WUO, Dohrn, Frenesi

[Joseph Tracy]

First off, I am a quaker, trying very hard to live a deep personal  
commitment to nonviolence.  Many years ago I once lived with some  
Young Lords and others with  WUO type ideas. I told them I intended  
never to fight for anybody's army  and killing cops was no better  
than killing Vietnamese. They argued but treated me with respect.  
Despite my conviction, there have been several times when I felt like  
the Bruce Cockburn song "If I had a rocket Launcher, some son of a  
bitch would die."  I cannot judge people for defending themselves.
While I generally agree that TRP rejects violence( against people) as  
a tactic or means to a better end, he also  shows that humans learn  
these karmic truths or fail to learn them at different rates  and via  
different experiences.  Part of what I have been trying to get at is  
that I feel and I think TRP  reveals a great admiration for those who  
risk their lives to live out convictions.
They may be wrong but they have room to grow or change(the  
Traverses).  He is equally unsymapathetic to those who risk others  
lives ad these are unable to change or grow ( all those V's)
  With awesome historic and human depth GR reveals the depravity and  
self destruction  at the heart of aggressive violence and the  
religious and philosophical ideas that infuse violence with glory.
I appreciate the info about Dohrn, but my admiration, while mixed,   
is real and undiminished.
I also agree with Mikes feelings about Frenesi. She helped set up a  
murder and joined the fascists. But in her longing to reconnect to  
her mother, DL, her daughter, and even. in honoring the picket line,  
her political roots,  Frenesi is like anyone who has ever been  
seduced into something they later regretted, and as a reader I feel  
that I am given insight into the seductive power of patriarchy,  
"order", security, and alignment with the power of the state.

Empire is an unholy  bargain between the  rulers and the ruled, the  
lenders and borrowers. I think VL shows that it ain't easy to opt out.

On Feb 3, 2009, at 11:53 AM, Mark Kohut wrote:

>
>
>
> 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.
> ______________________________________________________________________ 
> _____________________________________________________
> 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]
> ______________________________________________________________________ 
> ___________________________________________________________-
>
> 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
> .
>
>
>