Throughout the 1960s and 70s, there were dozens of different groups undertaking their individually grand projects of mass transformation of this country. Malcolm X, Martin Luther King Jr., and Fred Hampton of The Black Panthers mounted their respective battles for Civil Rights while our country waged war on a small nation in Southeast Asia under the guise of preventing the imminent ubiquity of Communism. The National Guard killed four people at Kent State University while thousands of acres of jungles and people were napalmed to find a supply trail running along a peninsula.
1969 brought the United States the death of Fred Hampton, freshly building off the reverberating assassinations of Martin Luther King Jr. and Robert F. Kennedy, the Manson murders of the Tates and LaBiancas, the height of the Vietnam War and the Mei Lai Massacre, the debacle that was the Chicago Democratic Convention, and the Altamont, the ultimate death rattle to the peace and love rock music encore.
So, why wouldn’t a group of individual seeking to become, as Mark Rudd suggests, a “Communist cadre, completely committed to revolution” be born from such dysfunction? Weather Underground replays these nefarious decades in our country’s existence and dances a thin line between supporting the Weathermen and decrying their actions.
While violent revolution is difficult to support, it is important to adhere to John F. Kennedy’s assertion that “if peaceful revolution is ignored, violent revolution is imminent,” and in a country that practiced the art of indifference when confronted with the issue of civil rights, it’s hard to believe that the emergence of resistance groups wasn’t foreseen.
The Weathermen were a subsidiary of Students for a Democratic Society (SDS), but had broken off in late 1969 when the philosophical approach of non-violent resistance became correlated with acquiescence, a notion stemming from the surging number of deaths and troop deployments in Vietnam despite the exponentially growing number of citizens fillings city streets to protest the longest – and first unwinnable – war in United States history.
Perhaps they were misguided in their approaches to bring down the establishment by planting bombs in various government buildings that include The Pentagon, Queens County Courthouse, NYPD Headquarters, and the US Capitol; however, it is difficult to completely deride them given that their member were college students coming of age in a society that seemed to sanction violence as a means of harnessing control and imposing values and social order – Vietnam.
At the same time, the Weathermen and The Weather Underground expose the conflict created by this learned behavior: All violence that is not sanctioned by the government is deemed criminal or mentally ill; thus, violence doesn’t work in bringing about revolution because a wealth of laws have been established to impede a violent overthrow of government. Likewise, this type of active violence is stigmatized, so the motives themselves are overshadowed and the focus is placed on what is deemed evil or inappropriate.
Four died at Kent State to preserve law and order. Millions died in Vietnam to prevent the spreading of Communism, yet the victors of that war have not become leaders of the free world, nor have the spread their governmental policies to any other nation via the “domino theory.” So, the use of sanctioned violence is nearly as heinous as the violence that is condemned, but the latter threatens to founder a precarious system built on ideological values.
What The Weather Underground ultimately exposes is the dangers of Puritanism and its subsequent encouragement of a fallacious “moral high ground,” which Brian Flanagan, former member of the Weathermen asserts, “leads to unconscionable actions,” which encompass acts of the Weathermen, individuals, and the government that often holds us in abeyance.
DYL MAG Score: 8