http://www.sfbg.com/blogs/politics/2009/09/sf_weekly_dredges_up_the_sixti.html
By Tim Redmond
September 17, 2009
I wasn't going to say anything about the SF Weekly's big story on the
Weather Underground. I mean, Peter Jamison clearly did a lot of work,
it was reported in some detail, and frankly, I've over talking about
what happened back in 1970.
But it keeps gnawing at me, mostly because I don't really like this
whole idea of dredging up radicals from the past and trying to find
ways to put them in jail today. I know, I know, a cop got killed and
there's no statute of limitations for murder, and nobody should ever
get away with killing anyone else.
But that was a time when all sorts of people on all sides were doing
really fucked-up stuff, from the Vietnam War to COINTELPRO; Geronimo
Pratt spent most of his adult life in prison after being framed for a
crime he didn't commit. Fred Hampton was murdered. The list goes on
-- and none of the perpetrators of the state-backed or
state-sanctioned violence have ever paid for their crimes.
You can read a remarkable essay by former Guardian arts editor J.H.
Thompkins about it here. His basic take:
The '60s were full of challenge, and although I'm not a
revolutionary now, in my heart, I'm still a revolutionary then. You
believed you could change the world and yourself in the process, and
that was liberating. The politics were confusing, we made mistakes,
and at the end of the day, the fact is that we were right and the
other side racists, politicians, corporate vultures, and the rest
were wrong.
Sometimes I think we should just have a Truth and Reconciliation
Commission, put it behind us and move on.
Anyway, I asked an old friend of mine who was around in those days
what he thought about the Weekly story. He didn't want his name used,
because even now this shit scares people, and the FBI seems happy to
be looking for every Sixties radical it can find. But he had some
interesting comments:
I'd heard this story was coming out;. it doesn't seem credible to
me. I wasn't too far away from that scene during those months they
refer to -- December '69-March 1970 -- and I don't think BLA and
Weather were much connected. Weather types had showed up in disarray
after the fucked up "days of rage" thing. And I just don't think they
had the ties -- in fact, I'm almost certain they didn't. even the
early weather people weren't so stupid as to meet a group (BLA) and
then pull some horrific job with them. I'd be more inclined to think
it was the splinter Panther, BLA-types, even though that trend wasn't
very big in the bay area.
Cops and FBI statements all sound like typical conspiracy things,
general and ignorant of any real nuance. And the writer - what was
the point of this? - doesn't dig much up but aging police sources,
but does a good job with the incriminating innuendo.
The most credible voice for the cops is Gitlin; because his
statement is very true. The group was nearly defunct after days of
rage, and the true believers were prone to crazed hyperbole like
Bernadine Dohrn's Manson riff at Flint. It was like that Sociology
101 book "when prophecy fails," so they were over the top between the
fall and when the townhouse exploded. then it changed dramatically.
But I still don't think that it makes any sense. The Weather people
were so naive and so new to it at the end of '69; I just don't think
they could have - or would have - pulled it off. Plus, and I was
closer to the people if not the group as '70 wore on, I never heard
one whiff of gossip about it, and those people loved to tell their
stories. What's more disturbing is the way all this stuff sets
precedents, softening up people so that the country is used to
finding demon radicals in America again.
I don't know if Weather Underground was involved in this bombing. I
do know that it's almost impossible at this point to prove it, one
way or another. There were too many nutcases doing too much crazy
stuff, and all this can possibly lead to is another show trial that
seeks to put the Sixties on defense again.
I'm kind of over that, too.
.
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