Mis-Remembering the Days of Rage

I lived through these years in the link - I THOUGHT I remembered what happened.

Part of the bargain of civilization is ceding the authority to commit violence to the State. (Has its own problems. Beats the alternative.) Lord knows there are people I’d love to beat the shit out of in the street, but if I don’t get to then neither do you. No, I don’t give a flying fuck who they are; you don’t get to do that.

Lefties say, “Well, that’s Nazis, they only do that to Nazis; Nazis are different, you have to shut that shit down, etc.” Great. Except that Lefties pull the same “shut this shit down!” stuff on mainstream Righties on college campuses, all the while calling them Nazis.

Hell, Lefties said Ted Cruz was a Nazi, Mitt Romney was a Nazi, George W. Bush was a Nazi. I’ve done human rights work that had me working in proximity to the U.S. military, so at a professional meeting a Lefty called me a Nazi.

So if you tell me that I’m a Nazi, and tell me people I respect are Nazis, and tell me you’re in favor of going out and beating up Nazis, guess what? I am suddenly very interested in the physical safety of Nazis.

And I’m Jewish.

I was wrong. I minimized the violence of those days in my mind. And, as the excerpt above shows, the Left isn't particular about labeling average people as The Enemy - then, acting on that label.

Towards the end of that post, comes some very specific cautions that we need to be aware of: the Left is organized - QUITE organized.

The big thing the hard Right is trying to do right now is create organization and infrastructure. They have, historically, sucked at it. The hard Left has great infrastructure. Look at DisruptJ20: they know enough lawyers to have 2 teams dedicated to getting them out of jail! Think any Righty group has gotten around to organizing lawyers on tap like that? Nope.

I originally read the post, and was just going to pass on the link and move on. Then, I realized that too many people would just discount this Remembrance of Leftists Past as partisan raving, and ignore it.

So, I decided to put links to these incidents, linking to the least biased (either way) sources I could find. What I found is below.

Angela Davis, and her role in the Jackson trial and death of the judge, among others. This is from Wikipedia, which sanitized her actions.

From iSteve Blog, a fuller, and more truthful report.

From Days of Rage (review) in The Nation.

According to FBI statistics, the United States experienced more than 2,500 domestic bombings in just 18 months in 1971 and 1972, with virtually no solved crimes and barely any significant prosecutions.

Unbelievable. I knew there were some 'incidents' as many of my friends called them. But, few of them seemed to touch me, living in Cleveland, OH.

Which, when I think about it, is crazy. Cleveland was right in the heart of the Leftist action. There was a thriving chapter of the Black Panthers. The "Days of Rage" that roiled Chicago were planned in Cleveland.

Cleveland's major urban riot - in the Hough neighborhood - was attributed to a combination of resentment of the police, juvenile aimlessness, legitimate grievances, and the skillful nudging of Leftists. The Professional Leftist Excusers scoffed at the very idea of Leftist influences; more cynical observers point out that this downplays their role in the violence.

Were "outside agitators" involved? Almost definitely - the resentment of the college students/dropouts/radicals who'd descended upon Cleveland, eager to stir up trouble, stemmed from class resentment. Unlike many other cities - New York, Boston, etc. - that had experienced actions, Cleveland was, at that time, a largely blue-collar, working-class city. For that reason, the Left was salivating at the idea of locating the epicenter in that location.

Alas, the drive to radicalize the proles was largely a failure. Most young people just wanted to get a decent job - which, at that time, meant the auto industry, steel industry, or other factory work. The few locals attending colleges - Cuyahoga Community College or Cleveland State University, primarily - had little time or inclination for revolution. I experienced the organizing efforts of the Workers' Socialist party and other Leftists, and noted the indifference with which they were received.

Only at Case Western Reserve University were the students affluent enough to find the Leftist message appealing. CWRU became a focal point of the Left activity in Cleveland.

My experience was colored by my personal circumstances - in 1974, I was newly married and enjoying the excitement of living downtown, near the exciting night life. By the end of the year, I would have moved to Pittsburgh, PA. Within 2 years, my husband and I had started our family, and we were coping with the chaos such a change naturally produces. We literally had no time for quixotic quests.