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Violent, uncontrolled demonstrations, vicious attacks on the police, bitter condemnations of ‘white privilege’, the comprehensive ‘cancellation’ and fabrication of history, and the destruction and vandalization of historical monuments under the umbrella of the Black Lives Matter campaign have become central features of the current radical assaults on Western societies.
The massive involvement of semi-hysterical young white people is one of the most striking features of this ‘cultural revolution’. Anxious to be associated with black protesters in the vanguard of destruction and chaos, they run back and forth in their designer black ‘Ninja’ outfits, elegantly masked, shrieking abuse and baiting police, throwing stones and Molotov cocktails, attacking bystanders, inanely kicking and punching toppled statues as they push them into drains, and smashing shopfront windows to loot items their parents would buy them without a second thought. And then, on social media they attack viciously anyone who dares to disagree with them or question how their over-hyped involvement helps the campaign for racial justice.
In seeking to understand this frenzied phenomenon of ostentatious self-abnegation it is necessary to discuss its ideological and activist origins in the far-left terrorist groups of the Sixties. This venture into history might serve to forewarn where this might all be heading.
At the centre of this history are the Weathermen (aka the Weather Underground). This was a far-left radical organization that advocated urban guerrilla warfare and terrorism to sow the seeds of a revolutionary upheaval in America and its allies, such as Australia. Their aims were stated in their manifesto (named after a Bob Dylan lyric): “You don’t need a weatherman to know which way the wind blows’. This 16,000-word diatribe identifies “the contradiction between the revolutionary peoples of Asia, Africa and Latin America and the imperialists headed by the United States as the principal contradiction in the contemporary world.”
The enemy was their own society, which they committed themselves to destroying from within. As they declared in one of their early pamphlets using a deliberate misspelling of ‘AmeriKKKa’ meant to denote its racist and fascist nature:
We move with the people of the world to seize power from those who now rule … We’ve got to actively fight. We’re going to bring the war home to the mother country of imperialism. AMERIKKKA: THE FINAL FRONT … We start to build a Red Army by fighting in the streets now. We’re going to knock the pig on his ass in those streets.
They were a determined Fifth Column, relying on the self-hatred engendered in their own country by the left’s control over education. According to one of their leaders, Bernardine Dohrn:
All over the world, people fighting Amerikan imperialism look to Amerika’s youth to use our strategic position behind enemy lines to join forces in the destruction of the empire … Our job is to lead white kids into armed revolution … Che Guevara taught us that ‘revolutionaries move like fish in the sea’. The alienation and contempt that young people have for this country has created the ocean for this revolution.
The defining psychological feature of the Weathermen was their hated and guilt about being white. They felt a desperate need to atone for their “white skin privilege”, as they put it in a formula that now has an iron grip on universities and the media. Consequently, their ideology and practice were characterized by a rejection of the white working class as racist, and their embrace of Black Power and Third World revolutionary movements as the only legitimate motors of historical progress.
Initially, the Weathermen focused on ideological work. For example, they launched an agitprop campaign in schools, urging white working-class students to join ‘The Revolution’, much as one of the co-founders of the Black Lives Matter organisation did recently at a school in Cabramatta, explaining to the students that “we are trained Marxists [with] an ideological frame” that reveals capitalism to be the main evil threatening the world. (paywalled: “Radical question Marx over BLM movement’s aims”, Daily Telegraph, 20/6)
The Weathermen organized squads to barge into blue-collar high schools in Pittsburgh, Milwaukee, Boston, and other cities. Yelling ‘Jailbreak!’ they pushed teachers aside, even tied them up and gagged them, before delivering their revolutionary message. As one Weathermen leader declared: “The kids would learn that their only choice is either joining the world revolution led by the blacks, the yellows, and the browns, or being put down as US imperialist pigs by the people of the Third World.”
However, the lukewarm response they received turned them to violence. They adored Che Guevara and modeled themselves after the Tupamaros, the ultra-violent Uruguayan urban guerrilla group. And so began the ‘Days of Rage’ in October 1969, as they carried out an extended campaign of violent demonstrations, riots, robberies, jail breaks, and bombings, including 250 major bomb attacks between September 1969 and May 1970.
As affluent, white, young university students they desperately sought credibility in the eyes of the Black Power activists whom they idolized. It was for this reason that they made extreme violence a non-negotiable tactic of all their activities, as they explained in one of their manifestoes:
We’ve got to show people that white kids are willing to fight on the side of black people and on the side of the revolution around the world. If you’re not going to fight, then you’re not part of us. It’s as simple as that.
And as one of their leaders, Bill Ayers, declared: “Kill all the rich people. Break up their cars and apartments. Bring the Revolution home, kill your parents.”
Committed to acts of exemplary violence to establish their revolutionary credibility, the Weathermen lived in a fantasy world of ultra-radical political posturing that progressed quickly from verbose polemical denunciations of Western society to deliberate street violence, vandalism and crime and, ultimately, to terrorism. Their pamphlets denounced all police as ‘pigs’, and they fantasized about killing them. As one Weatherman mused:
It’s a wonderful feeling to hit a pig. It must be a wonderful feeling to kill a pig or blow up a building. We’re against everything that’s ‘good and decent’ in honkey America. We will burn and loot and destroy. We are … your mother’s worst nightmare.
Their leaders fantasized about dying as heroes in a hail of police bullets, as vividly depicted in Bonnie and Clyde, Butch Cassidy and Sundance Kid, The Wild Bunch, and other popular movies from the period. Significantly, their first bombing destroyed a major Chicago monument to the police killed in the Haymarket Riots a century earlier. Later, they bombed a New York City police station, allegedly in retaliation for the death of a black activist who had been killed attempting a prison escape.
In addition to world communist revolution, the Weathermen called for the victory of communist North Vietnam in the Vietnam War and the creation of many Vietnam-like guerrilla wars around the globe, designed to consume all America’s military resources. The communist dictator of North Korea also attracted their adoration, and so they devised a song sung to the tune of ‘Maria’ from West Side Story:
The most beautiful sound I ever heard
Kim Il Sung …
I’ve just met a Marxist-Leninist named Kim Il Sung
And suddenly his line
Seems so correct and fine
To me
Kim Il Sung
Say it soft and there’s rice fields flowing
Say it loud and there’s people’s war growing
Kim Il Sung
I’ll never stop saying Kim Il Sung.
Kim Il Sung would have been delighted.
Inevitably, the Weather Underground became cultish and adopted the ritualistic public self-denunciations demanded in the Chinese Cultural Revolution. Members were forced to confess their mistakes or any thoughts that deviated from the group’s ideology. This ensured total ‘transparency’, especially of the rank-and-file to the leadership.
In the area of sexuality, their behaviour became pathological and can only be touched on here. Within the fanatical world of their ‘collectives’ the goal was to “smash monogamy” through various sorts of sexual experimentation, with all members, male or female, commanded to sleep with each other. One member wrote later of being ‘guilt-tripped’ into having sex with a black comrade to prove she wasn’t racist. Private relations of love and affection were declared exclusionary, counterrevolutionary and pathetically middle-class.
When some of the women had children, pressure was applied to ensure no bourgeois maternal attachments developed. Any ‘Weathermothers’ who were suspected of devoting too much time to their babies were forcefully reminded that the revolution came first and some were even ordered to give their babies away. Moreover, in line with their exaltation of Black Power, white babies were seen as tainted with the original sin of ‘white privilege’, while one ‘Weathermother’ was told as she breastfed her child that, “all white babies are pigs” and her baby should be put in the garbage.
The hideous violence associated with the Charles Manson-led Tate-LaBianca murders in 1969 appealed particularly to the Weathermen. Manson, like them, preached an upcoming race war, and they elevated him and his gang into revolutionary heroes. They kept a trophy picture of the brutally murdered Sharon Tate on their office wall. The new morality of Nihilism was expressed by Bernardine Dohrn in a notorious outburst:
Dig it. First they killed those pigs, then they ate dinner in the same room with them, then they shoved a fork into a victim’s stomach! Wild!
This exemplified the boundless hatred felt by the Weathermen for mainstream morality and society. Indeed, the leadership expected that they would have to direct a post-revolutionary extermination campaign, involving the killing of some 25 million Americans judged to be enemies of the new regime. As an incredulous witness to the discussion observed:
I want you to imagine sitting in a room with 25 people, most of whom have graduate degrees, from Columbia and other well-known universities, and hear them figuring out the logistics for the elimination of 25 million people.
This madness finally reached a crescendo with a massive series of explosions in a New York City townhouse in March 1970. Three Weathermen were killed when a bomb they were constructing exploded, blowing them to pieces, destroying the four-story building (right), the wall of the house next door (owned by actor Dustin Hoffman), and shattering windows throughout the neighborhood. It had occurred when a Weatherman misconnected some wires while making anti-personnel pipe bombs composed of nails wrapped around sticks of dynamite. A search by police and firemen found evidence of at over 60 sticks of dynamite, 30 blasting caps, timing devices made from alarm clocks, and a quantity of twelve inch iron pipes packed with dynamite. Apparently, the bombs were to be used in a large scale bombing offensive, beginning with an attack on young army recruits and their dates at a social dance at Fort Dix, New Jersey.
The bombing campaign nevertheless went ahead. Targets included the home of the judge who had presided over a trial of some Black Panther militants on conspiracy charges relating to the planned bombing of police stations, Macy’s department store, and the Bronx botanical gardens. Within months the group had bombed the Presidio Army Base in San Francisco, the Army Mathematics Research Center in Madison, Wisconsin (where a graduate student was killed), the Haymarket Memorial (for a second time), the Marin County Court House, the Long Island Court building, and the Centre for International Affairs at Harvard. Many more bombings occurred over the next few years. In the group’s later manifesto, Prairie Fire: The Politics of Revolutionary Anti-Imperialism, Bill Ayers, took credit for participating in some 30 bombings and other terrorist attacks, including on the US Capitol in 1971, and the Pentagon in 1972.
As one contemporary historian (who was himself a radical leader in the Sixties) has observed:
The Weathermen were traveling to the far reaches of loathing. Their immensely bad ideas and dreadful tactics must have had a root in some larger upheaval of the movement’s collective psyche. Charles Manson, the fork, the Weathermen as vandals and scourges – we had stumbled onto the realm of the demonic. — Todd Gitlin, The Sixties: Years of Hope, Days of Rage
Inevitably, the Weathermen were placed on the FBI’s 10 Most-Wanted list and Ayers, Dohrn and the rest went underground. During these ‘fugitive years’ Ayers claims to have lived in 15 states, using the names of dead babies in cemeteries who were born in the same year as he was, and living in safe houses full of books by Malcolm X and Ho Chi Minh, with Che Guevara’s picture on the walls. Ultimately he and Dohrn got married and used their wealth and high level contacts to escape justice for their terrorist activities.
They remain unrepentant. In an interview published to promote his memoirs, Fugitive Days, which appeared in the New York Times on the very day of the 9/11 attacks, Ayers declared that “I don’t regret setting bombs, I feel we didn’t do enough”, and when he was asked directly whether he’d do it all again, he replied: “I don’t want to discount the possibility” At a reunion in December 2007, Ayers and Dohrn basked in their persona as triumphant rebels who had embraced ‘the spirit of resistance’ and risen to fame and influence. This included becoming vital political mentors to a young Barack Obama as he began his political career in Chicago — a relationship that resulted in claims Ayers ghostwrote slabs of the future president’s best-selling biography Dreams of My Father.
Their wealth and influence ensured an affluent post-Weathermen lifestyle. Ayers recently retired as professor in the College of Education at the University of Illinois at Chicago, formerly holding the titles of Distinguished Professor of Education and Senior University Scholar. Dohrn also recently retired from a prestigious academic position: Clinical Associate Professor of Law at the Children and Family Justice Center at Northwestern University School of Law.
They remain proud of never deviating from their far-left ideology and continue to embrace their white self-hatred and theory of ‘white privilege’ as a template for social and historical analysis. As they made clear in their influential 2009 book, Race Course: Against White Supremacy, white supremacy has been the dominant political system in the United States since its earliest days and permeates every aspect of society: the criminal justice system, the political system, policing, defence and foreign policy, and especially education. In that area they have long preached an ultra-progressive line that has proven very influential, especially on contemporary radicals, including those involved in BLM.
And so the madness of the Sixties reverberates today, engulfing society at a moment of acute crisis. Amidst chaos and nihilism, ordinary folk must struggle on, seeking to earn a living and make something of their lives while trying to support and nurture their families. Meanwhile fanatical ideologues are allowed to run amok, replaying the madness of the past. Indulged by a petrified establishment, they attract massive media attention, ostentatious acts of sympathy, and even support from the leaders and institutions of the very society that they hold in contempt and are working feverishly to undermine and overthrow.
Was Dr Spock responsible for the creation of this loathsome caste of political activists?
Where did it come from? The Pit, that’s where.
Isaiah 14:19
“But you have been cast out of your tomb
Like a rejected branch,
Clothed with the slain who are pierced with a sword,
Who go down to the stones of the pit
Like a trampled corpse.
One of the drivers of the hatred of the Weathermen and their ilk is a desire to prove that they are good against some fabricated ‘evil’ that they are somehow exempt from. Its a form of ‘self-salvation’ that depends on self-delusion and is effect self-abuse!
Most concerning is that Ayres was allowed to have anything to do with education after this. Imagine if some neo-Nazi was writing educational directions!
Old people, you are too late. Why didn’t you stop them 30 years ago when you were strong?
> “Indulged by a petrified establishment …”
Yes, that’s why these mob outbursts happen. In a democracy, there is no way of stopping a large mob. Individuals and small groups are easy pickings, soft targets.
Lonsdale
My own (obviously grown) children are well aware of the pointless destruction engendered by the bile of envy and stay well clear. That’s the essence.
Skin color and its connotations, are a matter of genetics and culture – where ones ancestors resided for the past 10,000 years.
Tropical zone:- [1] black skin to avoid sun cancer. [2] Food grows fresh every day and goes rotten tomorrow, impossible and unnecessary to store food. [3] Warm weather so no need to build houses or make clothes. [4] Lions and tigers in the jungle eat all the slow runners. [5] Every day the same, no sense of time.
Temperate Zone:- [20-40 degrees of latitude]. [1] Yellow/olive skin to make Vitamin D and avoid sun cancer. [2] other features a transition to the frigid zone.
Frigid zone:- [1] white skin to make Vitamin D [2] Short growing season -> agriculture and food storage [3] Need houses and clothes to survive the winter [4] No need to run fast – no large carnivores [5] Fill in the winter by thinking and doing experiments – eg Swedes discovered 70% of all the elements in the periodic table.
Eventually these patterns of survival become embedded in traditions and cultures.
It’s very bad that this Ayers has been allowed to get within a bulls roar of education, but what is even more astounding is that Obama appears to have been a friend and pupil of his, and it was well known apparently before Obama was FIRST elected…and he incredibly went on to be elected a SECOND time. It defies logic and reason, and also defying logic and reason is the obvious fact that he and his wife, of similar ilk I read, are actually still walking the streets as free as a bird. When the callow and the mob see this, with the courts obviously also going along with it, is it any wonder we have them rioting and destroying almost at will….because I think they do know, and probably admire people like Ayres for being able to get away with it in the first place, and actually continue through life getting away with it and even teaching and giving interviews on it, This at a time when the mob and the courts seem to be able to go back many decades trawling up long forgotten sexual experiences….and actually charging people over it while leaving real criminals like Ayres completely alone ??
I am wondering whether the violence and rage of many young people today is a convenient form of protest. I don’t mean protesting the cause of BLM or anything else – but a protest against their upbringing and their parents in particular. These kids, like their parents, are of a generation that has been constantly affirmed. These kids, like their parents, received a ribbon on Sports Day which said ‘I took part in the Grade 3 Race’ even though they didn’t get a place. These kids, like their parents, interrupted adult conversations and expected to be – and were – responded to immediately instead of being told not to interrupt. These kids, like their parents, haven’t learnt the meaning of the word ‘No’ and that there are limits in life – and failure – and one has to make the best of it. I am wondering whether their rage and anger has got something to do with the reality that they have an inkling that they have been sold short and weren’t loved enough to be told to wait; told No; told that they weren’t perfect and that in life one makes the best of what’s to hand – and most importantly – if you want to change the world, you can’t – you can only change yourself. I am wondering if they are angry because of this upbringing – and along comes BLM or any other cause – which provide them with a vehicle for working out their rage and frustrations. I wonder.
I say again, and again, where are the people from the ‘silent majority’ to combat the ideologies and activities like those Mervyn describes? Until we grow a backbone and act to demonstrate our belief that Western democracy and ‘white’ technology and culture are worth defending, we will continue to be divided and destroyed by those described by Mervyn, and the like. While I acknowledge passing the buck, someone must find a supportive philanthropist to fund a movement that demonstrates in support of Western culture and acknowledges that ‘white’ people today, as a generalization, have created superior technology and are more powerful and democratic than most others. We have no need to apologize. The people of the World are not all equal. All ‘white’ people are not equal. People may be born equal, a nice idea, but they are not born into equal circumstances and rarely have equal opportunities. While all people should be given equal opportunity regardless of colour, race, ethnicity, religion, or anything else, we must understand the intellectual and circumstantial differences between people. Today, ‘white’ people have significant advantages over others. Like in the chicken coup, there is a pecking order. Trying to artificially change that order is to fly in the face of nature. Trying to improve the lot of the disadvantaged, whatever their colour or circumstance, is a good thing. Maybe, the pecking order will change. However, trying to diminish and destroy the position of ‘white’ people merely for the sake of ideology is ridiculous and dangerous.
he Weather Underground was extreme. I remember them well. Why didn’t we fight them? For the exact reason that young people today don’t fight Black Lives Matter. We were idealistic and we didn’t see where that might lead. Equality and economic redistribution rather than individual freedom and equal opportunity became our benchmarks. We lived well enough and felt guilty about it. We wanted to change things we hadn’t lived long enough to understand nor read enough to assess. We thought that you couldn’t trust anyone over thirty, we really did. We saw ourselves as a youthquake that would shake the world and its old foundations. We passionately wanted to ensure some genuine injustices were righted; and in doing so and supporting that we allowed the evil of ‘progressivism’ to dominate our thinking, and to excuse extremism in the name of a cause.
And then a few of us started to have doubts. Now more and more of our generation do. An American turned Republication I now know started his university career as a leader of the old Students for a Democratic Society, which was the start of much of it in the US and then here. His doubts and mine came from a personally lived experience of the ideologies we were spouting and the damages they were causing us and those we loved, or who were simply our friends. Haight-Ashbury disintegrated from a summer of love to a season of ongoing drug despair. Communes collapsed into petty despotism. Feminism didn’t free us and socialism left us short of a job we felt valuable doing unless we worked expounding further socialism, which we no longer wished to do, for it was sounding increasingly hollow as we shifted gear away from leftism.
Like many young people today we didn’t even recognise our ‘progressivism’ as socialism, let alone were we capable of seeing it as aligned to communism, which we dismissed as not ‘real’ socialism, a pattern repeating today amongst the more gullible. We became trapped. As is often said by the older and wiser now – it was hard to leave the left, for the left had taken over all of the social institutions by which we made our livings and lived our lives, even though we were beginning to shake off our leftism. And the infection grew bigger than us, and spread to the media and opinion makers and educators of the children we eventually had and we started to know the truth: it is easy to subvert the idealism of youth when the only perspective offered as desirable is a unitary one. That is why today I support the IPA’s efforts to bring a more nuanced and respectful view about the value and treasures of Western civilisation and its freedoms to young people in our Marxist-dominated universities and media. Break the chain.
Looking at it from an educational / societal point of view I think there’s a lot to thank the loss of individualism for in all this, not that it solves anything to recognise it,. Of course it’s been well known for over a hundred years but no ones been able to stop it. Kierkegaard prophesied in the early 1800’s the inevitable destruction of individual character and passion, through an inherently reflective social process of ‘levelling’ which is where our charming MSM comes into the picture. For levelling really to take place, a phantom must be raised, the spirit of levelling, a monstrous abstraction, an all-encompassing something that is nothing, a mirage – and this phantom is ‘the public’. I think only in a certain servile mental condition can this phantom develop, with the aid of the press, when the press itself becomes a phantom. Press and public today merge and dissolve in cyberspace that’s everywhere and sort of nowhere. My neighbour watches Al Jazeera breakfast news, bones up on SBS with a bit of everything else thrown in, including the ABC, while her library consists of a few pulp fiction type novels. I still think people can break out of this, but when you’re total guidance comes from the TV and your friends, watching the same stuff it’ll take a bit of doing- I think !