If Mark Rudd’s autobiographical book about the 1968 Columbia University Student Strike and Weather Underground that Rupert Murdoch’s HarperCollins firm just published (Underground: My Life with SDS and the Weathermen) interests you, then you might also be interested in checking out David Gilbert’s No Surrender: Writings From An Anti-Imperialist Political Prisoner that the anarchist Abraham Guillen Press published in 2004.
In his book, the still-imprisoned Columbia Students for a Democratic Society [SDS] co-founder and former Weather Underground member Gilbert, for example, wrote the following in reference to the Weather Underground Organization [WUO]:
“In a society where every single movie and TV program showed that the FBI `always got their man,’ the Weather Underground eluded capture and sustained armed action for six years…In a world where `legitimate’ governments bombed villages and assassinated activists but decried any armed resistance as `terrorist,’ the WUO carried out more than 20 bombings against government and corporate violence without killing anyone or so much as scratching a civilian.
“…The WUO was not formed as a narrow conspiracy but instead was a focal point within a much broader surge of anti-war militancy, as thousands of military buildings and Bank of America branches were burned to the ground, and as hundreds of thousands of people joined demonstrations that broke government windows, disrupted meetings of bigwigs, and resisted arrest.
“Weather’s exciting breakthroughs coexisted with costly mistakes. The earliest and most visible came during the first six months (late ’69 to early ’70), while we were still aboveground: our sickening and inexcusable glorification of violence, which grievously contradicted the humanist basis for our politics and militancy…To this day, almost all `history’ about the WUO makes the mania of those six months the whole story, without looking at our correcting of that error and the ensuing six years of solid and humane anti-imperialist action…
“Early Weather’s grave sins of commission were glaringly visible. The opposite movement sins of omission, which usually aren’t even noticed, can be even more lethal. The terrible passivity of most of the white Left to the early attacks on the Panthers gave the government a signal that it would not face widespread political costs for proceeding with its full-fledged COINTELPRO campaign, which killed scores and jailed thousands of Black, Native, and Latino activists.
“Weather’s militarism culminated in March 6, 1970, when a frantic bomb-making effort, including anti-personnel weapons, resulted in an accidental explosion in a safehouse (known as the townhouse explosion) that killed three of our own beautiful young comrades…
“…Our middle-class background meant that we did a poor job at outreach to more working-class sectors of youth.
“There were related problems in our internal life…
“To me, a crucial lesson is that activists must consciously grapple with the powerful pull of ego that can lead us to put our own position and leadership above advancing the interests and power of the oppressed…
“Despite these serious weaknesses, six years of impressive successes resulted from what was right about anti-imperialism. Contrary to the spy movie mystifications that are all about sophisticated techniques and technology, our survival underground was based on popular support from radical youth and the anti-war movement. That was the key to solving needs such as ID, money, and safehouses. There were moments when the FBI hunt was breathing down our necks, but popular support meant that information was kept from the state and instead flowed to the guerrillas.
“Our stage of struggle was `armed propaganda,’ with no illusion of yet contending for military power. Instead, the purposes of actions were to (1) draw off some of the repressive heat concentrated on Black, Native, and Latino movements, (2) create a leading political example of white solidarity with national liberation, (3) educate about key political issues, (4) identify the institutions most responsible for oppression, and (5) encourage others to intensify activism despite state repression. We also provided examples of non-armed struggle (e.g. spray painting), pursued dialogue with the above ground movement by writing to and reading responses in radical newspapers, and even created our own underground print shop. We wrote and published the book Prairie Fire, a well-developed statement of the politics of revolutionary anti-imperialism…
“The FBI never broke the WUO, but in 1976-1977 we imploded from our own weaknesses…”
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