The Weather Underground
Directed by Sam Green and Bill Siegel
Screening at the Glebe Valhalla, Sydney; coming soon to the Lumiere, Melbourne, and the [...], Brisbane
REVIEW BY SARAH STEPHEN
The Weather Underground is a superb documentary which examines one particular strand of the anti-Vietnam war movement in the United States. It is a history of Weatherman (later known as the Weather Underground Organisation), a group that formed in 1969 after a split in the radical Students for a Democratic Society.
The group named itself after a line in Bob Dylan's "Subterranean Homesick Blues", "You don't need a weatherman to know which way the wind blows". While for Dylan it held no political content, the words expressed the group's view that revolution was in the air and it was time to join the fight to overthrow the system. For Weatherman's founders, this meant direct confrontation with the police.
Weatherman's founders were driven by outrage at Washington's brutal war against the Vietnamese people, frustration as the war continued to escalate despite mass protests and a frantic sense that something had to be done immediately to stop it. The group was convinced that the US government was paying no attention to the growing mass anti-war protests across the country because the demonstrations were too passive and played by the rules. The proof, they felt, was the fact that protests hd not been able to stop the war.
The Weather Underground melds footage of the mass anti-war movement and deeply disturbing scenes of just how vicious the US war in Vietnam was. This starkly provides an explanation for the energy and anger that gripped so many young people in the US in the 1960s. The film is interspersed with interviews with former members of Weatherman and the Weather Underground. They reflect on the group's activities and its activists' motivations for turning to a strategy of violent confrontation. Each interview is accompanied by footage of the same participant 30 years before.
The group members' impatience and disconnection from the swelling mass anti-war movement meant they did not grasp the immense power of the movement of millions of people who filled the streets across the country, and the pressure that this was bringing to bear on the US administration at the end of the 1960s. They couldn't see beyond the posture maintained by US President Richard Nixon, who took every opportunity to dismiss the anti-war movement as irrelevant, and announced that "under no circumstances" would his war policy be affected by anti-war demonstrations.
In his account of the anti-Vietnam War movement, Out Now!, former movement leader Fred Halstead pointed out that there was "ample documentation that the White House was ... very much disturbed by the demonstrations". Halstead cites an account by Jeb Magruder, a Nixon aide, who was given memos on public relations that Nixon had dictated on September 22, 1969. Magruder wrote: "The president's memos had been inspired by the fact that two great anti-war demonstrations were approaching, the national moratorium on October 15 and the rally at the Washington Monument on November 15. We felt threatened, put on the defensive, by the imminence of these two well-organised, well-publicised demonstrations."
On October 15, 1969, the largest ever anti-war mobilisations took place across the US; participants numbered in the millions. A week earlier, Weatherman held its own week of action, which it called the "Days of Rage". Organisers had expected thousands of people, perhaps tens of thousands, to converge in a Chicago protest. They were shocked when only 500 gathered.
Despite its small size, the protesters proceeded with a violent attack on the wealthy Gold Coast strip and a showdown with the hated police force of Chicago mayor Richard Daley. They smashed windows and wreaked as much destruction as they could. Two-hundred people were arrested and a similar number injured. Serious charges were laid against all Weatherman leaders.
Weatherman turned to more dramatic tactics. Building on their central slogan, "Bring the war home", the group began building bombs to detonate at key US government installations. The group's argument was that the US government had to be made to pay for the carnage it was unleashing in Vietnam, and that the US people had to be reminded of the violence that was being perpetrated in their name.
One Weatherman explains in the film that the group felt that all Americans (particularly white Americans) were legitimate targets because their inaction made them complicit in the brutality in Vietnam.
On March 6, 1970, the group's first adventure went horribly wrong when the nail bomb they were constructing, to be used against US soldiers at an army dance, went off prematurely, blowing up the Greenwich Village house in which it was being made. Three activists were killed. At that point, it was decided that killing people in their bombing raids was not morally valid; from then only empty buildings would be targeted. For the next five years, the Weather Underground conducted a relentless campaign to — they hoped — bring the US government to its knees, bombing sites such as the New York police headquarters and a Harvard international studies centre.
The Weather Underground activists considered themselves to be communist revolutionaries intimately connected with the revolutionary upheavals then sweeping the world. But they were never revolutionary in the sense of seeking to build a new power that could seriously challenge the war-mongering imperialist US establishment. They didn't believe that it was possible to convince the majority of people involved in the anti-war movement to reject the social system as a whole.
The Weather Underground's object was to shock, threaten and frighten the US ruling circles into changing their ways. All they did was give the state further pretexts to crack down violently on the anti-war movement, other progressive movements and the US far left, and provide the government with ammunition to politically discredit the movement.
There was a glaring absence of political strategy and understanding within the organisation. Mark Rudd, a former member of the Weather Underground, makes a telling admission in the film when he says that he didn't know what to do in response to the horror being witnessed daily on the TV. And he still doesn't know what to do about the violence that the US state is able and willing to unleash.
It is remarkable that members of the Weather Underground evaded capture by the FBI, despite being pursued for years by a special FBI undercover squad. The documentary features interesting comments by Don Strickland, a former FBI agent who was a member of the "Weatherman Squad".
The Weather Underground offers a fascinating insight into an aspect of the 1960s radicalisation that accompanied the mass movement in opposition to US imperialism's war of terror against the Vietnamese people. As the 1960s progressed, many people sensed that revolution was on the agenda all over the world, wanted to be part of it and discussed and debated how such a change could come about.
Explaining what they hoped to achieve with The Weather Underground, directors Sam Green and Bill Siegel stated: "When the group is included in histories of the 1960s, it is usually only as an aberration — a final spasm of senseless violence punctuating a decade that somehow went off the rails. We feel very strongly that the real story of the Weather Underground is far more complex and morally ambiguous, and that in this nuanced version of history there are many ideas that can help us better understand society today.
"By exploring this controversial subject with depth and balance, we hope to encourage a broad debate of some of the most important issues of our time. What would real social justice look like — not just in America, but throughout the world? What is our responsibility as Americans for the inequalities of globalism? How do we as a society define violence and terrorism? And can violence ever be justified in the pursuit of social change?"
From Green Left Weekly, October 15, 2003.
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