| Rating: | ★★★★ |
| Category: | Movies |
| Genre: | Documentary |
This is a disturbing but engrossing documentary about a group of young men and women, some from very privileged families, who turned to bombing domestic targets inside the United States as a way to protest the Vietnam War. They split off from the more peaceful protests of the SDS (Students for a Democratic Society) and began to use violence in a calculated way to create a potential revolution.
Their targets ranged from the US Capitol to random violence the affluent "gold coast" of North Chicago to federal offices and banks in Berkeley and San Francisco.
The film takes contemporary interviews with surviving members and juxtaposes them with the tumult of that era. It succeeds in telling their story with a degree of dispassion that allows the viewer to come to his/her own judgements about these revolutionaries. My own feelings on the matter were that they went "off the rails" and lost whatever could be gained of a moral high ground against unjust causes. One also cannot deny that the same could be said for those in the corridors of power who promoted and prolonged the war in Vietnam. Those who like stories about heroes and heroines probably won't find any in this non-fiction network, but they will see how a network of desperate people created chaos and explosives and then reflect back on their time--some with deep regrets, some with a still-determined commitment to other social causes and others who couldn't stop their violent life and wound up in prison for crimes not related to their time with the Weather Underground.
I am annoyed with the knowledge I have in looking back at this time, I just wish more people would have joined with the younger generation, as to the ideas some had, that were more non-violent, I had older friends whom were in SDS, at the University, and we always chatted, debated, talked, about things. Some of the adults of the WW2 violently disagreed, in looking at the view of the older ones, that was in a way correct, but the younger had points that went simply beyond waving a flag, or singing a song.
ReplyDeleteAnd if you look at were we are now: BOOM --this is like a mind bomb going off! A wake up call -reminder?
"You don't need a Weatherman to know which way the wind blows" as Bob Dylan put it in Subterranean Homesick Blues. I remember reading an interview during the 1970s in one of the British underground publications (maybe it was International Times, Black Dwarf or Oz I don't remember which) with an Italian anarchist who was then in his 80s and was a hero of the anti-fascist struggle in Italy and elsewhere. When asked about terrorism in Europe happening then that involved the Baader Meinhof Group, the Red Army Faction and others, he described them as the 'spoilt brats of the bourgeoisie'.
ReplyDeleteThat term again came to mind when I read your piece on the Weather Underground and watched the video. There was a rash of similar organisations in the early 70s like the Symbionese Liberation Army in America and the Red Brigades in Italy.
Paramilitarism in Northern Ireland was a related phenomenon but was different in the class make up of it's various organisations and their mostly working class membership.
Groups like the Weather Underground were the offspring of the wealthy who were full of self righteous indignation and were throwing their teddies out of their prams in reaction to their own parents and their own privileges. The ideology such as it was of these groups was essentially elitist.
The sacrifice of innocent victims to any cause is never justifiable and is always a signature of fascism however sublimated in utopian rhetoric it may be.
This form of incendiary arrogance and single minded self righteousness is of course also essentially a component of the bourgeois mentality.
Basically the revolutionary anarchist movement has never taken kindly to toffs blowing up workers, for whatever reason they claim gives them the right to do that.
Chaos is the opposite of anarchy and undifferentiated hatred of everyone and everything (that is not ourselves or our friends) is a symptom of narcissistic personality disorder.
This should not be taken as a blanket condemnation of political violence, there are I believe situations in which it is legitimate i.e. historically in occupied France or currently in occupied Afghanistan, but this is not what the Weather Underground represented.
The bottom line is that trying to foment a civil war without the support of a significant proportion of the people is fundamentally wrong headed and ideologically totalitarian.
In 1968 the Weathermen reacting to US imperialist wars in South East Asia and encouraged by events in Paris and Prague split with the working class anti-imperialist movement in America.
Neither white kids with a bad conscience nor the Black Panthers were going to force change on America or anywhere else although bombing the Pentagon is now in retrospect amazing and an indicator of how locked down the US is now compared to the 1960s, it couldn't happen today I don't think.
At that time I was reading 'The Soledad Brothers', Bobby Seal and Angela Davies made me feel uneasy ... as did the Weathermen.
Between them they put back the cause of progressive change in the US by at least decades and maybe centuries.
They were (probably) unwitting tools of the political establishment which cemented their power to the point we are at today, a deeply undemocratic and authoritarian America undertaking imperialist adventures all around the world.
It is important I think to look back at the drivers of these movements and avoid such errors in the future.
The moral high ground in politics is the equivalent to 'confidence' in the economy, once lost it is very hard to regain.
Now that we have it again great care must be taken to not squander it by giving credence to the deadly tantrums of self appointed visionaries carrying out their own revolution in our midst.
Thanks for posting this reminder of dead ends from the past Doug.
I agree, Catherine, that groups like the SDS were in the best traditions of American dissent--no issue or response should be left undebated. The blanket castigation of 1960's and early 70's activist groups in the Reagan Era revisionism has only made the current situation worse. I take some hope that enlightened people of our generation are finally getting into high places of government. No more longings for a 1950's America of fear and loyalty oaths for teachers and professors and other tactics to ensure mass political conformity. We will find out if the leaders who grew up in this era the documentary covers will have learned from the mistakes of both Nixon's "Silent Majority" and those elitist groups like the Weathermen who thought they had a "moral" right to endanger ordinary people to get their kicks fighting the Establishment. Thanks for sharing your experiences.:-)
ReplyDeleteThank you for bringing such relevant background to this subject, AA. The notion of "toffs blowing up workers" I think encapsulates one of the chief ironies of the Weather Movement. Even when their planted bombs went off in a building in the middle of the night, or after some one called in to warn a newspaper just before a bomb went off, weren't they putting working people (security guards, cleaning ladies, night-shift workers) at risk? Who were they fighting for? Men like Orwell fighting with the Anarchists in Spain would never have countenanced turning weapons against ordinary working people.
ReplyDeleteIt questions how committed the WU was to ending a war versus their desire to make the morning news shows and mainstream papers. And how different was this thinking from the American Selective Service System (the Draft) which exempted college students and offered deferments and safe domestic national guard service to influential families like the Bush Clan and left drop-outs and working stiffs to march into jungles of napalmed villages and shoot and be ambushed by Vietnamese fighters---8,000 miles away from their own homes and communities? Is there not a parallel here?
Words and terms like "extreme rationalization", "radical chic", "arrogance" and "self-loathing" were words that came to my mind when watching this documentary and again in earlier talks with a friend of mine who helped write a newspaper series on the Weather Underground's legacy. To be blunt, their idea of prompting a revolution/civil war in America by these homemade bombs come off to me as only slightly less daft than the Charles Manson family in the Summer of 1969 breaking into west Los Angeles' homes in the middle of the night and killing, among others, a grocery store owner and his wife, and then slaughtering a defenseless pregnant film actress (Sharon Tate) and her friends---all as part of a "master" plan to start a giant race war. Chaos indeed!
I don't think a real underground movement fighting external enemies would have much to do with these people and would have seen them for the slumming elite that they were. That they set back the forces of profound change in this country is indisputable, in part because the Right-Wing pundits and politicos successfully lumped all the 1960's groups into one mass movement a decade later and essentially threw the healthy spawn of an entire decade out with the bath-water soiled by these "spoiled brats".
Absolutely great documentary.
ReplyDeleteThis is the first time I have heard of this group, to be honest. I find myself a little ambivalent. On first reading this post my thoughts were that no protest should be violent, that one is buying into the culture of violence by using violence as a tool and reducing the protest down to the lowest common denominator so to speak. And I think I will stick with those ideas, because I do believe that the means matters and I am against violence. One cannot teach peace at the end of a loaded gun, a fact the the American administration might well do to remember. Violence begets violence.
ReplyDeleteHowever I have a disclaimer here. Or a Query perhaps? Over and over on American blogs, especially from pro-gun people there is the refrain, 'it is our right to keeps guns, its in the constitution, we have them to defend ourselves against the government'. Usually it seems civilian Americans are using the guns against other civilians, could it not be argued that this group of activists and protesters are actually doing what was stated in the constitution?
A very good question. I don't think the Weather Underground were really about "gun-play" so much as planting bombs, although I'm sure the two went together at some point. A more interesting example of a left-wing militant group carrying firearms as a means to "defend themselves against the government" could be found at this time (the late Sixties-early Seventies) with the Black Panther Movement, a group of African-Americans dedicated to employ militant tactics to end police violence against blacks in major American cities. Indeed, it was a rather provocative "right-to-bear-arms" demonstration in California at the state capitol building in Sacramento that brought the group nation-wide attention. Here is a link to a article on what happened:
ReplyDeletehttp://xroads.virginia.edu/~UG01/barillari/pantherprologue.html
Back then, and maybe today even, people on the right (usually white and conservative ) were/are more comfortable when their Second Amendment Right is defended by the National Rifle Association and not a racially marginalized leftist social-activist party.
The Constitution gives citizens the right to bear arms "to maintain a well-regulated militia", a clause that has been debated forever over here and likely will continue to be. Basically the majority opinion over here is that anyone who is not convicted violent felon or a mentally ill person has a right to free access to a gun or semi-automatic weapon. There are electronic background checks required at gun stores in the last few years by many states and I believe it is also a Federal Law now. Many pro-gun groups like The National Rifle Association want to get rid of these electronic checks of police records on gun buyers because they say the federal government uses these as databases to keep track of gun owners. That debate will also go on as long as the earth turns on its axis I suspect.
Those who wish to carry a weapon outside their homes for personal protection have to get a "conceal-carry permit". In my state this usually means they have to go to a certified instructor and take a class in gun safety (bit of an oxymoron if you ask me, but nobody ever does) and be interviewed by a local law enforcement official. In some states its rather easy to get a "conceal-carry" permit; in places like Los Angeles it is more difficult. Politics and the local violent crime rate obviously come into play here. I'm not the best gun rights person on Multiply by a long shot, Iri Ani, but I hope I've given you a bit of background.
There is certainly a lot of room for debate. We could discuss this point forever. I'd be curious to know when is a 'militia' a 'terrorist' group and when is it not. I was really being a bit loose with my terminology placing guns and bombs in the same subset.
ReplyDeleteAgain, a very good question. My answer is that a militia becomes a rogue element that carries out crimes against government agents or buildings or private individuals or plots to harm the public safety. Others might take a more "benign" approach to these groups. I'm not as benign on this issue. I would hope the FBI and local law enforcement keeps an eye on these sorts of groups to see if they might develop a terrorist cell.
ReplyDeleteIn some places in America there are "weekend warrior" types who gather together as part of a militia group that has no affiliation with law enforcement. These groups generally are shadowy outfits. They received some attention after the 1995 bombing of the Federal Building in the state of Oklahoma. The main perpetrator, Timothy Francis McVeigh, had reputed connections to a "freedom militia" or some such in the state of Michigan I believe. Naturally, no one in the militia movement claimed this guy after he was caught, and later executed, for his horrific bombing that killed 150 people, including some kids in a basement day-care center in Oklahoma City.
I can see what Iri is saying here Doug as an outsider myself. In a way America is arranged to facilitate this kind of violence, the Constitution and it's amendments implant the notion of a 'just uprising' in the collective consciousness of America. However, as my own contribution above notes, this was not an exclusively American phenomenon. Obviously the WU cannot be seen outside of the historical context of Vietnam, the Cultural Revolution in China, events in Europe east and west, The Beatles, Charles Manson and the so-called New Left intellectual movement in the West. More particularly it cannot be seen outside the overarching phenomenon of the Cold War and the fact that subversive groups could turn to outside agencies (even empires) in the process by which our enemies enemy... becomes our friend. Cuba is a living symbol of that process I think.
ReplyDeleteAs Iri says 'violence begets violence' but when it is on a global scale and the population is armed the results are I think inevitable. This is the position I think America is in now.
Quite true to me as well. And to give credit to this documentary, AA, it does cover in passing a lot of these cultural and political movements and the ensuing unrest.
ReplyDeleteThanks Aaran. And I do agree that group subversive violence for its own sake is not an exclusively American phenomenon. I am just intrigued by the fact that it is written down as a 'right' and yet how that 'right' should be enacted is very much less than clear.
ReplyDeleteAnd to get back to the doco, it does sound like a very interesting watch. We should have more programmes/movies that challenge us and make us think instead of the mindless drivel and pap we are so often offered on our screens.
ReplyDeleteAbsolutely.
ReplyDeleteI understand your point here Iri, I have been proposing constitutional reform in the US for while now myself, we can't do it here because we don't have a written constitution.
ReplyDeleteWhether that is an advantage or not is a matter for speculation I think.
I don't think we have one either, Te Tiriti O Waitangi seems to be generally regarded as our equivalent of a constitution but I don't think it is in any way similar to what they have in the US.
ReplyDeleteTechnically we are still a "constitutional monarchy" sharing your "figurehead of state".
Gawd Bless 'er....Our Madge certainly gets around a bit,
ReplyDeleteYeah but her son is a proper charlie dontcha think?
ReplyDelete