Talkin’ ’bout a revolution: it may be almost 2013, but…
…this story recalls the revolutionary ardor of the 60s:
The daughter of a prominent New York doctor and her Occupy Wall Street-organizer boyfriend were arrested after police discovered an explosive used for making bombs and a cache of weapons in their upscale New York City apartment, it was claimed.
Morgan Gliedman, 27, and Aaron Greene, 31, were taken away from their home in Manhattan’s pricey Greenwich Village on Saturday.
Gliedman, who is nine months pregnant, is the daughter of a top Brooklyn cancer doctor and was educated at the Dalton School…Greene, the father of the child, went to Harvard University for his undergraduate degree and did graduate work at the Kennedy School of Government there, as well.
The New York Post reports that police found seven grams of HMTD, a high explosive powder that was reportedly used in the 2005 London Underground bombings.
Officers discovered bomb-making instructions, including one document titled ‘The Terrorist Encyclopedia,’ according to the newspaper…
There’s much more, but you get the picture. The 60s-era incident it reminds me of actually occurred in the very early 70s (March 6, 1970, to be exact), and it was another one in which highly privileged, Greenwich-Village-dwelling scions of the wealthy were involved in planning political terrorist activities that did not come to fruition. That earlier bomb-making spree cost some of them their lives (one of the hazards of their dangerous trade is the work-related accident; these people are literally playing with fire):
The Greenwich Village townhouse explosion occurred on March 6, 1970, in the Greenwich Village neighborhood of Manhattan. It was caused by the premature detonation of a bomb that was being assembled by members of the American radical left group, the Weather Underground. The bomb was under construction in the basement of 18 West 11th Street when it accidentally exploded ”“ the blast reduced the four-story townhouse to a burning rubble-strewn ruin. Three persons preparing the bomb were killed instantly, and two others were injured but escaped from the scene.
The townhouse was owned by the father of one of the survivors, Cathlyn Wilkerson, who along with another survivor (and daughter of a prominent leftist attorney) Kathy Boudin went underground for many years and later served some time for her misdeeds. In the case of Wilkerson it was less than a year; Boudin, on the other hand, was convicted of felony murder for her part in the related Brinks robbery in which two police officers and a security guard were killed, and served approximately twenty years, the result of a plea bargain. Wilkerson was not a participant in the robbery, but “surrendered in 1980 [after 10 years of hiding] and pleaded guilty to unlawful possession of dynamite” connected with the townhouse explosion and was sentenced to three years of which she served only eleven months.
There are so many ironies in these cases it’s hard to know where to begin. For one thing, the inadequate sentences the perpetrators received (for example, the bomb on which the Greenwich Village crew were working that night was apparently intended “an attack on a non-commissioned officers dance at Fort Dix, New Jersey that night”). For another, the largely unrepentant attitudes of some of the survivors (for example, Wilkerson’s 2003 views are discussed in some depth, here—and note that she’s been a teacher for many years). Still another is that Boudin’s son was adopted by none other than fellow-educators Bill Ayers and wife Bernardine Dohrn during Boudin’s prison sojourn.
More about other 60s radicals and what they’re doing today (that is, ten years ago, when the article was written):
Linda S. Evans, who was granted clemency by President Bill Clinton for convictions related to bombings and released from prison in 2001 after serving nearly 16 years, lives in Santa Rosa, Calif. She received a Soros criminal justice fellowship from the Open Society Institute and works to restore civil rights to felons. ”I’m trying to make things better in our society,” she said in a telephone interview. ”I just feel really strongly that the policies of our government are just anti-human at every level.”
Mark Rudd, the Students for a Democratic Society leader from Columbia, teaches mathematics at the Albuquerque Technical Vocational Institute, a community college. He, too, has called the group’s violence a ”terrible mistake.”
Of course it was a mistake, compared to the turn the left has taken in recent decades, which is to accomplish the same leftist ends by using the inattention of most people to the agenda, as well as the leniency of the system itself, to undermine that system by means of that long Gramscian march we’ve heard so much about.
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The Open Society Institute is funded by Soros right?
These spoiled brats are dangerous, deranged, and despicable. Its fortunate their evil intentions have been nipped in the bud.
“The Open Society Institute is funded by Soros right?”
Correct, that scheming spider funds a lot of trouble in this world.
Radical leftists tend to be over educated, over privileged, totalitarian in outlook, and advocates of violence. And often as not, they are Jewish. Nothing surprising here, nor in the 60’s and 70’s for that matter.
chuck: actually, they tend to be either red diaper babies (often Jewish, like, for example, some of the 1970 bombers such as Kathy Boudin and Ted Gold) or others who are rebelling against more conventional upbringings and who are most often not Jewish (such as, for example, 1970 bombers Wilkerson and Diane Oughton, who died in the blast—Oughton was raised in Illinois and her family were staunch Republicans, including a father who served in the state legislature and a great grandfather who founded the American Boy Scouts).
They also quite often tend (at least they did in the 60s) to join league with a very different kind of radical leftist, the militant black from a poor and sometimes criminal background. The combo was especially lethal.
chuck: Oh, and by the way, here’s more about Oughton, and Bill Ayers (most definitely not Jewish either, who had his finger in a lot of the nasty goings-on both then and now; in a way he’s the quintessential terrorist-turned-Gramscian) [emphasis mine]:
They stayed together a while longer and then went their separate ways. Read the whole thing; it’s a pretty fascinating story, and an object lesson in what the 60s were and how they still affect us today.
The website, Jewish Achievement mentions Ayers as notable for being among a minority of non-Jewish leaders in the Weather Underground, along with Brian Flanagan. [1] He married the Jewess fellow terrorist, Bernardine Dohrn.
Just sayin’. There were a lot of red diaper babies, I knew a few of them as well as several Communists from my father’s generation. Some of the red diaper babies were caught up in the hippie counter culture which, because the hippies were not very political, I suppose could be regarded as an act of rebellion.
I’ve wondered how much attitudes among the recent Jewish emigrants from Russia, nee USSR, differ from those of the emigrants who arrived in the late 1800’s, early 1900’s. Certainly the latter weren’t all radicals, some indeed were refugees from the Communists and got out early in the revolution. But I expect the experience of antisemitism in Soviet Russia may have had an impact on the more recent immigrants.
chuck: by the way, Dohrn isn’t Jewish by a lot of definitions—father Jewish (I think a secular Jew only) mother a Christian Scientist of Swedish origin. For Jews, the mother’s religion is traditionally the way it’s passed down.
Another indication that Dohrn’s father was a secular rather than religious or a traditional Jew is that his first name was Bernard and therefore it is clear that he named his daughter after himself. Naming children for a living relative is against Jewish tradition and practice.
That’s not to say that there weren’t a lot of Jewish red diaper babies in the left of the 60s (and the present-day left). There were, and are. But there were a lot of non-Jews, as well.
Chuck, anti-Semitism was present in Russia long before the Soviets, and doubtless continues to this day. Whatever impact it may have had, it’s probably pretty much constant.
neo, I think chuck’s point was to the disproportionate representation of Jews among the hard-left, not to absolute numbers, and he has a point. Jews and Mormons constitute roughly comparable proportions of the population (ca. 1-2%, depending on whom you count), yet it’s hard to think of a communist from a Mormon background.
For my part, I view the predilection of Jews for hard-left politics as analogous to that of Arab Muslims for terrorism, i.e., as arising from either a cultural problem or a genetic predisposition toward psychological problems in the Semitic peoples.
To preclude any ambiguity, in this context by “Jews” I mean the ethnicity, not the religion per se, as ethnicity is the relevant aspect for considering hypotheses relating to cultural and/or genetic factors.
Occam’s Beard: see my comment above. There is no doubt that there are more Jews on the left than their percentage of the general population would dictate. Same is true of philanthropic Jews, Nobel prizewinning Jews, etc.
And yes, leftist Jews are mostly secular Jews. Perhaps even entirely secular Jews; I’ve never done a study of it or read a study of it, but I’d be surprised if there were any religious Jews among them.
I wrote a bit about the phenomenon of Jewish attraction to Communism here. At least among the Jewish enthusiasts in the early days of Communism, its roots rested partly in the hope that Communism would do away with anti-Semitism. Some learned of course to their horror that they were wrong, wrong, wrong about that.
@Occam,
Agree that Russian antisemitism is an old story, but once upon a time it was associated with Czarist Russia and Communism could be seen as a cure. But during the trial period the curative powers of Communism proved overblown, so perhaps something else has replaced it as the hope of the future.
It is interesting they feel the need for this, given Obama’s success.
Yep, no two ways about it. Same question arises: why?
Me too.
Although ironically the passion of Jewish immigrants for Communism probably triggered a lot of anti-Semitism in the U.S., just as recent Muslim immigrants’ agitation for changes that they want others to make (special arrangements that constitute de facto recognition of Islam, such as separation of the sexes, dietary matters, observation of Ramadan, etc.) probably drives a lot of the antagonism that many Americans feel toward Muslims. In both cases, the prevailing sentiment is that if you immigrate to another country you know what you’re getting, and if you don’t like that, don’t come. And if you do come, and then want everyone else to change to what you want, expect some antagonism.
Not nearly enough of these sorry bastards blew themselves up
In reading Bill Ayers’s Fugitive Days, I was struck by the lack of remorse on his part. IMHO, anyone who co-authored a book [Prairie Fire] which advocated Dictatorship of the Proletariat for the US owes us a LOT of remorse.
My freshman year in college I attended SDS meetings, as they were against the Vietnam war. Towards the end of the year I was part of a conversation on the quad where a senior SDS person said that Lenin should be studied in universities. The reverence with which she said “Lenin” showed that she did not mean that one should study Lenin in the sense that one should “learn about your enemies,” but in the sense that one should study the works of great thinkers such as Dante, Shakespeare, or Gibbon. Or Marx?
While I was of the left, a Politics course I took my freshman year in high school had inoculated me against Lenin worship.
As far as I can tell, the Lenin worshiper never took the Weatherman/Weatherperson/Weatherwoman route. She later became an elected officeholder who apparently is now a run of the mill tax and spend Democrat.
I wonder if she now regrets her previous Lenin-worship and having proposed making Lenin [worship] a required part of the university curriculum.
I knew Linda Evans in college. She dated a friend. I figured she was kind of spacey. IMO, the failure of the world to match her spaceyness generated a serious resentment.
And, yes, it was interesting to see weedy hippies trying to recruit muscle from black guys, mostly athletes.
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Annnnnnd…The Stupidity of the ’60s. Boy, was there a lot to go around.
http://godfatherpolitics.com/8782/children-of-privilege-busted-in-occupy-bomb-scheme/