scrap pad

The Weather Underground - documentary

This morning I watched this documentary on the Weather Underground. It's now a day late due back to the library. I almost didn't pick it up because it has the 4 stars in quotes on the front, which for some reason in my head triggers an association with comedy. enjoyed it though. random notes from the film:

• "those who make peaceful revolution impossible only make violent revolution inevitable" -- JFK, quoted by Martin Luther King
• repeatedly compared the Weather Underground to Bonnie and Clyde
• one leader (I think of the Black Panthers), in distancing his group from the Weathermen, called them "custeristic" - leaders taking people into situations where they're going to be massacred (lose badly.)
• "there are no innocent in this war of aggression"
• two of the women talk about cutting themselves off from their families. it strikes me that a revolution that will stick and be meaningful should include the parents/families/etc. maybe I just think that because I share a lot of politics with my parents.
• "it was seen as impossible to defy the fbi. everybody on the left said, this is only going to last a few months"
• "violence didn't work"
• "I think that there's a history of resistance, and a history of white peoples' involvement in that resistance, that makes a difference in the ability of that kind of resistance to emerge again" - not to draw color lines, but it seems like radical groups of white kids "align" themselves with the Black Panthers without paying much attention to the Panthers' intrests and direction.
• when you get a list of what they did, the Weather Underground's accomplishments were pretty spectacular. the radicalism of using bombs to make a point is scary, and puts a lot of distance between most people and them: these people were terrorists. But the american (vietnamese, chilean, ...) people were more than equally terrorized by the american government, and had no other recourse.