'Attack And Dethrone God' trends amid BLM protests: Is the Weather Underground back from the dead to fight racism?
With the social unrest and Black Lives Matter demonstrations across the nation in the wake of the killing of George Floyd refusing to die down, extreme reactions have started surfacing on virtual platforms like Twitter and one of them is #AttackAndDethroneGod. It is not too difficult to understand who is the target of the Twitter trend and with it, the name of the once-famous Weather Underground Organization (WUO) is also doing the rounds. President Donald Trump has recently expressed his intention to designate the left-wing anti-fascist Antifa movement as a terror organization in the wake of the Floyd protests and with the surfacing of the WUO’s name now, it is clear that the US is now trapped between extreme conflicting ideologies.
What exactly is the WUO and why is it reviving an old memory for certain people? The WUO was a famous American radical group that was active in the late 1960s and 1970s. The group was committed to political violence and the Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) had sleepless nights to look for its members. Images of its leaders like Bill Ayers, Bernardine Dohrn, and many others were displayed prominently in every post office in the US for several years. This move actually brought the group more publicity and made some of its leaders’ names famous.
Weather Underground’s bathroom bombings
Like other radicals who used dynamite bombs in those years to protest the government’s policies on war, racial injustice, and corporate greed, the WUO also believed that such acts deserved to be met with a revolution. Although in its entire duration of existence, the body used only 25 bombs -- all of which were relatively small. Its activists, on an average, set off one bomb every six months and they mainly targeted bathrooms in government buildings and corporate headquarters. Originally called the Weathermen, the WUO, however, was never too big a threat to America’s existence.
There were times when Weather Underground made a noise
In the early part of the 1970s, the WUO had carried out some spectacular operations that included the bombing of the Capitol (March 1971), of the Pentagon (May 1972) and that of the state department (January 1975). The WUO functionaries were determined revolutionaries who wanted to destroy the system and the FBI wanted to stop them -- sometimes even overestimating their strength. By 1971, long after the Weathermen changed their name to Weather Underground, it became clear that the FBI was overestimating the threat but yet as a battle for prestige, the agency kept on pursuing the group in terms of both manpower and money. But despite all its efforts, the FBI could never catch a single major figure of the group permanently. The revolutionaries remained at large until 1977-80 when most of them gave up their revolution and returned to mainstream society.
The WUO wanted to see themselves as revolutionaries who are not just students reacting in anger over issues like the Vietnam War or racist injustice but as organizers with a political mind. They wanted to build a counterculture comprising disaffected young people that would empower their revolutionary project. But WUO’s policy of bombing had not won them the expected support and even the most radical underground newspaper of the time, Berkeley Tribe, felt that the body would only discredit itself with a bombing policy and get isolated.
By 1974, the body’s leadership realized the challenge and in a secretly printed book called ‘Prairie Fire’, it concluded that the only way forward to see a revolution gaining success in the US was by convincing the country’s working class. The book kicked off an ideological struggle within the body and the more radical wing prevailed over others in 1976. From that year onwards, those in the body favoring a more above-ground operation, like Ayers and Dohrn, either drifted away from the group or were expelled on charges of showing moderation. However, the group’s new leader Clayton van Lydegraf proved to be less than effective and that saw the core of his group being caught in 1977 and imprisoned. Over the next three years, a vast majority of the group’s members surfaced voluntarily and returned to the mainstream.
WUO though did not last long but its contribution towards serving rights of the black, women, gay and other communities cannot be overlooked.