Another False Left- Right "Equivalence"

I read a comment at Confederate Yankee yesterday:

"The ideologues at the increasingly partisan Times managed to slip in another attack against the Tea Party Movement several days ago, comparing them to the domestic terrorists of the Weather Underground."

This is similar to a number of comments about the Weather Underground I have seen from the right, and I think it is time for me to tell my tale about this organization.

The story begins, rather uninterestingly, at the last SDS convention, I think in 1969. It is necessary to talk for a moment about internal movemet politics of a type all too familiar to us all on both sides of the political spectrum, to be very interesting. Naturally, the SDS was fragmented into innumerable factions, most of them, as we look back, clearly little more than self-serving power groups. The most right wing of all of them was an organization known as the Progressive Labor Party, as close to being neo-Stalinist as anything I ever saw on the left. Now, in the run-up to this convention, I saw for the first time a right wing tactic that we have since then become all too familiar with, most recently in the Texas school board packing. The Progressive Labor Party at that time had a membership of around 800 to 1000, in a movement that was routinely mobilizing millions around the country to protest the Vietnam war. Yet, by systemsticall packing the local meetings at which convention delegates were chosen, they managed to amass a voting bloc of (I estimate) about 600 of the convention's 1500 delegates. This, combined with the typical right wing dishonesty about their intentions, gave them virtual control of the convention.

After a couple of days, when it became clear that this minuscule faction had effectively seized the SDS, approximately 600 of the 1500 delegates walked out of the main convention room, into another room, and began discussing what to do. As a couple of more days passed, this increased to about 900 delegates, leaving a minority still participating in the main convention. And yes, I counted. I am the only person I know who did. When I have said on my blog that I have been counting meeting attendees since the '60's, I wasn't kidding.

Participating in this meeting was a group including the now infamous Bill Ayers and Bernardine Dohrn, who seized the opportunity to press an agenda which, while not as extreme as what they would advocate later, was far beyond what most of us were interested in. So, within a short period of time, this group split again, leaving perhaps 300 to 400 people still in the room with Ayers and Dohrn. These people acted to establish what became known as the Weatherman

But there is more to the story. A large number of these people were alienated from the Weatherman within the first couple of months, as they began to understand the grotesque inappropriateness of their apocalyptic plans.

So, what are we left with? By the time the Weatherman went "undergroud" and set about blowing themselves up and heading themselves toward prison, I believe there were only a few dozen, or perhaps a hundred people at the outside, who were the true adherents of the Weatherman. And they were angrily opposed by the entire rest of the movement.

So this is what we have now: On the one hand, a political faction of, allegedly, millions of people, created and constantly egged on toward violence by national news media, and members of one of our two major political parties, versus something on the left which was a minuscule, outcast group, widely condemned for their violent positions. In fact, the rest of us on the left were more critical of the Weatherman than people on the right have been toward the lunatic madmen in the Hutaree Militia.

There is, as usual, no equivalence on the left and the right. You have millions of potentially violent people, versus dozens, supposedly mainstream leaders who clearly support these people, versus essentially no support at all, and above all, a toying with violence versus a rejection of it.