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Duration: 10:08 minutes Upload Time: 2007-08-03 19:11:32 User: jihadlovestoyota :::: Favorites :::: Top Videos of Day |
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rebellion revolution civil rights movement domestic resistance cointelpro black panthers weathermen fbi sds mark rudd
Description: In 1969, a small group of college students announced their intentions to overthrow the U.S. government in opposition to the Vietnam War. "We felt that doing nothing in a period of repressive violence is itself a form of violence. That's really the part that I think is the hardest for people to understand. If you sit in your house, live your white life and go to your white job, and allow the country that you live in to murder people and to commit genocide, and you sit there and you don't do anything about it, that's violence." -Naomi Jaffe The Weather Underground Organization (Weathermen) hoped to cause chaos on a level able to "wake" the American public out of what the group saw as its complacency with the slaughter of between 3 and 5,000,000 Vietnamese people. The group referred to itself as a revolutionary organization of women and men, whose purpose was to achieve the revolutionary overthrow of the Government of the United States. To that end, they carried out a campaign of bombings, jailbreaks, and riots. One of the first things the Weathermen did was to announce that they would "Bring the war home". Their attacks were mostly bombings of government buildings, executed after calling in bomb-threats and making sure their target buildings were evacuated. After the group began dissolving in 1977, many members moved on to other armed revolutionary groups and were subsequently arrested and held for long periods. Very few served prison sentences for their time in the Weather Underground; the infiltration and destruction tactics used against them by COINTELPRO made much of the evidence gathered against them deemed illegally obtained and inadmissible in court. Meanwhile, Weatherman members that later revealed themselves to be law enforcement officers, offered unapologetic testimonies of intentional incitement to violence and terrorist acts, used as a tactic at key junctures to discredit and destroy the group. Jennifer Dohrn, Bernardine Dohrn's sister, later claimed that according to documents released under the Freedom of Information Act, the FBI planned at one point to kidnap her son when she gave birth. The film was criticized for including lengthy interviews with the former members in which they justified their violent acts. However, the Weathermen damaged only property, and no deaths were caused by their actions, except the deaths of three of the group's own members: Terry Robbins, Ted Gold and Diana Oughton. "There's no way to be committed to non-violence in one of the most violent societies that history has ever created." Bernardine Dohrn Sam Green and Bill Siegel, 2002 |
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