Revolution went from violent overthrow to co-opting the system

Does any legitimate authority really think that communists targeted the U.S. public education system as a means to transform the American character from rugged individualism to comfortable socialism?

You bet. Let’s start with the U.S. Congress.

Back in 1969, the Committee on Internal Security (in the House of Representatives) issued a report on “SDS Plans for America’s High Schools.” It was readily apparent to the congressmen who signed this report that America faced a severe challenge from the young revolutionaries who publicly proclaimed themselves to be Students for a Democratic Society, but privately vowed to transform America into a socialist utopia:

“Basic to SDS is the idea that contemporary American society is corrupt, evil and oppressive — and must be destroyed. To reform it, they insist, to change it for the better, is impossible. SDS says our Nation’s system of government and traditional values must be destroyed.”

Therefore, according to the House committee report, the immediate goal of SDS back in 1969 was “to wreck our educational system,” and said that “the high schools in the United States are clearly targeted by the radical left, and particularly SDS for ‘activism.’”

The report went on to note that, “Many of the SDS leaders have publicly declared themselves to be revolutionaries dedicated to the Marxist-Leninist ideology. For example, Mark Rudd, William Ayers, and Jeffrey Carl (Jeff) Jones, leading national officers of the SDS, publicly identified themselves as revolutionary communists during a televised interview over station WJW-TV in Cleveland, Ohio, on August 30, 1969.”

Ayers, of couse, is of especial interest these days because he is a reputed friend of President Obama, but we should be more interested in him because of his long and respected career as a professor of education. How, after all, does society tolerate as a teacher someone who wrote this about the typical high school student: “Imperialism oppresses him by jailing him [in school] and the only thing to do is break out and tear up the jail [school].”

That is just one of many inflammatory statements about education in the SDS manifesto known as “You Don’t Need a Weatherman to Know Which Way the Wind Blows,” which Ayers co-authored. Moreover, SDS publicly declared its intention to foment militant resistance to school authority as a “means to overthrow [the] system” (as stated in the “high school resolution” passed at the SDS National Council meeting in Boulder, Colo., in 1968). So it is easy to see why Congress was concerned about SDS back in 1969.

But the congressional report didn’t quite get it right. The real threat of SDS to high schools had nothing to do with violence. Yes, there were isolated incidents on high school campuses, but for the most part militancy never took hold the way it did on college campuses in the 1960s. Nonetheless, SDS’s intention of radicalizing the nation’s high schools was a real and long-term threat.

That’s because the SDS strategy for America’s schools was two-fold from the beginning. More important than violent demonstrations was the plan to indoctrinate students to believe that America was a “sick” society that exploited workers at home and abroad. They did so, at first, with teach-ins and revolutionary propaganda. But later, they discovered it was much more effective to change the way students thought by changing the way they are taught. That meant working from within the system, and explains why Bill Ayers pursued his career as an instructor of teachers. It also helps to explain why much of the curricula in high schools today resembles a self-criticism session reminiscent of Mao’s Cultural Revolution.

But what it doesn’t explain is why America has accepted Ayers and other revolutionaries as respected leaders of our country instead of self-avowed traitors who should hang their heads in shame.

Remember, the leaders of SDS were dedicated revolutionaries who had declared themselves the sworn enemies of America, democracy and capitalism. Yet in the past 20 to 30 years, many of these same people and their fellow radicals who vowed to destroy the U.S. government, economy and educational system have become deeply embedded within those very institutions.

Maybe we should not be surprised. Working undercover was always part of the SDS strategy. In 1969, the group published a “Work-in Organizers Manual,” which instructed radicals on how to infiltrate business and industry in order to revolutionize society by giving up their summer vacations and spreading the party line while working on assembly lines.

An Aug. 1, 1969, report in Time Magazine on this strategy quoted an unnamed SDS leader as saying, “For SDS people, there is no summer vacation. We see ourselves working 18 hours a day forever. We’re in this for a lifetime.”

If that doesn’t scare you, nothing will, but try this on for size:

In a documentary entitled “The Weather Underground,” SDS leader Jeff Jones is seen in a film clip responding to an incident of alleged police brutality against protesters back in the 1960s.

Jones boldly declares, “The power belongs to the young people and the black people in this country. Come on! We gotta build a strong base and someday we gotta knock those m-----f-----s who control this thing right on their a--.”

That was bold and colorful revolutionary rhetoric, but isn’t that exactly what they did? Didn’t they go ahead and build a strong base out of what Time magazine called “community organization projects, propagandizing and planning,” and knock this country right on its butt?

Jones seems to have instinctively realized that the social changes brought about in just a few years in the mid-1960s were evidence of a huge power base that was largely untapped for political purposes. It was that recognition which fueled the new strategy developed by SDS and later the Weather Underground to not just fight the system, but to infiltrate it and work from within to fundamentally transform it.

If you don’t think it worked, then you don’t know who Jeff Jones is today. After his arrest by the FBI in 1981, Jones mainstreamed himself — first as a journalist and then as an environmental consultant. Today he operates Jeff Jones Strategies (“Consulting for Good Causes”) but like his fellow revolutionary Bill Ayers, he has not renounced his militant past (“I do not regret my militant opposition to racism and the Vietnam War”). Instead, he has learned to work more effectively to change the system by owning it rather than overthrowing it.

On his website, Jones says he is “committed to the idea of building a partnership of workers, environmentalists, business, government, social and environmental justice advocates” — in other words he is still working for the communist revolution, but is now doing it without bombs.

In fact, Jones was one of the founders of the Apollo Alliance, which is a coalition of unions, community action groups like ACORN, and environmental groups aiming to push social policy as far left as possible — as fast as possible. They accomplished that goal in 2009 when the federal stimulus bill was passed by Congress and signed into law by President Obama just weeks after he took office. It turns out that the Apollo Alliance wrote large portions of the law, which is officially called the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act.

That means a guy who was arrested 30 years ago for his part in a revolutionary movement to overthrow the U.S. government now played a huge role in a law that had the effect of bankrupting the U.S. government.

And for the most part, no one even cares. That’s why I state confidently that the revolution sought by Jones and Ayers has already succeeded.