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In this paper looks at the domestic terror group known as the Weather Underground. How the group came into existence, their cause, methods and tactics used by the group, recruitment techniques, radicalization model used to indoctrinate new members, and the ultimate end to the group.
The radical group known as the Weather Under-Ground began in 1969 on the Campus of Michigan University as a radical branch of the group called Students for a Democratic Society (SDS). The group wanted to implement social changes within the government with issues such as racism, anti-Vietnam War policies, and greedy corporations.
They also wanted to create a communist based government using violence in an attempt to overthrow the government and replace the current system. The group was led by Jim Mellen, Peter Clapp, John Jacobs, Bill Ayers, and Terry Robbins. They started out with acts of civil disorder by descending on over 200 neighborhoods destroying cars, breaking windows in Chicago. This action was known as the "Days of Rage." It was preceded with a warning by group member Bernardine Dohrn that stated "Hello, I'm going to read a declaration of a state of war...within the next 14 days we will attack a symbol or institution of American injustice." The Weather underground also began bombing symbols of the Government establishment across the country.
Thirty years ago, with those words, a group of young American radicals announced their intention to overthrow the U.S.
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government. In THE WEATHER UNDERGROUND, former Underground members, including Bernardine Dohrn, Bill Ayers, Mark Rudd, David Gilbert and Brian Flanagan, speak publicly about the idealistic passion that drove them to "bring the war home" and the trajectory that placed them on the FBI's most wanted list.
--bombing targets across the country that they considered emblematic of the real violence that the U.S.
was wreaking throughout the world. Ultimately, the group's carefully organized clandestine network managed to successfully evade one of the largest manhunts in FBI history, yet the group's members would reemerge to life in a country that was dramatically different than the one they had hoped their efforts would inspire. Extensive archival material, including, photographs, film footage and FBI documents are interwoven with modern-day interviews to trace the group's path, from its pitched battles with police on Chicago's streets, to its bombing of the U.S. Capitol, to its successful endeavor breaking acid-guru Timothy Leary out of prison. The film explores the Weathermen in the context of other social movements of the time and features interviews with former members of the Students for a Democratic Society (SDS) and the Black Panthers. It also examines the U.S. government's suppression of dissent in the 1960s and 1970s.
Looking back at their years underground, the former members paint a compelling portrait of troubled times, revolutionary times, and the forces that drove their resistance.
On January 29, 1975, an explosion rocked the headquarters of the U.S. State Department in Washington, D.C. No one was hurt, but the damage was extensive, impacting 20 offices on three separate floors. Hours later, another bomb was found at a military induction center in Oakland, California, and safely detonated.
Yet for years the FBI leadership remained obsessed with capturing the Weathermen, and they remained prominent on the FBI wanted posters. Why? After all, by any rational measure, Weatherman was not an existential threat to the country; it was too small.
True, some of its operations were spectacular: the bombing of the Capitol itself (March 1971), the bombing of the Pentagon (May 1972), the bombing of the State Department (January 1975). Moreover, the Weathermen were determined revolutionaries, not kids out on a lark. They consistently proclaimed their desire to destroy the very system the FBI was sworn to defend. And when in summer 1970 the original decision was made to put some Weatherman leaders onto the Most Wanted List, the FBI believed there were as many as 1,000 Weatherman Underground guerrillas at large in the United States. If that had been the case, Weatherman might have constituted a serious problem for the country; but in fact the FBI overestimated the scale of the Weatherman organization by a factor of ten and panicked.
The FBI decision garnered Weatherman a huge amount of publicity and made some of its leaders famous. Yet the Weather organization was minuscule. To be sure, it was almost unique among radicals in that period in using dynamite bombs to protest government war policies, racial unfairness and corporate greed. The Weathermen believed that the evil of these acts warranted an extreme response in fact, it warranted a revolution. But Weather only set off a total of 25 such bombs during its entire seven years of existence, all of them relatively small. And fully half of those bombs were detonated early on, in 1970. After that, Weatherman on average set off only one bomb every six months, mostly in the bathrooms of government buildings and corporation headquarters.
A domestic terrorist group called the Weather Underground claimed responsibility for both bombs. Originally called the Weatherman or the Weathermen, a name taken from a line in a Bob Dylan song, the Weather Underground was a small,
When SDS collapsed in 1969, the Weather Underground stepped forward, inspired by communist ideologies and embracing violence and crime as a way to protest the Vietnam War, racism, and other left-wing aims. "Our intention is to disrupt the empire ... to incapacitate it, to put pressure on the cracks," claimed the group's 1974 manifesto, Prairie Fire.
By the next year, the group had claimed credit for 25 bombings including the U.S. Capitol, the Pentagon, the California Attorney General's office, and a New York City police station.
The FBI doggedly pursued these terrorists as their attacks mounted. Many members were identified, but their small numbers and guerrilla tactics helped them hide under assumed identities. In 1978, the Bureau arrested five members who were plotting to bomb a politician's office. Others were captured after two policemen and a Brinks' driver were murdered in a botched armored car robbery in Nanuet, New York, in 1981.
Key to disrupting the group for good was the newly created FBI-New York City Police Anti Terrorist Task Force. It brought together the strengths of both organizations and focused them on these domestic terrorists. The task force and others like it paved the way for today's Joint Terrorism Task Forces created by the Bureau in each of its field offices to fuse federal, state, and local law enforcement and intelligence resources to combat today's terrorist threats.
By the mid-'80s, the Weather Underground was essentially history. Still, several of these fugitives were able to successfully hide themselves for decades, emerging only in recent years to answer for their crimes. Once again, it shows that grit and partnerships can and will defeat shadowy, resilient terrorist groups.
The Weathermen thought of themselves as revolutionaries that is, not merely as students acting out of anger over Vietnam and racism, but as politically minded organizers. They yearned to expand their numbers beyond a tiny revolutionary cadre. While they worried that the bulk of the white working class was corrupted by relative prosperity, and ineradicable racism which they called "white skin privilege," they hoped that in the counterculture, made up of disaffected young people, they might find a constituency capable of eventually empowering their revolutionary project. But the Weatherman bombing policy had not won support even on the extreme Left. Even the Berkeley Tribe, the most radical underground newspaper in the country, publicly warned that lethal bombings would discredit Weatherman and isolate the would-be guerrillas from potential supporters if they killed, they would be alone.
Yet however large Weatherman's constituency of radical students became, it turned out to be too small to be politically effective. By 1974, the leadership realized the problem. In an 186-page book called Prairie Fire clandestinely printed by Weather, and clandestinely distributed with great success, despite the FBI the leadership concluded that the only way to mount a revolution in the United States was to win over the American working class.
The Weather Underground. (2019, Dec 09). Retrieved from https://studymoose.com/the-weather-underground-example-essay
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