weatherman: classic or dud?

everyone considering answering this question has an fbi file already, c'mon

not as catchy as Dope, Guns and Fucking In The Streets.

er, wait, not the terrible Placebo song

rock'n'roll, dope and fucking in the streets

weatherman: elaborate fantasy life

true, though they did realize the importance of working with "the hip community"

xxpost

i'm going with dud for their deeply flawed race analysis and their inability to work with anyone else despite all their grand talk about alliances and solidarity

I love me some Weather Underground radicalism.

Now bring on the pragmatists, fun-haters and crypto-Tories to explain why they were stupid and wrong.

I guess I'm enamoured of that impulse to dream and dissect, no matter how ineffectual it ends up being. A better world begins with people envisioning the overthrow of this one. It just doesn't end there, obv.

noodle i'm not a fun-hater, just a hater of ineffectuality!

i also think their machoism is pretty dud -- it's no real surprise that their take on male supremacy was sketchy at best

i'm reading a book about them right now and honestly the thing that startles me most is not that their ideas were so fantastical -- after all, communist revolutions were happening all over the world then -- but that they consistently refer to police as "the pigs", every single time .. it's like .. hello you've just been talking about class solidarity for half an hour

every once in awhile in this book i'm reading someone will mention that no industrial society ever had a communist revolution and they sort of end the paragraph very quickly and move onto something else

http://www.newyorkcitywalk.com/images/nycwweathermen/Hoffman.jpg
Dustin Hoffman says dud.

I wasn't calling you a fun-hater there, Tracer.

Part of the whole "the pigs" thing is because a movement like this didn't really come out of class consciousness tho, it comes out of an amorphous "counter culture" which becomes aware of Marxist ideas when it's casting around for something to freak out the squares with, or to understand its own disaffection, or both.

i dont see how anyone committed to actually enacting maoist principals could be considered "fun"

oh and the violence thing too - def not fun

Noodle not really, sds was started in 1960 and its point wasn't to freak out squares it was to stop universities from being, as they saw it, factories for the exportation of war, weaponry and imperialism

xpost oh i don't know, i think some of those dudes got a real kick out of "getting pigged"

xpost

Well I tried to begin to explain what I found attractive about it, without wanting to defend the Cultural Revolution. I just don't have much sympathy for the idea that a good old vote will sort out all the world's problems either.

Maybe the whole attraction is a masochistic wallow in the hundred reasons why the Left are doomed to lose.

http://newsimg.bbc.co.uk/media/images/41148000/jpg/_41148618_weather_bbc_416.jpg

we don't need a weatherman to tell which way the wind blows cause we have the internet! it's all so clear now

i guess i just feel like violence never serves the right people in the end

have you ever read arendt's book on violence tracer?

no!

i would have liked to hear hannah arendt on "do the right thing"

i guess i just feel like violence never serves the right people in the end

Whilst I'm inclined to agree I'm also pretty damn sure that the wrong people frequently respond to very little else.

you should read it. i dont love it but shes fantastically smart and its basically a book-length scolding of the "new left" and its embrace of violence as a means to an end

one of the immediate criticisms of the orig weatherman statement was that its international analysis -- which feels pretty right-on -- meant that they were telling americans that their stuff is basically stolen and they should go give it all back

Which book are you reading, Tracer? Bill Ayers' memoirs are pretty interesting for anyone who's more curious about living on the run.

There's a pretty good book out there comparing Weather and the German RAF

Weather comes out appearing as relatively harmless stuff from kids with their hearts more or less in the right place.

So in a way classic from the sheer romanticism of the enterprise.

But dud for the explosion fiasco and their ultimate tactical naivety

yeah they quote all these old commie guerillas but then they don't realize they they need to do something like plan an escape route from an "action"

the book i'm reading is called "weatherman". it's a collection of essays from 1969 and 1970 (edited by harold jacobs). most of the stuff comes from new left notes magazine.

http://www.amazon.com/Weatherman-Harold-Jacobs/dp/0671207253

schools are prisons

^^ true

not that we need the weathermen to tell us that.

IIRC herbert marcuse, who i am proud to say was once a san diegan, did a pretty good job demolishing these guys

Described their manifesto as "one-dimensional"?

in more words, yes

basically a book-length scolding of the "new left" and its embrace of violence as a means to an end

yo i haven't read this either; is this where she takes on franz fanon?

when the critics have more mileage than your movement, you know you're dud.

when yr clueless kids w/violent fantasies purporting to speak for a working class that couldnt disagree w/you more, youre pretty much dud.

lol vanguardism

so vanguardism automatically dud?

yeah thats the one gff xxxpost

Weather comes out appearing as relatively harmless stuff from kids with their hearts more or less in the right place.

-- baaderonixx, Monday, February 11, 2008 9:57 PM (1 hour ago) Bookmark Link

Kathy Boudin did end up killing some people you know.

http://www.voxpopnet.net/images/guitar_army_cover_225x.jpg

i saw the documentary on the weatherman a few months ago and it was pretty upsetting. one guy completely renounced everything they did.

^^^lol 60s

i really <3 the band mc5 but "the white panther party" is full on retarded in as many ways as you can imagine.

explain why they were stupid and wrong

First, the ability to describe a problem in coherent terms is nice, but that and five bucks will get you a latte at Starbucks. They were wrong because their chosen strategy did not achieve a single one of their goals. They were stupid because they thought they didn't need to change their strategy in the face of persistent failure.

their goals were also pretty stupid and wrong - tho clearly not as much so as their actions

their goals were to end us imperialism worldwide -- ambitious yes but "stupid and wrong"?

a pretty scathing autocriticism from Mark Rudd

"the Weather Underground abandoned the basic principle of any strong political movement: a commitment to organizing"

nail, head

"We thought the bolder we were, the more people would want to join us"

this is the other thing that really bothers me about them -- it's not too far from this to "Shock and Awe", or the al-Qaeda belief that spectacular violence will shock Muslims into consciousness of their oppression by the West

Yeah, I was gonna bring up Al Qaeda, which it seems gathers followers through "martyr" attacks.

but I guess this kind of reasoning works better when your potential audience is disenfranchised with nothing much to lose.

the current issue of the Nation mentions a 1973 essay by Elinor Langer where she says

Because revolution was effectively impossible one did not have to dirty one's hands in compromise, nor mingle much with the hoi polloi (meaning: the middle class; the un-Chosen) along the way. And it was also ahistorical and smug, since it mistook revolution, a rare historical event, for a moral choice.

revive cuz this is a really interesting thread and has better discussion going on than the current one

yeah good thread. Re. notion of "vanguardism": is there any case of a successful movement launched through the radical and edifying actions of a "vanguard" alone (rather than or without a "commitment to organizing") ?

http://vimeo.com/31161211

no longer the province of video rental stores that still have a few VHS tapes left in their documentary section

propaganda worth watching once, now that it's online I can imagine watching the first five minutes over from time to time

this is the first page of my review of the weather underground and chris marker's a grin without a cat: fraid you'll need a jstor account to read the whole, and i don't own the copyright so can't just put it up myself :(

Beautiful first page. Will have to read the rest of that next time I'm in a good library.

It will be interesting to see what goes differently this time, and what goes the same.

currently logging every film i've seen since i was 13 onto letterboxd. lol @ my watching the weather underground documentary in october 2008.

http://reprints.longform.org/story-of-diana