Garry Trudeau’s character “Megaphone” Mark Slackmeyer
2,628 words
Mark Rudd
Underground: My Life with SDS and the Weathermen
New York: HarperCollins e-books, 2009
Fans of Garry Trudeau’s Doonesbury will recognize Mark Rudd as the inspiration behind the character “Megaphone” Mark Slackmeyer. Rudd is a Jewish radical from an upper-middle class background who was one of the founders of a Jewish-led, New Left terrorist group that came to be called The Weather Underground.[1] In an effort to know and understand one’s enemy, I decided to read and review Rudd’s book so Counter-Currents readers could gain the benefit of his testimony regarding activism, but need not pay its author.
Mark Rudd’s mug shot after the “Days of Rage” in Chicago
Rudd’s memoir is filled with Jewy neurosis. He talks about his sexual desire for exploiting Midwestern “shiskas,” seeing a shrink, Freudian psychology, and so on. However, there are some things he says that white advocates should take seriously. The first thing that stands out is that Rudd joined an existing Leftist metapolitical structure that was already well organized against the “war in Vietnam” by the time he became politically active in 1965. The second thing is just how Jewish the Leftist metapolitical structure Rudd worked in was. Rudd and his famous companions, Tom Gold, Bernardine Dohrn,[2] Eleanor Raskin, Michael Klonsky, Bill Ayers, and Jim Jones (gentile) were mostly Jews who came from Communist families, or at least families with Leftist backgrounds (Jones was an Anglo Quaker). All were upper-middle class and had good educations.
To further explain the Jewish angle, Rudd writes, “Imagine an idealistic Jewish kid growing up in a suburban New Jersey town, always knowing that the world consisted of two kinds of people: Us and Them, the Jews and the goyim. Crossing the river[3] to the big city and taking a place as a student in a world-class Ivy League institution run by Them, I found at the top, much to my surprise, rather slow-witted, Wizard of Oz-like characters who ran things really badly, violated their own principles, lied, put into effect both pro-war and racist policies. My reaction? In my speeches at rallies, I had taken to referring to President Kirk as ‘that shithead.’”[4] (My emphasis.)
Mark Rudd was also influenced by the “Holocaust Story.” He genuinely thought that American policy in Vietnam was “Nazi-like” murder and he didn’t want to be like the proverbial “good German”[5] who passively “let” the “Nazis” do what they did. Rudd believed that he had family members who were “Holocaust Survivors.” He also believes that he saw tattooed numbers on their skin.[6]
Critical here is that Rudd was a Jew who identified with his Jewish background. He was also pursuing Jewish interests. In all of American history there has only been one sustained, successful anti-war movement – the movement against LBJ’s policy in Vietnam. Rudd’s anti-war stands regarding the Iraq War (2003–2011) seem deliberately designed to be ineffective (why no in-depth study of the Neocons?). Furthermore, then as now he makes little to no mention of Israeli military policy or US support for the same. He called US policy in Vietnam murder, but his moral language regarding the Palestinian-Israel situation is very restrained.With such a large core of Jewish anti-war activists one can easily conclude that the anti-war activism of the 1960s was not a principled stand against “militarism” and/or “violence” but a cynical ploy to use the Vietnam War to displace America’s natural WASP ruling class with Jews.
The metapolitical structure that Rudd and his comrades entered into had ideological roots that stretched back to Robespierre’s Republic of Virtue during the French Revolution.[7] In 1965, the anti-war structure Rudd was involved in was officially Communist.[8] While officially Communist, the Weather Underground‘s closest Leftist inspiration was really more the Anarchist Movement of the late nineteenth century. While the ways in which the ideology of anarchism and those of Communists like Che Guevara, Ho Chi Minh, and Mark Rudd differ is an article in its own right, the important concept that must be emphasized is that the Weather Underground was dialed into international Leftist idea-creators, and carried out what anarchist thinkers called “Propaganda of the Deed”[9] . . . i.e. terrorism.
If Leftism can be seen as a Christian heresy, there is a sense of Christianity’s sin-and-salvation concept in Rudd’s account. When describing the white flight from Newark, New Jersey, Rudd says, “That’s my people, the ones who fled to the suburbs.”[10] He was deeply ashamed of his family’s “racism” although fleeing African dysfunction is hardly an irrational action. One of Rudd’s successful actions at Columbia University was to stop the University from buying up properties in New York City that held large numbers of blacks. He didn’t want the blacks displaced by a gym or other structure. Rudd also saw American liberals like Robert Kennedy and Eugene McCarthy as his number one enemy. Indeed, politics is a game where the extremists coldly move pieces over the heads of the centrists.
Rudd states in interviews that his book is a description of three different phases of his anti-war campaigning. The first phase is that of organizing. Rudd and his fellow Jews successfully organized a great many protests and attracted followers by carrying out edgier actions than others were doing. This was accomplished through the Students for a Democratic Society (SDS). The second phase consisted of increasing militancy which, for a time, appeared to attract more followers and make a larger impact. Finally, the hard core of Jewish activists decided to embark on revolutionary violence, and they formed the Weather Underground.
Of the underground violent phase, Rudd says:
Much of what the Weathermen did had the opposite effect of what we intended. We deorganized SDS while we claimed we were making it stronger; we isolated ourselves from our friends and allies as we helped split the larger antiwar movement around the issue of violence. In general, we played into the hands of the FBI—our sworn enemies. We might as well have been on their payroll. As if all this weren’t enough, three of my friends died in an accidental explosion while assembling bombs. This is not a heroic story; if anything, it’s antiheroic.[11]
The Weather Underground fell apart by 1977. Most its members were given slaps on the wrist and were re-integrated into society. Rudd and Bill Ayers became professors and Eleanor Raskin is a sitting judge.
The Ideas of the Weather Underground Weren’t New
Leftist Ancestor Worship: The Haymarket Police Memorial is bombed by the Weather Underground. The statue memorialized policemen killed by anarchists. (October 5, 1970)
As mentioned above, the Weather Underground was not a cutting-edge group of young people acting in a new way upon ideas they developed themselves. Much of what they said was a rehash of older thinkers and what they did matched the patterns of previous Leftist groups. While the Weather Underground spoke of Communism and socialist utopias, they had closer parallels with the ultra-Leftist Anarchist Movement of the latter half of the nineteenth century.
- A striking amount of Anarchist and Weather Underground violence took place in Chicago. The Haymarket Riot of May 4, 1886 was the scene of a vicious Anarchist bombing which killed seven policemen. In the mid-twentieth century, Chicago police fought New Leftist students at the Democratic National Convention in 1968. Later, there was a replay of Chicago Police vs. Leftists during the “Days of Rage” event which took place on 8–11 October 1969, and which Rudd was instrumental in organizing.
- In the 1880s, the Anarchists had latched on to a legitimate social grievance – the Labor Movement’s drive for the eight-hour work day. Likewise, in the 1960s and ’70s, the US government’s policies in Vietnam were an easy target for legitimate dissent. In the former case, Anarchist violence did nothing to help the cause of the eight-hour work day, but it did get a great many people killed. In the same way, the Weather Underground didn’t alter American policy in Vietnam, but it did help contribute to the rise of the inconvenient and ever-increasing security measures in government buildings.
- The Weather Underground also matched the earlier Leftist/Anarchist pattern of upper-middle class people drawn to terrorism. Czar Alexander II was killed[12] by a group of Leftists drawn from the upper class in 1883. Likewise, the Haymarket conspirators came from either the German or American upper-middle class. One was Albert Parsons, who was of Yankee colonial stock — descended from officers in the American Revolution. He had himself served in the Confederate Army during the US Civil War.
- The Anarchist Movement[13] and the Weather Underground[14] had a great many Jewish leaders. This Jewish core was probably the critical ingredient which caused their legitimate social dissent to drift into terrorism and bloodshed. Furthermore, nineteenth-century anarchism, twentieth-century New Leftism and its Weather Underground offshoot, and the twenty-first-century antifa movement all share one thing in common: they never attack Jewish activities, such as Zionism.
- These movements are fundamentally hypocritical. While they have visited Communist Cuba and North Vietnam as pampered tourists, none of them remained there. Nor did/do they give their own money to the poor.
- The Anarchists and Weather Underground had considerable supporters in the upper reaches of the social establishment. Weather Underground “veterans” are now in positions of power and responsibility. Contrast their treatment by law enforcement with that of Matt Hale of the World Church of the Creator and those in the Unite the Right Rally.
The Weather Underground Had Some Metapolitical Successes
While the Weather Underground eventually disbanded without realizing its goals, on the whole, the ideas that they supported did enter the mainstream. These include:
- Ivy League universities by and large ended their ROTC programs. It wasn’t until after American society started to return to “Veteran Worship”[15] in the aftermath of 9/11 and fight Jewish-planned Neocon wars that ROTC returned to these schools.[16]
- The Weather Underground and its larger worldview put a blanket on race-realist ideas for decades. This provided cover for a very large African crime wave that only ended with mass incarceration policies starting in the early 1990s.
- South African whites became the objects of international scorn. The white government was overthrown and today the Afrikaners are facing genocide.
- Bill Ayers did a great deal to get Obama elected President. During the Obama years the economy barely limped along, race riots returned (and stopped after Trump was elected), Islamist radicals took over much of the Fertile Crescent (and, strangely, rapidly vanished after Trump’s win), and whites in America died in droves due to opiates, booze, and hopelessness.
The Social Revolutions of the 1960s were a Chimpout[17] of Punching Left
The slayings of John and Robert Kennedy bookend the extreme social ferment of the 1960s. Much has been made of the killings, but both Kennedy assassinations only have a meaning that makes sense if one sees the killings as the expression of Leftists punching Left. John F. Kennedy was killed by a semi-bright, marginal Leftist who famously said he was not a Communist but a Marxist-Leninist. Senator Robert F. Kennedy was killed by the quintessential “victim” who was also an immigrant from the Third World. Had the Kennedys’ killers been more like Socrates, and clearly stated their respective messages rather than claiming to “be a patsy” or “not remember,” then millions of American man-hours would not have been wasted on conspiracies involving Cubans (Rightists or Leftists), homosexuals, the military-industrial complex, or whoever you wish to believe did it for whatever reason. Indeed, most of the ferment of the 1960s was a melee of punching Left. The Weather Underground was punching Left.
The critical idea here is that the whole of the American (and international) political Left united in 1933 in the Roosevelt administration and the Democratic Party. Indeed, it could be argued that FDR’s Democratic Party was a legitimate political expression of most of American society. The whole of political debate was framed by FDR’s Leftist coalition partners.
Ignore for a moment that this is the creepiest political poster ever and see the deeper message. Roosevelt’s coalition was a coming together of the whole of political left, tying William Jennings Bryan’s Agrarian Populism with Patrician Class noblesse oblige and Jewish Radicalism.
Essentially, the Democrats had a solid political vision provided by Williams Jennings Bryan, and it offered a stable society where all could benefit from the fruits of capitalism (i.e. “The merchant at the crossroads store is as much a businessman as the merchant of New York”).[18] The Democratic Party identified with rural Americans, especially those from the former Confederacy and Middle West. The Democrats were led by solid, old-stock Anglo-American Protestants like Bryan, Wilson, and Roosevelt. Indeed, Roosevelt’s ancestors arrived on the ships Mayflower in 1620 and the Fortune the following year.
The coalition started to break up after FDR’s death. Truman booted the Communists around the time of the Berlin Airlift, and the mainstream of the Democratic Party furthered this policy during the Korean War. The Democratic Party broke up with Progressive Southerners in the 1960s. White. The 1968 Democratic Convention was a battlefield. Other Leftist conferences fell apart. One example:
At summer’s end [1967], just before most fall terms started on American campuses, hundreds of diverse progressive and radical organizations, including the Madison chapter of the Committee to End the War in Vietnam, had assembled at the Palmer House in Chicago for the first National Conference for a New Politics.[19] Peace movement historian Charles DeBenedetti later called it “the largest gathering of the American Left since the 1948 Progressive party convention.” It turned out to be a raucous, contentious, exhausting convention, rife with walkouts, power plays, and endless posturing to see who among the three thousand delegates could look toughest. Splits became evident then that would grow into chasms in later years and decades. The issue of Vietnam was almost lost amid resolutions condemning Zionism and disparaging the Israeli victory in the Six-Day War, actions that prompted some left-leaning Jewish intellectuals to begin the turn toward neoliberalism or neoconservatism. There was also a demand by black delegates that they get as many votes and positions of power as the vastly larger number of whites.[20]
On a final note, the United States lucked out in that the state proved to be stronger than the Weather Underground. Rudd’s increasing ideological purity-spiraling and militancy was exactly what his Jewish kith and kin did to capture Russia during the Bolshevik Revolution. The Weather Underground wanted to relocate 25 million whites to “re-education” camps.[21] Again, the Weather Underground didn’t really care about the War in Vietnam; that issue was a McGuffin for them to achieve Jewish power.
Notes
[1] Creedence Clearwater Revival’s song “Bad Moon Rising” (1969) very likely is an allusion to the Students for a Democratic Society becoming the more violent Weathermen. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=oFVORAsspf8 (7:08 – 9:18)
[2] To see Dohrn cry with pain as she strikes you, view here.
[3] Namely the Hudson River, between Newark and New York City.
[4] Kindle Loc. 1172
[5] In Wisconsin, Jewish agitator Paul Soglin also believed in the mythology of the “good German.” It is likely these myths developed to help achieve Jewish aims. The story of the “good German” as well as German villainy during World War II is mostly propaganda. More on Soglin here.
[6] Is the “tattoo story” really true? Why tattoo people if one is going to gas them shortly? Is there a document or database somewhere which matches tattoo numbers to names and ages?
[7] http://teacher.sduhsd.net/tpsocialsciences/world_history/dem_ideals/robespierre.htm
[8] Many of Rudd’s Communist friends and supporters were also factory owners. Communism was a Jewish movement to harm their gentile enemies in Russia and New York City.
[9] https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/abs/10.1080/10576108008435483
[10] Kindle Loc. 194
[11] Kindle Loc. 76
[12] http://www.unofficialroyalty.com/march-13-1881-assassination-of-tsar-alexander-ii-of-russia/
[13] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jewish_anarchism
[14] https://www.theoccidentalobserver.net/2017/09/14/ted-gold-and-the-jews-of-weatherman-part-1/
[15] https://gs.columbia.edu/return-rotc
[16] There was also a metapolitical effort by Frank Schaeffer, son of the theologian Francis Schaeffer, to get the upper class to serve in the military. Francis Schaeffer’s ideas are explored here.
[17] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sWQ7KlDVt1s More: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Egqz9EggLK4
[18] http://historymatters.gmu.edu/d/5354/
[19] https://keywiki.org/National_Conference_for_New_Politics
[20] David Maraniss, They Marched Into Sunlight: War and Peace, Vietnam and America October 1967 (New York: Simon & Schuster, 2003), Kindle Loc. 1693-1703.
39 Comments
This is fascinating stuff, and in many ways a valuable essay. But is there any real evidence here (or anywhere) for the concluding assertions that the Vietnam war “was only a McGuffin for them to achieve Jewish power”? I couldn’t find any in the essay, but since these are non-obvious claims some evidence is needed. In fact, the essay seems to provide some reasons for doubting both assertions.
Let’s focus on the more modest claim that WU and other heavily Jewish leftist entities were aiming for Jewish power (and leaving aside the question of whether they regarded the war merely as a pretext for advancing Jewish power). How could we know this? Would the attitudes and motivations of Rudd and other Jews involved in these movements be relevant? It seems like they would be. (Or are we saying that such Jews are unconsciously aiming for ethnic power?) The author points out that Rudd “was a Jew who identified with his Jewish background”. That seems true, but then we have to ask in what way he identified with Jews or Judaism. For example, was his sense of Jewish identity a source of pride for him? Did he feel a special solidarity or kinship with other Jews? Maybe, but there’s no evidence provided here. There is a quotation from him about how people in his community divided the world into two groups, Jews and non-Jews. Okay. But what did he, Rudd, think about that? Without knowing what he says elsewhere in the book I can only speculate. But I’d be pretty surprised if a radical leftist like Rudd was not critical or contemptuous of this attitude. My guess is that he reports it as evidence of how parochial and narrow-minded the people in his Jewish community were, and in order to demonstrate his own enlightened universalism. The author also notes that Rudd strongly disapproved of “his people”, i.e., his Jewish family, for having “fled to the suburbs”. In other words he lumped his own Jewish family in with the rest of the supposedly “racist” white population.
In any case, the author does not give any evidence that Rudd _approved_ of this attitude, so for all we know Rudd _identifies_ with his Jewish background ambivalently or critically. (Many leftist whites identify with their white or European background in a purely negative way; they just feel inferior and ashamed as a result of the identification.) There’s no reason as yet to assume that Rudd’s Jewish identity was for him a motivation for advancing Jewish power. It could be that he had no conscious interest in this whatsoever, and had the same crackpot ideals as non-Jewish leftist extremists.
The author adds that Rudd “was also pursuing Jewish interests”. That’s an ambiguous statement. Does it mean that he intended to benefit Jews, or simply that he was doing things that served Jewish interests but possibly without intending such effects? If the claim is that he intended to secure Jewish interests, no evidence has been given that I can find in the essay. If the claim is just that his behavior did tend to advance Jewish interests, that’s somewhat dubious but in any case irrelevant to the question of what he or other Jewish leftists were trying to do–for example, whether they were using the war as a pretext.
Then there’s the example of the 68 convention. We learn that many of these leftists were pushing anti-Israeli themes, and that some Jews were leaving the radical left as a result. Well, what does that tell us? I guess one could come up with some story as to how all of that anti-Israeli stuff ultimately served Jewish interests, by pushing clever Jews into the neoliberal or neoconservative camps. But equally one could take this to show that the radical left itself was at best ambivalent on Jews and Israel, and perhaps not beneficial overall for Jews–in which case it would be doubtful even that Rudd’s activities advanced Jewish interests.
Rudd wanted to put millions of “whites” in camps. Horrific. But did he and other WU people distinguish in this context between Jews and other “whites”? I doubt that. I doubt that they intended to spare Jewish capitalists or conservatives or Jews who didn’t want to live around blacks. In any case the author offers no evidence that they _did_ intend that. So again it seems unclear at best why we should regard Rudd or his group as aiming to help Jews or even as aiming for something that would in fact help Jews regardless of their intentions.
So the bottom line is that the author makes a very strong and controversial claim without offering any real evidence, and while ignoring certain evidence (that he himself has cited) which appears to count against his claim. This makes us look irrational. It makes us look like bigots and paranoiacs, just as the media and the establishment want us to be. Why not dial back the paranoid Jew-hate to the level that is actually supported by the evidence? What do we gain by making controversial claims we can’t substantiate? This kind of thing is slowly turning me away from white nationalism or the alt right. I’m trying to be a reasonable thinker, unlike the assholes and idiots in the left and the mainstream. I don’t want to replace one system of irrational biases with another one. And I think many people are like me.
Many good points. I think I will write an article that andvances the idea the anti war of the 1960s was a McGuffin to advance Jewish aims domestically.
I wish to emphasize the point that Rudd’s anti war attitudes regarding today’s Neoconservative political situation is ineffective compared with what he did in the 60s. Why no teach ins on Syria, Iraq, etc? Since 25 million were not put in camps there is no way to know how that would have worked, but in the USSR, the camps were Jewish run affairs. He WU were basically Bolsheviks so they would have followed that pattern.
There is no inconsistency in my article regarding the 1968 conference in Chicago. He left was breaking apart over every issue including Zionism. While there are leftists ambivalent about Israel, they are ineffective. The winners on the leftist civil wars include he Organized Jewish Community. Furthermore, the WU and New Left didn’t then and don’t now protest US policy in the Middle East although that policy is as morally grey as Vietnam.
I don’t know much about what Rudd has been up to politically in recent decades, but as someone who lived in Ann Arbor, Michigan (the birthplace of both the SDS and the Weather Underground) throughout the 2000s, I can tell you that the former people from those organizations were very active in anti-war demonstrations during the Bush years. The founder of SDS, Alan Haber – who is not Jewish, by the way – still lives in Ann Arbor today and was a frequent speaker at anti-war demonstrations and events during the Bush years, and in fact refounded SDS in 2006 with the aim of making it a rallying point for the anti-war movement. I spotted Bill Ayers and Bernadine Dohrn at a number of anti-war events in Ann Arbor in the 2000s as well (in fact I once briefly spoke with Ayers). So I’m sorry, but your theory that the SDS/WU people protested the Vietnam War because they saw it as a goyim thing, and yet held their tongues during the neocon wars out of some sort of secret sympathy, is untenable.
I didn’t say they didn’t do any protests, I said their protests were ineffective.
The New Left had serious intellectual output regarding the Vietnam War in the 1960s. They have nothing close to that today. There is nothing like Kevin B. MacDonald’s study on the Neoconservatives on Rudd’s website.
“Serious intellectual content” is a rather subjective term. I’ve seen loads of books published by New Left authors, and by those following in their footsteps, analyzing neoconservatism and the wars it has wrought, Tariq Ali being one of them. You seem to be suggesting that the New Lefties have been holding back deliberately because their heart isn’t in the fight. It seems much more apparent to me that their intellectual milieu, which was vibrant and fruitful in the 1960s, simply grew impoverished and shopworn over time as people saw the actual effects of their ideas on society, hence why the same slogans and arguments didn’t have the same effect a second time around. Also, those who were radicals in the ’60s and ’70s had, as you point out, themselves entered the establishment by the twenty-first century, and are now far less likely to rock the boat than they once were.
your theory that the SDS/WU people protested the Vietnam War because they saw it as a goyim thing, and yet held their tongues during the neocon wars out of some sort of secret sympathy, is untenable.
In both cases they get to attack whitey. That’s how their minds work.
I don’t doubt that the Vietnam protest movement – of which Weather was a rather insignificant part, overall – advanced Jewish power, and that of their allies, in America. My only quibble was when Mr. de Camp claimed that the leaders of Weather were consciously acting in pursuit of Jewish aims, which I find much more dubious. As for the American “Right” of the time and Vietnam – well, most conservatives were simply duped into believing that Vietnam was somehow related to American national security when it wasn’t, just as Americans today are duped into believing that the endless wars in the Middle East have something to do with national security.
Was there any actual evidence here for the concluding assertion that, for Rudd or WU, the war in Vietnam was merely a pretext for advancing Jewish interests? Was any evidence cited to show merely that Rudd or WU were trying to advance Jewish interests in any way? I couldn’t find any.
Whether or not Jews were consciously using the New Left to advance Jewish interests is ultimately immaterial. That’s a tough one to prove, but why does it matter? The fact remains that they were about 2% of the population and formed the majority of the leadership of the New Left radicals that turned our country on its head (Rothman & Lichter, 1996, p.81 estimate they were 60% of the leadership of the premier New Left group – which Weatherman grew out of – SDS).
The outcome of what they did our country is the same, no matter what was in their head. Why should we care?
Here’s another quote from Rudd’s book, for what it’s worth (doesn’t prove anything one way or the other, but I find it to be interesting):
“I’ve often wondered, over the years, why I called my parents that morning. I couldn’t have been seeking their approval, something I knew I’d never get. Maybe it was simply that Jewish boys call home, it’s that deeply ingrained.
Or maybe I was unconsciously bragging to them: ‘Look, I’m finally an American, just like you wanted. I’m not afraid to stand up, to speak out. I don’t need to keep my head down, like you’ve always done. I can protest like any other American. I’ve made it in America! Oh, by the way, you may not be crazy about this part, but I’m going to work to bring down the dumb goyim who run this country. I’ll be the Jewish defender of the weak and the downtrodden.'” (Kindle loc.1201)
We need a good article delineating the differences between: anarchism; communism; socialism, and fascism. The article would also need to explain how the policies are put into effect.
I have done some work about the nuances of the political left starting with the ideas of Robespierre, but that article is not going anywhere fast. I think it will take a Frenchman to write it, not an American.
I saw Mark Rudd speak at a presentation of this book when it was first published, at the Ann Arbor Borders in 2009 (appropriately, since the Weather Underground was launched and initially led from Ann Arbor, and you can still occasionally see Bill Ayers and Bernardine Dohrn there when they’re visiting). It was quite interesting, and he definitely came across as an older man critiquing the errors and excesses of his youth. The thing he said that stuck in my mind was when he was talking about the absurdity of their goals, and he said, “We wanted to overthrow the government, but I doubt any of us had ever seen a purchase order before.” Words of wisdom. Revolutionary fervor and ideology without the practical know-how to back it up is fruitless.
Of course we can criticize the (unrealized) goals of the Weather Underground for being very different in some very fundamental ways from what we want to see, but the fact is that there was commonality there as well. Their main goal, of course, was to end the Vietnam War, which could be seen as the same sort of pointless waste of American lives that we were to see again later in the various neocon wars. And their main target was the American military and political establishment, which by the 1960s/’70s had long since ceased to represent the interests of whites, either at home or in Europe. So while their goals were different, their enemies were basically the same as ours. As for their objective being displacing the WASP elite with a Jewish one – well, that’s entirely speculative given that nothing they said or did concretely made that clear, but nevertheless, the WASP elite in America has been busy making that happen all on its own for a long time now, so you can hardly pin that one on the WU alone.
You exaggerate the number of Jews involved in the organization. In the case of Bill Ayers and Bernardine Dohrn, who were the leaders, Ayers is not at all Jewish and Dohrn is only half-Jewish on her paternal side, although they appear on your list. Apart from a few Jews, the WU remained an ethnically white organization. So your idea that it was almost entirely Jewish-led doesn’t really hold water, and it’s far from obvious that they were pursuing “Jewish objectives.” Sure, they cooperated with groups like the Black Panthers – but given that the Panthers’ goal was the achievement of separate, autonomous communities for their people, that hardly seems to be a point of contention, either, especially when we compare them to BLM and such groups today, which actually do seek the displacement of whites. And you say that Weather wrought “bloodshed,” even though the fact remains that the only time their activities ever killed or injured anyone was when three of their own members accidentally blew themselves up while building a bomb in New York in 1970. And I don’t think you can lay the blame for “putting a blanket on race-realism” on Weather. Their impact on American society was miniscule compared to the efforts of the New Left in academia, the media, and the political and cultural establishment – which were far more clearly pursuing “Jewish objectives” than anything Weather did. The same goes for South Africa; I haven’t studied Weather’s many public statements throughout their decade-long campaign, but I’ve never read that South African Apartheid was a focus of their efforts. And Ayers’ support for Obama came more than a decade after Weather’s dissolution.
And to blame Rudd and the others for hypocrisy is to fail to understand the revolutionary mentality. Obviously, a revolutionary’s goal is not merely to allow himself to live in the manner he chooses; he wants to bring all of his society into conformity with his values. The best way to help realize Communism wasn’t to move to North Vietnam, but rather to take down the government that was attacking it. Indeed, in a documentary on Weather that was released about 15 years ago, some of Weather’s leaders discussed meeting with the North Vietnamese to receive advice on recruiting and training. This is no different than a Right-wing activist choosing to stay and fight in present-day America rather than moving to an ethnically homogeneous country in Eastern Europe.
The worst thing that could be said about Weather is that they were totally ineffective – they deluded themselves into thinking that they could successfully transplant Third World Communist insurrectionist tactics into America and actually win. But really, that’s no less ridiculous than the many Right-wing would-be guerrillas who have believed essentially the same thing over the past few decades, often with far deadlier consequences for themselves and others than anything Weather did. I’m not saying they were “our guys” but we shouldn’t just dismiss them out of hand from a reactionary position, either.
Many good points, however I believe my conclusions are sound.
1. The WU and SDS had a solid Jewish core of leadership.
2. The WU was a terrorist group engaged in propaganda of the deed. Their actions inspired other bombers in the 1970s. The Fact that there was less and not more bloodshed was due to luck.
3. Rudd is right about metapolitics over bombs. However, the WU was using tactics that worked in Catelonia in the 1930s, across he Third World in the 1950s, and in Russia in 1918. The US government and society proved to be stronger than, say Russia 1918, was why the WU lost. Had things been different, they could have won.
Thank you, you’re welcome. Yes, it’s undeniable that there were Jews in prominent positions in both the SDS and the Weather Underground, but it’s equally true that there were many non-Jews in prominent positions in both. So that alone doesn’t prove your contention that they were pursuing goals intended to benefit Jews at the expense of non-Jews. There may very well be a case to be made there – I haven’t studied these groups in enough detail to say – but you haven’t yet made it conclusively in this article. As Andy pointed out, it seems rather that the Jews involved in Weather saw their co-religionists who were outside their movement to be enemies just as much as the goyim.
As for WU inspiring other terrorists, you may be right, although WU was only one of a whole host of “urban guerrilla” movements that emerged in the late 1960s and 1970s – not least being the far more successful and violent Red Army Faction in Germany. So I don’t think we can pin all of that on Weather alone. And of course their influence wasn’t limited to the Left – both the National Socialist Liberation Front and William Pierce (in “The Turner Diaries”) took inspiration from the urban guerrilla groups in the 1970s to attempt to develop a Right-wing equivalent – and one could argue that the legacy of their urban guerrilla ideas has had a much longer-lasting and destructive impact on the American radical Right than it has on the radical Left. (Whether one sees that as a positive or a negative depends on one’s point of view.)
Regarding your third point, it’s a classic misjudgment by radicals on both the Left and Right to believe that one can force a revolution through action. History has shown time and again that the only time violent revolutions break out is when a society has reached an existential crisis and a significant segment of the population loses its comforts. America in the late 1960s and early ’70s was in social turmoil, but the vast majority of people were still comfortable and America itself was not in danger of collapsing, so Weather misjudged the situation. So, yes, their tactics may have worked in another historical situation, but as it was, it was a complete misunderstanding of the period, and hence, as you yourself quote Rudd as saying, they ended up rather “playing into the hands of [the establishment].” So ironically, they probably unintentionally did more to harm their own cause than they did to advance it. (Which is something the Right is also constantly in danger of doing, as we saw in Charlottesville last year, another gross miscalculation of the public mood.) You’re no doubt right that the people behind the New Left and behind Weather shared similar, if not identical, goals, and only differed on tactics. But it is clear who was right. Weather had no impact on US government policy whatsoever, and today is only remembered by people who study radical political groups, whereas those of the New Left who entered the establishment itself and worked to undermine our cultural and political institutions have succeeded in completely transforming both America and Europe to the point that what seemed radical in the 1960s is now defended as being “essential American values.” So whatever their intentions were, Weather was very much on the wrong side of history – which is undoubtedly why Ayers and Dohrn switched to doing things like starting Obama’s political career instead of planting bombs. There’s an important lesson there.
In spite of my objections I was pleased to see an article on this topic at CC, so thanks for that.
I had no idea this article would generate so much intelligent pushback. I feel I need to write more. The Vietnam War and its passions are important to study.
Rudd’s website is worth a read. I must emphasize: the New Left put out A+ intellectual work regarding US policy in Nam. They produced C- work at best during the Iraq War and did not say anything (as far as I can tell) regarding the Arab Spring although US policy at that time was clearly misguided.
One final add: A number of years ago a senior Lebanese official remarked to a British TV show that US policy in the Mid East was to make Israel a Saigon and the rest of the ME a North Vietnam.
Given that I was a longtime resident of Ann Arbor, and given that as I’ve mentioned running into people who were part of SDS and/or Weather was an everyday occurrence there, I have a passionate interest in the subject!
What, in your opinion, was a top-quality intellectual work protesting the Vietnam War? I ask not to be difficult but because I’m genuinely interested. Again, however, I still think the lack of such a work in recent years likely had more to do with the fact that America since 2001 has been a very different place than it was in the ’60s/early ’70s. Besides the exhaustion of the intellectual Left, for one thing, there hasn’t been a draft, which any analyst of the period will certainly say was the primary driving force behind the anti-war movement. If Bush had activated the draft in, say, 2006 I certainly think you would have seen a much more robust anti-war movement arise. And as for the Arab Spring, I don’t know what the New Left had to say about it, if anything, but given that Obama was in a sense their offspring I don’t think it’s a surprise that they would be soft on his policies.
I think that if you dig there may very well be a “smoking gun” proving the points you made in this article, I just feel like you haven’t made the case yet. SDS and Weather produced mountains of literature in the ’60s and ’70s so there may very well be proof to be found. So don’t take my pushback as attempting to shoot down your thesis altogether.
Part of my interest in commenting here is simply that I always try to urge Rightists to see where we share commonalities with the Left rather than to only focus on the (many) points of contention. And whereas I am well aware that the world Weather was fighting for was very different from the world we want to see, in their specific goals there was nevertheless a large degree of overlap. I don’t see objection to American imperialism as a Left/Right issue – something which at least some elements of the American Right finally seem to be coming around to, after a century of pulling the wool over their own eyes.
Everything the anti war left put out in the 1960s was quality. One can do a google search and see what they wren publishing. Watch Ken Burns’s excellent movie about Vietnam and one will see a guy in a three piece suit asking JFK hard questions about Vietnam. Even the guys with the megaphones at the sit in have their act together. The intensity and eloquence of the anti war protesters is really a sight to behold.
I think that might be more because of how much dumber and more degenerate Americans are today than they were 60 years ago, however, than because of any deliberate change. And as I said before the major difference between the anti-war movement of the last 15 years from the Vietnam era is the draft.
What about neoconservatism? That never explicitly endorses “Jewish interests” either. A major pillar of Kevin macdonalds writings are that Marxism was perceived as furthering Jewish interests, so by corollary, the weathermen, who advocated more or less old style Bolshevism, with their call for re-education camps and all, would fall under the rubric of Marxism as defined by Kevin Macdonald. Are you fundamentally in disagreement with the thought of Macdonald?
Support for Zionism has always been one of the central planks of neoconservatism, so yes, neoconservatism does very openly support Jewish interests. Mr. de Camp has not clearly demonstrated this about Weather in this article. You could argue that fighting for a Marxist cause makes Weather implicitly “Jewish” in its conception, certainly, but I have yet to see evidence that the leaders of Weather were deliberately and consciously plotting to replace the WASP elite with a Jewish elite. That may indeed have been the outcome if they had won, though. However, as Rudd himself says in the book, and as Mr. de Camp quotes above, in reality, ironically, Weather inadvertently made itself a tool of the very same establishment that they opposed.
I don’t know what Weather’s position on Zionism was, but it shouldn’t be difficult to find out. However, if we look at the parallel urban guerrilla movements in Western Europe at the same time, they were strongly anti-Israel as they viewed Israel as an agent of American imperialism. The Red Army Faction infamously planted a bomb which didn’t go off in a synagogue in Germany on November 9, and collaborated with Palestinian groups that were opposing Israel, most especially in the Lufthansa hijacking in 1977 which they carried out in cooperation with the People’s Front for the Liberation of Palestine and led to the press dubbing them “Nazis.” In later years, Horst Mahler could claim that his transition from Left to Right wasn’t as strange as some have made it out to be, partly because of this. This of course doesn’t mean that Weather held the same view but I’m assuming it was similar given that they were part of the same milieu. I could be wrong, of course.
Their views on Zionism can be found in their book Prairie Fire.
They were hardcore anti-Zionist/pro-Palestinian.
https://archive.org/stream/PrairieFireThePoliticsOfRevolutionaryAnti-imperialismThePolitical/Prairie-fire_djvu.txt
So that alone doesn’t prove your contention that they were pursuing goals intended to benefit Jews at the expense of non-Jews.
They were motivated by typically Jewish hatreds toward us. Opposition to the Vietnam war offered them a medium through which they could express those hatreds.
If the Jewish New Left’s opposition to American militarism and “racism” had been genuine, they would have jumped at the opportunity to oppose Zionism after Israel’s conquest of Jerusalem and the West Bank in 1967. But they didn’t. Quite the contrary.
In theory, there must be some principled Jews roaming the world today. But it is difficult to find any. Israel Shahak is the only example I’ve ever located, and he is now deceased.
Imagine an idealistic Jewish kid growing up in a suburban New Jersey town, always knowing that the world consisted of two kinds of people: Us and Them, the Jews and the goyim.
That’s Jewish “idealism” in a nutshell.
Dohrn is only half-Jewish on her paternal side.
Dohrn (Ohrnstein) described herself as an “oven Jew,” because she believed the white power-structure, which she and her band of disgusting criminals were attempting to overthrow, would especially single her out for punishment as the daughter of a Jewish father. In other words, she clearly identified as a Jew and thought of her enemies as nazis. “Being crazy motherfuckers and scaring the shit out of honky America” was one of her ambitions for the Weathermen. That’s a Jew speaking.
their main target was the American military and political establishment
Their main target was the white race. The specific enemy they hoped to destroy was “honky America.” They made that fact abundantly clear in their various lunatic pronouncements.
Apart from a few Jews, the WU remained an ethnically white organization.
Most of the leading figures were Jewish. They made jokes about that among themselves. They noted, for example, that their orgies were largely free of foreskins.
After meeting one of Bill Ayer’s many Jewish comrades, his mother told him (quoting from memory) “now I know how you learned to talk like a New York Jew.” He had learned to talk like a Jew, obviously, because he was surrounded by Jews in his various revolutionary activities.
There is nothing admirable about the Weathermen, other than the fact that reading about them encourages anti-Semitism.
Please provide specific citations for all of the claims that you’ve made. Thank you.
Irmin will have to provide his specific citations, but here are some that will bolster his argument.
Rudd again, in his book:
“By contrast, Terry and JJ [Terry Robbins and John Jacobs – both Jews], the two East Coast leaders, sure of where we were going, were providing leadership. In our many meetings in New York City, one or the other would rant, “White people are pigs. This whole society has to be brought down. We have got to defeat white-skin privilege; we can’t let the Panthers and the Vietnamese bear all the costs.”
At that point we had determined that there were no innocent Americans, at least no white ones. They—we—all played some part in the atrocity of Vietnam, if only the passive roles of ignorance, acquiescence, and acceptance of privilege. Universally guilty, all Americans were legitimate targets for attack.” (Kindle Loc 3149)
“There were crazy discussions at Flint over whether killing white babies was inherently revolutionary, since all white people are the enemy.” (Kindle loc 3100)
Here is Doug McAdam (gentile) speaking about the “killing white babies” discussions in a video interview: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pZVbrvfAn_Q
What Rudd omits from his book is the meeting (recounted here by FBI infiltrator Larry Grathwohl: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=smkCbE7QehU), in which he and some other Weather Underground members decided that after overthrowing the U.S. Government they would need to put 100 million American citizens – 40% of the population at that time – into “reeducation” camps and exterminate a full quarter of them (25 million!).
Grathwohl specifically names Rudd as being present at that meeting in this video here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=b9iwcyjmgZg
The heart and soul of the (again, majority Jewish-led) New Left was indeed anti-white hatred.
Please provide specific citations for all of the claims that you’ve made. Thank you.
All of the quotes are genuine. I checked the quote from Ayer’s mother, and my recollection was, surprisingly, exact. I won’t provide citations. I don’t make stuff up, which you seem to be suggesting.
“Being crazy motherfuckers and scaring the shit out of honky America”
That you’re doubtful about this quotation suggests ignorance of the subject.
If what you say is true, then it’s a shame that genuine resistance against the Establishment in the 1970s was left to the Left and that the Right, which overwhelmingly and blindly continued to defend America during the Cold War, never stepped up, as Yockey had hoped. Although what you’ve said doesn’t explain the New Left’s opposition to Zionism, as another commentator showed.
Don Black distributed a lot of WN literature in his high school when he was a student. It’s interesting that he says the short-lived Yockeyist paper Trud was by far the most popular.
I recently acquired copies of TRUD! and it really was ahead of its time. Anyone who thinks that the Alt-Right were the original pioneers of combining radical Rightist perspectives with humor and a prankster spirit has never seen TRUD!
If what you say is true…
You should try to express your doubts more politely.
Everything he said is not only true but well-established.
It is non-debatable that the Weathermen discussed murdering white babies. It is non-debatable that they described white mothers as “pigs,” since they had given birth to white children.
When Kathy Boudin, a Jewish Weathergirl, described white mothers as “pig mothers,” did she include Jewish mothers in the category? That’s an interesting question. That she said it, on the other hand, is not open for discussion.
The worst thing that could be said about Weather is that they were totally ineffective
Seriously?
Insofar as they were ineffective, that surely must be the best thing we could say about them.
Something of the mind-set of the Weathermen during this period can be seen in the way the Weather leaders in Flint [at the 1969 “war council”] talked about death, with a characteristic combination of ruthless if distorted logic and a sense of guilt so strong it had turned to rage. The Weather analysis held that whites were virtually useless in the worldwide confrontation going on, and except for a few brave street fighters like the Weathermen they all were corrupted, bought-off tyrants. Logically, then, the death of a white baby is a positive revolutionary action, and indeed the Weathermen actually held abstract debates at the “war council” about whether killing white babies is “correct,” a Weatherman at one point shouting to the audience, “All white babies are pigs.” From there it was only a step to Dohrn’s ecstatic speech about the Charles Manson gang, the drugged and degraded children responsible for the recent Tate-LaBianca murders in Los Angeles: “Dig it: first they killed those pigs, then they ate dinner in the same room with them, then they even shoved a fork into the victim’s stomach. Wild!” In later months Dohrn would come to regret this adulation (her account of the facts, incidentally, is wrong), not the least because Charles Manson was obviously a cruel master of a virtual harem where women were treated as objects with less value than cow dung; but at the time Manson seemed the perfect symbol of American values stood on their head, and this is what the Weathermen were after.
From Kirkpatrick Sale’s _SDS: The Rise and Development of the Students for a Democratic Society_.
Although the fork shoved into Leno LaBianca was two-pronged, the Weathermen mistakenly adopted a four-fingered fork salute. They assumed the Manson family, by sticking forks into dead white pigs, was acting out of the same hostility to honky America that motivated them. A fork therefore seemed an appropriate symbol for their movement. They called their headquarters in New York “the Fork” for the same reason.
The Weathermen are sick leftists speaking to us from the past. That so many of them ended up with prestigious jobs, despite their crimes and their anti-white hatreds, says much about contemporary culture.
No one should be looking for areas of commonality between ourselves and these monsters.
***
A Chicago DA, Richard Elrod, was paralyzed for life during the “Days of Rage” in 1969. Bernadine Dohrn celebrated his paralysis with a song, based on Bob Dylan’s “Lay Lady Lay.”
The lyrics, authored by the Jew Ted Gold, begin “Lay, Elrod, lay / Lay in the street for a while / Stay, Elrod, stay / Stay in your bed for a while.” The song ends, “Play, Elrod, play / Play with your toes for a while.”
Gold, thankfully, died in a Weatherman explosion in Greenwich Village a year later.
***
Another Weatherman song, also authored by Gold:
To “White Christmas”: I’m dreaming of a white riot/Just like the one October 8/When the pigs take a beating/And things started leading/To armed war against the state. We’re heading now toward armed struggle,/ With ev’ry cadre line we write./May you learn to struggle and fight/Or the world will off you ’cause you’re white.
In the late 1960s, I suspect, few non-Jews would have heard white race in “White Christmas.”
What you’ve posted about the “white babies” and “pigs” remark is interesting, I hadn’t known about that and it goes without saying that it’s damnable. I have read about Weather and watched documentaries about them, but I would not claim to be an expert – I don’t really see it as worth the trouble, as they were quite marginal in comparison to the New Left and the anti-war movement as a whole; even other activists have attested that they took little interest in whatever Weather was saying or doing at the time. Still, however, the point which led to this whole discussion in the first place is whether or not Weather’s conscious intention was to replace America’s WASP elite with a Jewish one, which was the claim originally made by Mr. de Camp but for which he provided no concrete evidence. And I’m still not convinced on that score. I already wrote this previously, but I’ll do it again: yes, that may very well have been the outcome had they won, not that there was any possibility of that happening, but I would still need to be convinced that in their strategy sessions they talked about a Jewish elite ruling America.
That they venerated Manson is kooky, but then we have people on the Right at this present moment who see Manson as some sort of revolutionary hero, so this is hardly something restricted to Jewish revolutionaries. And quite honestly, believing “that whites [are] virtually useless in the worldwide confrontation going on” should strike a little too close to home, even for people on the Right. Sure, Weather’s worldview and objectives were twisted, but as with all of the radical Left, they were correct in their diagnosis even if they were wrong in their prescription. They recognized that post-war America was a decadent, corrupt, globalist monster that has replaced all higher values with finance and materialism and that the Vietnam War was part of their overall strategy to convert the world into a gigantic shopping mall. They even cooperated with racial nationalists of other ethnicities, just as Rockwell was doing at roughly the same time. It’s a pity that they didn’t extend that understanding to whites and saw them as synonymous with the Establishment, but as I wrote before, I would never make the claim that they were “our guys.” But nonetheless, they had a better understanding of what was going on than the bulk of the Right in America at that time, which was still obsessed with “commies” and busy helping to prop up the American social, economic, and political order that’s been destroying us ever since.
Also, I meant no disrespect in my previous comments. I wasn’t accusing you of making things up, but I genuinely want to know where these things come from, in part so that I can cite them myself in the future if needed.
the point which led to this whole discussion in the first place is whether or not Weather’s conscious intention was to replace America’s WASP elite with a Jewish one,
You’re right, in my opinion, on that issue.
I wonder whether, perhaps, MacDonald has us thinking too much that Jewish activism aims logically at concrete racial objectives, goals that we could list and easily understand. The urge to mess up whitey is very strong, I think, in Jewish consciousness, whether that messing up of whitey serves Jewish interests or not.
Especially since, as one other commentator pointed out, it seems from their own statements that Weather considered some Jews to be part of the same elite they were trying to overthrow. And there’s also the matter of theirs, and the broader New Left’s, opposition to Israel and Zionism. There may have been Jewish goals lurking behind their actions, even if only subconsciously, although it seems to me there’s an element of self-loathing that factors into it as well – which itself is quintessentially Jewish. It reminds me that when I was living in Ann Arbor in the 2000s, the head of the local chapter of the anti-Israel BDS movement, who was arrested on numerous occasions for doing things like carrying “Fuck Israel” signs into city council meetings and synagogues during services, was himself a Jew. (And may very well still be, I’m not sure what’s going on there today.) There’s clearly something psychological going on there.
“If Leftism can be seen as a Christian heresy, there is a sense of Christianity’s sin-and-salvation concept in Rudd’s account.”
I am a bit tired of this anti-Christian Alt Right stereotype. If you read this book by the conservative RC scholar Benjamin Wiker, you will learn that modern liberalism (and that way leftism) grew largely out of pagan Epicurean materialism (that was given some updated twists in the early modern era by thinkers like Machiavelli and Hobbes, thus we might call it “neo-Epicureanism”):
https://books.google.fi/books?id=n27AG9eyq3gC&dq=wiker+hedonists&hl=fi&source=gbs_navlinks_s
Bashing Jewish conspirators and subversives is OK, they deserve it, but you cannot truly tackle the fundamental presuppositions of liberalism until you deal with Epicurean materialism and the utilitarian hedonist ethics it gives birth to – and that you can hardly do without resorting to Christian spirituality.
I am not discussing Christianity in a negative way, but I must point out that Christian concepts like sin and salvation get applied in a secular way. This can be good or bad. Indeed, Communism is a Christian heresy. For further reading regarding that idea, I suggest Hiliare Belloc’s The Great Heresies. For a Protestant view read Francis Schaeffer. For a secular view, Reagan’s Evil Empire speech. Toynbee and others also say this.
Thank you for the review.
I’m confused as to what you mean by “punching left.” I only encountered the expression recently, maybe on this Web site, and it was “punching right,” and it seemed from the context that it meant a rightist criticizing or disavowing someone further to the right. But here you seem to say that punching left means getting more radical and trying to be as far left as possible. According to my original understanding of the term, “punching left” would mean a liberal criticizing or disavowing someone more to the left, which does not seem to be what Rudd and the Weather Underground did, to say the least. It’s a good, violent expression that we should use, but it would help to have us agree on its meaning.
I am using the term punching left as the opposite of the more commonly used term punching right. Punching right is he colorful expression of the following ideas:
1. The theory that the political left doesn’t disavow or work against anyone further to the left. However National Review and the GOP Establishment always shuns or works against those to the right. “Bill Buckley punches right, he just fired Joe Sobran.”
2. The political left is able to paper over problems between leftists, support leftists no matter what, and keep disagreements private. The left gets along while the right gets into infighting and punching right. Therefore the unified left always beats the right.
In fact, infighting on the left is quite vicious. JFK punched left against Castro and Ho Chi Minh. Oswald punched left at Kennedy. The 1960s was a flurry of leftist infighting.
The leadership of Weatherman was heavily Jewish. They were motivated by visceral and typically Jewish feelings of contempt for America and Americans. Whether they were working consciously for a JEWISH regime in America is debatable, but the fact is that the leadership group they developed to carry out their aims was heavily Jewish (and the two prominent gentile leaders, Jones and Ayers, were both strongly philosemitic), and there is no reason to believe that their government would not have been heavily Jewish as well. They had a particular hatred for whites, and foresaw a communist world order. Sounds pretty Jewish. See my articles in TOO, “Ted Gold and the Jews of Weatherman” and “A Forgotten Revolutionary: John Jacobs.”
Both Rothman/Lichter and James Miller, “Democracy is in the Streets,” identify Al Haber as Jewish.