The Venceremos Brigade, the Weathermen and Me

Like the pro-Trump rioters I was almost indoctrinated into a violent revolution.

This is the Snarky Sunday edition of Snarky Senior — the newsletter from Erica Manfred, which you can read about here. If you like it and don’t want to miss an issue, you can get it in your inbox by subscribing. This is an expanded version of a story that originally appeared in The Independent. last week.

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When I saw that rampaging mob descend upon the Capitol last Wednesday, I flashed back to my experience on the extreme left in the 1960s.  I knew what mob rule looked like. I also recognized why it was so appealing to people who feel disenfranchised for one reason for another — from the right or the left.

I was in my mid-twenties and I wanted to make a difference. I’d marched on Washington numerous times to end the Vietnam War — a worthy cause if ever there was one — and even climbed over the wall of the Pentagon in 1967 to face a line of armed soldiers.  

Not long after that, I went on the Venceremos Brigade to Cuba, supposedly to cut sugar cane to help the Cuban Revolution. Actually we young American leftists were a propaganda opportunity for the Cuban government.

I came from a long line of leftists. My grandparents were socialists, my parents communists,  and by default, I became a Red Diaper Baby.  I once took as gospel beliefs that now seem quaint: human beings are basically good; if people, not capitalists, owned the means of production, poverty would disappear; economic equality could cure all social ills. Misguided and dangerous though Communism was, the passion for social justice and compassion for working people that it represented is not.  

Despite my innate penchant for free speech and participatory democracy, I thought I’d miraculously find some kind of just, socialist system in Cuba that could serve as a model for the future of the left.   What could I have been thinking?  I knew better from personal experience.   My parents had defended Stalinism way after Stalin’s  crimes had been exposed They were dazzled by what one of my favorite writers, Vivian Gornick, called The Romance of American Communism.  They stuck to their preferred alternative facts, a term that wasn’t even on anyone’s radar yet. 

What I found in Cuba was much darker than I’d ever imagined. Not only was the Cuban government not a people’s paradise, it was a repressive, authoritarian dictatorship that didn’t tolerate dissent. And it was hosting a contingent of Weathermen who tried to radicalize the young Americans who had signed up.

The Weathermen were not then nor had they ever been a group of meteorologists. Named after a line in a Bob Dylan song, “You don’t need a weatherman to know which way the wind blows,” they had emerged from the New Left organization Students for a Democratic Society.

In Cuba, the Weathermen would stay up night after night in their tents, making speeches, haranguing each other with what they called “criticism and self-criticism” sessions (a form of indoctrination they derived from Chairman Mao which involved a lot of speechifying, breast-beating and shaming.) They threw around terms that are familiar today but were unfamiliar then: such as “white privilege” and “class struggle.” The overriding message was: You’re either with us or against us. You either commit to bringing down the fascist, imperialist US government by any means necessary, or you’re a tool of the capitalist ruling class.

One by one, I saw the friends I’d made on the Brigade — including my own boyfriend — drink the Kool Aid and decide to join the Weathermen themselves. I was horrified. Did they know what they were signing on to? Did they realize violent revolution meant they might wind up killing innocent people? (The Weathermen actually did wind up killing innocent people.) How could a tiny revolutionary movement with no broad support get anywhere in a country where they were an unpopular splinter group facing a powerful government?

No one could actually explain how this revolution was supposed to work. But it didn’t matter. The fervor of the moment was what mattered. What mattered was being a true believer.  I could see how heady it all must feel — how intoxicating to believe that you could change the world.  These children of the 60s were rebelling for the hell of it, because it felt good to fantasize about being revolutionaries, to rebel against being white and privileged in America, which came with expectations they didn’t ask for, and a life that seemed stifling.  

Despite their diametrically opposed politics, I recognized the mob at the Capitol on Wednesday: their wild, anarchic fervor to destroy, to kill, to tear it all down. They supposedly were fighting for Trump but they were also engaged in revolution for the hell of it, just like the Weathermen. They were rebelling against the powerlessness of being white and lower class in a society they no longer recognize, a society where they’re not respected, where they feel the power they deserve is being handed to people of color and immigrants they fear and revile.

The thrill of declaring “I matter, I’m strong, I can sit at Nancy Pelosi’s desk because I’m just as good as her” overcomes reason.

I’d seen it in Cuba. The emotional tug of violent fanaticism is profound and overwhelming to vulnerable minds. "We're against everything that's 'good and decent' in honky America," said John Jacobs, one of the Weathermen leaders, at the time. "We will burn and loot and destroy. We are the incubation of your mother's nightmare."

The most frightening aspect of that trip was how alone I was in my skepticism about the Weathermen. I couldn’t find one other person on that trip who agreed that trying to violently overthrow the US government was insanity. That such a thirst for blood had taken over a group of otherwise ordinary, middle-class kids was incomprehensible to me — and scarier than the actual Weathermen themselves.

I’m not sure why I was immune to the Weathermen’s cultish pressure. It might have been my red diaper baby roots, but more likely it was my sense of absurdity. We were separated into groups, or “brigades” to work in the fields. When we marched off every morning, most of the brigades dutifully chanted “Ho Ho Ho Chi Minh! The NLF is Going to Win!” I led my brigade in a rousing chorus of “Follow the Yellow Brick Road.” I was a fan of Abbie Hoffman’s, Steal This Book and the slogan that resonated with me more than all others was “Question Authority.” I suppose I was born a cynical journo.

On the boat on the way back from Cuba, some converts came to their senses. One girl — who had just a few days earlier been ready to make bombs — sounded like she was emerging from a trance. “I’ve changed my mind.  I’m going to medical school when I get back,” she told me.

That trip was the end of my romance with the American far left. I’ve been a member of the Democratic Party ever since.

If Twitter had existed back then, the end result of the Weathermen indoctrination attempts might have been very different. They had no charismatic leader like Castro, and no way to reach the masses, so in the end they went “underground” and started bombing public buildings, including banks, the US Capitol and the Pentagon. And they famously blew themselves up in a Greenwich Village townhouse in a bomb-making accident.

As for the Trumpster mob, one can only hope they’ll lose their fervor once their inciter-in-chief is out of office. But whether or not that happens, we’re all responsible for defending this fragile democracy that we’ve kept going for 200 years.

My motto? Never join a group that is planning to use violence in defense of “freedom.”

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