The Weathermen and their legacy: they won academia

My two posts on the Weathermen, the terrorist wing of the American student radical movement in the era of Richard Nixon, weren't intended as political polemic, although polemic is my strong suit. 

My purpose was twofold. First to bring to people's attention the speech by Bernardine Dohrn about the Manson murders and second to show part of the background to the anti-racist, progressive ideas that have influenced and continue to influence the world so much. 

To recap, Bernardine Dohrn told a Students for a Democratic Society meeting shortly after the Manson murders:

“Offing those rich pigs with their own forks and knives, and then eating a meal in the same room, far out! The Weathermen dig Charles Manson.”

Her audience “instantly adopted” “four fingers held up in the air, invoking the fork left in Sharon Tate’s belly,” according to Mark Rudd, another leader of the group.

1960s student radicalism, the Weathermen and the origins of political correctness

The SDS (Students for a Democratic Society) was an important American student organisation in the 1960s known for its activism against the Vietnam War. It split after 1968 over whether to use violence to overthrow the government. This article is in the public domain and sheds light on the origins of the modern left in the USA.

It was at this meeting that Bernadine Dohrn, celebrated the fork stuck into the heavily-pregnant Sharon Tate's belly.

“Dig it! First they killed those pigs, then they ate dinner in the same room with them. They even shoved a fork into the victim’s stomach. Wild!”

I draw your attention to this passage:

The logic of that view was expressed in a statement by Ted Gold, a top Weatherman, who said that “an agency of the people of the world” would be set up to run the U.S. economy and society after the defeat of the U.S. imperialism abroad.

A critic spoke up: “In short, if the people of the world succeed in liberating themselves before American radicals have made the American revolution, then the Vietnamese and Africans and the Chinese are gonna move in and run things for white America. It sounds like a John Bircher’s worst dream. There will have to be more repression than ever against white people, but by refusing to organize people, Weatherman isn’t even giving them half a chance.”

“Well,” replied Gold, “if it will take fascism, we’ll have to have fascism.”

“The issue is never the issue. The issue is always the revolution.”

“The issue is never the issue. The issue is always the revolution.”

An unnamed “SDS radical” quoted by David Horowitz - I wonder which radical if any said this. I remember hearing this expression back in my 1970s childhood. 

This brings to mind the recent emergence of transgender rights as a political issue.

It is interesting to be reminded of the revolutionary fervour of the 1960s, which later transmogrified into the identity politics of Barack Obama and Hillary Clinton, both disciples of Saul Alinsky. Alinsky's book “Rules for Radicals” was originally entitled “Rules for Revolution”.

Calling the gendarmes slaves is against the law

Last month a Romanian, posting on Facebook, called the gendarmes guarding the National Anticorruption Department (DNA) "slaves", reports News.ro. He has been ordered to pay a fine of RON 900 (about EUR 195) for offensive language.

Calling the gendarmes slaves is against the law.

Eastern Europe is starting to become as authoritarian as Western Europe: in the 1980s I could not have imagined writing this sentence.

Things are even worse in England where a demonstrator was fine for calling his MP a coward. that only made the local paper.

Freedom is a concept that people increasingly no longer even understand.

Bernardine Dohrn: "They even shoved a fork into the victim’s stomach. Wild!”

I wrote about the murderer Charles Manson  when he died two weeks ago. He was one of the increasingly few people who was before my time. 

At his death, the liberal press incredibly tried to suggest that the murderous Manson - a counter culture hero if ever there was one - was a forerunner of Donald Trump. 

I mentioned the debate in the SDS about whether killing white babies was a revolutionary act and quoted Bernadine Dohrn, the SDS and Weather Underground leader, who celebrated the fork stuck into the heavily-pregnant Sharon Tate's belly.

“Dig it! First they killed those pigs, then they ate dinner in the same room with them. They even shoved a fork into the victim’s stomach. Wild!”

This was at a meeting held just after the Manson murders to decide a strategy for using violence to take over America in the name of Vietnamese and Africans. One of the SDS leaders announced that fascism, his word for a Communist dictatorship, would be necessary to wrest control of America from white Americans. 

The SDS talked a lot about 'white skin privilege'.

The Weather Underground or Weathermen were angry about U.S. imperialism, the Vietnam War and racism in general. Whites, they thought, stole the resources of non-whites and all whites were culpable, including the working classes.

The Weathermen were extremists and terrorists and numbered about 800 people but these attitudes were general on the left during the Vietnam war. At first opposition to the war was confined to a small minority of Americans but the anti-war left won. This was a very important moment in the history of anti racism, an ideology which has transformed America and the world.

Here we see why, forty years later, the far left sympathised with Islamists and Muslim reactionaries.


And also why many immigrants in Western Europe harbour some degree of anger and resentment towards the countries in which they live.


Weathermen were responsible for the bombing of the United States Capitol, the Pentagon and several police stations.


Bernadine Dohrn after years on the run and a short spell in gaol, was hired by Northwestern University School of Law, as Clinical Associate Professor of Law. She was one of the founders of the Children and Family Justice Center.

Her husband and accomplice Bill Ayers later became a university professor, but in the 1970s he told his followers:

"Kill all the rich people. Break up their cars and apartments. Bring the revolution home. Kill your parents. That's where it's really at."

The couple know the young Barack Obama, though he is at pains to deny that they are friends. His political career in Chicago was launched at a meeting held in their sitting room. 

Another former member of the terrorist group is also a university lecturer. 

In November 4, 2010, in an interview with Newsclick India, Dohrn said of the American right,

"It's racist; it's armed; it’s hostile; it’s unspeakable."

And:

"The real terrorist is the American government, state terrorism unleashed against the world."

If you want to friend Bernardine Dohrn on Facebook she is here.

However evil or misguided people on the left are, it doesn't seem to affect their future careers. This is true of some of the key organisers of the 1968 Paris riots. 

Do you imagine Dohrn would have got a lecturership had she been on the far right?

In this wicked woman's demonic speech about the murder of Sharon Tate and her unborn baby we see the reason why academia has been taken over by an evil secular religion as well as by white self-hatred. 

The smoke of Satan, said Pope Paul VI in the 1960s, is in the Church. It was not just in the Church but everywhere in the 1960s and it still is.

Sir Edward du Cann was a crook

I blogged about the death of Sir Edward du Cann here. I wanted to add this, which I just read in The Spectator by Charles Moore.

Sir Edward’s longevity proved a problem for me when I was preparing my first volume for the publishers. A paragraph about him (incredibly, he came quite close to being chosen over Mrs Thatcher to challenge Ted Heath in 1974) had to have two versions, one if he were still alive, the other if he weren’t. He lived, so my quotation from William Waldegrave said that Heath’s supporters hoped that Du Cann would challenge because they ‘all knew that he had such a dubious financial record as to make him an easy target’. In the ‘dead’ version, Waldegrave said: ‘all knew that he was a crook’. Those who romanticise the probity of politics in the old days would do well to study Sir Edward’s career.

The King is dead

O good old man, how well in thee appears the constant service of the antique world.

I have been very busy and had simply no time to blog about the death of the King which, even though he was 96 and had been very sick for two years, was a huge sadness to me and almost everyone in Romania. 

The Guardian obituary is here.

When I first came to live in Romania almost twenty years ago I was told that all nice Romanians are monarchists. It is true. The monarchy in 1990 was the rallying cry of the people who rejected the National Salvation Front and the (ex-)Communist structure of power. 

For many years until this century the words Monarhia Salveaza Romania ('The monarchy will save Romania') remained painted on a wall in Piata 21 Decembrie, a remnant from the days in the summer of 1990 when the golani ('hooligans')occupied the square before being expelled with violence and murder by the miners called into Bucharest by the ex-Communist government. 

The monarchy and the King represented conservatism, the nation, freedom, the antithesis of the 'structure of power' that ruled Romania since the Communist takeover till today.

It made Romania a better country knowing the King, who bravely dismissed and arrested Marshal Antonescu in 1944, was alive. 

He represented another, better Romania and an elite which was destroyed by socialism. Though dethroned kings are very sad, their faces like worn coins.

Which head of state in the world today can compare with him for bravery, patriotism and principle?

Romanian politics surely prove the advantages of a hereditary monarch and a head of state who is, like Caesar's wife, above suspicion.

Is ISIS part of the Muslim reformation?

'I find it odd that people often call for a Reformation in Islam, because no one seems more Salafist and bloodthirsty than the men (mostly men) who brought in Europe's Reformation.'

(Christopher Howse, reviewing Eamon Duffy's new book in the Spectator.)

It is possible that ISIS is part of the Muslim reformation.

 

Guernica

When Colin Powell stood outside the Security Council meeting room to discuss the forthcoming invasion of Iraq a curtain was tactfully or disgracefully drawn to hide the tapestry version of Picasso's Guernica.