Karl Nemmersdorf
Townhouse explosion in Greenwich Village, 1970Ted Gold was a Jewish member of Weatherman, the Communist terror
group of the late 1960s and 70s, which was a radical spin-off from the
Students for a Democratic Society (SDS). Gold is best known for
perishing in the dramatic explosion in the New York townhouse caused by
Weatherman’s ignorance of how to build a powerful bomb that explodes
when desired and not before. His real importance, however, lies not in
his spectacular demise, but rather in his frank public call for a
communist dictatorship in this country, run by a revolutionary committee
from the Third World. Consistent with the thesis that Jews place a high
value on group interests, Gold worked unwaveringly within a mainstream
Jewish subculture against Whites and White power, the enemy whose
destruction many Jews thought would advance their own influence and
power.
Gold’s Early Years
Gold was born in New York City in December 1947. His father was a
doctor and his mother a professor at Columbia University. His parents
were classic liberals of the era; his father worked for civil rights in
the South and volunteered his medical services on behalf of the poor on
the East Side. The family lived on the Upper West Side, and were
generally considered as upper middle class.1
As a child, Ted played stickball with his father and became an avid
sports fan. He earned his way into a top high school, Stuyvesant, where
he graduated 212 in a class of 699, with an 89% average. (The Weathermen
are fond of describing each other as “brilliant,” but 89% is a bit
removed from brilliant.) He joined the track team, the Stamp Club, and
the History and Folklore Society and was also “politically active” in
the civil rights movement, helping to set up a chapter of “Friends of
SNCC” (Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee), which provided
material support for civil rights workers. (Have you ever heard of a
gentile who was so politically active in high school?) Gold’s parents
also sent him to summer “camp,” Camp Webatuck, whose clientele was
basically red diaper babies. I send my son to camp, where he exerts
himself physically and comes home enthralled with the joys of athletic
competition and boyish camaraderie. Camp Webatuck was for socialization
in Leftist ideology, complete with Woody Guthrie music: “labor songs,
unstructured hours, muted Marxist rhetoric.”2
By 1963, Gold was very pro-Castro. He was sixteen. He loved
the Yankees, the Knicks, and a Communist dictatorship.
University Years: SDS
Gold entered prestigious Columbia University in the fall of 1964.
There he became even more politically active. He and his new friends,
including David Gilbert (also Jewish), were inflamed about the civil
rights movement, the Vietnam War, and U.S. imperialism. He helped
Gilbert “educate” and “organize” other students about these issues. Gold
joined SDS, the largest American left-wing organization after the steep
decline of the Old Left. The leadership of SDS, especially in Columbia,
was heavily Jewish, of course.3 Thus, Gold left his Jewish
home to enter Columbia University, where most if not all his friends
were Jewish, where a large number of faculty were Jewish, and he joined
a leftist political organization whose leadership was almost wholly
Jewish.
In 1967, Gold became vice-chairman of the Columbia SDS chapter. The
chairman was his friend and roommate, Ted Kaptchuk (also Jewish). Gold,
Gilbert, and Kaptchuk were moderates intent on building up the
organization through education and patient work. They, with most other
SDS members, wanted to build a large movement that could force change on
America and end the Vietnam War. However, Mark Rudd’s more radical group
within the Columbia chapter, dubbed the “Action Faction,” aggressively
pushed Gold and his compadres aside in the winter of 1967–68, and took
control of the chapter. In the spring of 1968 Rudd—also Jewish; original
name Rudnitsky—proceeded to lead a brazen student takeover of the
University. Gold played a role in the takeover, but was not yet among
the hardline militants. In the course of the revolt, however, Gold
reportedly grew attracted to Rudd’s flamboyant revolutionary style, and
became convinced of the political value of violence. His transformation
from mild-mannered leftist “organizer” to (literal) bomb-throwing
Communist revolutionary had begun.4
Weatherman
In the summer of 1969, the radical leaders of the Columbia strike,
along with like-minded SDS agitators from the Midwest—among them the
now-famous Bill Ayers—forced a break with the more moderate mass of
SDSers. They dubbed themselves “Weatherman” after a Bob Dylan song. John
Jacobs (who wrote their manifesto “You Don’t Need a Weatherman to Tell
Which Way the Wind Blows”), Mark Rudd, and Bernardine Dorhn were the
most prominent leaders of the new faction. Jacobs was a Jew and Dohrn
had a Jewish father, original name Ohrnstein. Gold never became a leader
of the group, being overshadowed by the dominant trio, yet he
wholeheartedly threw in his lot with them.
The Weathermen were angry about what they saw as U.S. imperialist
rule over much of the world, and in particular about the Vietnam War,
which they labelled an unjust war against the Vietnamese people and
another facet of U.S. imperialism. The salient point of U.S.
imperialism, they held, was its racism: Whites were dominating much of
the world and living the good life off the stolen resources of the
non-Whites. Moreover, it was not just the White power structure: all
American Whites, even blue-collar workers, were complicit in this racist
system, benefiting from it and essentially supporting it. The Weathermen
hated Whites with a virulent intensity, and they campaigned
against—perhaps you have encountered this term—“White privilege.” (The
modern theory of “White privilege” derives from Theodore Allen, a
Communist non-Jew, and the Jew Noel Ignatiev, whose work was very
influential with the New Left.5) The Weathermen conceived
their role as working to initiate a struggle on U.S. soil to join the
worldwide revolutionary struggle against White colonial domination, with
the goal of overthrowing the U.S. government and establishing a
communist state.
Ah, sweet utopia! The Weathermen thought that provocative, violent
street actions would win them adherents and lead to a successful
revolution. This strategy was almost wholly rejected even by the larger
world of the New Left, but a few hundred Weathermen embraced it
fanatically.6
Weatherman, while operating within the larger Marxist worldview of
“oppression,” “imperialism,” and “exploitation,” transferred their agent
of revolution from the proletariat (which was too White and satisfied to
participate in their program) to the Blacks and coloreds of the world —
to the groups they considered most likely to rain destruction down upon
the hated Whites. Of course, all the “victim” groups that the Left
agitates for are merely means to the end, which is, seizing power. This
point was openly conceded by various radical groups in the New Left,
with their slogan, “the issue is not the issue.” Rudd says of the
results of the Columbia University student strike: “most important,
thousands of people had become radicalized. That was our biggest
victory, the goal SDS had set for itself years before we even knew about
IDA [Institute
of Defense Analysis documents] and the gym [the two issues
he used as a pretext]. We wanted to build the movement, and we
succeeded.”7 The New Leftist Mike Goldfield wrote, “You have
to realize that the issue didn’t matter. The issues were never the
issues. You could have been involved with the Panthers, the
Weatherpeople . . . SNCC, SDS. It didn’t really matter what. It was the
revolution that was everything.”8
It is easy to see what advantages the Weathermen saw in destroying
the U.S. government (the “White power structure”): total, unrestricted
revolutionary power. It would also provide opportunity for revenge. The
unbridled anger of Weatherman at “White privilege” clearly reveals this
motivation. Moral theology teaches that anger is an emotion that demands
external expression in revenge or punishment. Kevin MacDonald testified
that among the leftist Jewish coterie he experienced at the University
of Wisconsin in the 1960s there was “a strong desire for bloody,
apocalyptic revenge against the entire social structure.”9
This desire for revenge has a long history in Jewish relations vis-à-vis
the outer world.
In any case, the Weathermen launched their program with an
ill-considered (to put it mildly) “National Action” slated for October
1969 in Chicago. They planned to muster thousands, maybe tens of
thousands, of angry young people to revolt in the streets of the Windy
City. Mayor Daley’s city. He of the muscular police force. Weatherman
printed thousands of leaflets announcing their plan, and then
blew up a statue dedicated to policemen on the eve of the action. Mayor
Daley and his police reacted accordingly. When the Weathermen mobilized
in Lincoln Park with helmets and clubs, they were badly shaken at the
sight of the pitiful few who marshalled with them. Most of the
Weathermen were present, but only a few score of outsiders. After months
of agitating and leafleting, virtually no one had joined them.
Practically everybody was repulsed by their arrogance and over-the-top
militancy. Nevertheless, after speeches by Dohrn and others, they raced
out of the park smashing windows and attacking the police. They were
shot, beaten, and arrested for their pains. They had to fork out a
fortune in bail money and face indictments for rioting. Everybody but
Weatherman could see it was lunacy, but they carried on, labeling it a
victory because they showed their bravery (true), and because the
example of their fanaticism would draw crowds of recruits (false).
They did draw the conclusion that such street actions were
unsustainable. The leaders met and decided to go “underground” and begin
guerrilla warfare. In America. To bring down the state. A state that
spent billions a year on its military. One explanation for this
decision—which needs explaining—might be that they were reading a lot of
Marx and Mao and consuming a good deal of acid. Not a great combination,
for sure.
To prepare for their guerrilla campaign, Weatherman held a “war
council” in Flint, Michigan, in late December 1969. The freaks dubbed it
a “wargasm.”10 The gathering became notorious for Bernardine
Dorhn’s disgusting acclamation of the then-recent Manson murders in
California. The reason for her glee? White people had been slaughtered.
She assumed they were guilty of profiting from White “imperialism.” She
lauded the killers’ stabbing a fork into a victim’s stomach, and the
Weathermen walked around for weeks giving each other the “fork salute,”
four fingers held aloft. At this council, amid other bizarre scenes—mass
karate exercises, frenzied hopping and chanting in unison, sexual
orgies, discussions concerning the revolutionary value of killing White
babies— the Weatherman made speeches and cavorted before the assembly.
In a little-remarked oration, Gold bluntly described Weather’s vision
for the future of America: when the revolution succeeded, the Weathermen
would erect an “agency of the people of the world” to exercise power
here.
At this point, someone in the audience exhibited some seeming good
sense; he or she confronted Gold: “In short, if the people of the world
succeed [in making the revolution], then the Vietnamese and Africans and
the Chinese are gonna move in and run things for White America. … There
will have to be more repression than ever against White people.”
Chillingly, Gold replied, “Well, if it will take fascism, we’ll have to
have fascism”11 — i.e., a repressive regime: in this case, a
communist dictatorship. How ironic. Gold had now reached the culmination
of his career, having passed from the “participatory democracy” of early
SDS, to the fundamental societal change of generic revolution (the
Stones’ Street Fightin’ Man of 1968), to the maximum overthrow
of the government and communist dictatorship. Yet the enemy had remained
fixed through each phase: White people
Gold and the other Weatherman leaders understood that such an
international dictatorship over the United States would entail massive
repression of Whites. The supposed evil of White “imperialism”—and the
impossibility of White redemption, another Weather doctrine—was the
whole reason for the revolution. Mark Rudd later commented, “we had
determined that there were no innocent Americans, at least no White
ones.”12 Once the revolution was enthroned, ipso facto the
next step was liquidation, repression, and mass internment. Larry
Grathwohl, who infiltrated Weatherman for the FBI, described Weather’s
plans as including “education camps,” liquidation of all those who had
held power in the “imperialist” power structure, and total thought
control.13 A Weather triumph would have followed the exact
pattern of Bolshevik Russia: massive expropriation and repression,
followed by massive resistance, followed by even more massive
repression. Cue the return of leather-jacketed coke-snorting Jewish
secret police rounding up the gentiles for rape, torture and murder in
dank abattoirs. It happened, look it up.14
Ted Gold and the Jews of Weatherman, Part 2
Weather Terror: the New York Cell
After the Flint War Council, the Weathermen organized
quasi-underground cells or “collectives” in various major cities, and began
planning a terror campaign. They renamed the group “Weather Underground.”
The leadership assigned Gold to one of the several Weather groups based in
New York. John Jacobs, always militant, led one group. Terry Robbins, a
shrimpy New York Jew who was one of the strongest advocates of the terror
policy, headed the main cell, which was tasked by the leadership with
finding targets to bomb. At least two gentile females were members of
Robbins’ cell: Cathy Wilkerson, Robbin’s girlfriend, and Diana Oughton, Bill
Ayers’ girlfriend. Also present was Kathy Boudin, member of the prominent
leftist Jewish Boudin legal family. Robbins, Gold, and the women based
themselves in Wilkerson’s family townhouse on 11th Street in
Manhattan while her parents were on vacation.15
Gold matched the others in adopting the idea of “bringing the war home,”
the Weather motto for making America’s “White power structure” feel the
violence that they were inflicting on the Vietnamese. Jonathan Lerner,
fellow Weatherman, recalls that he and Gold had discussed planting a bomb on
a Chicago railroad to kill workers returning home at night.16
Rudd remembers that Robbins and Jacobs “would rant, “White people are pigs.
This whole society has to be brought down. We have got to defeat White-skin
privilege.”17 In the last days before the fatal explosion, the
once mild-mannered democrat Ted Gold issued a warning that anyone defecting
from the group would be subject to death, with the strong implication that
he himself would kill them.18
Robbins’ cell began building a nail-studded shrapnel bomb to plant at an
Army dance at Fort Dix, New Jersey. There was just one snag in their
planning. None of them knew how to make a bomb.
Just before noon on March 6, 1970, the day of the planned bombing, Terry
Robbins was putting the finishing touches on the crude dynamite bomb in the
basement of the townhouse. He mistakenly detonated what proved to be a
tremendously powerful device. The bomb instantly ripped Robbins and Diana
Oughton apart. Robbins was a bit more than ripped, actually. He was
shredded. The collapsing
townhouse crushed Ted Gold.
I have to confess that it brings me some pleasure to relate this
exquisite misadventure. Three communist terrorists destroyed with their own
infernal device. Cathy Wilkerson and Kathy Boudin, occupied upstairs, were
stunned but unfortunately escaped. Boudin later descended into a front
“revolutionary” organization (the May 19 Communist Organization) for a
sordid group of coked-up Black faux revolutionaries and helped get three
gentlemen killed in the
Brink’s armored car robbery in 1981. (Gold’s old buddy,
the Jew David Gilbert, another “mild-mannered idealist,” is still in prison
for that one. So is Judy Clark. Can you guess her ethnic background?
Gilbert, described as “luminously brilliant” by a former professor, and
Clark resorted to the hilarious stratagem of denying the legitimacy of the
court—because they were revolutionaries you know—and refused to
mount a defense. The court consequently and logically sentenced them to
forever in the slammer. Boudin, however, accepted good legal advice from her
father and got out after twenty years. Last time I checked she was working
as—what else!—a professor at Columbia University.)
Later History: The Weather Underground
After the shock of the townhouse the Weather Underground
Organization imploded. The few who remained carried on propaganda
bombings—usually restrooms in government buildings—but only sporadically
after 1971. They lapsed into dormancy, with a few true believers clinging to
Dohrn and occasionally issuing new missives reshaping their mushy ideology.
Eventually most of them “surfaced” and faced their legal charges in the late
1970s and early 1980s. They remain important only in FBI records, and in the
imagination of young radicals. They accomplished exactly nothing.
Leadership of Weatherman
We must sketch out the leadership of Weatherman. The charismatic,
attractive
Dohrn seems to be the key to understanding the power
nexus in the group. She had burst upon the radical scene with the looks and
verve well calculated to awe the often-homely Jews of the movement (her
mother was Swedish, according to Wikipedia). She quickly became the lover of
John Jacobs, the swaggering militant and Marxist theoretician who provided
much of the thrust behind Rudd at Columbia. Together Dohrn and Jacobs
planned and carried out the break with SDS that birthed Weatherman. They
dominated Weatherman for its first year, until the townhouse.
Mark Rudd was briefly in the top leadership group. He rode his fame from
the Columbia strike into a prominent role for Weatherman, but faded in
importance, unwilling or unable to match the bent for violence of the
others. Jim Mellen and Bill Ayers were two non-Jews in early leadership
positions. Mellen was an older theoretician who worked with Ayers in Ann
Arbor, but he quickly left the group when he realized how set on violence
they were. Ayers, however, became one of the most important and enduring
leaders of the group. Jeff Jones was another non-Jew with a lengthy tenure
in the leadership. Jones and Ayers were, tellingly, both lovers of Dohrn
after she moved on from Jacobs, and both derived significant authority from
the liaison. Dohrn’s power is revealed also in the fact that she was the
main mover in the expulsion of Jacobs from the organization after the
townhouse; he was made a scapegoat for the “error.” Dohrn continued in the
acknowledged top spot for years. She issued the communiques and drove the
agenda.
Others among the top leadership were Terry Robbins (obviously
short-lived), Howard Machtinger (cousin of Ted Gold), Robbie Roth, Eleanor
Raskin (both later added to the “Central Committee”), and Ronald Fliegelman.
All Jews. Fliegelman stands out in this group because he became the
bomb-maker. After the townhouse, he volunteered to master the art of
bomb-making and reportedly manufactured most or all of the bombs that
Weather subsequently used. One of the Weathermen later said that without
him, “there would be no Weather Underground.”19
John Jacobs (left) and Terry Robbins
The top theoreticians of Weatherman were Jacobs, Mellen, and Dohrn. The
top militants were Robbins, Ayers, and Jacobs. The person in the brightest
spotlight throughout was Dohrn.
The Jewish cohort seems to diminish slightly as one descends into the
middling leadership group, and then again into the rank-and-file. However,
this is hard to calculate exactly, as it is hard to gauge the membership.
Motivation of Weatherman
What was the motivation of Gold and the other Jews of Weatherman? What
part did their Jewish background play? Motivations are complicated, but I am
willing to grant the Weathermen a measure of idealism. Men virtually always
strive toward some good they see in a course of action; vanishingly few are
perverse and strive for something they know is evil. Gold and the Weathermen
apparently felt very deeply for peoples of color and the struggles they
faced. Gold’s father donated his time to serve the poor and Ted volunteered
to tutor Blacks in Harlem. However, the idealism of the Jews of Weatherman
was perverted; it was a canopy that also sheltered self-interest, murder and
lust for power. Idealism also varied; it was the entire motivation for some,
but very weak for others. We have seen that at least some of the radicals
were utterly cynical in their use of issues. Probably the idealism was purer
in the beginning, and faded in the fire.
Another aspect to consider in plumbing the depths of motivation is
self-deception. Self-interest so easily and imperceptibly cloaks itself with
morality. Kevin MacDonald discusses this matter perceptively in his
discussion of
the Left (p. 90ff) in Culture of Critique. Radical
Jews, in common with many humans, often have little awareness of their own
motivations, and not even the deeper ones.
There is plenty of evidence that the Jews of Weatherman were motivated by
Jewish concerns.
The Jews of Weatherman were not benighted caftan-wearers stumbling out of
the ghetto armed with rabbinic injunctions against the goyim; they were
middle- or upper-class youth strutting onto top universities mindful of
parental injunctions against the goyim. Not much of a difference. Mark Rudd
provides choice testimony in this regard: “What outraged me and my comrades
so much about Columbia, along with its hypocrisy, was the air of genteel
civility. Or should I say gentile? Despite the presence of so many Jews in
the faculty and among the students . . . the place was dripping with
goyishness . . . Certainly I reveled in my role of head barbarian within the
gates.”20
Then there is the emotional reaction to perceived injustice. Cathy
Wilkerson remembers, “From the first, Teddy Gold had a deep sensitivity to
injustice. This was encouraged and deepened by the stories his parents . . .
told about the treatment of their families as Jews in Eastern Europe and
Russia.”21 Wilkerson, a good friend of Gold, must have gotten
this information straight from him. If so, it must have occupied his
thoughts a good deal, and nurtured resentment.
National Socialist Germany and the holocaust figured prominently in the
minds of the Weathermen, even before the holocaust became such an
omnipresent phenomenon in American culture. A major Weatherman motif was the
need to avoid standing by and allowing injustice to occur; they often
reiterated the need to avoid being like the “good Germans” who did not
resist but simply “went along.” Rudd says, “World War II and the holocaust
were our fixed reference points. This was only twenty years after the end of
the war. We often talked about the moral imperative to not be Good Germans.”22
David Gilbert’s parents taught him, “unambiguously,” that racism was
wrong. “These values grew out of their experiences being Jewish following
the Holocaust,” he wrote later. David’s first essay was about the
“wonderfully accomplished” life of a man named Carl; the essay ended “But
none of the above ever happened because Carl was killed, as a young boy, in
a concentration camp.”23
Within a typically Jewish perspective, these Weathermen easily
transferred their perceptions of National Socialist Germany to the US
government. After all, both regimes were White, were they not? Not much
difference in Jewish minds. It is a neurological fact that outsiders find it
hard to discern variations within a different race. Rudd again: “We saw
American racism as akin to German racism toward the Jews. As we learned more
about the [Vietnam] war . . . we started describing the war as racist
genocide, reflecting the genocide of the holocaust. American imperialist
goals around the world were to us little different from the Nazi goal of
global conquest.”24 [Emphasis added.]
Other sources insist radical Jews are motivated by “tikkun olam,” the
purported holy imperative to “heal the world.” Rudd has a most hilarious
rejoinder. “As a kid in Maplewood [attending synagogue] I never heard of
tikkun olam, the now well-known commandment to repair the world. For all I
know, Michael Lerner made the whole thing up.”25 (Lerner was a
sixties radical turned progressive rabbi.) Rudd is hitting pretty close to
the mark here; see
this. “Tikkun olam” apparently does not represent a
tradition of Jewish concern for justice in the outer world, but merely a
concern for better implementation of laws within the Jewish world.
There are other, more minor, but still indicative Jewish aspects to the
Weatherman phenomenon. David Horowitz and Peter Collier in their superb
account describe the attraction that Jeff Jones, a blond California gentile,
felt to the Weatherman leaders, “Like other WASPs, he was attracted to the
Jewish drama of the new group and to ‘struggle sessions’ during which Rudd,
Robbins, and J.J. [John Jacobs] histrionically argued their positions.”26
Here we see the intense verbal interplay and knowledge of texts that is a
traditional element of Jewish life.
Another gentile, Bill Ayers, in his pretentious and often mendacious
memoir, gives this odd reaction to his immersion in Marx coupled with the
unjust expulsion of a Jewish friend from school:
I didn’t want to be a goy. I drew a Star of David and the word Jew on
my forearm . . . recolored it for weeks and kept it hidden under my
jacket. In Kerry’s honor, and for Marx as well, I invented another
identity, part rootless, wandering scholar, part brilliant if
ill-tempered Moor—I imagined myself a Jew.27
Bill Ayers mugshot
Conclusion
Weatherman was a movement led almost wholly by Jews, concerned deeply
with Jewish themes, and straining fanatically towards a potentially
genocidal communist dictatorship in which they could hold untrammeled power
over the Whites of America. The movement evoked half a dozen earlier
communist movements, each with their clique of Jewish leaders bent on
revenge.
Thankfully, Weatherman was a tiny movement, virtually powerless against
the vast and stable American society and government. Tragically, however,
they and their leftist peers have carried out the Gramscian “long
march”
through American society and have shaped much of the country to their image. Dohrn, Boudin, and Ayers have all been employed by prestigious universities.
Virtually all American institutions are presently committed to the attack on
“White privilege.”
Have the Weathermen triumphed after all? Will the attack on Whites
proceed from historical monuments and free speech, to flesh and blood? It
seems likely. Patriots, brace yourselves.
Endnotes
- Information on Gold’s youth can be found in two short biographies:
Kirkpatrick Sale, “Ted Gold: Education for Violence,” in Weatherman,
edited by Harold Jacobs (Ramparts Press, 1970), 470-484, and Flying
Close to the Sun: My Life and Times as a Weatherman by Cathy
Wilkerson (New York: Seven Stories Press, 2007), 396-98.
- Sale, 474.
- Stanley Rothman and S. Robert Lichter, Roots of Radicalism:
Jews, Christians, and the New Left. (New York: 1982), 80-83; Kevin
MacDonald, The Culture of Critique: An Evolutionary Analysis of
Jewish Involvement in Twentieth-Century Intellectual and Political
Movements. (2002), 76-77. See also Mark Rudd, “Why Were There so
Many Jews in SDS? (Or, the Ordeal of Civility).” Viewed July 11, 2017.
http://www.markrudd.com/?about-mark-rudd/why-were-there-so-many-jews-in-sds-or-the-ordeal-of-civility.htm
- Mark Rudd, Underground: My Life with SDS and the Weathermen
(New York: 2010), Ch. 3. See also Sale, 474-76.
-
Here is a view of Ignatiev from the right.
Here is another. See also “Theodore Allen” in
Wikipedia.org. Robin Morgan, the Jewish feminist, was told by an unnamed
Weatherwoman that she had no right to have the male “pig” baby [i.e.,
White] she was holding. Morgan, no shrinking Leftist violet, was
shocked. “How can you say that? What should I do?” she asked. “Put it in
the garbage,” the Weatherwoman told her. This story appears in Abe Peck,
Uncovering the Sixties: The Life and Times of the Underground Press
(New York: Pantheon Books, 1985), 217.
- For Weatherman ideology, see John Jacobs, et.al, “You Don’t Need a
Weatherman to Tell Which Way the Wind Blows,” in Harold Jacobs, 51-90.
See also Rudd, Underground, 147-48.
- Mark Rudd, Underground, 115.
- Rothman and Lichter, Roots of Radicalism, 35.
- Kevin MacDonald, The Culture of Critique, Note 83.
- For an account of this “council,” see David Horowitz and Peter
Collier, Destructive Generation: Second Thoughts About the ‘60s
(New York: Summit Books, 1990), 95-7. See also “Stormy Weather” in
Harold Jacobs, 341-50.
- “Stormy Weather” in H. Jacobs, 343.
- Mark Rudd, Underground, 194.
- Larry Grathwohl, Bringing Down America (New Rochelle:
Arlington House, 1976), 183-84.
- Stephane Courtois, et. al.,
The Black Book of Communism: Crimes,
Terror, Repression (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1999),
103-04. The passage can be viewed
here.
- Good descriptions of the New York cell can be found in Bryan
Burrough, Days of Rage: America’s Radical Underground, The FBI, and
the Forgotten Age of Revolutionary Violence (New York: Penguin,
2015), 92 and 100-05; in Rudd, Underground, 192-94; and in
Cathy Wilkerson, Flying Close to the Sun (New York: Seven
Stories Press, 2007), 324-44.
- Bryan Burrough, Days of Rage, 93.
- Mark Rudd, Underground, 192.
- Mark Rudd, Underground, 197.
- Bryan Burrough, Days of Rage, 125
- Mark Rudd, “Why Were There so Many Jews in SDS?”
- Cathy Wilkerson, Flying, 396.
- Mark Rudd, “Why Were There so Many Jews in SDS?”
- David Gilbert, Love and Struggle: My Life in SDS, the Weather
Underground, and Beyond (Oakland: PM Press, 2012), 15
- Mark Rudd (Why Were There so Many Jews in SDS?)
- Mark Rudd, “Why Were There so Many Jews in SDS?
- Horowitz and Collier, 80-81
- Bill Ayers, Fugitive Days: Memoirs of an Antiwar Activist
(Boston: Beacon Press, 2009), 38.
Weather Underground ex Wiki
The Weather Underground Organization (WUO), commonly known as
the Weather Underground, was an
American
militant
radical left-wing organization founded on the
Ann Arbor campus of the
University of Michigan. Originally called Weatherman, the group
became known colloquially as the Weathermen. Weatherman organized in
1969 as a
faction of
Students for a Democratic Society (SDS)[3]
composed for the most part of the national office leadership of SDS and
their supporters. Their political goal, stated in print after 1974, was to
create a revolutionary party to overthrow U.S. imperialism.
With revolutionary positions characterized by
black power and opposition to the
Vietnam War,[3]
the group conducted a campaign of bombings through the mid-1970s and took
part in actions such as the
jailbreak of
Timothy Leary. The "Days
of Rage", their first public demonstration on October 8, 1969, was a
riot in Chicago timed to coincide with the trial of the
Chicago Seven. In 1970 the group issued a "Declaration of a State of
War" against the United States government, under the name "Weather
Underground Organization".[4]
The bombing campaign targeted mostly government buildings, along with
several banks. The group stated that the United States government had been
exploiting other nations by waging war as a means of solidifying America as
a greater nation. Most were preceded by evacuation warnings, along with
communiqués identifying the particular matter that the attack was intended
to protest. No people were killed in any of their acts of property
destruction, although three members of the group were killed in the
accidental
Greenwich Village townhouse explosion.
For the bombing of the
United States Capitol on March 1, 1971, they issued a communiqué saying
that it was "in protest of the U.S. invasion of
Laos". For the
bombing of
the Pentagon on May 19, 1972, they stated that it was "in retaliation
for the U.S. bombing raid in
Hanoi". For
the January 29, 1975 bombing of the
United States Department of State building, they stated that it was "in
response to the escalation in
Vietnam".[4][5]
The Weathermen grew out of the
Revolutionary Youth Movement (RYM) faction of SDS. It took its name from
Bob
Dylan's lyric, "You don't need a weatherman to know which way the wind
blows", from the song "Subterranean
Homesick Blues" (1965). "You Don't Need a Weatherman to Know Which Way
the Wind Blows" was the title of a
position paper that they distributed at an SDS convention in Chicago on
June 18, 1969. This founding document called for a "white fighting force" to
be allied with the "Black Liberation Movement" and other radical movements[6]
to achieve "the destruction of U.S.
imperialism and achieve a
classless world: world
communism".[7]
The Weathermen began to disintegrate after the United States reached a
peace accord in Vietnam in 1973,[8]
after which the
New Left
declined in influence. By 1977, the organization was defunct.