Mark Rudd has written a new book about his involvement in the 1960s and 1970s with Students for a Democratic Society ("SDS") and the Weather Underground, titled "Underground: My Life in SDS and Weatherman."
In the late 1960s, photographs of Rudd's touseled visage were featured in national magazines that were covering the Columbia University students, led by SDS, who took over college buildings to protest the Vietnam War and college plans to expand in African American neighborhoods. After Rudd was expelled by Columbia, he rabble-roused against the War and racism on college campuses in his role as the national head of SDS. Then he joined the Weathermen, a small, extreme faction of SDS -- to "go underground" and "make the revolution."
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The Weather Underground's strategy was to "bring the war home" – mostly by blowing up public buildings. After a number of Weathermen, including Rudd, came "aboveground" in the late 1970s, they claimed that their bombings "never hurt anyone." They were lucky in that regard, but they did manage to make a lot of innocent people very afraid. (Three Weathermen were killed building a bomb they planned to attack US soldiers with.) The Weather Underground claimed that there were no innocents – if you weren't part of their revolution, your workplace and public property were fair game. Rudd does a good job of explaining how this is the precise attitude that leads to mass murder.
Rudd was featured in Sam Green's 2003 documentary film, "The Weather Underground." Green's film is a sympathetic portrayal of the Weather Underground, and it brought Rudd, who had become a college math teacher, back to popular attention. Since that time, Rudd has spoken and written extensively about his experiences. Some of his writings are collected on his website, markrudd.com. Rudd says that he wrote his new book to help to younger idealists who are working for social change, by pointing them away from "activism" and toward "organizing."
Rudd doesn't know very much about organizing, from either a practical or intellectual viewpoint. His specialty was sound-bite posturing with the cameras rolling, preferably with a cute girl watching who would spend the night with a romantic "student leader." Rudd 's advice about how to work for social change is heartfelt but shallow.
Rudd's book does have the substantial virtue of being a prolonged and sincere apology for his part in the idiotic, stupid, disgusting, criminal behavior of the Weather Underground. In this respect, Rudd has become a much better human being than his Weather Underground colleagues Bill Ayers – "Obama's pal" -- and his wife Bernadine Dohrn. They still preen that their opposition to the Vietnam War moderates or diminishes their culpability for committing acts that in every way made that evil war last longer! Equally disgusting is Ayers' and Dohrn's (and Rudd's) pitiful claim to have been acting in solidarity with African Americans. Like Jonestown, and Bhagwan Shree Rajneesh's Oregon commune, the Weather Underground was at its core a cult whose members "crossed the line." The leadership of all three groups were self-centered idealists who had (and still have) a high degree of vulnerability to self-delusion and moral idiocy.
Rudd's best writing is found not in his book, but in an essay on his website, where Rudd repudiates and demystifies his long-time hero, Che Guevara. However, I doubt that any admirer of Guevara will be brought to a different attitude by reading Rudd's essay. The romance of violence strikes deep chords in the human psyche, where rationality holds little sway. "La coeur a ses raisons que la raison ne connnait point."
Countering Guevara, as world-historical figures, are Gandhi and Martin Luther King –also romantic figures, but of the nonviolent persuasion, which Rudd says he now embraces. Perhaps King's death -- when the nation lost a great soul who could stir the romantic chords in idealistic young people like Rudd -- helped the Weather Underground to occur. But given the millions of people who survived that loss, and went on to work against the war and racism without becoming childish, violent fools -- it is wrong to view the Weathermen's conduct (including Rudd's) as anything other than an abominable kind of petulance.
Few people are likely to pay much attention to Rudd's advice, and that's just as well – his track record is poor, and the best part of his new book is the fact of his mea culpa, not his political prescriptions. But the campaign to elect Barack Obama has its roots deeply in the powerful organizing/electoral tradition of Bayard Rustin and Saul Alinsky, and even a touch of Gandhi and King. Maybe, from this blend, change will come -- we can hope!
(Tom Rodd, the author of this review, spent two years in a federal prison in 1964-67 for draft resistance in opposition to the Vietnam War. He received a Presidential pardon from Jimmy Carter in 1982 and is a lawyer in West Virginia.)