the government of the United States and capitalism, and toward that end, they carried out a campaign of bombings, jailbreaks, and riots. It was active from 1969 to 1976.
The name of the group derives from the Bob Dylan song "Subterranean Homesick Blues", which featured the lyrics, "You don't need a weatherman to know which way the wind blows", quoted at the bottom of an influential essay in the SDS newspaper, New Left Notes.
In October 1969, they organized their first event, called the "Days of Rage" in Chicago. The opening salvo in the Days of Rage came on the night of October 6, when they blew up a statue dedicated to police casualties in the 1886 Haymarket Riot. They announced to an SDS convention that they supported Charles Manson. Although the October 8 rally failed to draw as many participants as they had anticipated, the estimated three hundred who did attend shocked police by leading a riot through Chicago's business district, smashing windows and cars. Six people were shot and seventy arrested. Two smaller violent conflicts with police followed the next two nights.
In 1970, following the shooting and murder by police of Black Panther Fred Hampton, the group issued a Declaration of War against the United States government, changing its name to the "weather underground organization", adopting fake identities, and pursuing covert activities only. These initially included preparations for a bombing of a US military noncommissioned officers' dance at Fort Dix. But when three Underground members died in an accidental explosion while preparing the bomb in a Greenwich Village, New York City safe house, other cells re-evaluated their plans and decided to pursue only non-lethal projects.
The group released a number of manifestos and declarations, while conducting a series of bombings. These attacked the U.S. Capitol, The Pentagon, police and prison buildings, and the rebuilt Haymarket statue again, among other targets. The group took (ultimately sucessfull) measures to avoid any loss of life as a result of these bombings, issuing warnings to evacuate the building ahead of time via phone. They also took a $25,000 payment to break LSD advocate Timothy Leary out of prison, transporting him to Algeria. They remained largely successful at avoiding the police and the FBI.
In the mid-to-late 1970s, the group began dissolving, as many members turned themselves in to the police, and others moved onto other armed revolutionary groups. Very few served prison sentences, since the evidence gathered against them, by the FBI's COINTELPRO program, was inadmissable in court, due to the illegal methods used to obtain it.
Famous members of the Weather Underground include Kathy Boudin, Mark Rudd, Terry Robbins, David Gilbert, and the still-married couple Bernardine Dohrn and Bill Ayers.
Many former Weathermen have re-integrated into society, without necessarily repudiating their original intent. Bill Ayers, now a Distinguished Professor of Education at the University of Illinois, said in a September 11, 2001 New York Times profile "I don't regret setting bombs [against non-human targets]. I believe we didn't do enough." [1]
en.wikipedia.org
The original members of the Weather Underground were the privileged, heavily educated children of the intellectual elite. I think if you examine the whole anti-Vietnam war/anti-black oppression movements, you will find that the same thing is true across the board. These people who were the leaders of the youth movement would of course gravitate towards professions like college professor. I think that once you get to the college level, the goal of education is not to protect children from reality but to choose teachers who know as much about what they are teaching as possible. This was a painful and dramatic moment in American history, and I am glad some of the leaders are professors now, because the truth should be taught.
Revolution is a really charged concept. The conservatives go wild when they happen in societies like the U.S.S.R. We had one that ended in the birth of America, and most people seem very, very happy about that. Liberals are happiest when revolutions do things like stop an unjust war. Richard Nixon deserved to have a revolution happening around him. Three cheers and everything. What amazes me is that we are not having another one right now. |
