Review: The Trial of the Chicago 7
“Aren’t the Chicago 7 all Jews?”
President Richard Nixon
Richard Nixon was wrong when he assumed that every member of the Chicago 7 was Jewish, but he was close enough. The 1969 trial of seven leftwing activists for inciting a riot at August 1968’s Democratic National Convention was an intensely Jewish moment in American history. Of the seven activists on trial, three were Jews (Abbie Hoffman, Jerry Rubin, Lee Weiner), and a further two (Tom Hayden and David Dellinger) lived their lives in a heavily Jewish milieu and dedicated themselves to Jewish causes. The judge in the trial, Julius Hoffman, was Jewish, as were both defense attorneys (William Moses Kunstler and Leonard Weinglass) and one of the prosecutors (Richard Schultz). For several reasons, I’ve always regarded the ultimately chaotic and clownish trial of the Chicago 7 as nothing more than a piece of degenerate Jewish political performance art, demoralising to the American justice system and energising to a new generation of Judeo-Anarchist activists. These shambolic events of 1968/9 have now been disinterred for Netflix’s propagandistic and revisionist account of the episode, The Trial of the Chicago 7, in which Jewish writer/director Aaron Sorkin attempts to refashion its “lessons” for application in Trump’s America. The result is both historically disingenuous and artistically bland.
Sorkin’s The Trial of the Chicago 7 opens with a montage of eight [including Bobby Seale] activists preparing to protest at the Democratic National Convention in Chicago. There are several clear dogwhistles to Black Lives Matter, with barely veiled justifications of violence, including an exchange in the opening montage between Black Panther Leader Seale and a woman named Sondra. Sondra attempts to reason with Seale that his presence as a Black leader at a potentially violent rally will be taken “out of context” by “every White person in America.” As Seale persists in his preparations, Sondra begins to invoke “Dr King” before Seale responds:
[King] Is dead. He has a dream? Now he has a fuckin’ bullet in his head. Martin’s dead, Malcolm’s dead, Medgar’s dead, Bobby’s dead, Jesus is dead. They tried it peacefully, we gonna try something else.
This “something else” isn’t explored in any significant way because the film proceeds from the understanding that the violence and unrest in Chicago was purely the result of police brutality and bad local government. Painfully unaware of itself, the film sits uneasily in the aftermath of catastrophic policing and government during Charlottesville’s 2016 rally, an event that has unfairly gone down in history and popular consciousness as an exemplar of a “bad protest.” The ghost of Charlottesville, for me at least, hangs heavily over The Trial of the Chicago 7, highlighting its hypocrisy and lending the film a somewhat satirical or parodic quality that is entirely unintended and which, to my mind, is never shaken off.
The necessity of portraying the radical defendants as sympathetic has required a remarkable taming of all the characters involved, to the extent that all appear innocent to the point of mediocrity. Almost everyone in the film is two-dimensional with the possible exception of Hoffman and Rubin who are nevertheless portrayed as harmless, big-hearted clowns. Noted in history for their vulgarity and aggression (Abbie Hoffman declared of his intentions on going to Chicago:” We are dirty, smelly, grimy and foul. … We will piss and shit and fuck in public. … We will be constantly stoned or tripping on every drug known to man”), Hoffman and Rubin are reduced by Sorkin to rather bloodless and timid comic relief. We are given no indication as to the motivations or life trajectories of either Jewish activist, or indeed any of the Chicago 7, presumably because we are meant to assume that they were simply “good people” who wanted only to end the war.
As The Times of Israel has noted, the film represents a trial bleached of its intensely Jewish qualities. I’ve written previously that the 1960s New Left was indisputably a Jewish subculture. Jerry Rubin, given no backstory in Sorkin’s film, had “solidly Jewish roots” and after receiving his baccalaureate “he attended Hebrew University and later returned to Israel to spend a year there with his brother.”[1] His ‘Youth International Party,’ or Yippies, was co-founded with fellow Jewish radicals Abbie Hoffman and Paul Krassner. He married a Jewish woman, Mimi Leonard. Rubin conceived of himself as being at war with the White race. By his own admission, Rubin stated that in forming the ‘Yippie’ movement he had “dropped out of the white race and the Amerikan [sic] nation.”[2] Rubin believed that Jews in particular were “obligated to resist the fascism of whiteness.”[3] He was motivated by narcissistic notions of Jewish moral superiority, indicating a strong identification with his fellows Jews. In a book he wrote while in County Jail, he noted that “It is the Jew who should always be on the side of the poor, the oppressed, the underdog, the wretched of the earth. … And thousands of ex-Amerikan, ex-Jews are. Three of the kids killed at Kent State were Jews. An unusually high proportion of hippies and revolutionaries are Jews.”[4]
Despite having no attachment to the religious content of Judaism, Abbie Hoffman was undoubtedly also deeply connected to his Jewishness and the “invisible” Jewish subculture. He attended Brandeis University (mentioned in the film) at a time when it was basically a refuge for blacklisted Jewish academics, such as the Frankfurt School’s Herbert Marcuse, that had been rooted out from Harvard and MIT as ‘subversive’ by McCarthy. Brandeis survived the purge unscathed because McCarthy refused to target the university for fear of being branded anti-Semitic.[5] One of Hoffman’s psychology professors was Abraham Maslow, who imparted to the young Hoffman that society needed changing, and that nonconformity was “a positive sign of mental health.” Hoffman adored Maslow, later reflecting on his Brandeis days by stating, “Most of all I loved Abe Maslow.” During Hoffman’s attendance at Brandeis, Maslow formed a committee of correspondence which widened the circle of Jewish intellectuals who would essentially incubate the younger generation of Jewish radicals who would comprise the new Jewish subculture. As Gerald Sorin puts it, “Jewish overrepresentation in New Left movements looked like Jewish overrepresentation in old left movements.”[6] Maslow began corresponding with fellow Jewish gurus Eric Fromm, Kurt Goldstein, Paul Goodman, Ashley Montagu, and David Reisman among others, and together they founded The Journal of Humanistic Psychology. Hoffman, awed by these fellow-ethnic subculture figures, referred to them as “giants” who “walked in the space of my intellectual world.”[7] Hoffman was clearly engrossed in non-religious expressions of Jewish identity and in the Jewish subculture, writing in his autobiography that “I came into this world acutely aware of being Jewish and I’m sure I’ll go out that way.”[8]
None of this is probed in the film, which altogether dodges the prospect of exploring Jewish radicalism in the New Left. What is offered instead is a watered down, ethnically ambiguous, court procedural designed to act as a feel-good movie for comfortable, immature, middle-class leftists who daydream about sticking it to an image of “the Man” that hasn’t had any relevance for over 50 years.
After the opening montage, the film shifts forwards to the trial, returning during key witness testimonies to important moments from the protest. This has the doubly negative effect of both stalling any potential for building tension within the courtroom setting, and splintering any coherent narrative of how and why the protest/riot was planned and executed. John N. Mitchell, the Attorney General, appoints Tom Foran and Richard Schultz as the prosecutors, while all the defendants except Seale are represented by William Kunstler and Leonard Weinglass (played by the Jewish actor Ben Shenkman). Schultz, who in reality was highly ambitious and quite aggressive during the trial [transcripts are available here], is played by the Jewish actor Joseph Gordon-Levitt in a mawkishly written role as very much in sympathy with the protestors, and as clashing with an oppressive and legally questionable WASPish system that he has reluctantly become entangled with. The overall impression, despite Sorkin’s bleaching of Jewishness from the trial, is that of brave, big-hearted Jews and Blacks against cruel WASPs and violent police.
Judge Julius Hoffman, played here by Frank Langella (not Jewish), demonstrates clear bias for the prosecution as well as total incompetence, bad hearing, and poor memory. The trial is constantly interrupted by Hoffman’s inadequacies and biases (exaggerated in the film), by shouts from Abbie Hoffman and Jerry Rubin, and by the interventions of the defense lawyers. In reality, the leftwing audience in the gallery during the trial was notoriously noisy, violent, and difficult, which caused many breaks in proceedings. In the film, however, the gallery is extremely well-behaved with Hoffman himself responsible for most of the disruptions. Judge Hoffman, who is as two-dimensional as every other character in the film, is used mostly as a foil for the childish activities of Abbie Hoffman and Rubin, who show total contempt for the entire judicial process. Hoffman, inept more than malevolent, makes for a poor villain, but since his worst excesses are intercut with faceless, helmeted police wielding batons, we are presumably supposed to perceive him as the representative of “the System” against which the Chicago leftists are “bravely” warring against. Notably stripped from the film is any reference to the real-life exchanges between Abbie Hoffman and Julius Hoffman that involved Jewishness. In particular, Abbie Hoffman accused the judge of betraying Jewish interests, calling out in Yiddish during the trial that Julius Hoffman was a ““Shande fur de Goyim [Disgrace for the Gentiles]” a “Front man for the WASP elite,” and a “disgrace to the Jews, you could have served Hitler better.” During one episode, Hoffman and Rubin entered the courtroom in judges robes. This is repeated in the film with very one notable omission — in reality the robes had yellow stars on them. Sorkin’s omission can be attributed to the desire to clean the film of explicit allusions to Jewishness, and possibly also the desire to absolve the pair of a tastelessness that was in fact their hallmark.
In his The Ordeal of Civility (1974, 193) John Murray Cuddihy notes the overtly ethnic subplot of the trial, particularly the infighting between defendant Abbie Hoffman and Judge Julius Hoffman, the former representing the children of the Eastern European immigrant generation that tended toward political radicalism, and the latter representing the older, more assimilated German-Jewish establishment.
Seale’s attorney is not present due to illness, but Seale is repeatedly told by Judge Hoffman that he can’t represent himself. The constant silencing of Seale, historically accurate, along with some broader subtle commentary on police violence against Blacks, is the only clearly sustained narrative of the film, and was the only aspect I found remotely interesting. Deprived of legal assistance, Seale takes informal advice from his associate Fred Hampton. Seale finds out during the trial that Hampton has been killed during a police raid. This prompts Seale to become more assertive in pushing for his right to defend himself. Judge Hoffman responds by having Seale taken to another room, beaten, and returned gagged and shackled. The sequence is milked in the film for propaganda value, omitting the fact that, in reality, Seale had violently lunged at prosecutor Schultz and that it was the plan of the defendants to have Seale “bound and gagged so they could demonstrate to the world that the federal courts were racist.” The scene ends with Hoffman, losing control of the courtroom, taking Schultz’s suggestion of declaring Seale’s case a mistrial.
Aside from the propagandistic treatment of Seale’s experiences, The Trial of the Chicago 7 lacks authenticity and emotion. With Seale released from the trial, the film loses even more narrative direction. Kunstler and Weinglass decide to call Ramsey Clark, who was Attorney General during the riots, as a witness. Although Clark is willing to co-operate, and is willing to go on record that violence was started by the police, Judge Hoffman refuses to let the jury hear his testimony. Dellinger reacts furiously, punching a bailiff, resulting in his arrest, but since Dellinger has hardly featured in the film apart from waving to his wife and son, it’s difficult to care. There is a last-minute scramble to introduce tension by focusing on the discovery of a tape in which Hayden is heard, prior to the riot, declaring “Let blood spill everywhere.” The sequence is treated in a very ham-fisted way by Sorkin, and is destroyed by being explored, yet again, in flashbacks. Bringing the movie to a close, Hayden uses his closing statement by naming over 4,500 soldiers that died in the Vietnam War since the trial began, in spite of the judge’s instructions and objections. This prompts many in the court room to stand and cheer, and even Schultz joins in. This closing sequence prompted the real-life Schultz to comment: “That never happened. It was a total fantasy for Hollywood.”
The film closes by listing the various convictions for contempt handed down by Judge Hoffman, all of which were later overturned by other courts. We then find out that Tom Hayden went on to become a politician, and that Jerry Rubin became a stock trader. The seeming incongruity in these career choices, and the feeling that it undoes the trite anti-establishment theme we’ve been presented for two hours, embodies the fact that, stripped of the dirty reality, this is a film without any clear message at all. It isn’t focused enough to be an anti-war film, it hints at commentary on police violence but never directly engages with it, and it never explores the motivations of the radicals and so can never explicitly endorse them. In this sense, Sorkin’s movie is a perfect work of filmic neoliberalism, capable of digesting leftist radicalism and regurgitating it in a more palatable, marketable fashion while ignoring its glaring contradictions and ethnic identifications. Sorkin’s film has absolutely nothing to do say about the way in which these “radicals” became part of the System, or rather that they became an iteration of a new system of control via their participation in politics, the stock market, and, in Lee Weiner’s case, the ADL.
Weiner, a sociology professor and the last surviving Jewish member of the Chicago 7, has perhaps two lines in the entire film. Known in reality as the “quiet one,” this is perhaps justified, but his post-trial career trajectory is probably the most interesting. A 1976 article in Mother Jones reported that Weiner “is said to be somewhere near New York, leading a quiet life, sorting out what being Jewish means to him.”[9] Weiner in fact began working for the ADL where, according to Spencer Tucker, he has been directing “special projects” for years.[10] When contacted in 2007 by Jeff Kisseloff for a phone interview, Weiner responded that he was “raising money to fight hate.”[11] So Weiner, the “free speech” radical has become a key member of one of the most significant censorship organisations in the world.
Never explicit, it’s in the contradictions and subtleties of the film that it’s Jewish subtexts are revealed. I found it especially interesting that, during a heated exchange between Tom Hayden (played by the very WASPish Eddie Redmayne) and Abbie Hoffman (Sacha Baron-Cohen), there is a very prominent poster of Hitler in the background (with the caption “Visit Chicago” above it). The actual history of the poster is a play on contemporary accusations that Chicago Mayor Richard J. Daley was an authoritarian anti-Semite (he did in fact at one point shout at Senator Abraham Ribicoff: “Fuck you, you Jew son of a bitch, you lousy motherfucker go home.”) In any case, Hayden stands directly in front of the Hitler poster, while Rubin, Hoffman, and Weiner stand on the other side of the room, giving the momentary impression of Jews vs WASP/Hitler. This takes on greater significance when one considers that there was some real-life antagonism between Jewish leftists and non-Jewish radicals like Hayden. Hayden was known to have disparaged “the New York intellectual culture,” prompting Irving Howe, especially worried by New Left anti-Zionism, to denounce Hayden for his own authoritarian proclivities and to suggest that the New Left was becoming more “Christian” and “utterly American” (his most scathing insult) due to declining Jewish influence.[12] Howe needn’t have worried — Hayden went on to work closely with Jews to innovate Holocaust reparations legislation in California (Holocaust Victims Insurance Act), to be celebrated by the Jewish National Fund for his support for Israel, to employ a Jewish press secretary (Ralph Brave), and to help pioneer “Holocaust education.”
In some ways, it’s the chaos underlying both the real trial, and its filmic representation, that embody the Jewishness of it best. As I wrote at the outset, I’ve always regarded the ultimately chaotic and clownish trial of the Chicago 7 as nothing more than a piece of degenerate Jewish political performance art, demoralising to the American justice system and energising to a new generation of Judeo-Anarchist activists. There was ultimately no meaning to the trial, just as there is no meaning to the film, other than directionless Jewish protest. As Jon Stratton has noted, echoing the comments of John Murray Cuddihy in The Ordeal of Civility, regarding the historical and ethnic issues underpinning the real trial:
The point I want to make here about these people, about the personas they presented which merged with the performances they undertook, is that they lacked civility. Their disruption was, at bottom, a public unsettling of the civility that orders American sociality … The Jews’ lack of civility, and therefore the failure of Western people’s attempts to develop reciprocally civil interactions with Eastern European Jews spread shockwaves through nineteenth-century society. In arguing a larger alienation — since the norms of civility merely spell out and specify for face-to-face interaction the more general values of the culture — the failure of civility came to define the “Jewish problem” as this problem reconstituted itself in the era of social modernity.[13]
The trial of the Chicago 7 was ultimately a demonstration of Jewish tastelessness, chaos, and discord in the midst of American society, involving more than the specific antics of Rubin and Hoffman. The entire episode was a demoralising demonstration of Jewish disruption within the legal system, and the fact that basic Western values and modes of behavior have been viewed by Jews as hostile and oppressive. The trial of the Chicago 7, like so much Jewish activism, was essentially a war on civility. The same antagonisms can be seen today in the quintessentially Jewish vulgarity of comedians like Sarah Silverman, in the riots of Antifa, and in the increasing degeneracy of our cultural and political life. The spirit of the trial lives on in the ceaseless absolving of Antifa rioters of any legal responsibility for their violence and vandalism. Today’s Antifa, of course, will be tomorrow’s politicians, stock traders, and ADL speech monitors, certain to reminisce, without the slightest hint of self-awareness, on the good old days when they fought “the Man.” They might even make a film about it.
[1] S.R. Lichter and S. Rothman, ‘Jewish Ethnicity and Radical Culture: A Social Psychological Study of Political Activists,’ Political Psychology, Vol.3, No.1, (Spring 1981), 135.
[2] E. Sundquist, Strangers in the Land: Blacks, Jews, Post-Holocaust America, (Harvard University Press, 2005), 350.
[3] Ibid.
[4] Ibid.
[5] M. Jezer, Abbie Hoffman: American Rebel (Rutgers University Press, 1993), 21.
[6] G. Sorin, Tradition Transformed: The Jewish Experience in America (John Hopkins University Press, 1997), 223.
[7] Jezer, 25.
[8] Ibid, 8.
[9] Mother Jones Magazine, Aug 1976, 8.
[10] S. Tucker, The Encyclopedia of the Vietnam War (ABC-CLIO, 2011), 192.
[11] J. Kisseloff, Generation on Fire: Voices of Protest from the 1960s, An Oral History (University Press of Kentucky, 1997), 83.
[12] E. Lederhendler, New York Jews and the Decline of Urban Ethnicity, 1950-1970 (New York: Syracuse University Press, 2001),198.
[13] J. Stratton, Jewish Identity in Western Pop Culture: The Holocaust and Trauma Through Modernity, (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2008), 182.
Thank you, Andrew Joyce, for a most enlightening review. Now I don’t have to watch the film myself. I appreciated all your insightful factoids. Here’s another one:
Attorney Bill Kuntsler once revealed that he first tried LSD at Woodstock with Abbie Hoffman. Woodstock happened August 15-18, 1969. The first day of the Chicago 7 Trial was September 24, 1969.
When Hoffman took to the stage uninvited at Woodstock to sermonize during a performance by the Who Pete Townsend shouted to him in a language he would understand “Fuck off! Fuck off my fucking stage!” and that might just be the cry of any culture when Tikkun Olun wants to enter if it wants to survive. Look what they have done to America – next stop China.
Jews are a problem, I agree.
I must also say, regrettably and with sadness, that many Blacks are a problem because they reflexively vote for Democrats.
They are often what puts Democrats over the top and keeps out conservatives and good White Christians.
The big Democratic and Black cities are a wreck. In other words, in most cases the officials that Blacks vote for are just plain incompetent and even corrupt and do not improve the life of Blacks.
Blacks are misguided to vote this way, but that’s how they are.
There are simply not enough Blacks who will vote for good people. Blacks are stuck in the belief that they cannot achieve and so they look to Democrats and the government for sympathy and handouts.
I know that many Blacks are not that way but enough are.
And Jews support this too. They’re all wrecking the country.
I wish White Christians in the mainstream media and elected office would tell the truth.
1) Jews are wrecking American culture and getting us into foreign wars.
2) Blacks need to shape up.
“Blacks are stuck in the belief that they cannot achieve.”
Blacks on average cannot achieve due to unfixable biology.
Imagine a sliding scale- blacks at one end, mixed race mulattoes in the middle, and Whites at the other end. The IQ for real blacks is 67, and the brain size for such folks is 5 cubic inches smaller than White brain size. According to Dept of Justice the rate of violent crime is 8 times higher [than for Whites] BUT they are probably counting mixed race as “black”. . .the real crime rate for real blacks- not mixed race mulattoes- must be off the charts, and that may be why it is not available.
That data does not apply to Afro-Americans because the Declaration says ” all men are created equal “.
Many of us have discovered , thanks to the internet , that most people , especially White Christians , are sheeple whom “can’t handle the truth” and instead naively submit to TPTB that deceptively trumps-the-truth . The typically gullible sheeple majorities will mindlessly follow instructions , of their chosenite jewmasters , in submission to a genocidal agenda .
White Christians in the mainstream media? Anyone particular in mind?
I’m drawing a blank.
So true you are. As a Black American I responded on another platform about Joe Scarborough as well as Chelsea Handler criticizing and vilifying Ice Cube or any other Black Celebrity for at least being willing to work with Mr. Trump on an issue pertaining to Black Americans. I have always believed and still do that we as a people in America do ourselves a great disservice by blindly voting Democrat when they (Dems) certainly have done nothing for US. To think that we are all so simple minded that we vote in lockstep is an insult. I personally voted Libertarian these last two general elections to give some support to alternative parties, and do not considerate it a wasted vote. Though many Blacks still fall for the Con, it may just surprise you how many actually do not to save being vilified.
The largest Westernworld ethnic group is White Christian sheeple and that includes the USA .
Sheeple have three salient traits :
1 ) sheeple are normally politicly naive
2 ) sheeple are normally politicly gullible
3 ) sheeple are normally cowardly .
It is most unlikely that the White sheeple majorities will or can solve political problems related to severe governmental opposition to their inalienable right to preserve racial integrity where biblical Christianity has no concept of geneticly disparate people .
Great review. I was actually toying with watching this, due to curiosity about how well they evoked and recreated the era of the late-’60s. The film itself does not sound very good, however, and I will probably pass on it.
This subject of disruption and the end of civility is quite timely given the social media reactions of the Left to our newest Supreme Court Justice.
Very well written and a fascinating read. Thank you for a factual accounting of the history that actually happened.
Hollywood is not reality.
An incisive takedown of the so called Chicago 7, Andrew. Upon reflection, the whole zaney imbroglio brought to mind the stereotypical Jewish behavior that Germany experienced prior to 1933, which was appropriately called ‘Jude verueckt’, or in plain English, Jew crazy.
Those seeking a view from a differing perspective might enjoy reading Miles Mathis’ essay that touches on the main subject. I begin to “get” from the non-posting of other comments of mine, especially those in which I referenced work by Miles Mathis, this is a “non-starter” for the TOO comment board, no matter how relevant. Try, try again!
Excerpt 1.
(Note — Bobby Seale was “Number 8”, omitted from the subsequent trial of the other MAGNIFICENT 7. “One of the Chicago Eight, Bobby Seale—although initially tried with the other seven defendants—was dragged from the courtroom, gagged, tied, and allegedly thrown into jail for contempt. He was then supposed to be retried separately for the original charges. He never was.
Charges for that were dropped, as were murder charges in the New Haven Black Panther case.
Convenient.”)
The 1968 Chicago Eight trials were manufactured from the ground up, although I won’t have
time to prove that in full detail here. If you study them, you will see that for yourself. Go to the
Wikipedia page and see if the story makes any sense. It made no sense then and makes even less sense
now, given the gift of hindsight. Notice for a start that Timothy Leary testified on behalf of the
defendants. Also notice that all charges were dropped on appeal and that the Justice Department
decided not pursue a retrial. Even the contempt charges against Hoffman were dropped, although he
mocked the judge and the proceedings from start to finish. In a real trial, it doesn’t work that way. If
Hoffman had been a real hippie, he would have bought himself years in jail with such antics. All of
Hoffman’s grandstanding was just theater, created for the papers and TV. It was created to make the
hippies or yippies look like a bunch of annoying, loudmouth bums, and it worked. Hoffman was the
kind of guy you hated the moment you saw him: that was why he was hired.
Excerpt 2.
Also remember that Hoffman supposedly got convicted of selling coke soon after that, but skipped bail
and went into hiding for six years. As it turns out, he was hiding in a private resort in up-state New
York. When he gave himself up in 1980, they gave him a one-year sentence, of which he is said to
have served four months. I encourage you to go sell coke, get caught and skip bail: see if you get off
with four months. I would be willing to bet Hoffman didn’t spend one day in jail.
[Addendum April 19, 2017: In support of that, I remind you that the judge in the Chicago Eight trials
was Julius Hoffman. I learned that last night from an old Trivia Pursuit game (first edition). They tell
us there was no relationship between Abbie Hoffman and Julius Hoffman, but that is what they always
say. We have found it is never true. There always is a relationship. However, since Julius Hoffman
has no published genealogy, it is difficult to prove. All his encyclopedia entries suspiciously skip over
his early bio, including his parents. However, his slender bio is still nothing but red flags, including his
early relationship with Richard Daley of Chicago. They were law partners. Of course Daley was a
major crook, sold to us as Irish, but a close ally of the Kennedys regardless. Daley’s genealogy is also
scrubbed, a huge red flag for such a famous person; but we do know he was a Forrestal and a Dunne
(think John Donne). Wikitree would have us believe his paternal grandparents are unknown.
More on Julius Hoffman at link: http://mileswmathis.com/hippie.pdf
A delight to read for those of us who dallied in hippiedom. We participated in an intelligence project, the memory of which appears valuable enough to keep alive to this day! An intelligence test,. if you will.
For your information, Miles Mathis has published a review of the movie, too.
http://mileswmathis.com/sacha.pdf
EXCERPT
As you may know, Netflix just released an Aaron Sorkin film on the Chicago 7 or 8 starring Sacha Baron Cohen as Abbie Hoffman. Given that I know Netflix is an Intel front (of some sort), I wondered how they planned to whitewash Hoffman while maintaining the original project of blackwashing hippies….So I have to admit I was extremely surprised while watching The Trial of the Chicago 7. It was nothing like what I expected it to be. Of course the film has many levels, like anything else, but the top level—which most people will be affected by the most, I think—is pro-hippie, anti-police, anti-government, anti-fratboy, pro-black, anti-judge, anti-FBI and anti-war. In selling that cocktail, the filmmakers also have to sell the Black Panthers and the Yippies and the trials as real, which I imagine was job one. . . but still. Perhaps the biggest surprise was seeing Michael Keaton as retired Attorney General Ramsey Clark admit in sworn testimony the riots in Chicago were caused by the Chicago police. For me, that sort of trumps everything else in the film….
Excellent work, as always by Andrew Joyce. I think there is a general truism about Hollywood: “The more obviously Jewish the movie, the worse it tends to be”.
Good review by Andrew Joyce. Many good quotes. The trial of the Chicago Seven conspirators epitomized “Jewish tastelessness, chaos and discord.”
The riots at the Democratic Party Convention in Chicago in 1968 were a precursor to the riots of this year. It was another “mostly peaceful protest.” It was similar to the torching of our cities and states by Antifa in 2020, except the latter was encouraged and supported by the jew-media and the local authorities, and the material losses were much greater.
The 1969 trial of the Chicago Seven was “a piece of degenerate Jewish political performance art.”
And the 2020 movie of this trial is another example of communist propaganda. No need to see this one.
The antics of the defendants at the Chicago 7 Trail bear some similarity to what took place during the Great Sedition Trial of 1944. The latter was a political show trail of some thirty right-wing ant-interventionists who opposed the war policy of FDR:
https://www.jstor.org/stable/10.1525/sp.2007.54.2.170?seq=1
Thanks for the link. The article is pretty good, once one accepts as inevitable that principled opponents of the monstrous FDR and his even more monstrous war will everywhere be characterized as “far right,” as “extremists,” and as sympathizers with “America’s enemies.”
The excerpt from Francis Biddle’s memoirs describing FDR’s conduct at Cabinet meetings is exceptionally revealing. No wonder the morally and physically deformed bastard is a hero to the Establishment!
Thank you for this link. It is vital that we understand how this nation was taken to an unnecessary war by the Wasp -Jewish alliance – a war that killed huge numbers of white Europeans and set the stage for the genocide we are witnessing today.
I have no intention of seeing this movie, and when I saw previews (finally…theaters are open again), I went out until the main feature started.
I lived all of this, and the trial really angered and stunned people then, especially how these Jews got away with it. I remember how it indeed became a circus, and how scummy all the defendants were. Joyce is right showing how one-sided this hagiography is. Abbie Hoffmann was into drugs, and liked to scam people. I remember how he passed himself as a Playboy reporter and used this to get free meals all over Europe as a food critic for Playboy. He eventually committed suicide from a drug overdose. Rubin wrote Do It!, rantings of the 60’s radicals about stealing from the system, killing your parents, etc., but of course liberals…now in their 60’s and 70’s, hold this events as wonderful and historical, although, as William Pierce noted, journalists especially fall into this mindset, that of conformist, infantile adulation of rebellion. The Doonesbury types that never look outside the box.
In 1969, I recall watching a film made by the city of Chicago, What Trees Do They Plant?, giving the city’s side of the 68′ riots there, showing the radicals as criminals. Kind of okay, but I recall a lot of timpani and Dragnet-style narration.
I also remember The Strawberry Statement, written about the Columbia student riots, the erstwhile author concluding with : ‘since the United States is 190 years old and I am 20 years old, I will give it one more chance.’ Lots of that kind of faux doomsday writing contrasting with a free-range journal.
My 18 year-old mind kind of wavered between worlds; I liked rebellion, but still cheered the Chicago cops when they whacked the ‘demonstrators.’
There was such a released madness then, or so it seemed at the time, partly Dionysian, somewhat satanic, but really Jewish when you get down to it.
As William Pierce also noted, in the 60’s, the Jews were very anti-government, but now that the government is much more to the Jewish controlled media’s liking, this has changed.
And what movie did I see? A Call to Spy. Much better, an old-fashioned WWII movie Wirth the usual feminist umbrage, but still likable. Try to see it.
So is it true that Aaron Sorkin did not use Mayor Daley’s 1968 instruction to the police during the Democratic Convention riots? https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=O9sKSRrs46Y I would think it irresistible.
But perhaps today it would be inadvisable to suggest that the National Guard should unlimber the grapeshot to deal with looting and arson by the woke, on a weekly basis, today. In fact, there were Chicagoans lately invoking Mayor Daley as the examplar of what must be done to protect the citizens.
Ironically, Sasha Baron Cohen is himself intimately connected to the ADL and has called for the banning of free speech on the internet. He gets to pretend that he “fights the power” when in reality he has demanded that the most powerful corporations on earth censor grassroots political activists who oppose Israel’s abhorrent treatment of the Palestinians and its ceaseless aggression towards its neighbors.
Cohen having it both ways on free speech is not ironic
for a Jew Rob, For a european goy having it both ways is hypocritical but not for a Jew. Jews actually think they are vested in some sort of right to say and do what is good for the Jew even if it is ethically contradictory. I imagine this is some residue of thinking they are Chosen although some say this is a middle eastern trait. No commitment to truth but rather to a self serving storyline. Makes Jews with their high IQ’s great liars because in their view, there is no such thing as truth. Just successful self serving interpretation of the data. Makes them the first post moderns.
” Makes Jews with their high IQ’s great liars because in their view, there is no such thing as truth. Just successful self serving interpretation of the data.”
Superb observation .
John, why the obsession with blacks, unless you’re one yourself? We, whites, need separation of the races, period.
Political conservatives are as much a problem as progressives – they’re political plankton drifting with the tide, always ready to deplatform and stab the racialist right in the back for the sake of appearing respectable. The GOP must be destroyed because it is an obstacle to change.
” The GOP must be destroyed because it is an obstacle to change.”
The GOP changes with shifts in the political winds . No doubt they are an obstacle to White Nationalism . The GOP is a political basket case .
Is there a concise history that goes into the dynamics of Jews & gentiles in the counter-cultural movement? I find it interesting that the phrase “tune in, turn on dropout” that was popularized by gentile LSD pioneer Timothy Leary and explicitly meant dropping out of all society, dropping out of high school, out of college and not having a job. Which makes sense if your trying to escape “the man”. An article from Berkeley describes how it never described the ethos of the (((Berkeley Barb))) and the radicals associated at Berkeley.
https://alumni.berkeley.edu/california-magazine/spring-2015-dropouts-and-drop-ins/myth-dropout-turn-tune-drop-out-never-really
relevant quote from that article:
“It should be noted, too, that Berkeley has never really fostered a dropout culture—not even in the looser, more metaphorical senses that Leary liked to traffic in. In the rearview mirror, the ’60s counterculture may appear as one big Summer of Love. It wasn’t. That first Human Be-In was also called a Gathering of the Tribes, and it was meant to smooth over some of the emerging fault lines—primarily, the schism between the hippies in the Haight and the radicals from Berkeley. The real dropouts were the Leary-style [gentile] flower children, not to mention Ken Kesey [gentile] and his merry band of bohos. The Berkeley folks—people like (((Jerry Rubin))) and Berkeley Barb publisher (((Max Scherr)))—tended to see the Be-In as a lost opportunity for organized protest against the war in Vietnam.”
fafqw, you could do worse than read Miles Mathis’ essays about “hippies” and associated cultural phenomena. I lived in and through that period of time. For example, I spent 1965-1969 in the safe womb of a liberal arts college, a way station (or oasis) for drug-dealing folks oscillating from left to right coasts and back again. The dormitory hall in which I resided for a second year had freshmen from both San Francisco (hence our early introduction to the psychedelic music scene) and from New York City — think The Fugs. My first ex-wife and I headed to the SF Bay Area — specifically, the University of California, Berkeley — as soon as we graduated.
Long story short: I do think, in retrospect, that the intel project involving psychedelic drugs got terminated when Power$ That Be determined that too many folks got enlightened, and not frightened, by their experience(s). Check out the now ancient experiment at Johns Hopkins giving LSD to terminally ill patients. Then consider the consequences of having thousands of younger folks, healthy, with great expectations (!), coming to similar conclusions based on a “drug effect”.
Hence the sound theorizing of Miles Mathis concerning the blackwashing of hippies, per se. The Manson/Tate event, Kent State, and, here, the Chicago 8 (or 7) have that thread of consistency. All in a larger tapestry of the times, of course.
The Vietnam War was fought because communism was, in fact, taking down countries. If the Chicago 7 types were exempt from the draft, I doubt they would have stuck their necks out. They didn’t seem to fear a communist take over. Did they believe in Marxism light and that somehow they would remain unscathed?
Speaking as a veteran of that war, let me assure you that your “analysis” of the conflict and its causes is sorely in need of a reality check. The (((primary danger))) to the United States then is no different from the (((primary danger))) now. All that has changed is the size of that (((danger)))—and in case you haven’t noticed, it hasn’t been shrinking.
Thank you Pierre.
WW2 was a Jewish Wasp war against fascists who knew the Jew for what he was But I think the Chosen People in the main saw nothing to gain from Viet Nam. They knew America wasn’t threatened by Asian communist nationalism and they saw the war expending American resources which could be better devoted to Jewish interests.