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Today's
Stories
July
24 / 25, 2004
Alexander
Cockburn
The Democrats and Their Conventions:
Part One
July
23, 2004
Lee
Sustar
Revolution in Nicaragua: 25 Years
On
Dave
Lindorff
Battle for NYC: Bush 1, Protesters
0
Saul
Landau
Zaniest President in US History: Bush
Beats Reagan
Mike
Whitney
The 9/11 Whitewash: Blaming No One
Mickey
Z
Get On the Bus: 150 Years After Elizabeth
Jennings
Gary
Leupp
The 9/11 Commission and the Looming
War on Iran
July
22, 2004
M.
Junaid Alam
Ten Ways to Build a Better Democrat
Brian
McKinlay
Rusted On Down Under: Howard, Bush and Sharon
Jason
Leopold
Cheney Lobbied for Easing of Sanctions on Terrorist Regimes While
CEO of Halliburton
Chris
Floyd
Mob Rule: Ripping the Lid Off of America's Pious Myths
Uri
Avnery
Chirac v. Sharon
July
21, 2004
Paula
J. Caplan
The Emotional Casualities of War: Psychologists
Can't Heal All the Damage
Joshua
Frank
Nader Sleeping with the Enemy? Let's be Fair
Ron
Jacobs
American Exceptionalism
Reza
Ghorashi
The Elections, Iran and al--Qaeda
Amy
Martin
Will Congress Rearm the Guatemalan Generals?
John
Ross
Bush May Lose, But His Wars Will Go On and On
Sex,
Drugs & the Blues!
Serpents in the Garden
CounterPunch's Sizzling
New Book on Culture and Sex is Now Available
Click here to purchase
July
20, 2004
Stan
Cox
The Bush / Kerry War Ticket
Chris
Randolph
An Open Letter to Dr. Ehrenreich: It's Over, Barb!
Forrest
Hylton
The Ghosts of Gonismo: "Popular Patricipation"
and Bolivia's Gas Referendum
Mark
Scaramella
It's Official! Mendocino County is Crazier and Fatter Than the Rest
of California
Sam
Bahour
The World is Knocking on Israel's Door
George
Reiter
A Defense of David Cobb
John
Ross
Burying Iraq, Burying Bush
John
L. Hess
Girlie Stuff: Media Tolerance of Arnold & Co.
Website
of the Day
This Land is Your Land
July
19, 2004
Uri
Avnery
Marie and the Ghosts: the Hoax of Paris
Col.
Dan Smith
What Has Been Accomplished?
Mike
Whitney
Allawi: Our Puppet with a Pistol
Karyn
Strickler
Just Marriage, Not Gay Marriage
Robert
Fisk
The Crisis of Information in Baghdad
David
Swanson
Media Blackout of US Labor Opposition to Iraq
War
Jennifer
van Bergen
The Death of the Great Writ of Liberty
July
17 / 18, 2004
Gary
Leupp
Apocalypse Now: Why the Book of Revelations is
Must Reading
Ghada
Karmi
Vanishing the Palestinians
Lenni
Brenner
When Cattle Unite, Lions Go Hungry: Notes for Ralph Nader
Ben
Tripp
Man on a Bridge: a Ghost Story
Brandy
Baker
What Would Elizabeth Cady Stanton Make of John Kerry?
M.
Shahid Alam
Israel Builds Another Wall
Sasan
Fayazmanesh
Nuclear Hypocrisy: Israel, Iran and the IAEA
Patrick
Bond
The George Bush of Africa
Fred
Gardner
Politics of Marijuana: Cannabiniod Therapuetics
William
Blum
Bush and Thucydides
Ben
Terrall
Carter and the Indonesia Elections: "I Don't See Anything Wrong
with a General Running the Country"
Tom
Barry
John Lehman on the War Path
David
Vest
Dylan Without the Music
Phyllis
Pollack
Return to Sin City: Keith Richards Does Gram Parsons
Ron
Jacobs
Smearing Muhammad Ali: Bob Feller Strikes Out
Joshua
Frank
Kerry to Edwards: "Let's Lose!"
David
Nally
A Call for Sudan: Our Georgraphical Blindspot
Toni
Solo
Bolivia's Gas Referendum
Landau,
Hassan, Prashad & Lindorff
Three Reviews of Moore's F911
Poets's
Basement
Ford, Smith and Albert
July
16, 2004
Dave
Zirin
Adonal Foyle: Master of the Lefty Lay--Up
Shervan
Sardar
Dershowitz, the ICJ and Jim Crow Laws
Ron
Jacobs
The Lil' Engine That Couldn't: Kucinich Surrenders on Anti--War Plank
Robert
Fisk
Iraq, According to Edgar Allen Poe: Coffin Bombs
in Baghdad
Greg
Moses
The Forts of Iraq
Mickey
Z.
Ad Infinitum?: Presidential Campaigns in the Age of TV
Dan
Bacher
A Landmark Win for Salmon and the Tribes
Dave
Lindorff
The Mumia Case: Support from NAACP, But a Movement
in Shambles
Paul
McGeough
Did Allawi Shoot Inmates in Cold Blood?
Website
of the Day
10 Reasons to Fire Bush (and 9 Reasons Kerry Won't Be Any Better)
| Weekend
Edition
July 24 / 25, 2004
"The
Greater Part of the Revolution Remains Before Us"
The Weather
Underground's Prairie Fire Statement...Thirty Years On
By
RON JACOBS
I
was thumbing through the new AK Press catalog the other day and
discovered that they had some copies of the 1974 statement from
the Weather Underground for sale. This document, titled Prairie
Fire -- The Politics of Revolutionary Anti-Imperialism, was the
result of the individual and collective experiences and analyses
of Weather’s members. Its 1974 appearance in radical bookstores,
food coops, headshops, college campuses and many other places that
movement activists met was greeted with a combination of emotions
throughout the Left.
Thirty
summers ago, the US Left was in disarray, searching for a new modus
operandi in the wake of the coming defeat of the United States military
in Vietnam, Watergate, and a declining base of support stateside.
Serious leftists were forming new organizations, studying Marxist-Leninist
texts, moving into the US workplace and away from their student
and youth culture base, and just trying to figure out how they were
going to fit in the post-Watergate, post-Vietnam world. Many of
these folks would find themselves in various parties and party-building
organizations by 1976, as the New Communist Movement (NCM) went
into full swing. Even the underground was trying to figure out how
to remain relevant, especially the most renowned and organized of
the underground groups—the Weather Underground Organization
(WUO).
A
debate was taking place inside the group over exactly how to increase
their exposure while maintaining their brand of politics. Some argued
that it was time to go above ground and move into workplace organizing.
Others thought such a move would be self-defeating, both politically
and personally. After all, wouldn’t those individuals wanted
by law enforcement end up doing time? If so, how could that possibly
be politically effective? On the other hand, didn’t their
continued underground existence further isolate them from the very
population that they wished to organize? These were but a few of
the questions facing the organization. Time would eventually answer
them all, but in 1974 the Weather Underground decided to remain
underground and operate as it had since 1971, occasionally bombing
selected symbolic targets and propagandizing around those actions.
This was the context in which they released Prairie Fire -- The
Politics of Revolutionary Anti-Imperialism.
Prairie
Fire represented something of a shift in strategy for the WUO, but
one that had been developing since their December 1971 communiqué
New Morning, Changing Weather. While that statement recognized the
need for an underground army not to isolate itself from the masses,
it was criticized for minimalizing the role of armed actions. Prairie
Fire attempted to reconcile this apparent dichotomy by repeatedly
emphasizing the importance of mass revolutionary organizing, yet
describing Weather as an underground organization. What this suggested
was that Weather saw itself as the beginnings of a revolutionary
people's army aligned with the revolutionary movement. This differed
from their previous self-perception as a primarily foco organization
whose role was to incite insurrection. Whether or not the rest of
the movement shared Weather's new perception of itself was questionable;
questionable because most revolutionary groups of the period were
either reorganizing themselves or disintegrating. Those revolutionaries
not in organizations, meanwhile, were usually hesitant to align
themselves with any organization and often unwilling to even speak
in terms of revolution, given the fragmentation of the movement
at the time.
The
disillusionment implicit in such hesitation was the result of multiple
factors. Foremost among these were the counterinsurgency efforts
of the state. These efforts, as mentioned before, involved infiltration
and disruption, sabotage and rumormongering, and in the case of
the black and Latino liberation movements, outright premeditated
murder. During certain high points of rebellion (People's Park,
Cambodian invasion), the white movement, too, suffered deaths at
the hands of the police forces. Other factors that contributed to
the despair and disillusionment in the white Left of the 1970s,
according to Weather, concerned tendencies within the movement itself.
Those factors included a distrust of organizations, cynicism, racism,
and sexism.
Based
on the assumption that "the unique and fundamental condition
of this time is the decline of U.S. imperialism", the Weather
Underground Organization challenged the anti-imperialist movement
to continue its revolutionary path. Reflecting a consciousness developed
over years of revolutionary work, clandestine and aboveground, Weather
urged revolutionaries in the U.S. to organize and prepare constantly
wherever they were and in whatever way possible.
Above
all, Prairie Fire -- The Politics of Revolutionary Anti-Imperialism
was a call to organize. Once again identifying the enemy of the
world's peoples as US imperialism, Weather stated their goal was
to "attack imperialism's ability to exploit and wage war",
and eventually build a socialist society in the US. To begin this
process, Weather reiterated its original thesis that the empire
must be weakened and at least partially destroyed. According to
this thesis, the weakest links in the imperialist chain were the
colonies. For that reason, claimed Weather (as they always had),
it was the liberation of the third world that held the key to eventual
liberation of the mother country (the United States).
The
hopefulness of Prairie Fire—The Politics of Revolutionary
Anti-Imperialism is its most elemental and memorable aspect. Perhaps
this is why the statement was received positively by much of the
revolutionary Left. To say the least, the Left found itself scattered
following the signing of the Vietnam peace accords in January 1973—accords
whose signing had changed little on the ground in Vietnam, but had
convinced many US citizens that he war was over. The despair felt
by many activists as they searched for a strategy to deal with the
continued war in Indochina, the so-called energy crisis, and the
economic decline at home, was lifted somewhat with the public release
of the statement on July 26, 1974. At the press conference accompanying
the release of the book, a variety of activists spoke positively
about its contents. The staff of the leftist underground journal
Takeover from Madison, Wisconsin, which was, by 1974, one of the
few underground newspapers still holding true to its countercultural
revolutionary roots, noted that the lack of "apocalyptic rage
and rhetoric" in the statement did not mean an end to Weather's
militancy, but "clari(fied) the present thinking of SDS's boldest
heirs" and "spelled out the priorities of the seventies."
As
for some of SDS's other heirs, their response was much the opposite.
Carl Davidson, still writing a column for the independent Marxist
weekly The Guardian and a member of the Maoist October League, attacked
the book. Davidson voiced the Stalinist criticism of youth culture,
and accused the WUO of "repudiating the proletariat" and
having a "bankrupt line". His primary criticism of Prairie
Fire -- The Politics of Revolutionary Anti-Imperialism, however,
regarded the role of national liberation movements, both internationally
and domestically. According to the Stalinist model, the proletariat
is the main revolutionary force, while national movements become
its allies. According to Prairie Fire -- The Politics of Revolutionary
Anti-Imperialism, however, the revolutionary national movements
were proletarian revolutions in their own right against the world
imperialist class and provided the leadership in the worldwide anti-imperialist
revolution. If one assumed that, argued Davidson, they rendered
a worker's party irrelevant and, therefore, made socialist revolution
impossible. All of which, concluded Davidson, proved that Weather
had learned nothing in its years of existence except better public
relations methods.
Davidson's
sentiments were echoed by other groups and individuals who held
political lines similar to his organization’s. The arguments
that ensued over the issues raised by Prairie Fire -- The Politics
of Revolutionary Anti-Imperialism would continue through the next
summer. If nothing else, they were proof that WUO’s influence
and ability to stir debate had not declined despite the diminishing
influence of leftist thought in general on the US body politic.
Ron Jacobs is author of The
Way the Wind Blew: a history of the Weather Underground,
which is just republished by Verso. He can be reached at: rjacobs@zoo.uvm.edu
Weekend Edition July 17 / 18, 2004
Gary
Leupp
Apocalypse Now: Why the Book of Revelations is
Must Reading
Ghada
Karmi
Vanishing the Palestinians
Lenni
Brenner
When Cattle Unite, Lions Go Hungry: Notes for Ralph Nader
Ben
Tripp
Man on a Bridge: a Ghost Story
Brandy
Baker
What Would Elizabeth Cady Stanton Make of John Kerry?
M.
Shahid Alam
Israel Builds Another Wall
Sasan
Fayazmanesh
Nuclear Hypocrisy: Israel, Iran and the IAEA
Patrick
Bond
The George Bush of Africa
Fred
Gardner
Politics of Marijuana: Cannabiniod Therapuetics
William
Blum
Bush and Thucydides
Ben
Terrall
Carter and the Indonesia Elections: "I Don't See Anything Wrong
with a General Running the Country"
Tom
Barry
John Lehman on the War Path
David
Vest
Dylan Without the Music
Phyllis
Pollack
Return to Sin City: Keith Richards Does Gram Parsons
Ron
Jacobs
Smearing Muhammad Ali: Bob Feller Strikes Out
Joshua
Frank
Kerry to Edwards: "Let's Lose!"
David
Nally
A Call for Sudan: Our Georgraphical Blindspot
Toni
Solo
Bolivia's Gas Referendum
Landau,
Hassan, Prashad & Lindorff
Three Reviews of Moore's F911
Poets's
Basement
Ford, Smith and Albert
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