By Michael Gillespie, Contributing Editor

“Don’t do what we did!” exclaimed Mark Rudd before an audience of about 75 activists who gathered at Occupy Iowa headquarters in Des Moines on March 7.

Rudd, a leader of the Students for a Democratic Society (SDS) in the 1960s, together with others founded the violent SDS off-shoot, the Weather Underground Organization (WUO) that engaged in a campaign of bombings of government buildings during the 1970s.  Today, Rudd’s activism in behalf of progressive social change draws on the lessons of his radical and revolutionary past while emphasizing the importance of nonviolence and political organizing.

Rudd’s presentation in Des Moines featured, first, a viewing of The Weather Underground, a 2002 documentary film depicting the rise and fall of the WUO.   The film, which includes archive footage as well as interviews with various former WUO members taped much later after the group disintegrated, places a narrative about the militant communist organization within the larger context of the Vietnam War and the social and political turmoil of the era.  Directed by Sam Green and Bill Siegel, The Weather Underground won the audience choice award at the Chicago Underground Film Festival and went on to be nominated for an Academy Award in 2004.  Following the film, Rudd spoke eloquently and at length, his comments rich with self-deprecating humor, irony, and insight, responding to questions from an appreciative audience during an extended Q&A that lasted for well over an hour.

The Independent Monitor asked Rudd how his experience might benefit and inform the activism of Occupy Iowa.

Rudd explained that SDS organizers, many of them ‘Red Diaper Babies,’ attempted to create an antiwar movement in the 1960s based on political organizing.

“This is actually a different method than Occupy used.  Occupy used a method called exemplary direct action, and Occupy’s success was enormous.  My heart goes out to you.  Occupy accomplished what decades of organizing in the union movement [has not] … You got across the narrative, the story of the 99 percent and the 1 percent, the basic, fundamental economic and political injustice at the heart of this society.  The unions have been trying to do that for decades, and you did that in a matter of a few weeks.  It was phenomenal,” declared Rudd.

“What you did was the same thing we did in 1968 at Columbia, which was you demonstrated moral commitment.  The difference was, it took us years to get there, organizing,” said Rudd.

“Since 2003 I’ve been traveling around with this movie and talking to activists and organizers about how movements are built,” said Rudd.

Rudd said one of the big mistakes he and others made was that, “We forgot completely about organizing.  …  We stole [the SDS] and we took it in a crappy direction. … “We transformed SDS from being a radical reform and resistance organization to being revolutionary.  We wanted to go all the way.  It wasn’t enough to just be antiwar, to just end the war in Vietnam.  So, we attacked the antiwar movement because it wasn’t radical enough, it wasn’t militant enough, and it didn’t critique the entire system, the entire system being imperialism,” said Rudd.

“We quoted Che Guevara.  We loved Che Guevara!  ‘The duty of every revolutionary is to make the revolution’, meaning: You don’t talk about it; you do it, just like Che Guevara did it, but we hadn’t noticed that he was already dead [general laughter] in 1967.  This was 1969.  His strategy was terrible.  It was called the ‘foco’ theory.  I was a Guevarista; I was of the cult of Che.  ‘Pick up the gun!  The time of the revolution has come,’” said Rudd.

“I was elected national secretary of the SDS in June of 1969.  Within six months, my leadership clique had decided to kill off the largest radical student organization in the United States, 100,000 members in 400 chapters.  We did it in ’69, which was the height of the war.  We did it because we knew that it was not revolutionary enough, and that the only way, that the only thing that needed to be done now, was not to organize on college campuses but to pick up the gun.  That is … the arrogance that led us to kill SDS, which I incidentally consider to be an historical crime that I committed because of my ideas about revolution,” said Rudd.

Rudd described “a trajectory:  good organizing, followed by bad organizing, followed by the [Weather] Underground [Organization], which was horrible, no organizing,” and explained that he wrote his autobiography, titled Underground: My Life with SDS and the Weathermen, in order to “present this story so that people can get the distinction between how mass movements are built, which is a process called organizing – relationship building, coalition building, education, a lot of work! – versus self-expression, which is what we moved into.”

The Independent Monitor then asked Rudd to talk about how and why, after the accidental explosion that killed three WUO members on March 6, 1970 in a townhouse in the Greenwich Village neighborhood of Manhattan, the group adopted a strategy of bombing buildings after hours and on weekends to avoid injury or death.

“There was a moment that led up to the townhouse [explosion] in which we actually fell into a classic definition of terrorism, which is attacking innocent people,” said Rudd.

The people in the townhouse, explained Rudd, were building a bomb which they planned to plant at Fort Dix to explode at a non-commissioned officers dance, a bomb that might have killed soldiers and their wives, girlfriends, or others who attended the dance.

“Thank God the accident happened and we only killed three of our own!  Because the effects on the whole antiwar movement would have been horrendous,” declared Rudd, who recalled that a few months later an antiwar group in Madison, Wisconsin planted a bomb in Sterling Hall at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, a bomb accidentally killed an antiwar grad student who was working late in the building.

“They called in a warning.  They were following our example.  But somehow the police didn’t know there was a student working late that night, and he got killed. …  The Madison movement was hit really badly.  They simply died for a number of years.  We were lucky; those people following our lead were not lucky.  I feel, in retrospect … I lost my fire, my will, my courage; it was my failing in 1970.  I think what happened was we were unwilling to break with the entire strategy of bombings.  And Underground and revolution was wrong!  We should have been organizing on the college campuses, and we shouldn’t have tainted the essentially nonviolent antiwar movement with this violence that we were promoting,” declared Rudd with evident emotion.

“To this day – I don’t like to blow my own horn – but I am probably the only one in this film who is as critical of this strategy, and I think the other people are very ambivalent and confused.  Bernadine Dohrn and Bill Ayers, who are wonderful people who are like brother and sister to me, but I feel that they make the same mistake that a lot of people make when looking at this, which is that you confuse good intentions with results.  It’s very easy for us to take a subjective point of view of all of this and say, ‘Well, you meant well.  Your ideas about imperialism were right.  You were reacting to the violence,” said Rudd.

“Tom Hayden, on the other hand, analyzes it very well.  There is a brilliant book that has an essay on this called The Long Sixties: From 1960 to Barack Obama, and in it Tom says, ‘We were a perfect mirror for a violent society.  The more violence in Vietnam, the more we talked violence.’  Now that’s reactive, and it’s expressive, but it’s not strategic.  Strategy is the question, How do we build a mass movement?  Our goal is always a mass movement.  We have to believe that the large majority of Americans will eventually take some action against this injustice, against militarism, for justice, our fellow citizens, the 99 percent, which is a brilliant metaphor that you’ve developed, we have to believe that those people will be involved.  So, my question to you is, What can we do to help the other 98.99 percent get involved?  What would be a reasonable thing to ask them to do?  What kind of education is necessary?  What kind of coalitions need to be built?

Responding to a question from an Iowa Occupier, regarding Occupy activists who espouse a strategy of violence or “diversity of tactics,” which Rudd characterized as code for violence, the college professor, author, and former SDS and WUO leader said, “My first thought is that those people are police agents.”

Rudd explained that he has met many times “with young people who are Black Bloc, Green Anarchists, or followers of an idiot named John Zerzan, a guy my age who doesn’t believe that mass movements have ever helped anybody in the world.   He’s teaching that.  So, I’ve got to know the kids, but I’m not good at it. … I’ve told them, and they don’t want to hear this because I am crude in the way I say it: The only people who advocate violence are either cops or very stupid.  I didn’t add that I was very stupid.  I was one of these people.  I was so angry I wanted to overthrow the whole system, and I thought that everybody in the world was gonna think like me.  A friend of mine calls it existential politics.  We have to substitute real politics,” said Rudd.

“I like to draw a clear line, and you have done this really, really well here in Iowa, better than in Albuquerque and better than in New York.  You’ve said, ‘Our movement is a nonviolent movement.  Any violence that there is comes from the state, it doesn’t come from us.’  You haven’t given them anything.  You’ve figured this out for yourselves: Anyone advocating violence is working for the other side.  I know, because I worked for the FBI – I did their work for them!  Without knowing it!  Just because I thought my ideas were so smart.  I was no different from these stupid Black Bloc kids.  So, I think we’ve got to draw this clear line,” said Rudd.

“This [Weather Underground] story is a great story of what not to do,” said Rudd.    

Rudd was invited to speak in Iowa by David Goodner, a Des Moines Catholic Worker (DMCW) and community organizer with Iowa Citizens for Community Involvement. DMCW hosted Rudd while he was in Des Moines.

By Brian Terrell

On the long flight to the Gulf Kingdom of Bahrain on February 10, I had been studying the Lonely Planet guide to the region in order to be able to explain at the airport, if needed, that I had come as a tourist. As it happened, while most passengers on our plane sailed through passport control, my travel companion Linda Sartor and I were pulled from the line and subjected to a closer examination. My sketchy knowledge of the historic and cultural sights that I had come to see was good enough to satisfy official scrutiny. We were granted tourist visas and sent on our way.

That we had come as tourists was true. We had intentionally neglected to mention, though, that we had been invited to Bahrain along with a few other international activists to monitor the government’s response to demonstrations marking the one year anniversary of Bahrain’s “Arab Spring” pro-democracy uprising on February 14. This demand for basic rights was brutally suppressed by Bahrain’s police and military backed by the army of Saudi Arabia.

We certainly would have been barred entry to the country had our full intent been told—but, as Daniel Berrigan once mused, “How much truth do we owe them?” In fact, our invitation from Nabeel Rajab, president of the Bahrain Center for Human Rights, came because the government had made it known that observers from established human rights organizations would not be granted visas until the next month and that access to the country by the international media was to be severely limited during that period. The regime’s resolve that there be no witnesses to the events surrounding the anniversary made our presence for those days all the more crucial.

The morning after our arrival, we met with local activists and the small group of U.S. citizens who had come before us. Before long we were in the streets of Manama, the capital city, accompanying a march to the Pearl Roundabout, the focal point of last year’s demonstration. This peaceful march of men, women and children was quickly set upon by police in full riot gear and dispersed with tear gas and percussion grenades. Our first encounter with the Bahraini police appeared to be vicious, but our local friends assured us that our presence was a restraining factor. Two of the Americans we had just met, Huwaida Arraf and Radhika Sainath, were taken into custody at this march and later that evening deported, the government said, for activities not consistent with their status as tourists.

Our small group, called Witness Bahrain, grew over the next days, even as several friends who traveled to join us were turned away at the airport by a regime made even more hyper-vigilant after deporting Huwaida and Radhika. While being careful to remain at large at least until the events of the 14th, we toured Manama and the villages over the next couple of days, hearing testimony of government abuses and accompanying demonstrations and marches.

On February 13, Tighe Barry and Medea Benjamin of the peace group Code Pink joined us, and our Bahraini guide Wafa took some of us on a tour of the zoo and the National Museum. In the afternoon we witnessed a march of tens of thousands through the main thoroughfares of Manama.

This march was tolerated by the authorities until a large group split off to walk to the Pearl Roundabout. The police response was immediate and appalling. Tear gas in Bahrain is not used as a means of crowd control so much as collective punishment—crowds dispersed by gas are not allowed to escape but are pursued, cornered and gassed again. Many are injured by direct hits from gas canisters and percussion grenades.

We witnessed beatings and heard reports of injuries by birdshot and rubber bullets.

On the actual anniversary, the police had the country locked down. Patrols of armored cars sped through the streets of Manama and the roads out of the villages were blocked by tanks. Many hundreds still made it to the streets, many were injured, many arrested. Six more of us were taken by the authorities.

In my case, finally getting pinched by the Bahraini police was anticlimactic. Four of us Americans with a Bahraini friend were taking a back way along a quiet street to catch up with others to attempt reaching the roundabout when a passing police patrol stopped us and asked for identification. One more time, we explained that we were there as tourists. “If you are tourists,” we were asked, “why do you have gas masks?”

A few hours later we were in a police station where we met two more from our group who had been captured under more dramatic circumstances. One by one, we were summoned to talk with representatives from the Ministry of Information and were told that we would be put on a flight to London at 2 a.m. as our visas had been cancelled. Our claim to be tourists was regarded as a deception by the authorities. My protestations to the contrary were to no avail.

Bahrain is a tiny island kingdom that is home to about a million people—half of whom are not citizens—that is visited by 8 million tourists a year. Many of these, we were told, are Saudis drawn there by the night life and legal alcohol. Others visit the museums and beaches. In the brochures produced by the government, tourists are encouraged to meet the friendly people of Bahrain. This is what we did and it was for this that we were deported.

We were privileged to tour this beautiful and afflicted country and to live the reality of its people, if only for a little while. Not content with having our photos taken with camels, we spoke with emergency room doctors who, after treating victims of last year’s crackdown, were themselves tortured and charged with sedition. We met with mothers mourning their children who were killed or imprisoned, and workers barred from practicing their professions for being in favor of freedom.

We were in Bahrain as tourists, not of the malls and golf courses and museums but of the streets and villages where real people live and struggle. Anyone who visits Bahrain and never gets a whiff of tear gas is a poor tourist, indeed. To the police who arrested us, a tourist with a gas mask is a hopeless contradiction and proof of culpability. For the tourist who wants to learn the present reality of Bahrain, a gas mask is more indispensable than sunscreen.

The faithfulness and solidarity of the people of Bahrain will prevail over the perfidity and cruelty of its backward and crude monarchy, supported as it is only by the brute force of its sponsors, the governments of the U.S. and Saudi Arabia. “Sumoud,” meaning be strong, hold fast, is the Arabic word by which the resisters in Bahrain greet and encourage one another. Their peaceful strength is a challenge and an inspiration as we continue our common struggle on the far ends of the globe.

Sumoud.

By Michael Gillespie, Contributing Editor

After 10 years of war, a massive bail-out of Wall Street, and the worst recession since the Great Depression, Washington has run out of money.  As the pro-Israel lobby’s frantic efforts to foment war with Iran increase, the Obama administration is finally winding down the ill-conceived, immoral, counter-productive, and unsuccessful but hideously destructive wars in Iraq and Afghanistan.  The U.S. military is reducing troop levels, not hiring new recruits.  Unable to find work, many Americans have thrown themselves into an effort re-invent the corrupt system that is failing them.

In a word, Occupy Wall Street (OWS), which owes so much to the Arab Spring, was – and is – brilliant.  It has reinvigorated a flagging antiwar movement and rekindled interest in progressive ideas and ideals.  On a conceptual level, with its emphasis on nonviolent protest, direct democracy, and direct action in support of economic justice, honest government, accountability, and an end to oppression, exploitation, and war, OWS has shown itself to be everything that official Washington and Wall Street are not.  Though corporate media outlets were slow to recognize the importance, authenticity, and vigor of the new popular movement, once they did the national security apparatus quickly began to coordinate efforts by municipal, county, and state law enforcement agencies around the nation to stifle OWS dissent.

In many cities, including New York, Seattle, and Oakland, unnecessary violence has characterized law enforcement reactions to OWS encampments and activities.  New York Police Department Deputy Inspector Anthony Bologna, who was filmed pepper spraying, without provocation, a group of women standing in a police pen near Union Square on September 24, seemed to set the nasty tone.

CounterPunch author Pam Martens reported on October 10 that, “If you’re a Wall Street behemoth, there are endless opportunities to privatize profits and socialize losses beyond collecting trillions of dollars in bailouts from taxpayers. One of the ingenious methods that has remained below the public’s radar was started by the Rudy Giuliani administration in New York City in 1998. It’s called the Paid Detail Unit and it allows the New York Stock Exchange and Wall Street corporations, including those repeatedly charged with crimes, to order up a flank of New York’s finest with the ease of dialing the deli for a pastrami on rye.

“The corporations pay an average of $37 an hour (no medical, no pension benefit, no overtime pay) for a member of the NYPD, with gun, handcuffs and the ability to arrest. The officer is indemnified by the taxpayer, not the corporation.

“New York City gets a 10 percent administrative fee on top of the $37 per hour paid to the police. The City’s 2011 budget called for $1,184,000 in Paid Detail fees, meaning private corporations were paying wages of $11.8 million to police participating in the Paid Detail Unit. The program has more than doubled in revenue to the city since 2002.”

The taxpayer pays for each officer’s training, his uniform, his gun, and will pick up the legal tab for lawsuits resulting from official acts by police personnel following the illegal instructions of their corporate masters. Lawsuits have already sprung up from the program, according to Martens.  Bologna has been sued by OWS protesters.

Oakland police shot Scott Olsen, 24, in the head with a tear gas canister on October 25.  Olsen, a member of Veterans For Peace, was peacefully protesting when he was shot.  The former Marine who served two tours of duty in Iraq was hospitalized with a concussion and head trauma.

In Seattle, police pepper-sprayed 84-year-old Dorly Rainey, a 19-year-old pregnant woman, and a priest involved in nonviolent protest on November 15.

“Cops shoved their bicycles into the crowd.  . . .  If it had not been for my hero [Iraq Vet Caleb Walez] I would have been down on the ground and trampled,” Rainey told reporters.

In December, the Justice Department found reasonable cause to believe that Seattle PD engages in a pattern or practice of excessive force in violation of the Fourth Amendment of the U.S. Constitution and the Violent Crime Control and Law Enforcement Act of 1994. Oakland PD is currently under investigation for excessive use of force. NYPD is facing persistent calls for investigation of a stop and frisk policy that disproportionately targets Blacks and Latinos, while civil rights groups are calling for an investigation of NYPD’s monitoring of Muslims across the Northeast.

During a mid-November interview, Oakland mayor Jean Quan told the BBC that the crackdown on OWS was a coordinated effort involving the mayors of other major cities.

“I was recently on a conference call with 18 cities across the country who had the same situation where what had started as a political movement and a political encampment ended up being an encampment no longer in control by the people who started them,” said Ms. Quan.

In an article posted on the World Socialist Website, Andre Damon reported on November 17 that a, “spokesperson for the U.S. Conference of Mayors told Mother Jones magazine Wednesday that the call Ms. Quan mentioned was one of numerous conference calls—which included mayors and top police brass—that focused on discussing “efforts cities have made to accommodate the demonstrators and maintain public health and safety,” a statement that the real Mother Jones, labor activist and organizer Mary Harris, would have dismissed as ludicrous.

Nationwide, OWS arrests number well over 6,000 according to published reports, but given that the co-ordinated campaign against OWS involves copious amounts of disinformation and propaganda, all corporate media reports about OWS are best viewed with skeptical eye.

Author and journalist Chris Hedges limned the national security state’s strategy to contain, disrupt, and marginalize insurgencies and popular movements such as OWS in a February 13 Truthdig article.

“Physically eradicate the insurgents’ logistical base of operations to disrupt communication and organization. Dry up financial and material support. Create rival organizations … to discredit and purge the rebel leadership. Infiltrate the movement to foster internal divisions and rivalries. … Provoke the movement – or front groups acting in the name of the movement – to carry out actions such as vandalism and physical confrontations with the police that alienate the wider populace from the insurgency. Invent atrocities and repugnant acts supposedly carried out by the movement and plant these stories in the media. Finally, offer up a political alternative,” wrote Hedges.

OWS is a popular nonviolent movement, one which has much, much more in common with the Civil Rights Movement led by Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. than with the violent tactics of Tupamaros of Uruguay, the Irish Republican Army, or the Weather Underground, but some in government are determined to destroy it and are using many of the same tools they would employ were OWS a terrorist insurgency.  That mistake may prove profoundly detrimental to what remains of civil liberties in the USA.

Some municipal law enforcement agencies have avoided violence in dealing with OWS citizen activists.  Iowa, a state with a long history of progressive politics and one that has perhaps the strongest antiwar movement in the nation, responded to OWS in ways that other states and cities might profitably examine.  After Republican governor Terry Branstad refused to extend a permit for an Occupy Des Moines (ODM) encampment on the state Capitol grounds, on October 9, Iowa State Patrol officers arrested more than 30 Occupiers who refused to leave.  Days later, Des Moines Mayor Frank Cownie stepped in and offered ODM a city park on the opposite side of the Capitol complex.

“One of the original purposes of parks was for people to gather. We want you to feel like you can gather,” Cownie told ODM Occupiers on October 14. “I want my police force out chasing the bad guys and arresting criminals.”

The mayor’s administration and the Des Moines Police Department (DMPD) worked cooperatively with ODM for months, allowing the encampment to exist, inspecting the park regularly, talking with neighborhood residents, and respecting the rights of the Occupiers.

During November and December, as their plans for direct action during the weeks before the Iowa Caucuses advanced, Des Moines Catholic Workers and other experienced local peace and social justice activists worked with ODM Occupiers to conduct several nonviolence training sessions.

Kathleen McQuillen of the American Friends Service Committee in Des Moines, and Frank Cordaro of the Des Moines Catholic Worker facilitated a three-hour nonviolence training workshop at the Des Moines Valley Friends Meeting House on December 4.

“What we’ve got going for us is that we have collectively said to each other and to the world that, ‘We’re going to be nonviolent.  For this day, for this action, this group is going to be nonviolent.’  That empowers us,” Cordaro told activists during a small group session at Friends House.

“This is entry-level civil disobedience, there’s minimal risk.  I’m not saying that it’s insignificant, but it’s not that serious.  If we were taking on serious risk, we’d do a lot more than three hours training,” said the former priest whose anti-nuclear weapons and antiwar activism in the USA and in Europe spans decades and began long before he left the priesthood in 2003 after 18 years.

From their encampment at Stewart Square Park and rented space in a building in Des Moines’ East Village, ODM Occupiers, along with Catholic Workers, representatives of Iowa Citizens for Community Improvement, and members of several local churches and peace and justice organizations mounted a vigorous and sustained campaign of nonviolent direct action that involved several marches on and occupations of local banks and protests at both Democratic Party and Republican Party campaign events and candidate campaign headquarters during the run up to the Iowa Caucuses.  The Occupy the Iowa Caucuses coalition developed and maintained communications and cooperation with municipal law enforcement agencies in the Des Moines area, attracted over a hundred OWS movement activists from across the nation, conducted nonviolent direct actions, and staged a Peoples Caucus that attracted hundreds of activists, interested onlookers, and media personnel from around the world.

Between October 9 and January 3, local police forces made more than 100 Occupy-related arrests, and DMPD costs alone in regular and overtime pay for officers monitoring dozens of Occupy actions amounted to more than $75,000. But the Iowa Occupiers training in and commitment to Jesusonian/Gandhian/Kingian nonviolence proved remarkably successful.  No violent confrontations between municipal police officers and occupiers occurred – not even one.  Police officers respected the rights of Occupy activists, and Occupy activists cooperated peacefully with police.

That’s an accomplishment that all Iowans can be proud of.  It’s also a model that other American cities and states might explore and seek to emulate as spring approaches.

The OWS movement is evolving, and a continuing commitment to nonviolence is essential to its success.

Nonviolence, peaceful evolution rather than violent revolution, is what democracy looks like – when Americans work together for the common good during a crisis.