Last week I wrote about the Baader-Meinhof gang, and this week I'm writing about the Weathermen. These two groups were never connected, and Baader-Meinhof was much more murderous, but they did have some things in common. These include fanaticism and a complete lack of humor or perspective, but those are really just symptoms. What these two groups really had in common was uniformity of thought.
Before the Weathermen went underground, they lived in collective houses together and engaged in lots of Maoist-style “self-criticism.” This is where you get up in front of the group and rip yourself to shreds for whatever ideological deviations you might have been guilty of before discovering the One True Way. The Japanese Red Army did the same, and regularly murdered members who deviated just a little too far. The Weathermen were not as bad, but the emphasis on ideological uniformity was still there.
As an activist with the Occupy Movement, one thing that often strikes me is that no two Occupiers ever seem to agree completely about anything. This is a very healthy thing if you ask me, at least in comparison to groups like the Weathermen or Baader-Meinhof. I can't imagine a group of Occupiers getting together for a self-criticism session like that- people would just walk out rather than go along with it. The history of leftist terrorism should be a sobering reminder to any radical activist of the dangers of group-think and conformity in the name of any cause. These groups were destructive, tiny and totally ineffective. They ruined a lot of lives, and what did they achieve? This is one part of history that should be remembered and not repeated!