Sunday, April 20, 2008

Weather Bombings

image Dan Berger, in his 2006 book Outlaws of America: The Weather Underground and the Politics of Solidarity, writes about the bombing campaign waged by the Weatherman/Weather Underground in the late 1960s and early 1970s.

The bombings were targeted strikes against American centers of power involved in committing horrific, systematic, large-scale violence in Vietnam, Chile and here in the United States. The only Weatherman bombing that turned deadly occurred when explosives in a Greenwich Village townhouse accidentally ignited on March 6, 1970, killing Weatherman members Diana Oughton, Terry Robbins and Ted Gold.

Berger examines the group’s 1973 release of Prairie Fire, a book that, according to group member Bill Ayers, sought “to consolidate our political organization and to forge unity with progressive activists.”

The first chapter of Prairie Fire contains a list of Weatherman/Weather Underground bombings up until that point, divided into three categories. Berger writes: “There were bombings to ‘retaliate for the most savage criminal attacks against Black and Third people, especially by the police apparatus’; those done ‘to disrupt and agitate against U.S. aggression and terror against Vietnam and the Third World’; and bombings ‘to expose and focus attention against the power and institutions which most cruelly oppress, exploit and delude the people.’”
Berger describes the bombings:

Category one included the bombing of Chicago police cars after the assassination of Black Panthers Hampton and Clark (1969), the bombing of Department of Corrections offices in San Francisco and in Sacramento after the murder of Black radical George Jackson (1971), and the bombing of the 103rd precinct of the New York City Police Department after the murder of a 10-year-old Black boy (1973). Bombings against U.S. aggression included the Harvard Center for International Affairs (1970), William Bundy’s office at MIT (1971), and ITT’s Latin America Headquarters after the U.S.-supported 1973 coup in Chile. To expose illegitimate state power, the Weather Underground bombed National Guard headquarters after the murders at Kent State University (1970); the Presidio Army Base and MP Station (1970); and the Health, Education, and Welfare federal office (1974).

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