Weatherman Brings the War Home

Hawk1981

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Apr 1, 2020
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The Vietnam War continued to rage in the summer and fall of 1969. Newly elected President Nixon had embarked on a multi-pronged approach to extricate the United States from the war, in part by announcing the withdrawal of US troops from Vietnam and turning the war effort over to the regime in Saigon and their army; in part by stepping up the concealed war with increased bombings in North Vietnam, Cambodia and Laos to bring the communists to the negotiation table; and in part by directing a campaign of surveillance, intimidation and infiltration of the anti-war movement coupled with a media effort to create an aura of statesmanship.

The Vice-President, Spiro Agnew was sent out to rally support for the administration and attacking opponents. In a typical speech given in October 1969, he said "If, in challenging, we polarize the American people, I say it is time to rip away the rhetoric and to divide on authentic lines. It is time to discard the fiction that in a country of 200 million people, everyone is qualified to quarterback the government."

The anti-war movement continued to organize demonstrations, continued to march, continued to lobby and write letters and campaign for an immediate end to the war. The war continued and more and more of the movement was becoming frustrated and burned out. The younger, more radical and apocalyptic activists were giving in to bitter-end rage. Among a very few activists a vision was emerging that the imperialist machinery was desperate to continue a war it was losing. Suddenly it seemed that The Revolution might be at hand, and the goal was now not to just end the war, but to defeat the imperialists and win it.

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The Students for a Democratic Society had met in their annual convention in June 1969 and in a fight over control of the organization had splintered apart into several factions. The increasingly militant faction presented a position paper titled You Don't Need a Weatherman to Know Which Way the Wind Blows calling for the creation of a clandestine revolutionary party. This new party would be "akin to the Red Guard in China, based on the full participation and involvement of masses of people in the practice of making revolution; a movement with a full willingness to participate in the violent and illegal struggle."

The new faction adopting the name Weatherman called on radicalized American students to join the revolutionary struggle that would usher in the millennium of world communism. White youth would be radicalized to support black liberation through the example of Weatherman renouncing nonviolence and joining the armed struggle against American imperialism.

Inspired by the success of the demonstrations and rioting the previous year at the Democratic National Convention in Chicago, Weatherman planned for a no-holds-barred direct action to take place October 8 through 11, 1969, again in Chicago. Hoping to "Bring the War Home" by causing chaos in the streets and jolting the public out of its complacency regarding America's imperialist war in Vietnam, the action was timed to coincide with the ongoing Chicago Conspiracy Trial of the accused from the previous year's riots. The action's organizers and Chicago authorities both expected a huge turnout, perhaps as many as 25,000 demonstrators.

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Weatherman's leaders spectacularly misjudged the counterculture’s revolutionary fervor and were embarrassed to find only a few hundred demonstrators for the actions scheduled in October. On the first night the crowd of about 350 demonstrators broke windows and destroyed cars. When confronted by a thousand police, a melee broke out resulting in 6 Weathermen shot and 68 arrested.

Demonstrations and marches were mostly peaceful the next two days, highlighted with a 2,000 person march through a Spanish-speaking part of the city. On October 11, about 300 militant protesters clashed with police in the business district of Chicago smashing store and car windows. Within 15 minutes half of the protesters had been arrested.

In the aftermath of what became known as the "Days of Rage," the city of Chicago and the State of Illinois incurred about $185,000 in costs. Weatherman had 247 members arrested, including most of the leadership, and spent $243,000 to cover bail. Chicago Black Panther Party leader Fred Hampton, who had a mostly friendly relationship with Weatherman, denounced the group's actions fearing that it would alienate potential allies and escalate tensions with the police. Fred Hampton was killed in a Chicago Police raid three months later.
 
Fred Hampton announced during the Days of Rage that "We believe that the Weathermen’s action is anachronistic, opportunistic, individualistic, chauvinistic, it’s Custeristic. And that’s the bad part about it. It’s Custeristic in that its leaders take their people into situations where the people can be massacred and they call it a revolution. It’s nothing but child’s play. It’s folly. We think these people may be sincere but they’re misguided.”

Weatherman's internal analysis of the Days of Rage led to a complete revision in their tactics. The group adopted a program of armed propaganda. Consisting of a series of bombings in the early 1970s of government and corporate targets in retaliation for specific imperialist and oppressive acts. Warnings of impending explosions were provided to authorities in order to symbolically bring the war home without the taking of human life. Their name changed to the Weather Underground reflecting the new underground lifestyle of the small core of surviving militants.

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The Weather Underground failed to incite a working-class revolution in the United States, and with the end of the war in Vietnam, many radicals eventually gave themselves up and some successfully re-entered mainstream society.
 
The Students for a Democratic Society was at its most thoughtful and idealistic in the early 1960s. As the decade wore on, the SDS descended into violence and extremism, and its defeat as a political force.

The SDS’s campaign against the Vietnam War, which became its focus from 1965 on, did not halt the war but did help to elect President Richard Nixon, twice. From a too soaring or unnatural idealism, the radicals plunged into a deep, cynical hatred of the country they had once hoped to lead and redeem.

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It took a little more than two years to go from the “Summer of Love” to the “Days of Rage.” Students for a Democratic Society collapsed in 1969, paralyzed by schism and by its own decadent principles. The New Left came more and more to resemble the old, cheering Marx and Mao, and turning its back on the hope for “participatory democracy,” adopting Lenin’s principle of democratic centralism, concentrating control at the top, finally in 1969 in the so-called “Weatherman” faction.

The Weatherman’s call for “Days of Rage” in Chicago, designed ultimately to stop the imperialists’ war by starting a civil war at home, failed miserably. Afterwards, keen to sow terror, the Weathermen went underground to plant bombs, which later blew up several of their own.

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Townhouse explosion in Greenwich Village in March 1970, resulting in the deaths of Diana Oughton, Terry Robbins, and Ted Gold while assembling bombs.
 
“Bring the War Home” was in a sense the angry culminating slogan of a once ecumenical “Peace Movement” that had originally sought soulfully to “Bring Our Boys Home.”

The anti-war “Peace Movement” as a whole encompassed far more than Weatherman or SDS or students, but in 1966-1969 the student wing of the movement and SDS came to be seen as its most active element.

The draft, which was ramped up dramatically from 1965-1968, made the stakes higher for my generation, as did the end of automatic college exemptions. Anti-draft protests — as well as growing awareness that the deferments were themselves discriminatory against the poor and minorities — worked on the nerves of impressionistic and idealistic student radicals who in their teens grew up listening to Bob Dylan and Phil Ochs, supporting the Civil Rights Movement, opposing the never-ending War in Vietnam, yet never themselves experiencing war or serious state oppression.

The “New Left” sorely lacked an older generation of experienced activists to guide them, due to the collapse and destruction of the “Old Left” during McCarthyism, the Cold War and the long Post-War economic boom. Most of the new anti-imperialist movements, like in Cuba and Vietnam, ended up firmly under Stalinist influence. Che Guevara may have been a 20th Century Tom Paine, but he lived in an age of great powers that had largely grown to disdain Enlightenment principles.

Without a class-conscious radical Labor movement willing to lead strikes and protests against imperialist war, impressionistic students were left on their own and many fell victim to despair or took up absurd romanticized “revolutionary” stances that led nowhere. A section of SDS turned to working-class organizing, but the U.S. working-class proved highly resistant to its blandishments, and was often even supportive of the war and reaction. Every variety of Marxist organizing theory was tried, and even the most thoughtful proved ineffective. “Radical life styles” and “youth vanguardism” were easily coopted and commodified by capitalist culture, and soon unions themselves were weakening as U.S. industry itself began to decline.

The African-American “black power” movement also ended being (almost as) easily coopted by one of the main parties of the system. Student radicalism ended with the Vietnam War and the draft. Of course the tiny Weatherman group, like fringes of the Black Panthers, were easily wiped out by state repression. Others toyed with “revolutionary suicide.” Some remained “radicals” but most ended up making their peace with the system, or fell victims to drugs, despair and even criminality, largely depending on their personal class backgrounds.



This was my generation, and as an anti-war organizer and then an ordinary member of SDS in 1968-1970, and as a later union activist, I knew Weathermen personally and mostly found them idiotic, wrong-headed and pathetic. But I understood the desire in those days to ... “Bring the War Home.” I remember chanting “Hey, Hey, LBJ, How Many Kids Did You Kill Today?” and even “Ho, Ho, Ho Chi Minh, NLF Is Going to Win!”

I was actually kind of right about that last slogan. Too bad so many had to die and suffer before the U.S. finally left Vietnam.
 
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JFK used the CIA to train and equip an illegal invasion army which was abandoned at the Bay of Pigs. The CIA was well established in the democrat party and the CIA ran LBJ's Vietnam War while the Generals sat on the sidelines. When LBJ tearfully told Americans that he would not run for another term the CIA was in charge and the best strategy would be to blame the unfortunate era on a freaking republican. Democrats went along with it and suddenly withdrew funding and left Nixon holding the bag.
 
The 'Weather Underground' were a bunch of snobby dope addled rich kids playing 'revolutionaries' and supporting communist takeovers of Third World countries and murdering Americans; like all rich white elites, they detested working class proles, and lived pretty well even while 'underground'. They promoted mass murders, Maosim, and totalitarian rule, for 'Everybody Else', that is. After the American withdrawal, the went on to many years of enriching low life pieces of shit drug lords in South America and Mexico, running major drug smuggling and sales networks in the U.S. for some of the worse slime in the hemisphere.

The same kind of vermin sociopaths making 'heroes' out of the SDS are the same kind of scum making 'heroes' out of Georgy Floyd, PLO and Iranian terrorists, John Gotti, and any other homocidal nutjob who makes the news cycles.
 
“Bring the War Home” was in a sense the angry culminating slogan of a once ecumenical “Peace Movement” that had originally sought soulfully to “Bring Our Boys Home.”

The anti-war “Peace Movement” as a whole encompassed far more than Weatherman or SDS or students, but in 1966-1969 the student wing of the movement and SDS came to be seen as its most active element.

The draft, which was ramped up dramatically from 1965-1968, made the stakes higher for my generation, as did the end of automatic college exemptions. Anti-draft protests — as well as growing awareness that the deferments were themselves discriminatory against the poor and minorities — worked on the nerves of impressionistic and idealistic student radicals who in their teens grew up listening to Bob Dylan and Phil Ochs, supporting the Civil Rights Movement, opposing the never-ending War in Vietnam, yet never themselves experiencing war or serious state oppression.

The “New Left” sorely lacked an older generation of experienced activists to guide them, due to the collapse and destruction of the “Old Left” during McCarthyism, the Cold War and the long Post-War economic boom. Most of the new anti-imperialist movements, like in Cuba and Vietnam, ended up firmly under Stalinist influence. Che Guevara may have been a 20th Century Tom Paine, but he lived in an age of great powers that had largely grown to disdain Enlightenment principles.

Without a class-conscious radical Labor movement willing to lead strikes and protests against imperialist war, impressionistic students were left on their own and many fell victim to despair or took up absurd romanticized “revolutionary” stances that led nowhere. A section of SDS turned to working-class organizing, but the U.S. working-class proved highly resistant to its blandishments, and was often even supportive of the war and reaction. Every variety of Marxist organizing theory was tried, and even the most thoughtful proved ineffective. “Radical life styles” and “youth vanguardism” were easily coopted and commodified by capitalist culture, and soon unions themselves were weakening as U.S. industry itself began to decline.

The African-American “black power” movement also ended being (almost as) easily coopted by one of the main parties of the system. Student radicalism ended with the Vietnam War and the draft. Of course the tiny Weatherman group, like fringes of the Black Panthers, were easily wiped out by state repression. Others toyed with “revolutionary suicide.” Some remained “radicals” but most ended up making their peace with the system, or fell victims to drugs, despair and even criminality, largely depending on their personal class backgrounds.



This was my generation, and as an anti-war organizer and then an ordinary member of SDS in 1968-1970, and as a later union activist, I knew Weathermen personally and mostly found them idiotic, wrong-headed and pathetic. But I understood the desire in those days to ... “Bring the War Home.” I remember chanting “Hey, Hey, LBJ, How Many Kids Did You Kill Today?” and even “Ho, Ho, Ho Chi Minh, NLF Is Going to Win!”

I was actually kind of right about that last slogan. Too bad so many had to die and suffer before the U.S. finally left Vietnam.


In 1968 I was on active duty at the Navy Station in San Diego on 32nd St. The EM club had a jukebox and the most common songs being played were: White Rabbit, Eve of Destruction and Sky Pilot.
 

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