Ted Gold and the Jews of Weatherman, Part 1

 

Townhouse explosion in Greenwich Village, 1970

Ted Gold was a Jewish member of Weatherman, the Communist terror group of the late 1960s and 70s, which was a radical spin-off from the Students for a Democratic Society (SDS). Gold is best known for perishing in the dramatic explosion in the New York townhouse caused by Weatherman’s ignorance of how to build a powerful bomb that explodes when desired and not before. His real importance, however, lies not in his spectacular demise, but rather in his frank public call for a communist dictatorship in this country, run by a revolutionary committee from the Third World. Consistent with the thesis that Jews place a high value on group interests, Gold worked unwaveringly within a mainstream Jewish subculture against Whites and White power, the enemy whose destruction many Jews thought would advance their own influence and power.

Gold’s Early Years

Gold was born in New York City in December 1947. His father was a doctor and his mother a professor at Columbia University. His parents were classic liberals of the era; his father worked for civil rights in the South and volunteered his medical services on behalf of the poor on the East Side. The family lived on the Upper West Side, and were generally considered as upper middle class.1

As a child, Ted played stickball with his father and became an avid sports fan. He earned his way into a top high school, Stuyvesant, where he graduated 212 in a class of 699, with an 89% average. (The Weathermen are fond of describing each other as “brilliant,” but 89% is a bit removed from brilliant.) He joined the track team, the Stamp Club, and the History and Folklore Society and was also “politically active” in the civil rights movement, helping to set up a chapter of “Friends of SNCC” (Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee), which provided material support for civil rights workers. (Have you ever heard of a gentile who was so politically active in high school?) Gold’s parents also sent him to summer “camp,” Camp Webatuck, whose clientele was basically red diaper babies. I send my son to camp, where he exerts himself physically and comes home enthralled with the joys of athletic competition and boyish camaraderie. Camp Webatuck was for socialization in Leftist ideology, complete with Woody Guthrie music: “labor songs, unstructured hours, muted Marxist rhetoric.”2

By 1963, Gold was very pro-Castro. He was sixteen. He loved the Yankees, the Knicks, and a Communist dictatorship.

University Years: SDS

Gold entered prestigious Columbia University in the fall of 1964. There he became even more politically active. He and his new friends, including David Gilbert (also Jewish), were inflamed about the civil rights movement, the Vietnam War, and U.S. imperialism. He helped Gilbert “educate” and “organize” other students about these issues. Gold joined SDS, the largest American left-wing organization after the steep decline of the Old Left. The leadership of SDS, especially in Columbia, was heavily Jewish, of course.3 Thus, Gold left his Jewish home to enter Columbia University, where most if not all his friends were Jewish, where a large number of faculty were Jewish, and he joined a leftist political organization whose leadership was almost wholly Jewish.

In 1967, Gold became vice-chairman of the Columbia SDS chapter. The chairman was his friend and roommate, Ted Kaptchuk (also Jewish). Gold, Gilbert, and Kaptchuk were moderates intent on building up the organization through education and patient work. They, with most other SDS members, wanted to build a large movement that could force change on America and end the Vietnam War. However, Mark Rudd’s more radical group within the Columbia chapter, dubbed the “Action Faction,” aggressively pushed Gold and his compadres aside in the winter of 1967–68, and took control of the chapter. In the spring of 1968 Rudd—also Jewish; original name Rudnitsky—proceeded to lead a brazen student takeover of the University. Gold played a role in the takeover, but was not yet among the hardline militants. In the course of the revolt, however, Gold reportedly grew attracted to Rudd’s flamboyant revolutionary style, and became convinced of the political value of violence. His transformation from mild-mannered leftist “organizer” to (literal) bomb-throwing Communist revolutionary had begun.4

Weatherman

In the summer of 1969, the radical leaders of the Columbia strike, along with like-minded SDS agitators from the Midwest—among them the now-famous Bill Ayers—forced a break with the more moderate mass of SDSers. They dubbed themselves “Weatherman” after a Bob Dylan song. John Jacobs (who wrote their manifesto “You Don’t Need a Weatherman to Tell Which Way the Wind Blows”), Mark Rudd, and Bernardine Dorhn were the most prominent leaders of the new faction. Jacobs was a Jew and Dohrn had a Jewish father, original name Ohrnstein. Gold never became a leader of the group, being overshadowed by the dominant trio, yet he wholeheartedly threw in his lot with them.

The Weathermen were angry about what they saw as U.S. imperialist rule over much of the world, and in particular about the Vietnam War, which they labelled an unjust war against the Vietnamese people and another facet of U.S. imperialism. The salient point of U.S. imperialism, they held, was its racism: Whites were dominating much of the world and living the good life off the stolen resources of the non-Whites. Moreover, it was not just the White power structure: all American Whites, even blue-collar workers, were complicit in this racist system, benefiting from it and essentially supporting it. The Weathermen hated Whites with a virulent intensity, and they campaigned against—perhaps you have encountered this term—“White privilege.” (The modern theory of “White privilege” derives from Theodore Allen, a Communist non-Jew, and the Jew Noel Ignatiev, whose work was very influential with the New Left.5) The Weathermen conceived their role as working to initiate a struggle on U.S. soil to join the worldwide revolutionary struggle against White colonial domination, with the goal of overthrowing the U.S. government and establishing a communist state.

Ah, sweet utopia! The Weathermen thought that provocative, violent street actions would win them adherents and lead to a successful revolution. This strategy was almost wholly rejected even by the larger world of the New Left, but a few hundred Weathermen embraced it fanatically.6

Weatherman, while operating within the larger Marxist worldview of “oppression,” “imperialism,” and “exploitation,” transferred their agent of revolution from the proletariat (which was too White and satisfied to participate in their program) to the Blacks and coloreds of the world — to the groups they considered most likely to rain destruction down upon the hated Whites. Of course, all the “victim” groups that the Left agitates for are merely means to the end, which is, seizing power. This point was openly conceded by various radical groups in the New Left, with their slogan, “the issue is not the issue.” Rudd says of the results of the Columbia University student strike: “most important, thousands of people had become radicalized. That was our biggest victory, the goal SDS had set for itself years before we even knew about IDA [Institute of Defense Analysis documents] and the gym [the two issues he used as a pretext]. We wanted to build the movement, and we succeeded.”7 The New Leftist Mike Goldfield wrote, “You have to realize that the issue didn’t matter. The issues were never the issues. You could have been involved with the Panthers, the Weatherpeople . . . SNCC, SDS. It didn’t really matter what. It was the revolution that was everything.”8

It is easy to see what advantages the Weathermen saw in destroying the U.S. government (the “White power structure”): total, unrestricted revolutionary power. It would also provide opportunity for revenge. The unbridled anger of Weatherman at “White privilege” clearly reveals this motivation. Moral theology teaches that anger is an emotion that demands external expression in revenge or punishment. Kevin MacDonald testified that among the leftist Jewish coterie he experienced at the University of Wisconsin in the 1960s there was “a strong desire for bloody, apocalyptic revenge against the entire social structure.”9 This desire for revenge has a long history in Jewish relations vis-à-vis the outer world.

In any case, the Weathermen launched their program with an ill-considered (to put it mildly) “National Action” slated for October 1969 in Chicago. They planned to muster thousands, maybe tens of thousands, of angry young people to revolt in the streets of the Windy City. Mayor Daley’s city. He of the muscular police force. Weatherman printed thousands of leaflets announcing their plan, and then blew up a statue dedicated to policemen on the eve of the action. Mayor Daley and his police reacted accordingly. When the Weathermen mobilized in Lincoln Park with helmets and clubs, they were badly shaken at the sight of the pitiful few who marshalled with them. Most of the Weathermen were present, but only a few score of outsiders. After months of agitating and leafleting, virtually no one had joined them. Practically everybody was repulsed by their arrogance and over-the-top militancy. Nevertheless, after speeches by Dohrn and others, they raced out of the park smashing windows and attacking the police. They were shot, beaten, and arrested for their pains. They had to fork out a fortune in bail money and face indictments for rioting. Everybody but Weatherman could see it was lunacy, but they carried on, labeling it a victory because they showed their bravery (true), and because the example of their fanaticism would draw crowds of recruits (false).

They did draw the conclusion that such street actions were unsustainable. The leaders met and decided to go “underground” and begin guerrilla warfare. In America. To bring down the state. A state that spent billions a year on its military. One explanation for this decision—which needs explaining—might be that they were reading a lot of Marx and Mao and consuming a good deal of acid. Not a great combination, for sure.

To prepare for their guerrilla campaign, Weatherman held a “war council” in Flint, Michigan, in late December 1969. The freaks dubbed it a “wargasm.”10 The gathering became notorious for Bernardine Dorhn’s disgusting acclamation of the then-recent Manson murders in California. The reason for her glee? White people had been slaughtered. She assumed they were guilty of profiting from White “imperialism.” She lauded the killers’ stabbing a fork into a victim’s stomach, and the Weathermen walked around for weeks giving each other the “fork salute,” four fingers held aloft. At this council, amid other bizarre scenes—mass karate exercises, frenzied hopping and chanting in unison, sexual orgies, discussions concerning the revolutionary value of killing White babies— the Weatherman made speeches and cavorted before the assembly. In a little-remarked oration, Gold bluntly described Weather’s vision for the future of America: when the revolution succeeded, the Weathermen would erect an “agency of the people of the world” to exercise power here.

At this point, someone in the audience exhibited some seeming good sense; he or she confronted Gold: “In short, if the people of the world succeed [in making the revolution], then the Vietnamese and Africans and the Chinese are gonna move in and run things for White America. … There will have to be more repression than ever against White people.” Chillingly, Gold replied, “Well, if it will take fascism, we’ll have to have fascism”11 — i.e., a repressive regime: in this case, a communist dictatorship. How ironic. Gold had now reached the culmination of his career, having passed from the “participatory democracy” of early SDS, to the fundamental societal change of generic revolution (the Stones’ Street Fightin’ Man of 1968), to the maximum overthrow of the government and communist dictatorship. Yet the enemy had remained fixed through each phase: White people

Gold and the other Weatherman leaders understood that such an international dictatorship over the United States would entail massive repression of Whites. The supposed evil of White “imperialism”—and the impossibility of White redemption, another Weather doctrine—was the whole reason for the revolution. Mark Rudd later commented, “we had determined that there were no innocent Americans, at least no White ones.”12 Once the revolution was enthroned, ipso facto the next step was liquidation, repression, and mass internment. Larry Grathwohl, who infiltrated Weatherman for the FBI, described Weather’s plans as including “education camps,” liquidation of all those who had held power in the “imperialist” power structure, and total thought control.13 A Weather triumph would have followed the exact pattern of Bolshevik Russia: massive expropriation and repression, followed by massive resistance, followed by even more massive repression. Cue the return of leather-jacketed coke-snorting Jewish secret police rounding up the gentiles for rape, torture and murder in dank abattoirs. It happened, look it up.14

Go to Part 2.

69 replies

Comments are closed.