I'm on a roll with great books atm. This is one where I think pretty much everyone on here would get something out of it. Here's the blurb to sum it up better than I can.
"he Weathermen. The Symbionese LiberationArmy. The FALN. The Black Liberation Army.The names seem quaint now, when not forgotten altogether. But there was a stretch of time in America, during the 1970s, when bombings by domestic underground groups were a daily occurrence. The FBI combated these groups and others as nodes in a single revolutionary underground, dedicated to the violent overthrow of the American government.
The FBI s response to the leftist revolutionary counterculture has not been treated kindly by history, and in hindsight many of its efforts seem almost comically ineffectual, if not criminal in themselves. But part of the extraordinary accomplishment of Bryan Burrough s Days of Rage is to temper those easy judgments with an understanding of just how deranged these times were, how charged with menace. Burrough re-creates an atmosphere that seems almost unbelievable just forty years later, conjuring a time of native-born radicals, most of them nice middle-class kids, smuggling bombs into skyscrapers and detonating them inside the Pentagon and the U.S. Capitol, at a Boston courthouse and a Wall Street restaurant packed with lunchtime diners radicals robbing dozens of banks and assassinating policemen in New York, San Francisco, Atlanta. The FBI, encouraged to do everything possible to undermine the radical underground, itself broke many laws in its attempts to bring the revolutionaries to justice often with disastrous consequences. "
Hes' just talking about the Weathermen atm. I knew of the SDS already but didn't know anything about that going on to be the Weathermen. It's insane how amateurish the whole thing was. Statements that don't mean anything and are barely backed up by anything either, and yet Nixon was terrified of them. He was certain they were going to be the start of a revolution starting with him being assassinated.
Comparing those guys to what he Black Panthers were doing for a time seems almost laughable. Bring on the rest of the book.