Back during the campaign, Republicans often attacked Obama over his relatively minor associations with former Weatherman William Ayers. Ayers had the sense to stay quiet during the campaign. He did put out an op-ed in December where he explained himself but didn't really grapple with the decision to use violence. Howard Machtinger, another former Weatherman, has a post that I found far more useful and reflective (Via Matt Yglesias).
In the initial history, Machtinger argues that the organization did not commit terrorism, but that one cell of it had the intent to do so by blowing up a non-commissioned officers dance at Fort Dix. Instead, they blew themselves up killing three of their members in a townhouse. The organization classified that as a "military error" and targeted property and not people in subsequent attacks. After most members turned themselves in for amnesty in1978-9 a splinter group helped commit an armed robbery that killed two police officers. That roughly gels with what I've read and seen elsewhere.
His analysis of what drove the Weather Underground seems plausible to me:
There were also those who argued for the legitimacy of armed resistance—defending its use in national liberation struggles, for instance—without trying to implement it as an appropriate strategy for that historical moment in the United States...
What lay behind the WU trajectory, however, was not merely frustration with the shortcomings of the “aboveground” movement, or long-term strategic thinking. It was an attempt to prove revolutionary mettle in the imagined spirit of the Vietnamese resistance or the Black Panthers...
Other longtime activists argued that our actions would isolate the movement, obscure its message, and sabotage priorities: We dismissed all of these criticisms as examples of white privilege, if not cowardice. Counter-arguments served mainly to convince us of our own revolutionary righteousness. Not even Chicago Black Panther leader Fred Hampton’s labeling us “Custeristic”—for the 1969 Days of Rage demonstration, which he accurately saw as self-destructive—slowed us down.
Machtinger laments that they rejected the "organizing tradition" of leftist politics used by "the Civil Rights, Black Freedom, Women’s Liberation and antiwar movements."
This organizing tradition, which the WU abandoned, has a developmental, long-haul perspective and an emphasis on building relationships that endure. It respects collective leadership and holds that the best movement leaders should have ongoing, accountable relations with their bases—the grassroots...
The WU favored more dramatic action that ended up disconnecting the purported leadership from any mass base, leaving it unaccountable (except self-glorifyingly to a nebulous “people of the world”) in its self-defined trajectory. The WU rationalized its practice by attacking any possible base as too privileged, too corrupted by consumerism and imperialism.
Similar temptations toward what has been variously called “infantile” leftism, “phallic” politics, or “petit-bourgeois” adventurism have not disappeared – they reappear in new guises, but parade with the same heedlessness and self-importance. The “fierce urgency of now” is always with us, but the struggle to maintain one’s humanity in building a movement for social justice in an oppressive world has a more profound urgency.
I'm no revolutionary, but I think this particular case study does have lessons for foreign policy interventions. The world is far more anarachic than even 1960s America and those situations where intervention takes place typically have rather limited avenues for non-violent opposition. Nonetheless, there is a definite risk of disconnecting with the base of people you intend to help as well as the domestic base whose resources and even blood are being used towards this purpose. This of course isn't a new insight, but I think the pathologies that develop in examples we can systematically reject can be helpful in identifying mistakes when the use of violence seems more appealing.
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