From a review of Fugitive Days:

Ayers wants us to see Oughton as a revolutionary saint who struggled against the Weathermen’s bomb-based violence. He imagines that she blew up the town house deliberately, killing her comrades and herself, to prevent the explosives from being used against their targets. The notion that Oughton resisted the group’s more violent tendencies is borne out in Lucinda Franks’s 1981 New York Times Magazine account of an argument that is said to have consumed the day and the night before the explosion.

Ayers may have been close enough to Oughton to know her true feelings—he is described as her “lover” in the article, although given the (perhaps overblown) sexual proclivities of this radical group, “lover” might not have meant much in terms of true intimacy. Ayers’ fantasy of Oughton committing suicide bomber terrorism as a tactic or statement against the faction favoring non-suicide bomber terrorism—that’s too richly self-mythologizing for me to swallow in one gulp, or even to nibble at. While it might be cruel of me to theorize ghoulishness here, perhaps Ayers had bidding on the film rights in mind when he wrote that.

I should point out: by “terrorism”, I mean surprise attacks against not directly complicit civilians, with mayhem definitely the intent. You wouldn’t catch me calling Earth First’s tree-spiking campaign “eco-terrorism”, for example, because they had a policy of reporting which forest areas they’d spiked.

The definition of terrorism is not that clearcut for some. I had a discussion recently with some conservative friends about how to define “terrorism”, one of the two friends being a relatively moderate Republican, the other definitely a right-wing evangelical. Both were comfortable with describing Irgun’s bombing of the King David Hotel as terrorism. I pointed out that Irgun had phoned in warnings, which were ignored. This was a surprise to them both. Then I asked again whether the King David Hotel bombing was really terrorism in intent, rather than something more like an attempt at sabotage that ended up unintentionally killing innocent civilians. The response of the more right-wing of the two was illuminating: in his view, it still had to be terrorism, because if it wasn’t terrorism, that would mean that Bill Ayers wasn’t a terrorist either.

I wish I could tell you I was making this up. Maybe it doesn’t take the cake for politically convenient definitions of terms, but it’s up there somewhere in the top ten, in my book.

I don’t think the Weather were incompetent. After the famous explosion in Greenwich Village, which killed four members, including Diane Oughten, the group made a U turn about bombings – they explicitly decreed that the bombing campaign would be set up so that nobody would be hurt. It isn’t incompetence that was exhibited when their bombs went off at midnight, or 2 am, when nobody was around, but intelligence and design. This is a typical Weather action, from Ron Jacob’s history of the movement:

“On August 7, 1970, Jonathan Jackson, the 17-year-old brother of prison revolutionary
George Jackson, entered the Marin County courthouse armed with a submachine gun. He
hoped to force the release of the Soledad Brothers—George Jackson, Fleeta Drumgo, and
John Clutchette, who were charged with the murder of two guards at Soledad Prison after
guards had killed another prisoner. Jonathan gave guns to three prisoners who were present
in court—Ruchell Magee, a jailhouse lawyer who was testifying at the trial of fellow prisoner
James McClain, and William Christmas. The three then took the judge, the prosecutor, and
three jurors hostage. They left the courthouse and placed the hostages in a county van.
Before the armed men and their hostages left the courthouse, the Marin County sheriff had
ordered his men not to shoot, but the van was hit by a hail of gunfire from San Quentin
prison guards and other law-enforcement personnel immediately after it left the building’s
garage. Jackson, Judge Haley, McClain, and Christmas were all killed. Several weeks later,
at approximately 1:30 in the morning on October 8, Weather exploded a bomb at the
courthouse building in anger over the “murders.” The explosion wrecked one of the
courtrooms in the building and an adjacent bathroom.”

1:30 was pretty much an ideal time for a bombing that would do building damage but that would not hurt anyone. The Weather got better as they went along, from freeing Leary to pretty much putting bombs into any space they wanted to. I’d compare their record to the IWW favorably as far as that goes.

Weather Report appeared on Don Kirshner’s Rock Concert. This links them to every band that ever performed on that show—including a band that appeared far too many times for anyone’s taste (not that taste had anything to do with it): Black Oak Arkansas. And there’s your Obama link, a triple word score actually: Obama is black, oaks grow from acorns, and Obama is now supported by the Clintons, who used to rule Arkansas. Working at it from the other direction: as we all know, Weather Underground derived its name from a Bob Dylan song. While I can find no evidence that Dylan performed on Don Kirshner’s Rock Concert (even incognito), Joan Baez performed with Dylan at times and sang covers of his songs, and she appeared on the show.

Yeah, OK, maybe I could do better, but with that kind of investment of time, I might as well turn pro and start writing for David Horowitz’s Discover the Networks.

Weather Report appeared on Don Kirshner’s Rock Concert. This links them to every band that ever performed on that show—including a band that appeared far too many times for anyone’s taste (not that taste had anything to do with it): Black Oak Arkansas. And there’s your Obama link, a triple word score actually: Obama is black, oaks grow from acorns, and Obama is now supported by the Clintons, who used to rule Arkansas. Working at it from the other direction: as we all know, Weather Underground derived its name from a Bob Dylan song. While I can find no evidence that Dylan performed on Don Kirshner’s Rock Concert (even incognito), Joan Baez performed with Dylan at times and sang covers of his songs, and she appeared on the show.

Yeah, OK, maybe I could do better, but with that kind of investment of time, I might as well turn pro and start writing for David Horowitz’s Discover the Networks.

Oh man, that’s brilliant! Please tell me Fox have covered this?

No? Tell that to the Haymarket Martyrs (killed). Or to Sacco and Vanzetti (killed). Or to those jailed under the Smith Act (jailed). Or the Black Panthers (killed and jailed).

It looked to me like WU was a bunch of poseurs. They may have had a small clandestine wing but they were mostly not clandestine at all. They may have played at making explosives but they didn’t seem to be very serious about it. Etc. And yet you may be right that they themselves believed they meant it.

The problem that clandestine groups have in the USA is that we are not oppressed enough. Ideally you’d be spreading seditious ideas, and you have to be clandestine to keep from getting jailed or killed for doing it. But we don’t jail people for that. You could kill politicians, but they’d only be replaced by other politicians. You could sabotage waterworks and powerplants etc, but it would only annoy people. There’s nothing for a clandestine group to do here except get persecuted, and to even get persecuted they have to spread the news that they’re a clandestine group up to no good.

So the SLA was a bunch of glory hounds, doing their best to get into the news. Not so they could recruit hundreds or thousands or tens of thousands of new members. Just to be in the news and feel important.

There’s no ecological niche for a clandestine revolutionary group, except among people who’re oppressed already. To get taken seriously that way in the USA you pretty much have to be a black separatist. Do you hear much about them? Does the media make a big splash when a black separatist leader gets captured and put on trial? Do you know the names of the leading groups? Have you seen their logo? No, they’re actually pretty clandestine and everybody involved wants to keep it that way.

Rage against the Machine definitely doesn’t count. Several of Spinal Tap’s drummers spontaneously combusted, which is sort of like blowing yourself up. However, the group was never about overthrowing a corrupt political system. It could be considered “clandestine”, I suppose—all attempts to locate the members, or even to interview them by phone, have been futile so far.

The early 80s retro-soul rap ensemble Malcom X’s Love Child had several members who were, under pseudonyms, violating the terms of their parole simply by performing together. You could say that was rather “clandestine” of them. Their lyrics also suggest a somewhat subversive streak, especially the line “Cinque, barbecue, Tania sez she’s missing u.” However, when they broke up, it wasn’t in some factional division over whether it was permissible to use deadly force in a plot to spring Antonio Negri from prison. As recounted by one beat-boxer sideman who sat in on the recording session during which the group began to have what their manager later called “serious artistic differences”, the split started when one band member described another’s girlfriend as a “ho”, or some syllable to that effect.

I’d say Malcom X’s Love Child qualifies as “clandestine” primarily in the sense that it had a very underground following, and remains almost entirely unknown today. Indeed, the group’s leader had been described in (now unlocatable ) xeroxed fanzines as “the retro-soul rapper’s retro-soul rapper, unfairly consigned to the remainder bin of history,” and the group is rivaled in their obscurity perhaps only by H. Rap Brown’s Ectopic Pregnancy. That group formed in my dorm room one night, produced one (now-missing) demo tape, and broke up very acrimoniously the next morning, something about whose turn it was to pay for breakfast at Denny’s (not mine, I swear.)