Wow. Wow. And Wow.
I knew nothing of any of this.
I’m 50 and remember hearing about the Weather Underground and some bombings, but I didn’t know all of this.
And how far back it reached.
And how other govts were involved.
It seems like an Exhausting, NEVER ENDING battle between good and evil in this country.
I guess it always has been.
You’ve had some experiences, my friend.
Glad that you can share your knowledge with us.
Left-wing violence in the late 1960s and early 1970s was similar to what we are now seeing. So was the demonization of Richard Nixon, who was probably more of a centrist than a right-winger.
A common occurrence near or on university campuses in the U.S., Canada and other western countries was burning police cars, blowing up computer labs (the computers of that time were big suckers housed in large rooms, you’ve probably seen them in space travel movies of that era).
The leftist violence cycle tried to renew itself in the Reagan presidency but students at that time were less open to left-wing agitation, without Vietnam as a focus. Also the Soviet Union appeared to be a tired and doomed entity bogged down in Afghanistan, so it had less appeal to students than it might have had around 1970.
The one thing that was missing from the equation back then was the internet, so people were more dependent on mainstream media which slanted news coverage in much the same way they do today. And there was no hysteria about global warming, even Hurricane Camille in 1969 did not get blamed on human activity, and it was a doozy.
Reminds me of my younger liberal lawyer (redundant) brother that claimed to have never heard of the descriptive PIAPS until a few months ago when I explained it to him.