Students for a Democratic Society and the Weatherman Underground Association

Scope: Covering the years1962-1977, this file provides descriptions of anti-war rallies and materials produced by the Students for a Democratic Society. It also has detailed information on the protests at the 1968 Democratic Convention in Chicago, a "defining moment" of the SDS. "The Students for a Democratic Society (SDS), a progressive, radical reformist student group, grew from the ranks of the League for Industrial Democracy (LID), whose own student group, the Student League for Industrial Democracy (SLID) had become all but defunct by the end of the 1950s. . .Under new Field Secretary Robert Alan Haber, University of Michigan graduate student, SDS established a national office in New York and began to organize itself as a fringe political group within American academe by the end of the 1961-62 school year." "SDS had been monitored by the Federal Bureau of Investigation as early as 1962, but SDS involvement in the April 1965 Student March on Washington against the Vietnam War caught the Johnson administration off guard and the order to monitor SDS activities followed swiftly. The Bureau investigation centered in Chicago, where SDS had established its national office at 1103 E. 63rd Street, in the heart of the ghetto." "The FBI could find no hard evidence of outside influence or control of SDS, even though many of its leaders were espousing the radical thinking of Marx, Lenin, Stalin, Mao, Castro and Che Guevara. Because SDS had none of the traditional hall marks of foreign control or influence, they were classified as part of what became known as the 'New Left.'" From the Introduction of the Guide to the collection

This collection also includes information on the Weatherman Underground Organization, a faction that came out of the SDS and was of interest to the FBI. The guide to the collection also provides some information on this group.

Subject Categories: To find more information on this topic in our library, search under these subject headings in the WebCat:

http://newsmax.com/archives/ic/2004/2/2/124555.shtml

Monday, Feb. 2, 2004 12:02 p.m. EST

Kerry Took Cash From Chinese Military Intelligence

Democrats are counting on Sen. John Kerry's military credentials to convince voters that he can be trusted with America's national security.

But documents that surfaced over the weekend raise serious questions about whether Kerry was duped in the 1990s into helping the Chinese military perfect its ability to strike the U.S. with nuclear weapons.

In 1996 Kerry met with Liu Chaoying, the daughter of a powerful Chinese military official who also doubled as vice president of a subsidiary of the state-owned China Aerospace Corp.

Before the meeting, held in Kerry's Senate office, Liu's sponsor, Johnny Chung, made clear she was interested in getting her company listed on the U.S. Stock Exchange.

The Democratic presidential front-runner was only too happy to oblige and ordered his aides to contact the Securities and Exchange Commission.

"The next day," reports Newsweek, "Liu and Chung were ushered into a private briefing with a senior SEC official."

Within weeks, Chung returned the favor, staging a Kerry fund raiser at a Beverly Hills hotel that raked in $10,000 for the senator's re-election campaign.

Bank records would later show that Kerry's Chinese campaign cash came from $300,000 in overseas wire transfers sent to Chung on orders from the chief of Chinese military intelligence, Newsweek reports.

The money was routed through a Hong Kong bank account controlled by Liu, whose company later benefited from waivers granted by the Clinton administration to the U.S. aerospace giant Loral Corp.

As Liu and Chung were lining the pockets of the Democratic Party's political elite, Loral handed over top-secret missile guidance technology to Liu's firm.

Liu's China Aerospace used the information to perfect Beijing's fleet of intercontinental ballistic missiles, which before the 1990s could not strike the U.S.

By the end of the decade, however, China's ICBMs could reach the entire continental United States with pinpoint accuracy, thanks in part to the senator who says now he can be trusted with America's national security.

Chung later testified that before Liu wired him the cash to contribute to prominent Democrats, the chief of Chinese intelligence personally told him: "We like your president. We want to see him re-elected."

Apparently, Beijing felt the same way about Sen. John Kerry

http://lists.village.virginia.edu/sixties/HTML_docs/Resources/Primary/Manifestos/Panther_platform.html

October 1966 Black Panther Party
Platform and Program
What We Want
What We Believe

1. We want freedom. We want power to determine the destiny of our Black Community.

We believe that black people will not be free until we are able to determine our destiny.

2. We want full employment for our people.

We believe that the federal government is responsible and obligated to give every man employment or a guaranteed income. We believe that if the white American businessmen will not give full employment, then the means of production should be taken from the businessmen and placed in the community so that the people of the community can organize and employ all of its people and give a high standard of living.

3. We want an end to the robbery by the white man of our Black Community.

We believe that this racist government has robbed us and now we are demanding the overdue debt of forty acres and two mules. Forty acres and two mules was promised 100 years ago as restitution for slave labor and mass murder of black people. We will accept the payment as currency which will be distributed to our many communities. The Germans are now aiding the Jews in Israel for the genocide of the Jewish people. The Germans murdered six million Jews. The American racist has taken part in the slaughter of over twenty million black people; therefore, we feel that this is a modest demand that we make.

4. We want decent housing, fit for shelter of human beings.

We believe that if the white landlords will not give decent housing to our black community, then the housing and the land should be made into cooperatives so that our community, with government aid, can build and make decent housing for its people.

5. We want education for our people that exposes the true nature of this decadent American society. We want education that teaches us our true history and our role in the present-day society.

We believe in an educational system that will give to our people a knowledge of self. If a man does not have knowledge of himself and his position in society and the world, then he has little chance to relate to anything else.

6. We want all black men to be exempt from military service.

We believe that Black people should not be forced to fight in the military service to defend a racist government that does not protect us. We will not fight and kill other people of color in the world who, like black people, are being victimized by the white racist government of America. We will protect ourselves from the force and violence of the racist police and the racist military, by whatever means necessary.

7. We want an immediate end to police brutality and murder of black people.

We believe we can end police brutality in our black community by organizing black self-defense groups that are dedicated to defending our black community from racist police oppression and brutality. The Second Amendment to the Constitution of the United States gives a right to bear arms. We therefore believe that all black people should arm themselves for self defense.

8. We want freedom for all black men held in federal, state, county and city prisons and jails.

We believe that all black people should be released from the many jails and prisons because they have not received a fair and impartial trial.

9. We want all black people when brought to trial to be tried in court by a jury of their peer group or people from their black communities, as defined by the Constitution of the United States.

We believe that the courts should follow the United States Constitution so that black people will receive fair trials. The 14th Amendment of the U.S. Constitution gives a man a right to be tried by his peer group. A peer is a person from a similar economic, social, religious, geographical, environmental, historical and racial background. To do this the court will be forced to select a jury from the black community from which the black defendant came. We have been, and are being tried by all-white juries that have no understanding of the "average reasoning man" of the black community.

10. We want land, bread, housing, education, clothing, justice and peace. And as our major political objective, a United Nations-supervised plebiscite to be held throughout the black colony in which only black colonial subjects will be allowed to participate for the purpose of determining the will of black people as to their national destiny.

When in the course of human events, it becomes necessary for one people to dissolve the political bands which have connected them with another, and to assume, among the powers of the earth, the separate and equal station to which the laws of nature and nature's God entitle them, a decent respect to the opinions of mankind requires that they should declare the causes which impel them to the separation.
We hold these truths to be self evident, that all men are created equal; that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable rights; that among these are life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness. That, to secure these rights, governments are instituted among men, deriving their just powers from the consent of the governed; that, whenever any form of government becomes destructive of these ends, it is the right of the people to alter or to abolish it, and to institute a new government, laying its foundation on such principles, and organizing its powers in such form, as to them shall seem most likely to effect their safety and happiness. Prudence, indeed, will dictate that governments long established should not be changed for light and transient causes; and accordingly, all experience hath shown, that mankind are more disposed to supper, while evils are sufferable, than to right themselves by abolishing the forms to which they are accustomed. But, when a long train of abuses and usurpations, pursuing invariable the same object, evinces a design to reduce them under absolute despotism, it is their right, it is their duty, to throw off such government, and to provide new guards for their future security.

http://lists.village.virginia.edu/sixties/HTML_docs/Resources/Primary/Manifestos/FSM_fold_bend.html

Free Speech Movement:
Do Not Fold, Bend, Mutilate or Spindle

At the beginning, we did not realize the strength of the forces we were up against. We have learned that we must fight not only Dean Towle, Chancellor Strong, and President Kerr, but also the Board of Regents with their billions of dollars and Governor Brown with his army of cops.

But neither did they realize the forces they were up against. At the beginning they thought they had only to fight a hundred or so "beatniks," "Maoists," and "Fidelistas." But they put eight hundred of the "hard core" in jail and found they still had to face thousands of other students and faculty members.

The source of their power is clear enough: the guns and the clubs of the Highway Patrol, the banks and corporations of the Regents. But what is the source of our power?

It is something we see everywhere on campus but find hard to define. Perhaps it was best expressed by the sign one boy pinned to his chest: "I am a UC student. Please don't bend, fold, spindle or mutilate me." The source of our strength is, very simply, the fact that we are human beings and so cannot forever be treated as raw materials--to be processed. Clark Kerr has declared, in his writings and by his conduct, that a university must be like any other factory--a place where workers who handle raw material are themselves handled like raw material by the administrators above them. Kerr is confident that in his utopia "there will not be any revolt, anyway, except little bureaucratic revolts that can be handled piecemeal."

As President of one of the greatest universities in the world, one which is considered to lie on the "cutting edge of progress," Kerr hopes to make UC a model to be proudly presented for the consideration of even higher authorities.

By our action, we have proved Kerr wrong in his claim that human beings can be handled like raw material without provoking revolt. We have smashed to bits his pretty little doll house. The next task will be to build in its stead a real house for real people.

--Anonymous statement from the FSM Newsletter

Is this guy the CNN CORRESPONDENT?

Forgive and Forget--
And Then Move On
Ed Henry, Alexandria, VA

Ed Henry gives every vet who goes back to Viet Nam with him a copy of the following essay. He makes them read it before they get on the plane. He says he wrote this piece after reading "a bunch of stuff about the 25th Anniversary of the Tet and Khe Sanh battles." What people need to understand, he writes, is that "we lost the war."

Twenty five years after the U.S. and the former Republic of Vietnam went through one of the most pivotal periods of the war with North Vietnam, the United States still suffers from what has been labeled as the "Vietnam Syndrome." We question again and again the final legacy of America's longest, and certainly most complicated, war. Academicians and armchair strategists engage in their parlor games of who won and who lost, who suffered and who didn't. Speculation and talk is cheap--points are made without a true point of reference. The reality of the national psychic cost is better understood when you consider that government statistics show that some 43 million Americans are connected (family-related) to the 58,000 names on the Vietnam Veterans Memorial in Washington, DC. Statistically, we still have a huge section of our American population that needs to come to closure over the losses suffered in the Vietnam war.

The whole of the U.S., and especially its families were traumatized by a great loss of its sons and daughters in a war that lasted too long. Years after the fact, a huge segment of our population still questions the meaning of the loss. The truth is, no matter how many military "victories" we've seen since the end of the Vietnam war, or no matter how many presidential speeches have decreed that Vietnam is over with, we Americans seem reluctant to let go of this thing called the Vietnam Era. Library book shelves continue to gather more and more tomes extolling someone's new and final analysis of the Vietnam war and its aftermath. Psycho-babblers and media people scan the cracks of America to find the most weirded-out vets for Memorial Day and Veteran's Day interviews. All of it continues to perpetuate the myth that anyone who came back to America from the war in Vietnam is a screwball--and the psycho-babblers and second-year psychology students love every minute of it.

Speaking as a veteran, I served as a Navy Corpsman with the Marine Corps for six years. I know what the brutality of modern warfare can do to human beings. My family lost a cousin in the Vietnam war and so did my wife's family. Both of our families have a sacred and eternal connection to the Wall in Washington, and I can empathize with those families who paid the ultimate cost in the life of a son or daughter. I never though of the cost to the other side until I made my first trip back to Vietnam in 1988.

The Summer of 1988 I found myself in a village called Co Loa on the outskirts of Hanoi with two American vet friends. The trip up to that point had been a wonderful lark--just another great adventure. I had no idea I was in for a moment of insight, a life-change.

We were going through a very beautiful and very ancient temple complex with a young man who was well-spoken, yet by the sight of him, extremely poor. As he talked softly and we all walked through the village together, he did a strange thing: he turned suddenly and faced us, and said, "Your bombs killed my whole family in 1970!" He blurted the words out with an amount of controlled agitation. We were shocked and quiet and you could have cut the air with a knife. All of us sat beneath a tree. The young man poured some tea and we talked. I've never been the same since that day of discussion.

Many strange things have happened to me and in my life since my participation in the Vietnam war. Not all of them have been wonderful. It's almost as if an unknown force had driven me to that point in Co Loa twenty years and 30,000 miles later, through time and space. I was forced to begin considering the losses of the other side, and how much more these people had suffered than us. Four-hundred-thousand killed in combat. One-and-a-half million civilian casualties. Three-to four-hundred-thousand missing in action and never accounted for; all of these figures being estimates that I've heard or read in various American and Vietnamese reports.

I offer no apologies for us or them. For the rest of that trip my traveling partner Paul Lieberman and me talked about reconciliation--how we had to reconcile ourselves first and then our Vietnam veteran brothers and sisters, and then just maybe the rest of the world. As an upstanding and practicing Catholic, I am supposed to understand the full implications of reconciliation. I don't think ever truly understood it until that day in Co Loa, deep in the heartland of what we used to call the enemy. I learned on that trip to Vietnam and on subsequent trips, that the Vietnamese people had already reconciled themselves with the idea that America could not, or would not, forever be thought of as the enemy. In both of our countries a whole new generation of Americans and Vietnamese have grown to maturity who have no recollection of the war years. Only our older generations have any memories of it.

On a return trip in 1990, I spoke with a party official high in the ranks of the bureaucracy in Saigon. He was of my generation and as I spoke of the war years he interrupted me with, "When you American veterans are able to admit to yourselves that America lost the war, then true reconciliation will happen." I couldn't disagree with him and he knew it. I must have spent the next six months thinking about his comments.

The truth is, when you travel back to Vietnam you realize after a while that the older generation of Vietnamese have put the war behind them. The same sense of Vietnamese will that caused America's defeat is now focused on solving Vietnam's emotional woes. They have a national sense of "getting on with it," moving past the past. This national thinking is very much tied to their history which happens to be a couple thousand years older than ours. Why dwell on a minute time period in that unfolding history?

We will not be healed of the Vietnam syndrome until every American is willing to reconcile himself or herself with all that occurred during a dark time in America's history. Except for the U.S. Civil War, no other war was more divisive for the American public. And lest we forget the Vietnamese side, millions bled and died in the name of the national will. Buried ordnance, more than was dumped on all of Europe during World War II, continues to kill and maim and we may never know the destructive extent of the millions of gallons of herbicides we spread over the landscape of Vietnam.

Reconciliation will also have to take place among the millions of Vietnamese who have fled Vietnam during and after the war, as all of us, veterans, Vietnamese, American, and Vietnamese refugees, try to untangle our way toward normalization. The first and most important step is with us, the veterans. We have to release ourselves from our anger and bitterness and we have to release ourselves from past situations over which we had no control. We have to face our racism and we have to understand what drives it, so we can rid it from our belief systems.

Each of us has to give up--and forgive--and then move forward. The major step is to forgive ourselves, so the self-punishment and national punishment over the Vietnam war will cease

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