Monday, August 17, 2015

Read This With Pepto Bismol Handy

So you know I was already super aware of "The Weather Underground" and shitty Bill Ayers and Bernadine Dohrn.  I don't get how more people aren't outraged about the crap they pulled and how they smugly walked away from it.  I am constantly agog when people buy the Ayers/Dohrn malarkey that dismisses any talk of their actual & attempted violence and rewrites their past through rose-colored, we-were-trying-to-save-the-world lenses.

And I am well versed in 60s, 70s & 80s history.  I lived through it, I watched Huntley & Brinkley, I read various newspapers.  Later, I was interested in history, so my reading tended toward that area.

But somehow I missed a bigger picture.  Maybe I wasn't ready to see it as a whole.  I knew, as I said, about Weather Underground.  And I knew about the Black Liberation Army, the Symbionese Liberation Army, the FALN; I could tell you who Party Hearst, Joanne Chesimard, Eldridge Cleaver and Malcolm X were.

But here in this book, Burroughs lays out all of these groups and people and their actions chronologically and in depth.  And like someone vividly bringing back the circumstances of a terrible wound that is scabbed over, Burroughs made me feel outrage.

I highly recommend this book.  It's interesting.  It's well written.  And it remembers people who should be remembered, the victims of these terrorists.  The groups weren't protesting, they were destroying & murdering. 

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