The revolution you may not even know happened

Revolutionaries, by the very nature of their task, face a peculiar challenge that creates inherent risk in their enterprise, and thus necessitates that they be ready to change tactics frequently.

It is easy to understand why. To achieve their goal of overthrowing the government or ruling system, they must have a public campaign to persuade the masses, yet everything they do publicly may also be used against them by the government which they oppose.

If they give up the public campaign and just wage a private battle, they are almost certainly doomed to failure by their own small numbers and the brute strength of entrenched power. Yet if they go public, they expose themselves to the risk of arrest or even death in the worst-case scenario, or the more subtle risk of public rejection should their revolution prove to be unpopular with the “downtrodden masses.”

Just such a choice confronted the Students for a Democratic Society back in 1968 when they were seeking to overthrow the U.S. government and the capitalist system. For a while it had seemed like the propaganda of the street would win the war. Americans grew= their hair longer. They wore their skirts shorter. They enjoyed the fruits of free love and readily available psychedelic drugs. Even Mrs. Robinson was ready to throw caution to the winds. The button-down generation had come unglued.

But then something strange happened. Nixon got elected. The Vietnam War continued. Jim Morrison, Janis Joplin and Jimi Hendrix died. Charlie Manson killed. Maybe the revolution wasn’t quite as ready for prime time as Bill Ayers and his fellow conspirators in SDS had hoped.

It was around this time when Ayers, fresh from being named “Education Secretary” for the new radical branch of SDS, went underground in the Weatherman organization, along with his girlfriend Diana Oughton, his future wife Bernardine Dohrn, and a small cadre of dedicated revolutionaries. Instead of encouraging street demonstrations and teach-ins to rally public opinion to their cause, they switched tactics and planted bombs. As part of their campaign for the violent overthrow of the U.S. government, they bombed the Capitol, the Pentagon, the State Department, and even themselves. (Oughton and two other radicals died in their Greenwich Village apartment when a bomb they were assembling prematurely exploded.)

By the middle of 1970, the Weather Underground had actually declared war on the United States. This declaration is instructive in several particulars about the nature of the revolution that they sought, and the tactics they would pursue.

“We’ve known that our job is to lead white kids into armed revolution,” the declaration read by Dohrn asserted. “Ever since SDS became revolutionary, we’ve been trying to show how it is possible to overcome 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.”

The declaration referred to the deaths of Oughton, Ted Gold and Terry Robbins in the N.Y.C. townhouse explosion several times and promoted them as martyrs for the cause. It also noted that 10 of the 12 Weatherman leaders who were under indictment for their conspiratorial activities had outwitted the system.

“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...,” the statement claimed. “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... 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.”

In other words, the revolutionaries had recognized that they could never overturn the power structure by talking their fellow citizens into joining them in armed rebellion for political purposes, but they could turn them into outlaws by corrupting them. If these hip revolutionaries could seduce the masses with sex and drugs, then they could count on their support when they fought to topple the system that tried to regulate sexual morality and to outlaw drugs.

That strategy in and of itself shows that the revolution sponsored by Bill Ayers and Bernardine Dohrn was not some naive childish prank. Their very success in corrupting the morals of the American republic using the “weapons” of sex and drugs in the 1960s and ’70s proves that they were the equals of Lenin and Che as revolutionary strategists. Once the moral values of the country had been surrendered to the revolution, it was inevitable that the political values would follow. Thus, feel-good personal morality led like clockwork to feel-good public policy, and the system was gradually milked of billions of dollars in a Marxist transfer of wealth from the haves to the have-nots. And most of this occurred long after the last bomb was set by the Weather Underground.

Bombs were a matter of convenience, but revolution was a matter of conviction — a conviction which neither Ayers nor his wife Bernardine Dohrn have ever renounced. Indeed, as Dohrn read in her Declaration of War, “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.”

Elsewhere, in the declaration, the revolutionaries note that their parents falsely believed that “the revolution was a game for us. But the war and the racism of this society show that it is too f---ed up. We will never live peaceably under this system.”

Those words were written in 1970 when Ayers, Dohrn and the other Weatherman leaders were fugitives. In 1980, they turned themselves in. Federal charges against Ayers and the others were dropped. Prosecutors had determined that evidence against the revolutionaries had been gathered illegally by the FBI. But also, times had changed. You didn’t need a weatherman to know which way the wind blew — America was a new place. The young radicals of the early 1960s were starting to run things, and the old America of Lawrence Welk, Guy Lombardo and Kate Smith was now singing a new tune.  

There was no need for the Weather Underground to stay underground any longer because their radical agenda was now being implemented above ground. The seeds in other words had sprouted. As a result, the revolutionary propagandist Bill Ayers got off scot-free. Bernardine Dohrn had to face Illinois state charges and was fined a paltry $1,500 and placed on three years probation for her part in a deadly conspiracy to overthrow the government of the United States. In other words, they beat the system.

But it is wrong to assume that in the years following 1980, they somehow embraced capitalism, the Constitution, and the American way of life.

Just the opposite. Although they both settled down to outwardly normal lives (he as an educator and she as an attorney), numerous statements and writings in the intervening years prove conclusively, in their own words, that they never gave up their contempt for the country they live in. Thus, although they did not continue to pursue violent overthrow of the government, it is safe to assume that they remain committed to their pledge to “never live peaceably under this system.” They do not live “under” the system; they live within it — as agent provacateurs.

Indeed, for anyone who has read his book “Fugitive Days,” it is plain that Bill Ayers remains a dedicated Marxist radical whose aim is to bring about what has been called elsewhere “fundamental transformation” of the United States of America, and what is better known as revolution.

I think it is inarguable that they accomplished their goal. A theory about how they did so will be put forth in next week’s column.