No one who knows me would ever consider me a domestic terrorist. I am, in fact, a pacifist. You may think that's naive, but it would be a real stretch to consider my pacifism to be the same as terrorism, even if you think it helps terrorism (in which case I strenuously disagree). I'm a doctor and take the responsibility to heal pretty seriously. Barack Obama is being accused of "palling around with terrorists" because he has had an association with people the McCain campaign decided they want to call domestic terrorists purely for the purpose of inferring guilt -- guilt, literally, by association. So in the interests of full disclosure and for the purpose of making a clear statement, I declare that by their standard I've palled around with a few domestic terrorists in my time. Most of them weren't terrorists at all. Not by any stretch of the imagination. I'll concede some could plausibly be described as low level domestic terrorists. Like Bill Ayres. Although I don't know Bill Ayres from a hole in the wall, I may indeed have "palled around with him" once. I have no idea. Here's the story.
It's no secret here, or anywhere else, that I am opposed to the war in Iraq. It's not a new stance for me. I opposed the intervention in Afghanistan, the first gulf war, the military adventures in Grenada, the Panama Canal, Nicaragua. And of course the war in Vietnam. I opposed that war before it was even recognized as a war, traveling by bus in February 1962 from my college perch in Wisconsin to Washington, DC, protesting the role of US advisors as intervenors in a civil war. JFK sent out coffee and doughnuts to picketers outside the White House (how times have changed!), although I confess at that moment I was dining on Chinese food nearby. It was cold in February. Anyway, I have been pretty consistent and I think I have been shown right in every one of these instances. Some of you may feel the jury is still out on Afghanistan but for me it was wrong from the outset and I have said it here on multiple occasions (here, here, here, here). Not news. But back to palling around with terrorists.
I was pretty deep into the anti-Vietnam war movement in the sixties. I helped found a draft resistance organization for medical students and doctors and resisted the draft myself (that's another story, of course; maybe I'll have reason to give some of the details another time). The anti-war movement was a major part of my life for about ten years and it's fair to way I was generally obsessed with the war. I lived in a student style one bedroom apartment in a basement in those days, although by that time I had graduated from medical school and wasn't a student any more. I was starting my career in research and paid so poorly I couldn't afford more. As part of my obsession I had set up a TV antenna on the apartment building roof, with 300 ohm twin lead running down the side of the building (the manager was absentee).Its only purpose was to get the TV station in Manchester, New Hampshire because they ran one of the network news shows a half hour later than the latest in Cambridge, where I lived then. That way I could see ABC, CBS and NBC one after the other and then pick up the local public TV station at 7 pm, which had its own 15 minute news (The News with Louis Lyons, sort of like PBS's Newshour; independent and more objective than the networks). And that was all the broadcast news in those days. No cable, no AM talk radio. FM was mainly music. No internet, although there were some alternative weekly newspapers. As I said, I was obsessed with the war. If you are obsessed with the election and check the polls compulsively and visit DailyKos every 5 minutes, you know what I mean. Obsessed.
I didn't just watch the news, of course. Among other things, I was active with the Medical Committee for Human Rights (MCHR), an organization that started in the early sixties providing medical support for the Freedom Riders in the Civil Rights movement (I cannot claim involvement with them at that point, alas). By the mid to late sixties MCHR had taken on a whole host of medical issues, including national health care and access to care for the poor, as well as medical support for "the movement." I was part of the leadership in MCHR in Boston and nationally, but I had lots of company. Many medical and nursing students and young doctors and nurses were politically active in different ways, and MCHR was one of them (by the way, I still see many of my colleagues from those days and they remain politically active and dedicated; it's not true that yesterday's radicals have become today's fat and satisfied conservatives).
Providing medical support for "the movement" meant a lot of things. We weren't particularly choosy. It was a "united front" strategy and we supported almost anyone who, like us, opposed the vicious war that was causing an unbelievable loss of life on a daily basis. Each day the US military announced a "body count" of enemy and the news announced hundreds of US soldiers killed in action -- hundreds a day, not hundreds a month! So I traveled to the Democratic Convention in Chicago in 1968 as part of an MCHR medical aid team, taking turns driving overnight in the Boston Draft Resistance Group's VW van. In the five days of the Democratic Convention I saw so much violence up close I became permanently turned off of violent means for the rest of my life. Some of those five days my white coat was covered with blood of profusely bleeding scalp wounds from police batons; at once point I was almost permanently dispatched myself when a frightened police rookie, who had tripped in the midst of a panicking crowd, himself panicked and swung his rifle at me like a baseball bat, just missing my spleen by a half inch and doing a roundhouse 360. He was pretty scared and so was I. It all happened fast in the midst of chaos. Tear gas ("CS gas") was everywhere and three times I ran into clouds of it in the Grant or Lincoln Park skirmishes, chasing demonstrators who had become disoriented and run the wrong way. If you've ever been gassed, you know what this is like. I've had a chronic dry cough since those days. It wasn't all trauma, of course. Abbie Hoffman was bothered by a cold and cough. He wanted cough medicine. But it had to have codeine in it. I disappointed him.
Most demonstrators at the Chicago convention were basically peaceful, but mad as hell. And some weren't so peaceful. In particular a small faction of Students for a Democratic Society (SDS) was already considering a tactic of "bringing the war home." I was never a member of SDS (my college days preceded their existence), nor was I a member of any other group or sectarian political party. But until 1967 or 1968 SDS was the kind of New Left group that had objectives I could agree with. While the Battle Against the War on campus fueled tremendous growth in SDS, it soon started to engage in the kind of internecine warfare that was the downfall of one left wing group after another. By 1969 it was essentially self-destructed with the help of another group, the infantile ultra leftists of the Progressive Labor Party ("PL"). Perhaps that comment betrays my continuing contempt and bitterness about PL, a group that has done immeasurable damage to the American Left, not just SDS. [NB: This account simplifies a very complicated situation. If it interests you there are a number of memoirs of participants that will fill in the details, although the sectarianism of those days survives in today's accounts. One I read recently was by an SDS leader of the non-violent side, Carl Oglesby (Ravens in the Storm).]
By 1970, one of these SDS splinter groups, calling itself The Weathermen (after a line in Bob Dylan's Subterranean Homesick Blues: "You don't need a weatherman to know which way the wind blows"), had gone underground. They proceeded to wage their own war at home. This was a pretty small group, maybe a dozen former SDSers. Among them were Mark Rudd, Bernadine Dohrn and Bill Ayres. They styled themselves as revolutionaries in the mold of Che Guevara and they took themselves very seriously. The Weathermen considered the State to be at war with them and the Vietnamese people and they fought back -- quite literally. This included at least one bank robbery, where a guard was killed, and a handful of bombings. This was pretty bad, but was still on a tiny scale. Yes, this should be considered terrorism. But so should bombing and shooting civilians in Vietnam. State terrorism is still terrorism and both should be condemned, although in terms of scope there is no comparison.
That's by way of background. Now back to palling around with terrorists. It's after the Convention (and much else) and I'm still in Cambridge, obsessed with the war, enraged but feeling helpless. No matter what we did, no matter how big our demonstrations (and I was part of every major anti-war demonstration of the period up and down the east coast), no matter how much public opinion had turned against it, the war went on and on and the killing went on and on, all on an almost unimaginable scale. Day after day of watching the news and listening to the body counts and GI deaths. Daily. It was almost unendurable, unbelievably discouraging and demoralizing. But we kept doing what we could (we had no other choice), and this included providing medical care for anyone and everyone who needed it. Street people and kids in Harvard Square, demonstrations, the Black Panther Party. And it wasn't just medical care. For a time I was one of the Trustees of an American Friends Service Committee Bail Fund. I used to get calls in the middle of the night about some kid picked up with "burglar's tools" in his pocket (usually this meant a screw driver) who was locked up and couldn't even make nominal bail. I got other calls, too.
One night, sometime in 1970 or 1971, I got one of these late night calls to come to the top floor of a three decker in a decaying Cambridge neighborhood. AllI knew was that some political people had been attacked and were hurt. I met two of my MCHR colleagues (both women) and we set off for Putnam Avenue. When we got there we found Mark Rudd and a some of his Weathermen comrades, by then "underground" (we didn't know that, of course). They had indeed gotten into a fight with some members of Progressive Labor and had an assortment of contusions, lacerations and bruises. Nothing much. Even my rudimentary surgical skills could handle it.
Was Bill Ayres in this group? Probably. Needless to say there were no introductions. I knew Mark Rudd because he was a well known figure, but there were at least a half dozen or a dozen others and the Weathermen Underground never had many people in it. I will freely admit these guys were now pretty scary. At one point Rudd stood there, while we were occupied with our first aid stuff, clinking a tire chain up and down, while someone else announced, "Capitalist doctors are still pigs and if necessary will be offed." "Being offed" meant becoming not alive. We got out of there at the first opportunity.
That was then. The world has changed a lot and so have The Weathermen, including Bill Ayres, although he remains committed to positive social change. I never knew him personally, but I'm pretty sure I "palled around with him" late that night in Cambrdige almost 40 years ago.
Does that mean I can't run for President?
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Dude, that shit is fucking gripping! Your readers demand more tales of your fascinating life!!!!!!!!!!
Well, I can't compete with that.
Wow! I am speechless! This is so amazing, and eye-opening! Thank you!
'Someone' should set up a website for everyone to designate how many degrees they are from each of the Weathermen, SDS, the Kent State 'rads' (those that lived, and those who died), and all the other protesters against the VN war. I'd really wonder about those who were NOT connected to someone who knew someone who knew . . .
A friend and I visited the Washington DC SDS headquarters when I lived there in 1969-70. We eventually realized that their version of peace envisioned a violent phase before the peace -- we declined to work for them. Who knows how many of these people I encountered since then in peace and social change organizations -- and graduate school at Columbia instroduced me to many of the 60's protesters. Does that mean that I am not a good American citizen?
In my primary school, many girls spent inordinate amounts of time 'calling out' other girls about who they knew, who they talked to, who they failed to sneer at -- as a form of devisive social control. I thought it was disgusting behavior then (and openly denounced their practice) and certainly more so now when adults do it. It's a version of shunning -- I am sure there is a term that describes it. Does anyone know the term? Any sociologists in this group? An attempt to falsely designate someone as a social/civic deviant --
More. We need more.
I think the term you are looking for is bullying. Not very different when adults do it or children do it.
McCain is quite closely linked to the Right Wing Contra Death squads.
http://news.yahoo.com/s/ap/20081007/ap_on_el_pr/mccain_iran_contra
Thank you for sharing your story, Revere. For those of us who were born much later, it is encouraging to be reminded that we follow in the footsteps of brave and principled people who continue to be the change we want to see.
Thank you for this story. I am sure it is only one of many, however this one made many points which are highly relevant to Tuesday's election. You are indeed a true American patriot.
Of course, being married to a man who was a member of a secessionist/theocratic political party, presumably with people who were also members of the militia movement during the Clinton years, that gets you a shot at the vice presidency.
Does that mean I can't run for President?
If not you can always come up here and run for Prime Minister. I'll vote for you.
You can run for president, but you can't hide!
err...
Is your president running? Better go catch it!
...
"I also have a problem with capitalist doctors. I keep telling them, 'It's just the way I write!'" - e.e. cummings
Interesting, it seems you are saying MCHR were the Weathermens Health Service providers. MCHR as I know was mainly focused on equal health care for blacks, a laudable effort during the Civil Rights movement. What many people do not realize is the Weathermens ties to black power groups like the Black Panthers. In fact, the reason for them splintering off from the SDS was because they were too peaceful and they believed they could never trigger a revolution with the SDS, they were too white, even if they were all white themselves.
The believed a revolution needed to be triggered by a black movement as they had been ill treated and a vast reservoir of anger and hatred existed which could provide the fuel for change.
The Weathermen and SDS they came from were funded by the Ford Foundation (incidentally, Obamas mother worked for the Ford Foundation for many years) and leaders at the national and regional levels were controlled intelligence assets. A revolution largely made up of white students was thought to be no danger to the power structure, and was desired as they wanted an excuse to change the constitution with a constitutional convention before 1976. But going at it with a black movement was a risk, it could get out of control as we did not have the technological and police state apparatus in place to control it like we have today.
So the Weathermens function was to discredit the anti-war movement and the SDS was essentially defunded and it's national organization dismantled. The SDS soon withered, allowing the war to continue for a few more years.
Many people do not know this but the Foundations do intelligence work for government agencies, the stuff that gets outsourced or privatized. Reagan legalized this by EO but the relationship had been in place for some time.
Now if you have ready Brzezinskis Two Ages from 1970 you will know he expects the next revolution to restore equality between whites and blacks. A laudable goal, but revolutions tend to be rather messy, and he has other reasons relating to One World Government for a revolution. Brzezinski of course is Obamas key adviser and has been linked to Obama since their days together at Columbia Univeristy in 1981-1983.
Obamas association with former Weathermen is far from a casual one. Obama was Chairman of the Board of the Annenberg Chicago Challenge, the architect of who was Bill Ayers. From 1995 to 1999 Obama and Ayers together promoted a program that raised and spent over 150 million dollars up till 2003 to improve education and did nothing but cause dissension in the system, which was likely the real goal. In 1995, a fund raiser was held at Ayers home for Obama to kick off his political career.
People call the Weathermen terrorists, and so they were, they beat Osama in bombing the Pentagon, but they were controlled intelligent assets, as are most of the worlds terrorists today.
His book Dreams From My Father had been published a couple of years earlier, expressing sympathy for black nationalism. His Pastor Wrights racial anger is an example of the people Obama seems to surround himself with.
Yet like Bush and his National Guard service, or lack thereof, the MSM cover this stuff up.
It should be an interesting few years. Hopefully we will not be looking back on the Bush years as the good old days.
I've often wondered how many "terrorists" I'm associated with from attending a coopertive summer camp.
Really, the people who weren't associating with anti-war protesters in the 60s are the ones that have something to answer for!
Wow! Tell us more!
Very interesting!
Dude! I was in Chicago 1968. You docs were awesome.
So neither of us can run for president.
"Hopefully we will not be looking back on the Bush years as the good old days."
We will if McCain wins.
Tsu: It is a not so uncommon coincidence. Later, when I became a Dept. Chair, I hired a faculty member who was also there, although we didn't know each other then. There was a famous moment in front of the Hilton, when police were clubbing people indiscriminately and throwing them into wagons and the crowd started chanting, "The whole world is watching, the whole world is watching" (it is on film and was on live TV). He and I were both in that intersection at that moment, so while we didn't know each other then we could say with certainty later that in Chicago we had been within 50 yards of each other at one point.
Why don't we see big American demonstrations these days? Not that I'd like to see anyone beaten about the head and chucked in a squad car, but it just seems that we're quite content to sit in the dark watching Big Brother (a la "Idiocracy" or "Farenheit 451"). Where are the fired up Americans?
And you say that as if it's a bad thing? You're talking about one of, like, 5 people in the world who correctly predicted the collapse of the Soviet Union, something that all those legions of sovietologers (for example C. Rice) completely failed at!
Yes, together with plenty of Reaganites and at the invitation of a Reaganite. Go spend a few hours on factcheck.org.
Oh, but I forgot you mentioned "One World Government". That shows you're too ignorant to be listened to in the first place.
Claudia: There was a huge demonstration in February 2003 on the run-up to the Gulf War, but in general, political organizing is done differently these days. We are in different times and we know meet each other here, in cyberspace. You give up some things when you do that (like the wonderful solidarity of a mass demonstration) but you gain a whole lot more in ability to communicate, move and respond quickly and affect events. This is one of many reasons why Net Neutrality is so crucial.
l was goaded into this post by my Sciblings who felt I should share some of my history, but I am mainly interested in the present and the future. I'm glad some readers found it interesting (although baffled by why), but now we all have to put our shoulders to the wheel. A better world doesn't just happen. We make it.
The biggest demonstration in the history of Alaska was one against Palin, last month...
As a pre-teen kid in 68-72 I had unbridled admiration for people like you. Thanks for what you guys did back then.
*clenched-fist salute*
Some of us actually were in the Weathermen, though most of us left before they went underground and started blowing things up. If the Weathermen were getting "funding" from the Ford Foundation in 1969, I wonder why most of us were suffering from malnutrition by December. Maybe I was in one of the groups that wasn't getting its share of the grant????
@CC2 - there are at least 2 CCs: OK, I'll start the ball rolling. I'm 2 degrees from one of the students who were killed at at Kent State, a fellow student and acquaintance of one of my former coworkers.
I'm sure my dad "palled around" with a few people who might be called "terrorists" as a community organizer in the late 60s. I'm 3 degrees from Martin Luther King by way of him.
I'm 2 degrees from Nelson Mandela (who was also called a "terrorist" in some circles) and Dr. King by way of a friend from my former church, and 3 degrees from Oscar Romero by way of the same friend.
When the Ayers connection was distorted by McCain et pals, I thought about a 'Degrees of Freedom' website but I had too much work so I couldn't do it. Now I realize there should be a parallel site launched at the same time 'Degrees of _____' for those who are REALLY trying to destroy the U.S. Any one suggest a name for that one? Man, would I like to nominate a few people to THAT list!!!!
People do not know the history of many of these groups -- all the whinging about the Black Panthers made me realize how the US is still so pervasively racist. Some people used Obama's admiration for the Black panthers to criticize my support for him, to which I said: "Have you lost your minds? The violent group was the Black Liberation Army. I admired the Panthers too." But, ja, y'know, both groups were black . . . maybe Ejyption . . . y'never know.
Major US domestic terrorist & freedom groups:
Ku Klux Klan - I really want to know who is in this group!!!!
SDS
Weathermen
Symbionese Liberation Army
Army of God, right-wing Christian militants, Eric Rudolph
Animal Liberation Front
Earth Liberation Front
Black Panthers
Black Liberation Army
Women's Liberation groups
FALN
UNABOMBER - was he a singleton? Probably.
Oklahoma City bombing, Timothy McVeigh, Terry Nichols
what was the name of the group McCain belonged to?
Any others?
Claudia, demonstrations still happen. The corporate media have decided that it's declasse to cover them.
The RNC spent $50 million on "security" for their convention in St. Paul this year. Security being a euphemism for protester suppression.
They sent approximately one riot cop for every protester, tricked out with teargas and "non-lethal" shock grenades and rubber bullets. Here are some pictures.
Donna Brazille got pepper sprayed, a Fox News crew got gassed. The corporate media were too polite to say anything.
Over 800 people were arrested over the course of the convention, most for nothing more than being in a crowd when the officers ordered the crowd to disperse.
I'm a little younger than Revere. I attended Berkeley from 1968 to 1972, the only four years when there was a riot every spring. During the People's Park demonstrations in 1969, my sister and I were encircled by National Guardsmen and just barely avoided being trucked to the county jail like most of the crowd. We tear-gassed by helicopter on campus. It was a crazy time.
I also learned that I was not a leftist, merely a liberal. A leftist was at a minimum a Marxist, preferably Leninist or Maoist. Oh well. At least I get a shadow of a thrill when the right accuses our ideals as scary socialism.
Wow. Did you know John Beckwith from those days?
(Strangely I'm reading your entry in my apartment at the corner of Putnam & Brookline)
Claudia: Why don't we see big American demonstrations these days?
It's not that they don't happen, but there's this little phenomenon called the corporate media which accounts for why you don't see them...
Heads up, prospective demonstrators (& medical/legal/journalistic fellow travellers): the next demo against the torture & coup curriculum at the School of the Assassins in Ft. Benning, GA, starts Friday, Nov. 21!
(Keeping fingers crossed that there won't be reasons for massive American protests earlier: say, Wednesday, Nov. 5...)
Where have all the demonstraters gone? Long time passing!
(oh all right, i am sorry for trying cuteness).
In the 60s we had motivation to protest; the draft potentially put our butts on the line to vacation in SE Asia. Part of the reason the US pulled out was cause of the protests on the domestic front. Government types figured out such problems might be avoided if the armed forces were all volunteers so today, no draft, send soldiers whereever and get little resistance from those who disagree with whatever the current military adventure is.
Now that I am old I find that the draft has value, it forces the citizens to think about whether or not said adventure is worth dying for. This can make people more emotional and cause largish crowds to gather. Perhaps manditory military service is actually important in helping a democracy stay out of unjust wars.
degrees of Dan Berrigan! 1 (college class), 2 (dear old dad's college advisor of some sort). Do I get any "associating" credit?
bike: You do from me. And Dan is still alive. I thought he had died but only Phil is gone.
Revere:
I was briefly in the SDS, but they were clearly showing signs of the "I am more radical than thou" infection. Everyone wanted to prove their revolutionary fervor by escalating the action. Between the pissing contests and the provocateurs, it was hard to get much done.
They were sexist pigs too ... asking a SDS guy to clean up his own messes was like asking Archie Bunker to cook dinner.
"[C]ollege perch in Wisconsin," hippie tendencies, war activism ... you sound like a Willy Street resident!
But seriously, this is a great story. Hopefully you keep posting more.
Even more seriously, I hope stories like these make people realize that the left does NOT have a monopoly on reason. The fringe of the democratic party can be just as bad as the fringe of the republican party. If the author is indeed from Madison, he surely remembers the sterling hall bombing that killed an innocent physics post-doc. I can't say that incident has never crossed my mind when I'm working late in lab ...
Revere, you really really rock. Thanks for this.
"'Someone' should set up a website for everyone to designate how many degrees they are from each of the Weathermen, SDS, the Kent State 'rads' (those that lived, and those who died), and all the other protesters against the VN war. I'd really wonder about those who were NOT connected to someone who knew someone who knew . . . "
so, if everyone collaborates with, say, the kkk, then collaborating with the kkk isn't a big deal.
the weather underground's campaign is almost exactly identical to the abortion clinic terrorism of the 80's. same body count, same number of incidents, same amount of property damage.
so, you could then forgive a republican for collaborating with eric rudolph, so long as he reframed abortion as "genocide" (as many pro-lifers do)?
i don't wan't to bring secondary issues into this, but if the whole thing can be blown off by saying that war is worse and of a larger scale than the domestic terrorism of wu and associated groups, one has to consider that they were not opposing the war qua war opponents in principle, but rather they opposed the u.s. as self-identified partisans of the marxist-lenninist cause in indochina, who both started the war prior to u.s. involvement and continued it after u.s. withdrawl, in the form of purges in vietnam and a genocide in cambodia which wreaked death numbering in the millions. that's the comparison to make. the legacy of the anti-vietnam war movement is that the vietnamese and cambodians have inherited a dystopic police state. go ahead and pat yourselves on the back for that.
"Over 800 people were arrested over the course of the convention, most for nothing more than being in a crowd when the officers ordered the crowd to disperse.
Posted by: Lindsay Beyerstein | November 2, 2008 3:44 PM"
in fact, the protesters were smashing storefronts, setting fires and hucking rocks at the police.
bear in mind that if there were so much as a group of anti-tax protesters outside the dnc, we'd be hearing you shriek about the unpresidented mobilization of hate thus exhibited.
jummy: Glad to know you were there and saw all of that. I was, too, but I guess I was in a different part of the city.
I am astounded by your complete conflation of the truth.
Too bad you were not horribly maimed by one of your colleagues bombs.
The world would be a better place, truly.
Mike: Exactly whom are you addressing and what are you saying?