elementropy: Gordon Liddy Also Cites The Weathermen as an Excuse to Act as Fascist as He Wants

Friday, October 10, 2008

Gordon Liddy Also Cites The Weathermen as an Excuse to Act as Fascist as He Wants

More from Will. Liddy's just met with Gerry Ford and some other Rethug bigwigs, and accepted their job offer. His thoughts as he prepares to move to D.C.:

It was March 1969. The nation was at war not only externally in Vietnam but internally. Within the previous thirty months 28 had died in Watts; 40 in the race riot in Detroit, which required federal paratroopers to restore order. In the past year 125 cities had been hit by riots, including the nation's capital, and the army had to be called out. Snipers had shot at police in Cleveland as violence was increasingly directed against them as a "revolutionary" tactic. The Democrats reaped the fruits of their permissiveness as their own national convention was trashed by a radical mob. Huge "peace" demonstrations led to such scenes as army troops fighting off protesters assaulting the Pentagon. Like the millions who had voted for Richard Nixon, I was fed up with the double standard of the left. I had learned long ago the maxims of Cicero that "laws are inoperative in war" and that "the good of the people in the chief law." That "anything goes" concept so beloved of the left-liberals cuts both ways.

Looking back now from a decade later many people think of that time as the era of the "flower-child" and wonder how we could think of them as a war-like enemy. As a reminder that we weren't simply dodging flowers in those days, I offer these lines, spoken by Mark William Rudd, leader of The Weathermen faction of the Students for a Democratic Society. He delivered them in 1969 at a national "war council" of the Weathermen in Flint, Michigan:

"....We have to start tearing down this fucking country. We have to have a revolution in this country that's going to overthrow -- like bombs, like guns, like fire bombs, by anything and everything....The most important thing that the Weathermachine should be right now is to create a consciousness, a political consciousness and the best way to create this is by doing and performing some kind of exemplary action, like offing some pigs, creating chaos in the streets, blowing up pig stations, blowing up banks. Once the Weathermachine begins this and starts the ball rolling, then the Weathermachine will not have to be involved as much. Other white revolutionaries are going to get involved and try to destroy the system that we all hate so much."

That, to me, is war. I was ready. And willing.

Well, that's extreme all around. Clearly, Liddy's trying to find his moral equivalent, his justification. But it won't do: there's a fundamental moral difference between the pirate and the emperor; Liddy's terrorism was in service of the government. And at least Rudd didn't approvingly quote Nazis. Finally, who really thinks that Liddy would have been a decent, law-abiding operative had there been no Weathermen? The fact is, he was "willing" no matter what.