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To: Plutarch; LibertyRocks; backhoe; PhilDragoo; Grampa Dave; Mike Darancette; MeekOneGOP; devolve; ...
1969 was the year of the Flint convention where I believe the Weatherman group was formed....

See this:

Weatherman ....Declared "war on Amerikkka" at its Flint War Council in 1969

**************************EXCERPT******************


 

Weatherman (known colloquially as The Weathermen) was a political faction elected in 1968 to lead the radical group Students for a Democratic Society (SDS). The organization took its name from a line in the Bob Dylan song Subterranean Homesick Blues ("You don't need a weatherman to know which way the wind blows"). Emerging in 1969 as the most militant wing of the SDS's Revolutionary Youth Movement, the fledgling Weatherman issued a "manifesto" eschewing nonviolence and calling instead for armed opposition to U.S. policies; advocating the overthrow of capitalism; exhorting white radicals to trigger a worldwide revolution by fighting in the streets of the "mother country"; and proclaiming that the time had come to launch a race war against the "white" United States on behalf of the non-white Third World.

Grounded in identity politics, Weatherman ideology and rhetoric rebelled against what later came to be known as America's "white skin privilege." Weatherman opposed the strategy of a rival SDS faction, Progressive Labor, which rejected the sexual and chemical excesses of the counter-cultural movements of the 1960s in favor of a purer, Marxist-Leninist popular front movement aimed at developing student-labor alliances. 

FBI files from 1976, recently made public under the Freedom of Information Act, confirm the connections between Weatherman, Havana, and Moscow. Weatherman leaders like Mark Rudd traveled illegally to Havana in 1968 to engage in terrorist training. There, camps set up by Soviet KGB Colonel Vadim Kotchergine were educating Westerners both in Marxist philosophy and urban warfare.

At a 1969 "War Council" in Flint, Michigan, Weatherman leader Bernardine Dohrn (currently a law professor at Northwestern University and a Board member of the ACLU) praised the serial murderer Charles Manson and his accomplices: "Dig it. First they killed those pigs, then they ate dinner in the same room with them.  They even shoved a fork into the victim's stomach. Wild."  She then proclaimed that the time had come to launch a war against "Amerikkka" (Weatherman always spelled "America" this way, to convey the group's belief that the nation was ineradicably racist to its core). Toward this end, Dohrn advocated the formation of an even more radical "Weather Underground" cult to carry out covert terrorist activities rather than public acts of protest. By early 1970, her wish would be realized.

Weatherman's first public demonstration was its October 1969 "Days of Rage" protest in Chicago, timed to coincide with the trials of the Chicago Seven (a group of radical leftists led by Tom Hayden), who had fomented a riot at the Democratic Party nominating convention in that city the previous year. Advertised with the slogan "Bring the war home,"  "Days of Rage" sought to create enough chaos to shock the American public out of its alleged complacency vis a vis the Vietnam War.

The opening "Days of Rage" salvo, designed to glorify the anarchist movement, was the October 8 demolition of a statue dedicated to the memory of eight policemen who had been killed in the Haymarket Labor Riot of 1886. Thereafter, some 300 people -- both members and supporters of the Weatherman agenda --  ravaged Chicago's business district, smashing windows and destroying automobiles. Six people were shot and seventy were arrested. The violence continued, though on a smaller scale, for each of the next two nights. As Sixties historian Todd Gitlin observed, however, no popular uprising was sparked by these events, much to the group's dismay. Notable "Days of Rage" leaders included Bill Ayers, now a Professor of Education at the University of Illinois, and Mark William Rudd, currently a mathematics professor at a New Mexico community college.

Weatherman was further radicalized by the December 1969 shooting death of Black Panther leader Fred Hampton by Chicago police. Hampton was a street thug who, in his much-heralded "morning education" programs, taught black youths that violent opposition to the U.S. government was a worthy goal. He was quoted in a 1969 Chicago Sun-Times article as saying, "I am at war with the pigs," and forecasting an armed struggle between blacks and whites. He routinely carried weapons and instructed his subordinates to do the same. For Weatherman, Hampton's death provided one more excuse to pursue a revolutionary agenda. In March 1970 the organization issued a "Declaration of a State of War" against the United States government, using for the first time its new name, the "Weather Underground Organization" (WUO), adopting fake identities, and pledging to pursue covert activities only.

Shortly after that Declaration, three members of the Weather Underground accidentally killed themselves in a Manhattan townhouse while attempting to build a powerful bomb they had intended to plant at a social dance in Fort Dix, New Jersey -- an event that was to be attended by U.S. Army soldiers. Hundreds of lives could have been lost had the plot been successfully executed.

The Weather Underground went on to claim credit for some 25 bombings over the next several years, detonating explosives at the rebuilt Haymarket statue, a bathroom at the Pentagon, the Capitol barber shop, the New York City police headquarters, and a variety of other targets. 

The Weather Underground also (for a fee of $25,000) helped psychedelic drug guru Timothy Leary break out of a California prison and arranged for his transport to Algiers. When Leary was re-arrested in 1974, he cooperated in the FBI investigation of WUO in exchange for a lighter sentence.

By the time the U.S. withdrew its military forces from Vietnam in 1975, the Weather Underground was clearly losing vitality as an organization, having failed to invigorate a new radical movement in the U.S. or to inspire an all-out war against the government. In the wake of President Jimmy Carter's amnesty for draft dodgers, members of the group began to emerge from hiding. Many were never prosecuted; others had their convictions overturned. Some, like Rudd, Dohrn, and Ayers, claimed places for themselves in academia, while others attempted to return to the mainstream. 

On October 20, 1981 -- long after the Weather Underground had ceased to exist -- former Underground member Kathy Boudin and her soon-to-be husband, David Gilbert, were accomplices in the robbery of a Brinks armored car in Nyack, New York. In the course of that heist, one Brinks guard and two Nyack police officers were murdered. Also involved in the robbery was Judith Clark, who had served a prison term for her participation in the "Days of Rage."  Boudin hired attorney Leonard Weinglass, a law partner of her father, to defend her in the case. Weinglass arranged for a plea bargain whereby Boudin pled guilty to one count of felony murder and robbery, in exchange for a prison sentence of twenty years to life. She was paroled in 2003, however, over strong opposition from New York State police. Gilbert remains in New York's Attica State Prison, having refused to bargain.

In 1985, former Weather Underground members Susan Rosenberg (who also was implicated in the Nyack robbery) and Linda Evans were apprehended while transporting 740 pounds of explosives which they both acknowledged were slated for use in additional bombings. Rosenberg was sentenced to 58 years in prison, Evans 40; President Bill Clinton pardoned both women in January 2001.


42 posted on 10/08/2008 10:02:37 AM PDT by Ernest_at_the_Beach (No Burkas for my Grandaughters!)
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To: Ernest_at_the_Beach

bttt


45 posted on 10/08/2008 10:17:44 AM PDT by SE Mom (Proud mom of an Iraq war combat vet)
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To: Ernest_at_the_Beach
From the dates of their most recent activities, it seems the SDS/Weathermen didn't completely disband (much like the Viet Cong didn't cease to exist after having been decimated during Tet in '68).

The SDS was at Princeton though their chapter wasn't as rabid as those at Columbia or Kent State and Michelle Robinson attended Princeton shortly after the last vestiges of the SDS were extinguished.....or were they. Chances are they were alive and smoldering in the staff. After all, it was that way when I attended school as a returning vet.
74 posted on 10/08/2008 7:50:50 PM PDT by BIGLOOK (Keelhaul Congress! It's the sensible solution to restore Command to the People.)
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To: Ernest_at_the_Beach; Amityschild; Plutarch; Grampa Dave; BIGLOOK; BOBTHENAILER; potlatch; ...
The opening "Days of Rage" salvo, designed to glorify the anarchist movement, was the October 8 demolition of a statue dedicated to the memory of eight policemen who had been killed in the Haymarket Labor Riot of 1886. Thereafter, some 300 people -- both members and supporters of the Weatherman agenda -- ravaged Chicago's business district, smashing windows and destroying automobiles. Six people were shot and seventy were arrested. The violence continued, though on a smaller scale, for each of the next two nights. As Sixties historian Todd Gitlin observed, however, no popular uprising was sparked by these events, much to the group's dismay. Notable "Days of Rage" leaders included Bill Ayers, now a Professor of Education at the University of Illinois, and Mark William Rudd, currently a mathematics professor at a New Mexico community college.

My friend Roger and I followed Mark Rudd around Purdue for seven hours as he spoke in excited fashion before groups from 5,000 on the grass to seventeen on the living room rug.

Sitting next to him on the carpet I asked him what he was doing.

He replied smilingly that he and his friends were out to change things but he couldn't talk about it as his friends (the frowners in the red armbands) were suspicious of Roger and me with our Beaulieu 16mm and tape recorder. "They think you guys are cops," Mark Rudd explained.

He seemed quite the amiable speed freak.

I wondered who was paying him and who was providing his dope.

Roger scored an Econoline and sawed a hatch in the roof. We screwed mesh to the windows and went up to Chicago for the Days of Rage October 8-11, 1969.

I will say Daley's police army was formeedablay.

Pigeon's egg blue helmeted platoons, white shirts, in formation.

No crossing the street to the block of the hotel housing Judge Hoffman of the Chicago Eight. A bullhorn informing it was forbidden.

Continuous convoys crisscrossing the city composed of three four-door Chevrolets in black, blue, light blue, tan, white, followed by a black wagon.

The Tactical Police Unit's black metro bus with its meshed windows disgorging its black leather gladiators wielding the long sticks.

Clustered trench-coated Dick Tracy's around milk carton walkie talkies as we entered the park.

And in the park's parking lot, the simultaneous arrival of lots of hardtops and convertibles spitting out twenties and thirties-something young men with short hair punching their palms in anticipation of a little ultraviolence. Plain-clothes cops yippie eye oh.

The too-serious-taking-of-themselves "Maoists" were wearing rags from Salvation Army counters, the odd bandana or rag around the arm, or the mouth or the head or the knee, the boots, the boots, the boots.

A bullhorn as the smoke thickens over the hastily assembled pile of broken police barricades, black and white stripes smoldering smokily. That nasty smoke in the city night trees. I mean it's Chicago.

A garbled exhortation and BANG they're off!

We got back to the van and were repeatedly cut off by the police convoys, sirens and sirens, here and there, here and there.

We trailed a path of broken glass--and the crews were out already, the 24-Hour-Emergency-Board-Up-Service pickup trucks their headache racks loaded with sheets of plywood, sawhorses on the sidewalks, circular saws screaming, covering the revolution.

Theater goers stepping over the broken glass of the revolution.

In the restaurants we asked what they thought of the revolution.

"Whatta I think! Whatta I think! I'll tell ya what I think I think they belong in JAIL that's what I think!"

And we understand those seven Episcopal churches were not the sanctuary the exhuberant Rudd & Co thought they'd be.

O the humanity--they gave a revolution and no one came.

I wound up in Boston later and "trashing" was the revolution. A trashcan through a window substituted for storming the Bastille.

You know, I knew a troubled son of privilege such as Bill Ayers in that day who fancied himself the rebel-rebel.

He bragged he and his father passed Jack Paar in the apartment elevator hall on occasion.

The System, Comrades!

We'll all get mansions like Hussein and send our children to fancy schools and throw thousands at their dance lessons--

--for the workers!

Showing daddy, killing daddy, Oedipussies.

The End


78 posted on 10/08/2008 9:28:22 PM PDT by PhilDragoo (Hitlery: das Butch von Buchenvald)
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