Was 1968 our global 1905?

■ A special appearance by friends and comrades Bernardine Dohrn and Bill Ayers in Santa Fe - the precious town known to some Cypriots as "Kyrenia of the high-altitude desert".
■ "“Whatever the so-called ’60s was, it was mainly a prelude to what we need to do today”, said Ayers."
 

It's an essential and burning question that keeps recurring to people who are actively engaged in the revolutionary process, in the study of its history and the theoretical foundations that might guide better guide us in understanding its curious developments in order to help bring the revolution to a VICTORY (or to a new beginning): it's the question of 1968 - the need to understand the historical role of the planetary-scale revolutionary period of the "sixties and seventies" symbolized by the year 1968.

Students of revolutionary Socialist history often see the 1905 revolution in Russia as a launching pad (a dress-rehearsal) of the 1917 revolution in Russia which gave birth to the Soviet Union. Could it be that the revolutionary period exemplified by 1968 can act as a prelude to another and more SUCCESSFUL global revolution? Can this happen even though two whole generations have already passed, and we're in the process of losing many of the people who were the bearers of the Light, Love and Consciousness from that time?

Is it possible that the Socialist revolution possesses qualities that are transcendental (like a number?), going beyond the boundaries of the particular experiences of individual persons or specific populations, embodying a transpersonal reality capable of actualizing a "small 'c' communist" society all over the globe in the same sense that we witness the materialization of Archetypes? In that sense, it would be reasonable to assume that the next global prairie-fire can be self-igniting, without the necessity of being mediated by people who have lived through 1968. Or, to say it differently, it might be possible that those would who bring that spark over across time from 1968 to the present, might be able to re-ignite the prairie through a discarnate process, through an incorporeal abstraction acting on and through objective reality.

Could it be that the contradictions discovered within capitalism and global Imperialism by marxian science keep generating the Consciousness necessary for humanity to overcome them and replace them with the socialist ~ communist ~ anarchist ~ feminist ~ green ~ autonomist society we yearn for?

What about the social and political conditions? Is it possible to envision a global collective coordinating body that will harmonize and coordinate the Movement? Are modern populations emotionally and politically capable of overcoming the individualism and narcissism enforced on us by the commodity shopping culture and the Spectacle; by narrow perceptions of collective struggle confined by the mental borders of the nation-state; and move forward to removing the obstacles to unity found among the communities and populations of the present? Of the future?

Where is the radical culture that can bind us together? Where is the organizational structure ("One Ring to free them all: One Ring to find them, One Ring to bring them all, and in the Light to bind them")? Where are the radical Jedi, radical Bene Gesserit, the witches and guerillas, the musicians and healthcare workers, the geeks and "fairy weirdos" who will serve as the cadre of a future revolutionary party that can emerge as a Conscious force on the stage of history to embody the Last International?

Is it viable to work in that direction? Is it premature? Are there radicals consciously and knowingly engaged in building that network? Does it already exist, hiding in plain view and gently guiding us in the direction of planet-wide Liberation?

Petros Evdokas, petros@cyprus-org.net
~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~

Radical activists to discuss next steps of resistance
By Megan Bennett / Journal North Reporter
Friday, September 22nd, 2017 at 12:02am
https://www.abqjournal.com/1067393/radical-activists-to-discuss-next-steps-of-resistance-ex-former-weather-underground-members-to-join-sfais-equal-justice-residents-on-panel.html

SANTA FE, N.M. — Two members of the Weather Underground, the 1960s-70s radical activist group most famously known for protesting the Vietnam War and black oppression through bombings of government buildings, will speak at the Santa Fe Art Institute Sunday about current-day issues and creative solutions for fighting back.

Though they are most famous for their activism in their teens and twenties, husband and wife Bernardine Dohrn and Bill Ayers, both now in their seventies and living in Chicago, say they are not stuck in the past. The two are still activists in what Dohrn called “perilous times” with the election of Donald Trump.

“We’re not looking wistfully at a ship that already left the shore,” said Ayers. “We’re very much living toward the future. Whatever the so-called ’60s was, it was mainly a prelude to what we need to do today.” He said what he and his wife were fighting for then, like stopping the “underlying causes of war” and white supremacy, still need resolution today.

Both Dohrn and Ayers began their activism in college protesting against U.S. involvement in the Vietnam War and for the Civil Rights Movement, a period during which Ayers said he participated in sit-ins and was arrested at the 1968 Democratic National Convention.

They later helped organize the Weather Underground – sometimes labeled, then and now, as a terrorist group – that detonated small bombs at places like the U.S. Capitol and the Pentagon to protest war and other social issues. Three members of the Weather Underground died in 1970 at a New York townhouse while creating an explosive.

Ayers and Dohrn, who was once on the FBI’s Most Wanted List, were on the run for several years until 1980 when they turned themselves in. By then, most of the charges against them had been dropped. Dohrn served less than a year of jail time for refusing to testify in a case, then went on to a career as a legal advocate and in teaching law. Ayers became an education professor in Chicago – whether he had any significant associations with Barack Obama there became an issue in presidential politics.

“My whole life I’ve been told that won’t work, that’s extreme or that’s crazy,” said Ayers about criticism of radical activism throughout the years. But he said activists can’t rely on what polls or powerful figures are saying about a movement and, sometimes, unpopular or new ideas are necessary.

Now, they’re retired college professors who keep up with movements like Black Lives Matter, as well as activism on climate change, women’s rights, protection of undocumented immigrants and other issues.

The two will participate in an “inter-generational” panel with several SFAI Equal Justice Residents, a group of local and national artists invited to work on political or social movement-related art pieces, to discuss alternatives to addressing today’s political climate.

The couple will offer a discussion of their lives, during which people can ask questions. They’ll be available afterward to sign copies of their books if audience members bring them. Dohrn said the couple welcomes all opinions and perspectives in the discussion, including those who disagree with their past tactics.

While there is no “road map” for activism, Dohrn says everyone has something they should be doing right now in response to today’s political situation. She hopes the conversation with artists will evoke some innovative ways of resistance.

“We need to talk to each other, we need to think deeply about other domains, other than just talking in which we can impact, inspire, ignite and imagine a different world,” said Dohrn.

If you go

WHAT: “SFAI Presents the Weather Underground: A Night of Radical Imagination” panel discussion, Q&A and book-signing.
WHERE: James A. Little Theater, New Mexico School for the Deaf, 1060 Cerrillos Rd.
WHEN: Sunday, 6-8 p.m.
TICKETS: Free, but comes with the option to include a $10 or $25 donation to help fund the Equal Justice residency. Go to sfai.org for tickets.

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Originally published here:

Was 1968 our global 1905?
http://cyprus.indymedia.org/node/5166 

and archived here:
https://web.archive.org/web/20171003183813/http://cyprus.indymedia.org/node/5166

~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~
 

From the Weather Underground Organization: MARCH 6 1970-2010

We've just received this communication from our friends and comrades Bill Ayers and Bernardine Dohrn of the Weather Underground Organization.

Every day is a day to honour the dead and fight for the living - but today is a special one.

Cyprus IndyMedia Collective

* * *



MARCH 6 1970-2010

A front page headline in the New York Times on March 7, 1970 announced: “Townhouse Razed by Blast and Fire; Man’s Body Found.” The story described an elegant four-story brick building in Greenwich Village destroyed by three large explosions and a raging fire “probably caused by leaking gas” at about noon on Friday, March 6.

The body was later identified as belonging to 23-year old Ted Gold, a leader of the 1968 student strike at Columbia University, a teacher, and a member of a “militant faction of Students for a Democratic Society.” Over the next several days two more bodies were discovered—Diana Oughton and Terry Robbins had both been student leaders, civil rights and anti-war activists—and by March 15 the Times reported that police had found “57 sticks of dynamite, four homemade pipe bombs and about thirty blasting caps in the rubble,” and referred to the townhouse for the first time as a “bomb factory.” That awful event announced widely the existence of the Weather Underground, in some ways the most notorious, but far from the only group of Americans to take up armed struggle as a protest tool at that moment—the story took off from there, growing, changing, and accelerating every day

A few days after the Townhouse explosion Ralph Featherstone and William “Che” Payne, two “black militants," associated with the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee, according to Time magazine, “were killed when their car was blasted to bits” by a bomb police said was being transported to Washington D.C. to protest the prosecution of SNCC leader H. Rap Brown. The Black Liberation Army leapt onto the national scene, and other organized groups—Puerto Rican independistas, Native American first nation militants, and Chicano separatists— emerged demanding self-determination and justice.

Violent resistance to violence was far from an isolated phenomenon: Time noted that in 1969 there had been 61 bombings on college campuses, most targeting ROTC and other war-related targets, and 93 bomb explosions in New York, half of them classified as political,” a category that was “virtually non-existent ten years ago.” According to the FBI, from the start of 1969 to mid-April 1970, there were 40,934 bombings, attempted bombings, and bomb threats. Out of this total, 975 had been explosive, as opposed to incendiary, attacks, meaning that on average, two bombs planned, constructed, and placed, detonated every day for more than a year. Our national history includes times of anarchist resistance, labor militancy, massive unreported (and still largely unacknowledged) slave rebellions, and the armed abolitionism of John Brown; the late 1960’s and 1970’s was becoming one of those times.

How had it come to this?

Empire, invasion, and occupation always earn blow-back. In 1965 most Americans supported the war, but by 1968 people had turned massively against it—the result of protest and organizing and a burgeoning peace movement, and of civil rights leaders like the militants from SNCC, Muhammad Ali, and Martin Luther King, Jr. denouncing the war as illegal and immoral. Even more important, veterans came home and told the truth about the reality of aggression and occupation and war crimes. The US government found itself isolated around the world and in profound and growing conflict with its own people inside its own borders. The Vietnamese themselves were decisive: they refused to be defeated. The Tet Offensive in 1968 destroyed any fantasy of an American victory, and when President Lyndon Johnson announced at the end of March, 1968 that he would not run for re-election, it seemed to us we had won a victory.

But peace proved to be a dream deferred, for the war did not end—it escalated into an air and sea war, expanded into all of Cambodia and Laos, and every week the war dragged on another six thousand people were murdered in Southeast Asia. Six thousand human beings—massive, unthinkable numbers—were thrown into the furnaces of war and death that had been constructed by our own government. The war was lost, but the terror continued. All Vietnamese territories outside US control were declared “free-fire zones” and airplanes rained bombs and napalm on anything that moved, destroying crops and live-stock and entire villages. John McCain, an unremorseful war criminal, flew some of those missions. As a young lieutenant, John Kerry testified in Senate hearings at the time that US troops committed war crimes every day as a matter of policy, not choice.

No one knew precisely how to proceed, for the anti-war movement had done what it had set out to do—we’d persuaded the American people to oppose the war, built a massive movement and a majority peace sentiment—and still we couldn’t find any sure-fire way to stop the killing; millions of people mobilized for peace, and our project, our task and our obsession, was so simple to state, so excruciatingly difficult to achieve: peace now. The war slogged on into a murky and unacceptable future, and the anti-war forces splintered then—some of us tried to organize a peace wing within the Democratic Party, others organized in factories and work-places, some fled to Europe or Africa or Canada, others to communes, the land, and hopeful but small organizing projects. Some began to build a vehicle to fight the war-makers by other means, a clandestine force that would, we hoped, survive what we thought of as an impending American totalitarianism. Every choice was contemplated, each seemed a possibility then—and we had friends and family in every camp—and no choice seemed utterly beyond the pale.

The Weather Underground carried out a series of illegal and symbolic attacks on property then, some 20 acts over its entire existence, and no one was killed or harmed; the goal was not to terrorize people, but to scream out the message that the US government and its military were committing acts of terrorism in our name, and that the American people should never tolerate that. Some felt that our actions were misguided at best, off-the-tracks, indefensible and even despicable, and that case is not impossible to make. But America’s longest war itself, with all its attendant horrors, was doubly despicable, and while many stood up, who in fact did the right thing; who ended the war; who transformed the world?

We began to think of ourselves as part of the Third World project—revolutionary liberation movements demanding justice and freeing themselves from empire, we believed, would also transform the world. We thought that we who lived in the metropolis of empire had a special duty to “oppose our own imperialism” and to resist our own government’s imperial dreams. Eventually we came to think that we could make a revolution, and that in any case it was our responsibility to try. It was a big stretch, but every revolution is impossible until it occurs; after the fact, every revolution seems inevitable.

All of that was forty years ago—lots of water under the bridge since then, raging rivers and cascading falls, rapids and torrents, chutes and ladders—a long time in the life of a person—the young become the old, and stories get retold. But it’s also a matter of perspective: the meaning of any historical event will always be contested, and the more recent the event, the fiercer the contestation. The last word has not been written about the radical movements of youth in Europe in 1968, and certainly the meaning of the Black Freedom Movement or of the US invasion and occupation of Viet Nam and the various American reactions to that catastrophe—from mindless jingoism to sincere patriotism, from reluctant participation to gung-ho brutality, from protest to armed resistance—are far from settled. We’re reminded of the Chinese premier Chou En Lai responding to a French journalist’s question many years ago about the impact of the 18th Century French revolution on the 20th Century Chinese revolution. He thought for quite awhile and finally said, “It’s too soon to tell.” Forty years is less than the blink of an eye.

The big wheel keeps on turning: events and actions and adventures plunge relentlessly forward and nothing withstands the whirlwind of life on-the-move and history in-the-making. No single narrative can ever adequately speak to the diversity and complexity of human experience, for meaning itself is in the mix, always contested and never easily settled. Because meaning is made and remade in the present tense, our backward glances are now necessarily refracted through the US defeat in Viet Nam, the steady decline of empire, the hollowing out of the economy through militarism, the destruction of our political system, the environmental catastrophe that capitalism wrought, the terror attacks of 9/11 and the subsequent invasions and occupations and wars that continue as defining features of our national life. There is no sturdy accounting of distant times: everything must change, no one and nothing remains the same.

Many who knew and loved them 40 years ago, choose to remember Ted Gold, Diana Oughton, Terry Robbins, Ralph Featherstone, and Che Payne every day as beautiful and committed young people who believed fiercely in peace and justice and freedom, believed further that all men and women are of incalculable value, and thought that they had a personal and urgent responsibility to act on that deep belief. We think of Brecht: a smile is a kind of indifference to injustice. And then we turn to Rosa Luxemburg writing to a friend from prison: love your own life enough to care for the children and the elderly, to enjoy a good meal and a beautiful sunset, to embrace friends and lovers; and love the world enough to put your shoulder on history’s great wheel when required.

We have not forgotten our fallen friends, not for a moment. March 6 is for us a time of more formal remembrance. Their deaths and all that followed offered us an opportunity to reconsider and recover. We were able to recommit and to see that the first casualty of making oneself into an instrument of war is always one’s own humanity, that, in the words of the poet Marge Piercy, “conscience is the sword we wield. Conscience is the sword that runs us through.” We remember our lost comrades, their many brave, as well as their damaging last acts, and we continue to vibrate with the hope and despair they embodied then.

Bill Ayers, Bernardine Dohrn
~~~~~~~~~

Editorial Note:
We reproduce here the first communication from the Weather Underground to show the spirit of the times - and because we still embrace the political and moral validity of that path, as well as its slogan: "Arm the Spirit!"

Communiqué #1 From The Weatherman Underground

From /The Berkeley Tribe/, July 31, 1970. The Red Mountain Tribe.

Hello. This is Bernardine Dohrn.

I'm going to read A DECLARATION OF A STATE OF WAR.

This is the first communication from the Weatherman underground.

All over the world, people fighting Amerikan imperialism look to Amerika's youth to use our strategic position behind enemy lines to join forces in the destruction of the empire.

Black people have been fighting almost alone for years. We've known that our job is to lead white kids into armed revolution. We never intended to spend the next five or twenty-five years of our lives in jail. Ever since SDS became revolutionary, we've been trying to show how it is possible to overcome the frustration and impotence that comes from trying to reform this system. Kids know the lines are drawn revolution is touching all of our lives. Tens of thousands have learned that protest and marches don't do it. Revolutionary violence is the only way.

Now we are adapting the classic guerrilla strategy of the Viet Cong and the urban guerrilla strategy of the Tupamaros to our own situation here in the most technically advanced country in the world.

Ché taught us that "revolutionaries move like fish in the sea." The alienation and contempt that young people have for this country has created the ocean for this revolution.

The hundreds and thousands of young people who demonstrated in the Sixties against the war and for civil rights grew to hundreds of thousands in the past few weeks actively fighting Nixon's invasion of Cambodia and the attempted genocide against black people. The insanity of Amerikan "justice" has added to its list of atrocities six blacks killed in Augusta, two in Jackson and four white Kent State students, making thousands more into revolutionaries.

The parents of "privileged" kids have been saying for years that the revolution was a game for us. But the war and the racism of this society show that it is too fucked-up. We will never live peaceably under this system.

This was totally true of those who died in the New York townhouse explosion. The third person who was killed there was Terry Robbins, who led the first rebellion at Kent State less than two years ago.

The twelve Weathermen who were indicted for leading last October's riots in Chicago have never left the country. Terry is dead, Linda was captured by a pig informer, but the rest of us move freely in and out of every city and youth scene in this country. We're not hiding out but we're invisible.

There are several hundred members of the Weatherman underground and some of us face more years in jail than the fifty thousand deserters and draft dodgers now in Canada. Already many of them are coming back to join us in the underground or to return to the Man's army and tear it up from inside along with those who never left.

We fight in many ways. Dope is one of our weapons. The laws against marijuana mean that millions of us are outlaws long before we actually split. Guns and grass are united in the youth underground.

Freaks are revolutionaries and revolutionaries are freaks. If you want to find us, this is where we are. In every tribe, commune, dormitory, farmhouse, barracks and townhouse where kids are making love, smoking dope and loading guns—fugitives from Amerikan justice are free to go.

For Diana Oughton, Ted Gold and Terry Robbins, and for all the revolutionaries who are still on the move here, there has been no question for a long time now—we will never go back.

Within the next fourteen days we will attack a symbol or institution of Amerikan injustice. This is the way we celebrate the example of Eldridge Cleaver and H. Rap Brown and all black revolutionaries who first inspired us by their fight behind enemy lines for the liberation of their people.

Never again will they fight alone.

May 21, 1970

~~~~~~~~~~~~~~

No Year required

These last few days I've been immersed in reading Bill Ayer's "Fugitive Days". It's gotten me shifting in and out of a mental~emotional fugue affecting my language skills severely: tenses conflating into one another with ripped apart time references; jumbled memories of my own teen years in the clandestine resistance rising up gasping for air, registering themselves on the desktop of my self-perception's computer; forbidden memories; censored memories and lethal secrets bound by oaths sworn decades ago all getting mixed up with the present time....

When I get my head back together again I'd like to write a little about the experience of reading Bill's book. But it's too early yet.

I'm only able to read small doses at a time. The personal~political path Bill helps us traverse through the pages is so familiar, so unbearably familiar that it burns my eyes to read. I often stop to read a few sentences two and three times again - there's so much condensed in there - did I catch his meaning correctly here? And here? Or am I just projecting into his words fragments of meaning (or lackthereof) from my own insane past?

Last night I was ruminating again on what a tremendous time-twister, what a ripped up mandala this thing turned out to be when on September 11, 2001, the New York Times published an interview with Bill in which his book was first presented. With the sensationalist and deliberately misleading title of
"No Regrets for a Love Of Explosives; In a Memoir of Sorts, a War Protester Talks of Life With the Weathermen", the interview was timed to coincide with the release of "Fugitive Days":
http://www.nytimes.com/2001/09/11/books/no-regrets-for-love-explosives-memoir-sorts-war-protester-talks-life-with.html

And then another weird thing about September 11, 2001, was that my friend and comrade Mitchel Cohen was - we hoped! - going to get elected Mayor of New York City on that day's Mayoral primary elections. Voting was postponed due to the horrendous events of that day, forever engraved in peoples' perception as the date without a year. The date "September 11" stands by itself. No year required.

And then again this morning I received an automatic notice from the facebook account of Christiana Voniati saying that my name, along with Bill Ayer's and a bunch of other people's names got jumbled up on a cartoon reference to 9/11...

Ok, it's a difinitely an omen, I thought, and it means I have to make a good centralized list of some of my articles about September 11. People are always asking me what I think of those events, and I'm usually reluctant to say "would you like to read my articles on it? I've got plenty!"

If you have the time and interest, I'd like you to read them. More so, I'd like to hear your thoughts, your feelings, criticism, feedback, questions, suggestions for improvement. Here they are:

911 Truth, Psychology and the science of Consciousness
Issues around September 11 denial, fear, resistance, the Psychology of repressing the Truth
http://portland-or.net/911truth/Psychology-and-the-science-of-Consciousness.html

Bittersweet Mandate
http://www.portland-or.net/911truth/bittersweet-mandate.html

Demolition is an Understatement
What determines the Mind's Ability to Resonate with Truth?
http://www.portland-or.net/911truth/Demolition-is-an-Understatement.html

More on the Fake Left
or,
"Left is Right and Right is Wrong
Better decide which side you're on"
- Tom Robinson Band
http://wtcdemolition.com/blog/node/1182#comment-11246


Noam Chomsky and September 11
1. Open Letter to Kevin Barrett
http://groups.yahoo.com/group/911truthportland/message/223
with Comments, here:
http://wtcdemolition.com/blog/node/1159
and
2. Good News from Kevin Barrett
http://wtcdemolition.com/blog/node/1182#comment-11246

"We'll say we were only following orders. Right?"
http://cyprusindymedia.blogspot.com/2009/09/well-say-we-were-only-following-orders.html

9/11 from Day One
Quoting Casseia:
“...oh my gawd, one of the posts from September 12th, 2001, basically nails everything that the Truth movement was going to argue over and about for the next several years.
That link to the Entheogens group post - obviously, proof that for at least some people, ‘yer brain on drugs’ is considerably more perceptive than ‘yer brain on FOX news.’”
These arguments are by now known to everyone, but it's the date that matters:
"Twin Towers/ Pentagon disaster"
http://groups.yahoo.com/group/Entheogens/message/1832

Bill Ayers, Ward Chuchill, September 11 and the struggle to restore democracy in
the US:
http://groups.yahoo.com/group/911truthportland/message/307


The Lobby Represents the Most Dangerous Faction of the US Ruling Class
In conversation with Seth Farber
http://wtcdemolition.com/blog/node/1251


More:
Search: +"Petros Evdokas" +"9/11"
http://tinyurl.com/petrosevdokas9-11
or
http://www.google.com/#hl=en&safe=off&num=50&newwindow=1&q=%2B%22petros+evdokas%22+%2B%229/11%22+-%22censored+news%22&start=100&sa=N&filter=0&fp=e09c21d05d4f9976

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