Unsafe in any Generation
How can people be so heartless
How can people be so cruel
Easy to be hard
Easy to be cold…
…And especially people
Who care about strangers
Who care about evil
and social injustice…
Easy to Be Hard
Hair, 1968
James Rado and Gerome Ragni
Don’t throw the past away
You might need it some rainy day
Dreams can come true again
When everything old is new again…
Peter Allen
Everything Old is New Again
The buildings burst into flame around dawn on October 19, 1998- eight of them, clustered across the mountaintop. By 7 a.m. the inferno was visible for miles. Residents began calling the local fire department: the top of Vail Mountain is on fire.
Fire crews rushing to the scene may have passed the passenger truck already on its way to Denver. Two days later, a statement taking responsibility for the fire was emailed from a computer in a Denver public library:
“Putting profits before Colorado’s wildlife will not be tolerated. This action is just a warning. We will be back…”
They called themselves the Family- 16 men and women ranging in age from their late 20’s to early 40’s who conspired to create a terror campaign lasting 6 years and stretching across 5 states. Their arson and sabotage spree included bombing a police station and collapsing an electrical transmission tower in an attempt to start a “Y2K-”type meltdown. In all, the Family committed 17 violent actions whose “primary purpose,” according to court documents, was to
“…influence and affect the conduct of government, commerce, private business and others in the civilian population by means of force, violence, sabotage, destruction of property, intimidation and coercion…to retaliate against the conduct of government…”
Everything old is new again.
“Tens of thousands have learned that protests and marches just don’t do it. Revolutionary violence is the only way,” proclaimed Bernandine Dohrn in June, 1970.
Shortly thereafter, the Weather Underground, Dohrn’s own terrorist group, bombed a police station.
That bombing was merely one in a string of violent attacks intended to coerce both the U.S. government and public opinion. The Weather Underground’s terror campaign would not officially end until a botched Brink’s robbery in 1981 ended in a shootout with police. By then Dohrn and her partner, Bill Ayers, had abandoned their underground lifestyle. Dohrn would spend a token 7 months in prison for refusing to testify against her old comrades-in-arms at the Brink’s robbery trial.
Ayers faced no charges at all.
With much of the police surviellance declared inadmissable and statutes of limitations expired, the two Weathermen quietly returned to the bourgeoise, upper-class lifestyle they had once scorned. Ayers is now listed as a ‘distinguished professor of education’ and ‘Senior University Scholar’ by the University of Illinois at Chicago. Dohrn is the director of Northwestern University Law School’s Children and Family Life Center. The pair are influential in Chicago left-of-center politics; the Weather Underground’s dangerous, decades-long tantrum has been politely forgotten.
But not by all.
For the generation born after 1963, the Weathermen became part of “The 60’s,” a group with some vague name recognition but with most of the violence airbrushed out. The ugly reality of terror and destruction was replaced by romantic notions of “resistance” and “revolution.” Even New York Times writer Dinitia Smith succumbs to the insurgent allure in an otherwise critical piece about Ayers and Dohrn:
“He describes the typical safe house: there were usually books written by Malcolm X and Ho Chi Minh, and Che Guevara’s picture in the bedroom; fermented Vietnamese fish sauce in the refrigerator, and live sourdough starter donated by a Native American that was reputed to have passed from hand to hand over a century.”
Dig it, Baby!
The distortions of nostalgia make rational assessment of groups like the Weather Underground all but impossible for today’s young people. Writing in Yes! magazine, student organizer Joshua Kahn Russell explains:
“…a lot of us had a warped understanding of how social change is made. We were constantly measuring our activism up to some mythical idea of “the 60’s.” U.S. soundbite culture chronicles the past as one big crescendo after another- as if our movements were just a series of isolated earth-shattering events.”
The limits of that “warped understanding” are now being tested. On Martin Luther King Day in 2006, a group of young activists and 60’s veterans announced that they were re-launching Students for a Democratic Society.
Students for a Democratic Society- SDS- began in 1962 as an umbrella group for student activists. More a coalition than a single entity, by 1967 SDS was devoting itself to protesting the war in Vietnam. But it’s own internal factions began warring against each other and in 1969 the turmoil gave birth to the Weathermen.
SDS collapsed. Peaceful protest was overtaken by terrorism.
While the actions of the current SDS have included, at worst, some disruptive theatrics, it’s unclear whether the distinction between civil disobedience and violent coercion is understood by it’s members. SDS activist Tom Good was quoted in the Orlando Weekly in 2006:
“We think that the whatever you call it- radical democratic, anarchist, anarcho-syndicalist- approach to a nationwide organization is the way to go.”
If the new SDS (with over 200 chapters nationwide)looks to Bill Ayers for philosophical clarification, they aren’t likely to find much; Ayers has never admitted to committing terrorist acts. This is not say he does not believe in terrorism. He does, and defines it this way:
“…the destruction of human beings and/or their property, their livelihood, their homes, for the purpose of exacting a political agenda; and it’s the indiscriminate destruction of innocent people to enact a political agenda.”
Yet he says of the Weathermen:
“What we did was never terrorism, although we contemplated it, we thought about it, we might have done it but we never did.”
Call it the Doctrine of Ayers Exceptionalism. Or perhaps Committing Terrorism in Your Heart. In either case, this refusal to draw bright lines and take personal responsibility brings us back to the Family.
Unlike the SDS, the Family was a successful cohesion of violent splinter groups. Members of the Animal Liberation Front (ALF) and the Earth Liberation Front (ELF) pledged mutual support, trading members and expertise until the two groups became indistinguishable.
They also claim not to be terrorists.
They like to call their violent attacks “direct actions” and compare their “actions” to the Boston Tea Party.
They could also be compared to burning crosses and dangling nooses.
Spokesmen for ALF and ELF like to point out that no one has ever been killed or injured by their actions. This is not strictly true. Anyone researching ALF and ELF in the United States soon learns that they are transplant organizations. ELF was founded in Britain in 1992; ALF in 1976. SHAC also originated in Great Britain, and includes members of ALF and ELF.
This is the loophole. Using the model of autonomous cells and leaderless resistance, members of ALF and ELF can commit violent acts against people in the name of SHAC. For example, in 2001 Brian Cass, Huntingdon Life Sciences’ managing director in Great Britain, was savagely beaten by three men armed with baseball bats. When told of the attack, Ronnie Lee, founder of Britain’s ALF, expressed his approval:
“He has got off lightly. I have no sympathy for him.”
The man eventually apprehended for the assault, David Blenkinsop, had ties to SHAC.
The Justice Department is another group in Great Britain organized along the leaderless resistance model. Thus far they have specialized in letter bombs and their efforts have impressed the London Independent, who called their attacks “the most sustained and sophisticated bombing campaign in Mainland Britain since the IRA was at it’s height.”
Investigators in Great Britain believe that Keith Mann of ALF founded the Justice Department.
The violent groups of the 60’s were limited by the tools available to them: meetings that could be survielled, vulnerable telephone lines, letters that could be intercepted. They were dependent on the cooperation of radio, television and newspapers to air their threats and spread their propaganda. Today’s autonomous cells can accomplish all these tasks using the internet. It’s one-stop shopping for terrorist wannabes: the ELF website features manuals with such titles as Setting Fires with Electrical Timers: an Earth Liberation Guide and Arson Around with Auntie ALF; sympathetic websites offer instant gratification to terrorists who can post communiques and photos of their attacks.
No more smuggling dog-eared manuals from safe house to safe house; no more anonymous tips to newspapers or demanding air time on local TV.
Add to this fluidity of communication an ambiguos, irresponsible definition of terrorism and you have set the stage for a self-righteous, self-reinforcing cult that can jump borders with its ideology intact.
Which is precisely what ALF, ELF, SHAC and the Justice Department have done.
In the 2003 documentary The Weather Underground, ex-Weatherman Brian Flanagan told an interviewer:
“When you feel you have right on your side, you can do some horrific things. That is the dangerous ethical position we fell into.”
The Justice Department feels it has right on its side. Since its establishment in North America in 1993, the Justice Department has mailed 80 razor blades dipped in rat poison to researchers, hunting guides and other victims. The poisoned blades are positioned inside envelopes so that no one opening them can avoid being cut. They come with a note:
“Dear animal killing scum! Hope we sliced your finger wide open and that you now die from the rat poison we smeared on the razor blade.”
Scientists have long been favorite targets of such hate groups; their homes are vandalized and their families threatened. In July 2002, Dr. Michael Podell abandoned his research and resigned from Ohio State University after receiving a photograph of a British scientist whose car had been bombed.
“You’re next,” was scribbled on the picture.
On February 24th, 2008, a University of California at Santa Cruz researcher and her family- whose names have not been released- were the victims of an attempted home invasion. The family was hosting a birthday party for one of their young children when six masked attackers began trying to batter down the front door of their home. The husband ushered the rest of the family into the rear of the house and then returned to face the attackers. They struggled briefly with him before they fled.
Someone inside the house tried to place a call to 911 during the attack, but all the operator could hear was a woman screaming and children crying.
“We who have an affinity with non-human animals and nature are finding it increasingly difficult to love our fellow man,” Princeton University philosopher Peter Singer told the Australian Herald-Sun in 2002.
Another ex-Weatherman, Mark Rudd:
“All Americans were legitimate for attack…I was overwhelmed by hate; I cherished my hate as a badge of my moral superiority.”
Belief in their moral superiority has led some domestic terror groups to broaden their agenda. An ELF video declares that the group wants to destroy “the entire capitalist system.” A commenter on Infoshop News, a website catering to anarchist views, wrote in May 2007:
“As things get worse for the planet, and for working people, more and more people will be doing these radical actions. Capitalism has to go. It ain’t going to go easily.”
Enter Recreate ‘68.
A group calling itself Recreate ‘68 began issuing media communiques in January, 2007, announcing that “activists representing diverse communities” were organizing a “week of political solidarity in resistance and protest” to coincide with the Democratic Convetion in Denver, Colorado. A November, 2007 communique promises that “tens of thousands of people will participate in a Festival of Democracy and the Days of Resistance that will bring back the spirit of the sixties…”
In this instance the “spirit of the 60’s” was the sight of young people being cracked over the head with police batons while chanting “The Whole World is Watching!” This does not seem to be what Recreate ‘68 has in mind, however; in an odd combination of time-travel and role reversal, the group presented a list of demands to the City Council designed to discourage any police presence and give the group unlimited access to any desired city park or venue. The Recreate ‘68 website also features helpful discussions of how to “fight the pigs who want to take your rights away.”
All of this in liberal Denver, whose City Council passed an official resolution protesting the Patriot Act in 2002. What will happen in such a city if, as R-’68 predicts, “tens of thousands” of demonstrators show up- and, sprinkled among them, terrorists committed to advancing their agenda by means of arson, death threats, and attempted murder?
Will the past be prologue, or simply an ugly, ragged circle?
And the seasons, they go ’round and ’round
And the painted ponies go up and down
We’re captive on the carousel of time
We can’t return, we can only look behind
From where we came
And go ’round and ’round and ’round
In the circle game…
References
From Push to Shove/Heidi Beirich and Bob Moser
Earth Liberation Front Arsonist Sentenced/Jeff Barnard
Verdict in Ecoterror Case Likely Today/Paul Shukovsky
11 Indicted in Five-State Ecoterror Campaign/ADL
Backstory: Eco-vigilantes:All in “The Family”/Brad Knickerbocker
No Regrets for a Love of Explosives/Dinitia Smith
Terrorists Who Never Have to Say Sorry/Jonah Goldberg
Obama Once Visited 60’s Radicals/Ben Smith
Who Is Bill Ayers?/Michael Miner
Homegrown Terrorists-The Weather Underground/Matt Kapko
Environmentalists Classified as Terrorists, Get Stiff Sentences/ABC News
Not Your Grandfather’s SDS/Joshua Kahn Russell
SDS, New and Improved/Adam Doster
Yacht Racer To Arsonist/Allyn Harvey
Arson in the Name of Activism/Mark Freeman
FBI Joins Probe of Violent Protest/San Jose Mercury News
Researcher Victim of Home Invasion/Tomas Roman
UCSC officials: Animal rights activists targeted researcher’s home/Tom Ragan
UC Berkeley Library: Anti-Vietnam War Protests
The Whole World is Watching/Chicago 68
Cross-posted at Deafening Silence.
The word Terrorism, just as the "terrorist," are in the eye of the beholder. Who is the greater terrorist in Tibet right now? The angry Tibetans, violently attacking ethnic Han Chinese, or the indiscrimately firing PRC Police? The safe Israeli gunner firing missles from the safety of the wall, or the 17 Palestinian kid hard wired to kill innocents as innocents around him have been killed? John Walker Lindh, who fought as a soldier in a government army known to sponsor terrorism or The US Marines in Haditha who slaughtered a village?
And what is terrorism? By your defination, the Bosten Tea Party was terrorism. If, as I believe you suggest, property destruction is terrorism, do the economic effects of a strike or bloackade count? Are tree-sitters terrorists?
Do you not consider it terrorism if done by the state? When the US accidentilly bombs a wedding in Iraq is that terrorism? Surely it is if a suicide bomber achieves the same results.
Terrorism. like Freedom, is subjective. George Washington, Crazy Horse, William Wallace, Che Guevera, Micheal Collins. Terrorists to their enemies, hero’s to those they led.
I will be in Denver for the DNC. Not to get my head bashed in. (Only the Police really can "recreate ‘68, as it was declared a ‘police riot’ by the investigations.) I will be their to do all I can to force the Democrats to grow a spine and end the war.
And by the way, my dog’s a Beagle. Huntingdon employees get about as much sympathy from me as they show to their animals.