December 04, 2004

"You can kill a revolutionary, but you can't kill a revolution." On December 4th, 1969, Black Panther Fred Hampton was gunned down in his apartment by members of the Chicago Police Department. The report alledging that the CPD acted in self-defense was demolished by reporters of the time (though there doesn't seem to be any internet trace of it), but the officers were exonerated anyway. In 1990, Chicago's City Council declared December 4th "Fred Hampton Day," which was narrowed from the "National Revolutionary Day" that was declared by his survivors. Vibe Magazine interviews his son Fred Hampton jr. about his father.

It's hard for me, having been born in 1979, to imagine a time where there was open violent unrest in America's cities. On the one hand, a lot of progress was made toward equal rights and self-determination by militant groups, and open displays of force are sometimes appealing when regarding the impotency of non-violent protest in today's society. On the other hand, things were really aweful to get to that level of violence, and a lot of outdated Marxist rhetoric means that it's hard to imagine people falling in line like that again. Does the militant have a place in today's American society? Were the '60s America's last attempt at violent revolution?

posted by js 20 years ago
  • I was in ninth grade and just becoming aware of activists like Fred Hampton when he was killed. The anti-war movement was growing quickly by then, and campuses were centers of political organization. Many of my friends had older siblings in college who kept us informed. (Amazing that word could get around so efficiently without an internet.) We were all young and just learning that the US government would kill to serve its purposes. Vietnam and Dr. King's assassination made us suspect that, and deaths like Fred Hampton's and those of the Kent State students six months later, confirmed our fears. This exchange, from the Wikipedia article linked in the OP, really jumped out at me today: That's Fred Hampton. Is he dead? ...Bring him out. He's barely alive; he'll make it. Two shots were heard, which were fired point blank in Hampton's head. One officer then said: He's good and dead now. Chilling by any standards, but I could swear I've heard that paricular dialogue much more recently.
  • [particular]
  • Does the militant have a place in today's American society? Hope not. Were the '60s America's last attempt at violent revolution? Hope so. The current situation sucks, but this is a good perpective check. i wasnt born yet, but with the assasinations of RFK and MLK, Vietnam and everything else, it must have really seemed like the country was falling apart.
  • Gotta second Dr. Robotnik on The Weather Underground. I was also born in '79 so its hard to try and understand the motivations of the people involved (in the Weathermen) because I don't have the same frame of reference. Excellent documentary, but I couldn't help but feel that the Weathermen ran away with an established more stable party (Students for a Democratic Society) and ultimately encouraged well meaning kids into situations they weren't prepared for. Or as the aforementioned Fred Hampton remarked of the Weathermen "Days of Rage" campaign, "taking people into a situation where they can be massacred." Roger Ebert review of "The Weather Underground".
  • "I'm not a pacifist, but I do have deep admiration for pacifists. I don't agree with them, but I believe they are motivated by the right values. I believe that one must exhaust all options and possibilities for non-violent struggle. One does that precisely because one never, ever wants to either lead people or be lead into a dead end or cul-de-sac. People are already suffering. You don't want to increase their suffering. And two, because any time one takes the life of another human being it is in some way tragic, even when those human beings are on the other side of the barricades. But I do in fact believe that there are extreme circumstances under which the only option left is to go down violently. I say that with a heavy heart. But it's real." - Cornel West
  • I just saw Weather Underground a couple of days ago (or rather, the first 85 minutes of it) in my 20th Century Politics class. That was part of why I made this post. Dr. Jimmy- Aside from being blithe, do you want to give any more thought to those questions? I think that a large part of why the militants couldn't exist in today's atmosphere is that it's hard to even imagine people willing to die for a cause in today's politics. And that's almost a shame, because it says more about disenfranchisement and apathy than about the efficacy of our democracy. Today, when there's violence against protesters, not only do most people assume that the protesters "deserved it" but also that violence in return is unwarrented. This is a country founded on violent revolution, and at least one of our founding fathers thought we should have a revolution every ten years to prevent stagnation and oppression. I don't see revolution as necessarily negative, and I don't see peaceful revolution as possible. Further, there still is oppression and institutionalized violence, not just here but existing on a global scale. Sometimes force is justified. On the other hand, do I really want to live in a society wracked by violence? Well, not if innocents are being harmed (one of the better points about the Weathermen). But I'd rather have fighting in the streets than a police state, and I think (free speech zones excepted) that we're more likely to see the latter than the former.
  • From my perspective when you got to armed vanguardists trying to effect change like in the 60s in the US (similar to Red Brigades in Europe etc.) all hope for radical change was in fact already pretty much gone and the move came in part out of desperation. Movements with a mass base like the IWW were probably your last best chance for socialist utopia. You can't beat a man into heaven with a stick as the saying goes. /terribly ignorant historical over-simplification
  • ...I don't see peaceful revolution as possible. wtf? all over eastern europe in the late 1980s and early 1990s? georgia (the country) just last year? i'm not saying they're very good examples or have had great results, but they're definitely peaceful revolutions.
  • Add the Phillipines to your list, roryk.
  • Roryk: Eastern Europe as peaceful revolution? Not really. All of the countries that had peaceful outcomes to the Communist collapse succeeded because they already had a strong national identity and political institutions prior to Communism. It wasn't Solidarnosc that freed Poland, it was the Russians not being able to support an unpopular regime. In countries without a strong tradition of collective nationhood (though, in the case of Poland, not necessarily a strong tradition of statehood), there was massive violence and secession. See Yugoslavia or the Czechs. More than Eastern Europe being a success for peaceful revolutionary movements, it was rather the final failure of a violent revolution that lasted about 80 years. Further, I was more talking about the US. The US isn't going to have any sort of radical change without a massive context-shifting event that makes 9/11 look like Paris Hilton's dognapping. I do have to confess to not knowing enough about the Phillipines or Georgia to really comment, but from what I do know it seems that the Phillipines have swapped one oligarchy for another, which is hardly a revolution.
  • but from what I do know it seems
    ...that you don't know much. There's a pretty big difference between the sometimes shonky democracy the Philipines now enjoy and the thuggish US-backed dictatorship of the Marcos years.