Weather underground history6/24/2023 It was riddled with factional in-fighting over who was to succeed a rapidly aging J. And it had never faced a truly revolutionary situation as appeared to exist in the divided America of 1970. In 1970, the FBI was not very large: it had about 8,000 special agents to deal with 220 million people. To begin with, the myth of the FBI especially on the left-that it was all-powerful and all-knowing-is greater than the facts. No Weatherman leader was ever caught no Weather Underground bombing was ever blocked. ![]() For its part, the FBI devoted tens of millions of dollars and tens of thousands of man-hours to attempts to capture the Weathermen and to stop their bombings. Many were college-educated, but the underground was an amateur military operation. Yet the Weather Underground group really was minuscule in size (about 100 guerrillas, with about 200 direct supporters), and it was very young most people were in their early twenties, and the leaders only in their mid-twenties. Weatherman’s outlaw legend has endured to this day -surfacing, for instance, in a 2002 documentary that was nominated for an Academy Award, and in the 2012 feature The Company You Keep, starring Robert Redford as a Weatherman veteran haunted by his past and Julie Christie as a Weatherman veteran still committed to revolution. ![]() The charges that the federal government brought against Weatherman carried scores of years in prison as penalties. For years, leaders of the group such as Bill Ayers, Bernardine Dorhn, and Mark Rudd appeared on FBI wanted posters in every post office in the country. ![]() In protest of American racism and the Vietnam War, they detonated more than two dozen dynamite bombs between 19, and hit some spectacular targets, including the Pentagon, the State Department, and the U.S. Weatherman -the Weather Underground Organization -was the most famous group of young people committed to revolutionary violence to emerge out of the late 1960s.
0 Comments
Leave a Reply. |