The award-winning 1966 film Battle of Algiers documented the explosion of terror and violence that paved the road for Algerian independence. As Africa’s largest country…and rich in natural gas…Algeria was a choice plum for European imperialism. In 1830, under the shakiest of pretenses, the French invaded and within a few years 825,000 Algerians (one third the population) were dead.
The French confiscated choice lands and awarded real estate to European immigrants who arrived in droves, eventually becoming the majority in the capital city of Algeria. Citizenship was granted to Europeans, Christians and Jews, but Muslims were denied. The Jews became the go-between Muslims and French, and both sides initially tried to recruit them, although most sided with France, something they may have regretted after Vichy France began persecuting Jews. The Nazis built an ideological bridge between fascism and Arab nationalism fueled by mutual hatred. When the British and Americans landed in Africa, the Vichy forces initially tried to repel the Allies, but were eventually allowed to switch sides, greatly angering the free French forces led by Charles de Gaulle.
On May 8, 1945, the same day Nazi Germany surrendered, Muslim activists held victory marches that provoked violent responses from French occupiers. The ensuing street massacres put a lid on the simmering independence movement for almost a decade, but in 1954, the movement resurfaced in force through the appearance of the National Liberation Front (FLN), a merger of Communist and Islamic ideologies. The FLN began a savage campaign of assassinating Harkies and their dependents. Harkies were Muslims serving in the French army who acted as police. As many as 150,000 may have been murdered. Harkies and their families weren’t the only casualties as the French launched a counter attack on Muslims. As many as 700,000 perished and two million displaced during the eight years of unrelenting violence.
Shot in black & white, Battle of Algiers had the look and feel of a behind-the-scenes newsreel. Rather than take sides or mine the subject for emotional response, it coolly revealed turpitude and affinity for violence shared by both sides. Within a few months, the FLN became the template upon which the savage Weather Underground was created. Strangely, the leaders of that movement (which effectively destroyed the non-violent Students for a Democratic Society), were sons and daughters of the super wealthy, although they rounded up a handful of acolytes by preaching a twisted form of self-hatred for the American middle class, an indoctrination accompanied with drug-fueled orgies designed to break down individuality and moral codes. It had all the makings of a intelligence mind-control operation.
After the Weather Underground declared war on America and went into hiding, they divided into cells exactly like the FLN and began releasing communiqués exactly like the FLN, and informed their ranks millions would soon die in the coming war. Many of their parents would be forced into concentration camps once the revolution succeeded. The war was quietly launched with some small pipe bombs planted in police parking lots in the Bay Area, set to go-off during lunch hour. Although they never took credit for these two bombings, rest assured they were most likely the initial attempts to spark war between police and the emerging counterculture. Like all Communist revolutions, the Weather Underground cell structure was designed to protect the organization’s leaders from exposure once the killing began. In truth, the Weather Underground cells had been penetrated on inception, although the many FBI informants planted in the lower ranks, had no idea the key lawyer running and funding the organization had his own mysterious connections to counterintelligence.
The springboard used to catapult the organization into the national spotlight was the murder of Fred Hampton by Chicago police connected to counterintelligence. Not so coincidentally, Bernadine Dohrn was immediately on the scene leading the press on tours of the murder site (strangely left wide open by Chicago police) while giving lectures on the need for reprisals, despite Hampton’s total dedication to non-violence. Hampton was rising inside the Black Panthers, the most respected black rights organization, and leading the membership away from armed insurrection and toward what Hampton dubbed “the rainbow coalition.” Hampton was the biggest detractor of the Weather Underground inside the counterculture and dubbed the group as insanely “Custeristic.” So you can see how killing Hampton served the interest of the Weather Underground while also allowing them to exploit his death as a fulcrum for convincing clueless teenagers to support violence as the only logical response.
The blood bath they plotted was severely hampered, however, when their first major bomb blew up while being constructed in New York City and killed three of their own. The mega-bomb had been planned for a cadet dance at Fort Dix but instead destroyed a million-dollar townhouse in Greenwich Village. The deaths sent shivers through the organization, and the leaders rapidly dialed back on future murder plots, although the “kill-cop” rhetoric continued unabated and infected many others. Eventually the Weather Underground would be responsible for four police murders, but played a role instigating at least fifteen others fomented by the United Freedom Front (1), Symbionese Liberation Army (1), and Black Liberation Army (13). But that’s just the tip-of-the-iceberg, because our interventions in Indochina resulted in 3.5 million deaths, and many of those could have been avoided had the senseless war ended sooner. Had a vast majority of Americans rejected the war early on, President Nixon would have been forced to dial back. But by presenting the counterculture in such an intensively negative light, the Weather Underground made sure middle America sided with the President’s reasonable requests for the rule of law and order to prevail.
Even stranger is the fact that after Timothy Leary was renditioned back to a high security cell and held in isolation while enduring the most savage interrogations of his life, he caved and told everything he knew about the Weather Underground that had broken him out of jail, provided him with a fake passport and whisked him off to Algeria to join forces with Eldridge Cleaver in fomenting a wave of violence. They even had put out a press release claiming Leary was now “armed and dangerous” and ready to join the ranks of the immortal cop killers, unrepentant murderers the Weather Underground lionized. Strange that upon his caving, the word immediately went out that Leary was a stool pigeon. Predictably, the head of the National Lawyers’ Guild called for someone to assassinate Leary, a feat designed to send a message to future traitors to the Communist cause. Unpredictably, Leary was taken out of prison and driven around the country so he could point out the safe houses he’d stayed at while describing the occupants in great detail. During this escapade, a revolver placed on the floor of the vehicle by the FBI agent in the passenger’s seat slid back into Leary’s view, and he realized he could easily pick it up and assassinate both cops. Fortunately, he declined to touch the weapon, and that likely saved his life, for I feel sure had he picked up that gun, he would have been instantly killed on the spot. Strangely, although Leary spilled all the beans he could, his confession never amounted to an arrest or interrogation of anyone. Soon the principle leaders of the terrorist Weather Underground would emerge from hiding, but only after all the FBI files on them mysteriously disappeared, which allowed them to accept high-paying gigs at major universities. Now retired, they continue to collect pensions.
Meanwhile, there’s an attempt to whitewash the Weather Underground as being led by earnest radicals, instead of exposing the organization as the state-sponsored counterterrorism psyop it really was. The purpose of the organization was not to foment a revolution as that concept never had a prayer of success due to their tactics. The real purpose was to frighten middle America away from supporting the peace movement sweeping the country, something they were easily able to accomplish with some random bombings and advocation of Charles Manson and Sirhan Sirhan as counterculture heroes. But there’s a karmic load that accompanies violence and a day of reckoning is coming. You only have to turn this log over to see the vermin hiding underneath.
The proletariat must organize lawyers in various countries who sympathize with the liberation struggle. Together with the legal bureau of the International Red Aid (IRA), organize in every country, in particular England, the USA and Japan, and strive to enlarge the number of new cadres.
IRA directive issued in at the Second International Conference, Moscow, 1927.
Admission to the bar is not just about training, but moral character and a sacred oath to uphold the Constitution. Participation in conspiracies involving subversion, violence and terror is a gross violation of this oath. The National Lawyers Guild was founded by Communist Party members to spread a Communist agenda. Of course, propaganda was designed to make the Guild appear as a do-gooder champion of the little guy. Behind the scenes a different story was unfolding.
It would be naive not to realize the Communist Party has been dotted with spooks of all persuasions since inception. They did not provoke the revolution in Russia, they subverted a democratic/socialist government that had emerged. The first act of the revolution had been to abolish the death penalty, as the Czars secret police had murdered so many. The first act of the Communists (Trotsky, Lenin, Stalin) was to reassert the death penalty and use it on the Czar and his family, including the children. This is all you need to know about the origins of Communism.
My thesis is that a group of secret agents were sent into this orbit for the purpose of managing counterintelligence operations. These lawyers were pretending to submit to Communist dogmas, but were really spooks reporting to the highest levels of the national security state.
In the 1960s, the primary mission of this operation was to outflank the emerging peace and freedom movement by fomenting acts of terror that would drive the population toward the political right.
The spearhead of this infiltration was Louis Boudin (working with John Reed and Jay Gladstone), and later passed to Boudin’s nephew, Leonard, whose daughter Kathy would join the Weather Underground, assist the assassination of three police in a failed bank robbery, and wind up a tenured professor at Colombia University. Go figure.
In 2008, Boudin was Sheinberg Scholar-in-Residence at New York University’s School of Law, lecturing on “the politics of parole and re-entry.”
The takeover of the Russian revolution by a small cadre funded by Wall Street was mirrored by the Weather Underground takeover of the SDS funded by the National Lawyers Guild.