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Weather Underground video


KaBar2

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I ran across a new video documentary filn about the Weathermen, the 1969 organization that split off from SDS at the 1969 SDS Convention. It's really pretty good. It has extensive '60s footage of famous Weathermen, including Bernadine Dohrn, Bill Ayers, Mark Rudd, Brian Flanagan and others. It has film of the Townhouse Explosion in Greenwich Village, shot just shortly after the fire trucks arrived, and some very impressive (and VERY rare) footage of the Chicago Days of Rage rampage down Chicago's Gold Coast nieghborhood, where the Weathermen smashed hundreds of plate glass windows and windshields of luxury cars, etc. (The person who shot that footage was very much in danger, as much from the cops as from the Weathermen.)

 

The part I liked the most was a pissed-off interview with a former leader of SDS, who could barely contain his rage and contempt for Weatherman. He felt like they highjacked SDS and destroyed the Student Left with their Maoist/Stalinist tactics.

 

Also shown is 16mm footage of the immediate aftermath of the Chicago police/FBI attack on Black Panther Fred Hampton's apartment, showing the bullet-riddled premises and Hampton's body.

 

I know it's hard to understand the intensity of the 1960's/ Boomer Generation feelings about that period. A lot of people are like "Man, LET IT GO, it was thirty fucking years ago!" But it was like the Civil War, brother against brother, and we can't forget. This Weatherman film shows a lot of action footage, and has a list of all their bomb attacks against the Government, with news footage. There is an interview with a member of the FBI Squad 47--the "Weatherman Squad." (Everybody knew it existed, but none of my acquaintences knew the name of the FBI unit, it was just "the FBI.") The movie producers said it was a hell of a lot harder to get the retired FBI guys to talk than it was to find surviving Weathermen.

 

Mark Rudd was a major player in Weatherman. He led the student strike at Columbia University. After the Days of rage he was underground for 11 years during the Weather Underground bombing campaign. He teaches math at a community college in New Mexico.

 

Bernadine Dohrn was a young lawyer back then. She also was underground for 11 years, then surfaced and surrendered. She married Bill Ayers while they were underground. They had two kids, and later adopted the Gilbert's son, when the Gilberts drew long prison sentences for their role in the deaths of two police officers and an armored car guard during the Black Liberation Army armored-car Brinks robbery in Nyack.

 

Bill Ayers and Diana Oughton were a couple, I understand, before the Weathermen "smashed monogamy" within the organization. Oughton was killed, along with Ted Gold and Terry Robbins, in the Townhouse Explosion. Ayers later married Dohrn. Some people believe that Diana Oughton, who was a very dedicated pacifist, may have deliberately detonated the explosives to prevent Terry Robbins and Ted Gold from carrying out a bomb attack against a NCO Club dance at Fort Dix, N.J. She felt responsible, the theory goes, because she had tried to dissuade them, but failed. Her father was a multi-millionaire.

 

The music is pretty good, not a single tired-ass song from the '60s. The film is aimed at college-age people today.

 

The name "Weatherman" comes from a Bob Dylen song called Subterranean Homesick Blues--the VERY FIRST RAP SONG EVER--1967. It comes from the line "You don't need a weatherman to know which way the wind blows."

 

Rudd, Ayers and Dohrn are all college professors now.

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Well, yes, this is a FILM, but I rented it from Blockbuster for like three bucks.

 

Of course, in 1969, none of us could see into the future. I felt a lot like one of the women interviewed (someone who was not a "leader," like Dohrn and Rudd and Ayers, but just a rank and file "comrade,") that we were looking at a rare revolutionary period, and I wanted to be part of it. Unfortunately (or maybe, fortunately, for me, the Weathermen were absolutely authoritarian and dogmatic. I was so turned off by their Marxist-Leninist politics that it kept me from even considering joining their organization. But one couldn't help wondering what they were going to do next.

 

I became an anarchist, instead. And we had our own set of stupid errors, but luckily, none as spectacular as those made by the WUO.

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