Category: Politics, Power, and Governance

TACTICS

Washington DC caved to the civil rights movement in just three weeks. As soon as fires started. Why? Control is an illusion. A tiny number of people create the pretense. The state cannot tolerate the illusion of loss of control. This is why Baltimore and Kansas City and such were let go: the force necessary would result in the loss of political legitimacy and the evidence of the illusion of institutional control.

FAILED TACTICS

For those of us who remember the marxists and civil rights movements of the sixties and seventies, bombings were a daily if not weekly occurrence. We are reminded of a few right wing activists frequently, but we are never reminded of the fact that marxists of all sorts and the civil rights movement was a continuous campaign of ATTENTION-SEEKING violence, with as many as five bombings per day.

Civil terrorism doesn’t work. It never works. Revolts against the institutions do work. Revolts with SPECIFIC DEMANDS work – if those demands are JUST. Self determination is just.

FROM TIME MAGAZINE

—“Nearly a dozen radical underground groups, dimly remembered outfits such as the Weather Underground, the New World Liberation Front and the Symbionese Liberation Army, set off hundreds of bombs during that tumultuous decade—so many, in fact, that many people all but accepted them as a part of daily life. As one woman sniffed to a New York Post reporter after an attack by a Puerto Rican independence group in 1977: “Oh, another bombing? Who is it this time?’”

The underground groups of the 1970s were a kind of grungy, bell-bottomed coda to the protests of the 1960s; their members were mostly onetime student leftists who refused to give up the utopian dreams of 1968. While little remembered today, there was a time during the early 1970s when the U.S. government—the Nixon Administration—considered these groups a genuine threat to national security. Alarmed by a series of Weatherman attacks, Nixon told J. Edgar Hoover during a June 1970 Oval Office meeting that “revolutionary terror” represented the single greatest threat to American society. Hoover promised to do what he could, which wasn’t much.

As paranoid as Nixon could be, it was hard to argue with his line of thinking: Bombing attacks were growing by the day. They had begun as crude, simple things, mostly Molotov cocktails college radicals hurled toward ROTC buildings during the late 1960s. The first actual bombing campaign, the work of a group of New York City radicals led by a militant named Sam Melville, featured attacks on a dozen buildings around Manhattan between August and November 1969, when Melville and most of his pals were arrested.

Weather’s attacks began three months later, and by 1971 protest bombings had spread across the country. In a single eighteen-month period during 1971 and 1972 the FBI counted an amazing 2,500 bombings on American soil, almost five a day. Because they were typically detonated late at night, few caused serious injury, leading to a kind of grudging public acceptance. The deadliest underground attack of the decade, in fact, killed all of four people, in the January 1975 bombing of a Wall Street restaurant. News accounts rarely carried any expression or indication of public outrage.”—