Fw: Weather Underground

[Mark Kohut]

We have been over these bombed-out ruins of ideas before. Members (and historians)
have shown how the WUO 'harmless bombings' commitment came only after the Greenwich
Village townhouse self-murders. 

wikipedia: 
In 1970 the group issued a "Declaration of a State of War" against the United States government, using for the first time its new name, the "Weather Underground Organization" (WUO), adopting fake identities, and pursuing covert activities only. These initially included preparations for a bombing of a U.S. military non-commissioned officers' dance at Fort Dix, New Jersey in what Brian Flanagan said had been intended to be "the most horrific hit the United States government had ever suffered on its territory".[13]

I know, through a writer who went to high school with Bill Ayers and this FBI guy now in Chicago who said they had Ayers, others, on [illegally] tapped phones
describing the non-harmless bombing they were planning. Could not, rightly, be used in court and the self-bombing precluded moving on them with all they legally had---which was not case-making after the deaths and evidence destruction.
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wikipedia
 New York City Arson Attacks
On February 21, 1970, gasoline-filled molotov cocktails were thrown at the home of New York State Supreme Court Justice Murtagh, who was presiding over the trial of the so-called "Panther 21," members of the Black Panther Party over a plot to bomb New York landmarks and department stores. One bottle full of gasoline had broken against the front steps, and flames scorched the overhanging wooden frame until its contents burnt out. In addition windows were broken, and another molotov cocktail caused paint charring on a car. Painted in red on the sidewalk in front of his house was "FREE THE PANTHER 21", "THE VIET CONG HAVE WON", and "KILL THE PIGS" [14]. The same night, molotov cocktails were thrown at a police car in Manhattan and two military recruiting stations in Brooklyn.[15] The son of Justice Murtagh claims that the Weatherman were responsible for the attempted arson,[14] based on a letter promising more bombings sent by Bernadine Dohrn to the
Associated Press in late November, 1970,[16] although that letter is generally assumed to refer to an October bombing of a Queens courthouse.[17] While nobody ever claimed responsibility, or was caught or tried, for the arson attempt,[14] a number of historians[18][19][20][21] state that the arson attempt was enacted by the Weathermen but was considered a failure.

 Greenwich Village townhouse explosion
On March 6, 1970, during preparations for the bombing of an officers' dance at the Fort Dix U.S. Army base and for Butler Library at Columbia University,[22] there was an explosion in a Greenwich Village safe house when the nail bomb being constructed prematurely detonated for unknown reasons. WUO members Diana Oughton, Ted Gold, and Terry Robbins died in the explosion. Cathy Wilkerson and Kathy Boudin escaped unharmed. It was an accident of history that the site of the Village explosion was the former residence of Merrill Lynch brokerage firm founder Charles Merrill and his son, the poet James Merrill. The younger Merrill subsequently recorded the event in his poem 18 West 11th Street, the title being the address of the house. An FBI report later stated that the group had possessed sufficient amounts of explosive to "level ... both sides of the street".[23]
The bomb preparations have been pointed out by critics of the claim that the Weatherman group did not try to take lives with its bombings. Harvey Klehr, the Andrew W. Mellon professor of politics and history at Emory University in Atlanta, said in 2003, "The only reason they were not guilty of mass murder is mere incompetence. I don't know what sort of defense that is."[22]
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I think I will argue until the day my brain is self-bombed out---no reader yet has convinced me otherwise----
that 'Against the Day" has one of the fullest condemnations in fiction of violence in social action ever put on paper.

Any violence. Evil in itself. 

Like Coetzee's work embodies.

See, besides what happens to all the Traverses, the allusions to Tolstoy's non-violence essays in the Vienna
section of AtD---- later, Cyprian learns, is indebted to, inmho---which came to Tolstoy thru Thoreau, Kropotkin and others.

Anyone coming of age and sorting out themes of justice, etc. when Pynchon was writing his masterpieces
was aware of all the words, ideas, reissued books re violence and social change that were alive then---filling the aether.

No, I say in Thunder, TRP has NEVER stomached even the possibility of violence as a means. Never. Never. Never. Never. Never. 

Mark
.