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.
The Weather Underground were the TERRORISTS of over 30 years ago. It was interesting to see the attitudes of the former Weathermen today. Mark Rudd now sounds ambiguous and confused. Bryan Flanagan was the one Weatherman who sounded genuinely remorseful and even compared the tactics of the Weather Underground to the current Al Qaeda terrorists. Bernadine Dohrn sounded still defiant as did a couple of other women. Amazingly, despite planting bombs and engaging in terrorist activities, many of these Weather (Terror) Underground members are now teaching at college campuses.
If you missed this documentary, I STRONGLY recommend you see it in the rebroadcasts. Here is a LINK to more info about tis documentary and the Weather Underground.
'despite'??? I thought terrorist experience was a prerequisite.
Apparently a high percentage of the Weather Underground members are now teaching on college campuses. BTW, I predict that if Bush wins this year by a landslide that a lot of DUmmies will go the Weather Underground route. A lot of DUmmies even use Weather Underground imagery in their posts.
As other posters have noted, the real aim of the WU and other anti-war groups was not opposition to the VN war, but a communist overthrow of the US politial/economic system.
As the decades recede, it becomes more evident that the US really was in a fight against global communism (duh!). The point being that the Soviets had to be behind this to a much greater extent than previously thought.
With success in the US and fall of VN, the communists really were on a roll. Thank G-- for Ronald Reagan. Who could have guessed that after their high-water marks in the late 70s, only a decade remained before the whole facade came crashing down?
There was actually a strange tribute to Ronald Reagan in this documentary. This documentary relates how bad things got by the late 70s and how bad the morale in the country became....then it switched to an image of a smiling President Reagan of the 80s. I gotta tell you, after watching all the downside stuff it actually gave me a warm glow inside to see that image of Reagan who brought CONFIDENCE back to this country. I don't know how leftist the filmakers were but one result of this documentary was an inadvertent salute to Reagan.
Why is that amazing? It isn't amazing to me.
I caught part of the documentary. I could only take it in very small doses. I thought they were way out of line to give so much air time to these terrorists. The program should have given air time to the families of the people who were hurt or killed, so we get a sense for the evil and pain these traitors brought into the world.
MUST SEE viewing for all Freepers. I don't know what the intentions of the film makers were but the end result is that the Weather Underground came off as a bunch of idiots, especially with the talk from the women Weather Underground about some generic feel-good revolution. Mark Rudd hit it on the head when he said their goal was COMMUNIST REVOLUTION.
Next time watch all of it. In the end, the Weather Underground didn't come off well at all. The women Weather Undergound members were blathering that their goal was some sort of generic revolution by the "people" but Mark Rudd state their real goal---COMMUNIST REVOLUTION.
BTW, I bet some of the former Weather Underground members were pained when they saw this documentary with Mark Rudd saying this. They were probably thinking: "Hey, you're not supposed to actually say what our REAL GOAL was." They want to fool folks into thinking they just wanted some "progressive" feel-good revolution.
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