More info...we should Freep the live chat......
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Posted on 04/28/2004 6:22:25 AM PDT by PJ-Comix
In October 1969, hundreds of young people wielding lead pipes and clad in football helmets marched through an upscale Chicago shopping district, pummeling parked cars and smashing shop windows. Thus began the “Days of Rage,” the first demonstration of the Weathermen, later known as the Weather Underground. Outraged by the Vietnam War and racism in America, this group of former student radicals waged a low-level war against the United States government through much of the 1970s, bombing the Capitol building, breaking Timothy Leary out of prison and finally evading the FBI by going into hiding. In THE WEATHER UNDERGROUND, former Weathermen including Bernadine Dohrn, Bill Ayers, Mark Rudd and David Gilbert speak frankly about the idealist passions and trajectories that transformed them from college activists into the FBI’s Most Wanted.
The Weather Underground emerged when Dohrn and a group of fellow University of Chicago students split with the campus-run Students for a Democratic Society, or SDS, because they disagreed with the SDS’s peaceful protest tactics against the Vietnam War. Dubbing itself the Weathermen, this new organization took its name from a line in Bob Dylan’s “Subterranean Homesick Blues”—“you don’t need a weatherman to know which way the wind blows”—and within months had set off bombs at the National Guard headquarters and set in motion plans to bomb targets across the country that it considered emblematic of the worldwide violence sanctioned by the U.S. government.
Using extensive archival material such as photographs, film footage and FBI documents, THE WEATHER UNDERGROUND chronicles the Weathermen’s public rise and fall and offers a rare insider look into the group’s private conflicts. Fueled by righteous anger, these white, middle-class students were also widely criticized for their controversial—some say misguided—politics. As former SDS president Todd Gitlin says: ''Like Bonnie and Clyde, many of them were attractive personally. They were into youth, exuberance, sex, drugs. They wanted action.” Ultimately, the Weathermen's carefully organized, clandestine network managed to successfully dodge the FBI for years, although the group's members would eventually reemerge to life in a country that was dramatically different than the one they had hoped their efforts would inspire.
As an exploration of the Weathermen in the context of other social movements of the time, the film also features rare footage and interviews with former SDS members and the Black Panthers, further examining the U.S. government's suppression of dissent during the 1960s and 1970s. Looking back at their years underground, former Weather Underground members paint a compelling portrait of troubled times, revolutionary times and the forces that drove their resistance home.
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Yes -- exactly. In the parts I saw there was very little discussion about why support for a communist revolution was a horrible, almost unforgiveable thing.
Yeah, the ONE person who now has a REAL JOB is the only one who sees CLEARLY what the Weather Underground was really about.
Notice how there is nary a mention of his involvement with the Weathermen.
Director, Children and Family Justice Center
Clinical Associate Professor of Law
Bernardine Dohrn, Clinical Associate Professor of Law and Director and Founder of the Children and Family Justice Center, is a leading child advocate. She serves on the boards of directors of the Erikson Institute, the Chicago Reporter and is a member of the Local School Council of the Nancy B. Jefferson School. Ms. Dohrn is a member of the Domestic Violence Child Abuse Working Group of the National Council of Juvenile and Family Court Judges, the steering committee of the Illinois Family Violence Coordinating Committee and is a board member of the Human Rights Watch Children’s Rights Project and the Midwest Coalition for Human Rights. She was a member of the Expert Work Group for the Adoption 2002 Project of the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services, and she co-chaired the Fordham Conference on Ethical Issues in the Delivery of Legal Services to Low Income Persons.
With her law students, Ms. Dohrn has visited South Africa to gain cross cultural perspectives on children’s human rights and legal issues. She is a founder and member of the American Bar Association section of litigation’s Children’s Rights Committee and appointed to the ABA advisory committee to the Immigration Pro Bono Development and Bar Activation Project.
Education: BA with honors, MA, JD, University of Chicago
Past Appointments: Adjunct faculty, University of Illinois/Chicago (2000-present) Visiting Faculty, Vrieje University, Amsterdam (2002), Dept of Criminal Justice, Director, Juvenile Court Project 1991-1992, Poverty & Race Research Action Council, Legal Assistance Foundation, Homeless Advocacy Project, 1991, Children’s Rights Project, Roger Baldwin Foundation of the American Civil Liberties Union, 1990-91, long-term litigation legal associate, Office of the Public Guardian, Cook County, Juvenile Division, 1988-1990, Sidley & Austin, 1984-1988.
Selected Publications:"The School, The Child and The Court," (in eds. Margaret Rosenheim, Franklin E. Zimring, David S. Tanenhaus and Bernardine Dohrn) A Century of Juvenile Justice, University of Chicago Press (2002); “Look Out Kid/It’s Something You Did: Zero Tolerance for Children," (in eds, William Ayers, Rick Ayers and Bernardine Dohrn) in The Public Assault on America’s Childhood, (2000 ed. Valerie Polokow) Teachers College Press, Columbia University; Zero Tolerance: Resisting the Drive for Punishment, The New Press
The biggest thing for me to show out of touch these folks were was when they decided to move off the college campus' and into blue-collar neighborhoods in big cities; thinking that would help grow the movement. I've yet to know too many blue collar guys who were sympathetic to Leninist thought.
Huh? That would be Bill Ayers. Could you post a link to that article? That would be a MUST READ. Sheesh! Talk about BAD TIMING!
Yes, behind closed doors. Often these radicals say one thing for public consumption and quite another among themselves. Recently a substitute host for Rush played a tape of an "anti-war" meeting AFTER the reporters left. It discussed how to support the Iraqi "resistance" fighters killing American troops.
The New York Times broke a story on Sept. 11 of this year that was slightly overshadowed by the tragic events that transpired that morning.
Nearly three months after the worst terrorist attacks in the history of the world, it's time to re-examine that story.
The story was about a home-grown terrorist – one that not only got away with bombings of the U.S. Capitol in 1971, the New York City Police Headquarters the year before and the Pentagon in 1972 but one who is totally, 100 percent unrepentant about those actions.
His name is Bill Ayers. He was a leader of the Weather Underground – a terrorist faction of the Students for a Democratic Society.
''I don't regret setting bombs,'' Ayers told the New York Times in the story published ironically on Sept. 11. ''I feel we didn't do enough.''
Ayers spent the 1970s as a fugitive. But today, he lives in a big turn-of-the-19th-century stone house in the Hyde Park district of Chicago.
He is not only proud of his terrorist actions, he prospers from them.
His new book, ''Fugitive Days,'' currently ranked 25,228 by Amazon, is the 56-year-old's memoir. But this incompetent bomber is also a liar. He admits that parts of his story are fictionalized.
A publicity shot for the book shows Ayers with the American flag crumpled in weeds by his feet.
Though he admits his role in the bombings, Ayers, we're told, is probably safe from prosecution. A spokeswoman for the Justice Department told the New York Times there was a five-year statute of limitations on federal crimes except in cases of murder or when a person has been indicted.
In 1970, Ayers was said to have summed up the Weatherman philosophy as: ''Kill all the rich people. Break up their cars and apartments. Bring the revolution home, kill your parents, that's where it's really at.''
Today Ayers is a "distinguished professor of education" at the University of Illinois at Chicago. And he says he doesn't actually remember suggesting that rich people be killed or that people kill their parents, but ''it's been quoted so many times I'm beginning to think I did,'' he said. ''It was a joke about the distribution of wealth.''
"He went underground in 1970, after his girlfriend, Diana Oughton, and two other people were killed when bombs they were making exploded in a Greenwich Village town house," the New York Times explains. "With him in the Weather Underground was Bernardine Dohrn, who was put on the FBI's '10 Most Wanted' list. J. Edgar Hoover called her 'the most dangerous woman in America' and 'la Pasionara of the Lunatic Left.'"
Between 1970 and 1974, the Weathermen took responsibility for 12 bombings, Ayers writes, and also helped spring Timothy Leary (sentenced on marijuana charges) from jail.
Today, Ayers and Dohrn, 59, who is director of the Legal Clinic's Children and Family Justice Center of Northwestern University, are married.
In 1969, after the Manson family murders in Beverly Hills, Dohrn told a Students for a Democratic Society audience: ''Dig it! Manson killed those pigs, then they ate dinner in the same room with them, then they shoved a fork into a victim's stomach.''
In Chicago recently, Dohrn said of her remarks: ''It was a joke. We were mocking violence in America. Even in my most inflamed moment, I never supported a racist mass murderer.'' A joke? Pretty funny, huh?
Would Ayers do it all again? ''I don't want to discount the possibility,'' he told the Times.
Ayers has something else in common with Osama bin Laden – besides a fascination with terrorism. His father, Thomas, now 86, was chairman and chief executive officer of Commonwealth Edison of Chicago, chairman of Northwestern University and of the Chicago Symphony. In other words, he's another rich-kid terrorist.
Dohrn got a slap on the wrist for her charges. She pleaded guilty to a rioting charge and received three years probation and was fined $1,500. The federal charges against them were dropped before they surrendered to authorities in the 1980s.
Does this make you angry? While the U.S. is at war with terrorism, our universities here in the United States employ people like Ayers. They prey on our children and fill their minds with romantic tales of fighting "inside the belly of the beast" – the United States of America.
But here's the real punch line of this sick joke.
Guess what Ayers teaches? He instructs prospective K-12 teachers in "moral education" and in the "ethical and political dimensions" of education.
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