Then Sheldon comments:
I have to ask, is it really true that Weather bombings actually helped finish off the anti-War movement?
Although I agree with Dennis' last sentence, I am not so convinced that the WU did the damage he and others claim it did. As I recall, WU bombing mostly occurred between 1969-1973. Did not the anti-Vietnam war movement continue throughout this period?
Cox: I think Sheldon is correct and Dennis wrong here. I've made my views of WU clear enough and I won't repeat them here. The WU did kill the anti-war movement _temporarily_ here in B/N, but some students got it going again a year later. (I think Max in a separate post is accurate here.) But there is a larger historical point to make. As I think I've said in almost exactly the following words before, there will _always_ be a WU-equivalent; there will _always_ be a PLP-equivalent; there will _always_ be academics who, confusing building a movement with elaborating an ideal solution, will piteously whine, but will that turn the electricity on? In an older jargon, in an ideal world neither left nor right opportunists would exist, but of course in an ideal world there wouldn't need to be a movement. If a pimple on the movement like the WU could kill it, then it wasn't much of amovement to begin with.
Max, while rightly noting that the anti-war movement continued, still writes: "What did die was the radical student movement. After all, the WU did split SDS and propagate its ridiculous ideology. It also provided some great political ammunition to Richard Nixon."
All of RYM, RYM 2 as well as Weatherman, were responsible for splitting SDS, but there were many complex forces at work in that split, which I can't quite formualte now but may return to. And the radical student movement had probably, as a student movement, already run its course. That is, Weather & RYMw were _ssymptoms_, not causes, of the dying off of the radical student movment. And it did, sort of, 'live on' in the various efforts of the New Communist Movement, of WU, of SWP, of PLP in the following years to build a natioanal movement. Those efforts failed - but, that failure is not to be ascribed to any remediable "mistakes" on anyone's part. The movment that begin with Rosa Parks had simply reached what, under given conditions, were its limits. Nothing that we could have done would have made much diffrence.
And Max is simply irrelevant in his reference to political points for Richard Nixon. The point there is that Nixon would have 'found' such points whether or not the WU existed. (And, as I said above, such pimples will _always_ be around; they are part of the terrain that one lives with.)
Back to Sheldon's post: Elswhere, not quoted above, either Dennis or somebody else I think suggests that the WU helped provoke repression against the Panthers. I hardly see how this could be the case given that the Panthers were at the receiving end of severe repression prior to, during and after WU actions. Correct me if I am mis-interpreting somebody here. Sheldon
Cox: This is I think correct. Repression would have hit the Panthers, WU or no WU. The failure of the white movement as a whole to maintain solidarity with the Panthrs, as I argued in an earlier post, was outrageous - but perhaps that too was merely a symptom of the limits we were coming up against-limits that were more deeply rooted than in the mere mistakes of this or that section of the movment.
Milton noted that though tyranny must be, that is no excuse for tyrants. Similarly, though left opportunism must be (will always be part of the terrain of struggle), that should not be regarded as ab excuse for ultra-leftists!
A final note, that I want to developmore carefully another time. There was a radical difference between Weatherman and Panthers, a qualitative difference. The Black Pannther Party for Self-Defense proclaimed the right of self-defense, armed if necessary, for black people. They were absolutely correct in so doing. But it did not declare a _strategy_ of vioelnce. That was the core of the WU STRATEGY: the commission of acts of violence essentially for the sake of committing acts of violence. There may be, I suspect there are indeed, conditions under which that would be correct. It was not correct in the U.S. in 1969, nor I suspect would ever be correct inside an industrial state with even _miminal_ rights of public assembly and protest.
Carrol
P.S. The Weather people did blow up the statue of a fucking Haymarket cop in Chicago. Good Show!