From DailyKos - read the whole article and get a sense of one radical faction of the left in the 60's & 70's. Good read.
I finally saw the award winning 2003 documentary on The Weather Underground, the 1970's dissident/terrorist organization which aspired to a sort of third world revolution in the US. Not the most realistic movement in the history of the New Left. The Weather Underground had its roots the early sixties civil rights and anti-war movements, chiefly in the faction ridden Students for a Democratic Society led by the noted historian of the New Left--and a favorite writer of mine--Todd Gatlin.
There seems to be about as many opinions on the Weather Underground as there were in the Sixties. Most Conservatives believe them to be nothing more than terrorists. Those in the far left--especially the Trotskyite/Nadar true believers--seem to hold a only thinly disguised admiration for them.
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The weathermen, each of them giftedly bright, charismatic, and personally attractive would eventually win the battle for control of the S.D.S. Over next year, the manner in which they wielded power would become progressively more radical and threatening to the federal government, specifically to J. Edgar Hoover.
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However, before they went underground, they staged one final anti-war conference to discuss strategy and tactics for further militancy with the other members of the S.D.S. leadership. Gatlin describes it as a descent into madness. At the conference, Mark Rudd spoke of pigs and destruction. "It's a wonderful feeling to hit a pig. It must be a really wonderful feeling to kill a pig or blow up a building," he said. Jeff Jones declared, "We're against everything that's good and decent in honky America. We will burn and loot and destroy. We are the incubation of your mother's nightmare."
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At the end of the film, Mark Rudd, looking back on his actions and thinking at the time says, "These are things that I am not proud of, and I find it hard to speak publically about them. And to tease out what was right and what was wrong. I think part of the Weatherman phenomenon that was right was our understanding of the position of the United States is in the world. It was this knowledge that we just couldn't handle. It was too big. We didn't know what to do. In a way, I still don't know what to do with this knowledge. I don't know what needs to be done now. And its still eating away at me just as it did thirty years ago."
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http://www.dailykos.com/story/2005/3/8/01927/77742