Feb 19th, 2009 at 8:43 am
A Weather Underground Veteran Looks Back
Howard Machtinger, a former member of the Weather Underground, offers what Bill Ayers didn’t manage to do during his recent period of fame—provide a serious retrospective look at the activities of the organization and the deeply problematic nature of its approach. Very much worth reading.
31 Responses to “A Weather Underground Veteran Looks Back”
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February 19th, 2009 at 8:49 am
OK… But does anyone still care about Weather Underground? Especially people like Matt (or me) who were not born at the time.
February 19th, 2009 at 9:04 am
Almost no one bought the Weather Underground’s records. but everyone who did went out and started a band.
February 19th, 2009 at 9:59 am
You can’t create a successful revolutionary movement without the support of the people — and you don’t gain the support of the people by being self-indulgent assholes.
A guy I know who worked against the Weather Underground as an Army spy said that what infuriated him –and helped motivate him in his work — was that some of the Weather leaders claimed to speak for “The People” while being little more than spoiled, arrogant rich kids playing with violence. My friend was from a blue collar background.
I never knew any members of the Weather but I remember thinking at the time that some members of the leftist movement seemed to speak in an incomprehensible jargon akin to Swahili.
February 19th, 2009 at 10:01 am
Which just prompted me to go read Wikipedia’s entry on The Big Lebowski. Now I have to go find the movie.
February 19th, 2009 at 10:02 am
You don’t need the Marxist dialectic to explain to some worker:
“Here’s how you’re being conned — and here is how the rich guys are fucking you.”
February 19th, 2009 at 10:07 am
They should have targeted the elites, and allowed them to overreact in a way that Average Americans would see as bizarre. Thats where they went wrong.
none of anything you all are saying would have worked, they would have just been ignored. Protests are ignored. Public opinion is ignored. There’s only one thing left.
February 19th, 2009 at 10:08 am
actually, don, it was the progressive labor faction that spoke in incomprehensible jargon, although your basic point about the weather underground – upper-middle class kids playing at revolution – is true.
February 19th, 2009 at 10:20 am
How many Vietnamese did the US kill in another stupid, pointless war?
I don’t hear much outrage over that.
February 19th, 2009 at 10:30 am
His NY Times editorial seemed to me to be perfectly fine. I know that liberals were outraged about it because it didn’t include a promise to commit ritual suicide on national TV, but still.
February 19th, 2009 at 11:07 am
My friend said the biggest danger to him was that multiple government entities were targeting the Weather but were not cognizant of their duplicate efforts because of secrecy, need to know, compartmentation etc.
On one occasion, he got the signal to leave a safe house before it was raided by the FBI. However, when he was picked up by his Army handler down the street, they were detected by over-achieving local policemen who were backup for the raid. After being shadowed by the policemen through town, his handler picked up speed, was chased by the policeman and then drove onto the local military base for support by armed guards.
In hindsight it was kinda hilarious — the startled policemen wondering “Why did that Weatherman terrorist flee to an Army base. And why are those MPs pointing M16s at US?”
February 19th, 2009 at 11:09 am
It was a violent time. Barry Goldwater not only urged America to bomb the North Vietnamese back to the stone age, but his most famous line, stated at a Republican convention, was that extremism in defense of liberty is no vice. Malcolm X, who, like Goldwater, has become a hero to millions, pointed out that people had the right to defend themselves by any means necessary. Living in Berkeley, I witnessed more than one “police riot” in which police activity at what began as a non violent protest of the war initiated a violent response. Few during that period kept their heads, and many leaders were egocentric fools. While SDS leaders were not so extreme as those who went into the Weather Underground, and often funnier, especially when they permutated into yippies, they appeared to many similiarly egoistic. The antiwar movement in America was eventually successful; even Elvis Presley sang songs for peace. And most of us who took part in that movement did so out of nonviolent convictions.
The Weather Underground was a marginal group, albeit less wacky and far more intellectual than the Symbionese Liberation Organization. Effete and unconvincing (how does being violence provide an alternative to violence?), they gave the anitwar movement and the counter cultural revolution of the time a bad name and the know nothing right a decades’ long easy target that could be easily spotted at Palin rallies last fall.
February 19th, 2009 at 11:11 am
The problem with the Vietnam War is that it was a Democratic War supported by Republicans. After Robert Kennedy was killed, Humphrey was nominated, and Nixon elected, there was no real possibility of working within the system. Humphrey’s people vaguely hinted that he might do the right thing, but there was no reason to believe them.
The various sort of extralegal anti-war activities were in the context of that. The only in-the-system option would have been to make formal protests of various sorts in full knowledge that the war would play out to its conclusion with no regard for whatever opposition there was — essentially, to accept the war as a done deal and move on to other issues. But by that time a large movement had set itself absolutely against the war, and whatever people did was in the context of desperation and hopeless.
Once the executive and the military-intelligence complex have decided that war is necessary, and once they’ve recruited the media and key Congressmen to the cause, I’m not sure that war can possibly prevented, and once a war is underway it can’t be stopped. Recently I’ve read the histories of the opposition movements to WWI and WWII (and peripherally the Philippine occupation and various Latin American adventures), and all sorts of themes came up that we saw during the Vietnam War and the Iraq war. It was all the same kabuki.
If the Vietnam was right, its opponents were wrong. If citizens should accept the government’s decisions to go to war automatically, without argument, the Vietnam War’s opponents were wrong. But if you concede that the Vietnam War was really wrong and should have been imposed, it’s very hard to say what opponents should have done, because the situation was almost hopeless.
February 19th, 2009 at 11:14 am
“opposed”
February 19th, 2009 at 2:19 pm
Like, say, police riots during Democratic conventions, or police assassination of progressive leaders?
That kind of overreaction? You know, the stuff that actually happened?
February 19th, 2009 at 3:27 pm
worked against the Weather Underground as an Army spy
Of course, it was flatly illegal for the Army to engage in domestic espionage
February 19th, 2009 at 3:29 pm
once a war is underway it can’t be stopped.
Well, but of course, the Vietnam War was stopped, eventually.
February 19th, 2009 at 4:24 pm
The nice thing about Machtinger’s article is that he acknowledge all the points raised above, about the enormity of the war and the self-destructive narcissism of the WU. The article is really worth reading.
February 19th, 2009 at 6:02 pm
As I understand it, terrorism refers to the killing of innocent civilians for political reasons; therefore all forms of nongovernmental violence do not qualify as terrorism.
Did Machtinger mean to write that? If it’s his actual reasoning it’s doubly indefensible (conflates “for political reasons” with “by a government” and “killing” with “violence”), but it’s so weird I assume it’s a typo.
Kotsko, how could you possibly think these two paragraphs (the only part of the Times Ayers editorial which discusses what they did) are an honest accounting of the the role of the weathermen, “I never killed or injured anyone. I did join the civil rights movement in the mid-1960s, and later resisted the draft and was arrested in nonviolent demonstrations. I became a full-time antiwar organizer for Students for a Democratic Society. In 1970, I co-founded the Weather Underground, an organization that was created after an accidental explosion that claimed the lives of three of our comrades in Greenwich Village. The Weather Underground went on to take responsibility for placing several small bombs in empty offices — the ones at the Pentagon and the United States Capitol were the most notorious — as an illegal and unpopular war consumed the nation.
The Weather Underground crossed lines of legality, of propriety and perhaps even of common sense. Our effectiveness can be — and still is being — debated. We did carry out symbolic acts of extreme vandalism directed at monuments to war and racism, and the attacks on property, never on people, were meant to respect human life and convey outrage and determination to end the Vietnam war.”
February 19th, 2009 at 6:37 pm
Re rea’s comment “Of course, it was flatly illegal for the Army to engage in domestic espionage”
————-
Dick Cheney says that’s not correct. Heh heh heh
Of course, exposure of the Army’s operations only occurred because one of its soldiers ratted to Congress.
Today, of course, we have severe legal penalties for talking to Congress without permission. Which kills oversight and allows the Executive to start disasterous wars to seize non-existent nuclear warheads.
People attempting to fix this problem stuck major legislature into the Stimulus Bill to provide real protection to Whistleblowers in the Intel Community. That section was yanked out at the last moment as part of the compromise with Senator Collins of Maine.
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