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| The World's First Postmodern Warfare Manual |
1966 Aug 31 -- Battle of Algiers is released, a documentary on an urban guerrilla force battling French occupying forces during the Algerian War of 1954-1962. "The apocalyptic revolutionary's favorite movie." The film wins the Golden Lion award at the Venice Film Festival but is banned in France.
1967 Mar -- a Columbia University Students for a Democratic Society activist named Bob Feldman discovers documents in the International Law Library detailing Columbia's institutional affiliation with the Institute for Defense Analyses (IDA), a weapons research think tank affiliated with the U.S. Department of Defense. The nature of the association had not been, to that point, publicly announced by the University
1967 May -- Greg Calvert is denounced by other SDS members after publishing his New York Times article: "We are building an urban guerrilla force."
1968 Jan 5 -- Beginning of Prague Spring with election of Alexandr Dubcek as First Secretary of the Communist Party of Czechoslovakia.
1968 early -- Apocalyptic revolutionaries, nicknamed "Kamikazes" rise to forefront of many SDS chapters. Chapters split between "armchair protesters" and "action factions", which desired immediate violent action.
1968 Jan 30 ---Beginning of the Tet Offensive. Campaign of surprise attacks against U.S. forces is launched in Vietnam during the Tet holiday.
1968 Feb 8 -- The Orangeburg Massacre. Three black protesters at South Carolina State are killed in clashes with the state police in Orangeburg, South Carolina.
1968 Feb 27 -- Following the initial phase of the Tet Offensive, CBS Anchorman Walter Cronkite declares the war unwinnable."We have been too often disappointed by the optimism of the American leaders, both in Vietnam and Washington, to have faith any longer in the silver linings they find in the darkest clouds" and added that, "we are mired in a stalemate that could only be ended by negotiation, not victory." Far from suffering a loss of morale, however, the majority of Americans had rallied to the side of the president.1968 Mar -- Student protesters in Warsaw are beaten by Polish state police.
1968 Mar -- British students opposing the Vietnam War physically attack the British Defense Secretary, the Secretary of State for Education and the Home Secretary.
1968 Mar 28 -- Police murder of a Brazilian high school student protesting for cheaper lunches blossomed into nationwide protests against the Brazilian military government.
1968 Apr 4 -- murder of Martin Luther King
1968 Apr -- SDS Faction at Columbia University occupy administration building after becoming outraged over segregation of a proposed gymnasium and the university ties to a Pentagon-sponsored think tank. Administrator who goes to meet them is taken hostage and barricaded in his office. Police, fearful of inciting violence in the nearby black neighborhoods, decline to storm the building. The occupying students harangue onlookers with bullhorns.
"Because this happened in New York, the world's media center, Columbia became an overnight phenomenon, as images of angry, shouting students, were beamed to television sets around the world. ...the star of the show was the student spokesman, a soft husky New Jersey sophomore named Mark Rudd, whose dramatic poses--typically one fist-raised, the other around a bullhorn---appeared seemingly everywhere, climaxing with the cover of Newsweek.
For mainstream America, Rudd had become a symbol not only of SDS but of the Movement itself, the prototypical nice Jewish boy from the suburbs transformed into something new and angry by these strange times.
Behind the scenes, however, the driving force of the occupation was, and the man who would eventually craft the political framework for Weatherman, was Rudd's best friend, a hyperintense, motormouth political Connecticut leftist named John Jacobs, universally known as JJ. Brilliant and handsome, with a streetwise style marked by beat-up leather jackets and slicked back hair, JJ was already a legend at Columbia when the protests began. Some thought him a prophet, others a poseur, but either way he was surely the purest voice of the apocalyptic revolutionary.
1968 Apr -- Student protests in West Germany following murder of a student activist by a rightist assassin.
1968 May 2 -- Beginning of "May 68" in France--a series of demonstrations, general strikes, and occupations of campuses and factories. Economy of France comes to halt. President DeGaulle secretly flees the country.Heavy police repression of the protesters led France's trade union confederations to call for sympathy strikes, which spread far more quickly than expected to involve 11 million workers, more than 22% of the total population of France at the time.
1968 Jun -- murder of Robert Kennedy
1968 summer -- 'Study finds that more 350,000 young Americans consider themselves to be "revolutionaries.
"The term of course meant many things to many people...No sane person, it was widely assumed, believed the U.S. government could actually be overthrown.."
"But others did believe it. For the hard core,, for those who saw governments teetering everywhere, who felt that the Movement was doomed to failure, who despaired at the murders of...King...and Kennedy, 1968 bore signs of the apocalypse."
"For these activists, who might be called apocalyptic revolutionaries, there was a vivid and growing sense that the world was on the brink of historic, irreversible change and that the morally corrupt American government, murdering the Vietnamese, unleashing dogs on Southern black, and beating its protesters, was poised for imminent collapse. SDS's leadership happened to be populated by an outsized number of Jewish students, and for many of these the notion of challenging a U.S. government they imagined to be the second coming of Nazi Germany had enormous appeal. All that was needed was a push. Castro had done it Cuba. Lenin in Russia. Mao in China. Why not in America?"
1969 early -- formation of Weatherman
1969 -- The Mini-Manual of the Urban Guerilla is published. by Brazilian Marxist Carlos Marighella.
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