My Usual Charming Self | Bernie Reeves | SDS Lurks Behind UNC Student Protest

SDS Lurks Behind UNC Student Protest

By Bernie Reeves

The recent student activism at UNC has not gone over well. Based on what they hear in class from the radical scholars, the demonstrators who disrupted a talk by Tom Tancredo on immigration are probably surprised their antics were not embraced by the school’s constituencies. Instead, UNC Chancellor Holden Thorp has displayed a rather terse-lipped demeanor, indicating he is not amused as he wades through highly critical letters and e-mails.

It may have passed everyone by that the ruckus was kicked up by students and outsiders associated with the Students for a Democratic Society (SDS), a blast from the past most thought was dead and buried. Alas, SDS was resurrected in 2006 during the “grass roots” movement culminating with the 2008 election of Barack Obama to the presidency of the United States.

It is synchronistic timing indeed that the autobiography of Mark Rudd, one of the chiefs of the student revolution, hit the shelves at the same time as the UNC incident. Underground: My Life with SDS and the Weathermen seeks to re-energize SDS and rally students and fellow travelers to the ramparts.

Rudd is best known as the headliner associated with the Columbia University riots of 1968-69 — where, incidentally, Erskine Bowles, president of the UNC system of colleges and universities, played the role of mediator as student president of the Columbia School of Business. Rudd had joined SDS — formed by activist Tom Hayden with the incoherent Port Huron Statement of 1962 — and went on to assist in the establishment of the Weathermen, later the Weather Underground — and even later the Weather Organization. His indoctrination included a long trip to Cuba, where we now know the Soviets trained American activists in the arcane arts of revolution. Castro’s enclave was a handy offshore staging ground for mustering the troops to bring down America.

Later, Rudd lived a rather mundane and uneventful life underground as a “fugitive” until he gave himself up. He, like his counterparts Bill Ayers and his flamboyant wife Bernardine Dohrn, served no time in jail for their bomb-making and armed robbery antics.

The core belief of the SDS, that supersedes their incessant internal doctrinal quarrels (Che or Mao: Stalin or Trotsky, etc), is their unerring manifesto that “we must remake the world and abolish capitalism, the root cause of war, domination, and class and race exploitation … and replace it with a humane, rational economic system.” The Soviets couldn’t have said it better — and they did.

Former KGB Maj. Gen. Oleg Kalugin told the Raleigh Spy Conference in 2003 that in one year alone — 1981 — his officers pushed Soviet anti-American propaganda by “funding or supporting 70 books, 66 feature and documentary films, more than 100 television stations, 4685 articles in magazines or newspapers, 300 conferences or exhibitions and 170,000 lectures around the world.”

With that in mind, and after reading the screeds by Ayers (Fugitive Days, 2001) and now Rudd, the elephant in the room no one wants to notice is who funded the massive student movements of the ’60s and ’70s? Ayers says a guy would show up with a suitcase full of money (“we called him DB Cooper”). Rudd does say “community supporters” and wealthy advocates of the cause ponied up bail money, but he does not expand on the briefcase filled with $10,000 in cash he displayed to his parents to prove the Movement was real.
SDS and the dozens of splinter cadres that dominated the Vietnam era have avoided closer scrutiny due to lack of will by the new breed of scholars who refuse to examine their heroes. The only available data come from books written by the participants seeking to burnish their place in history. Where, for example, is the PBS documentary/The New York Times/“60 Minutes” in-depth coverage of the Weathermen? Or their counterparts in Germany, Italy, Japan and Peru who dominated the headlines as late as the mid-’80s? Baader Meinhof, the Red Army Fraction, the Red Brigade and the Shining Path kidnapped, murdered and blew up innocent bystanders with regularity. Is that not history of interest in the new age of terrorism?

Rudd and Ayers and the domestic terror gangs inflicted a deep scar on the landscape. Yet they are treated as innocent children who went awry. Over at Carolina, the tenured radicals are keeping this history to themselves for their own political motives. That’s the real story.

The Truth Will Set You Free
Although rooted in the 1930s and ’40s before the New Left got up a head of steam, the facts behind Soviet control of American spies has been verified — again. The new book Spies: The Rise and Fall of the KGB in America — by John Early Haynes, Harvey Klehr and Alexander Vassiliev — should put an end to the incessant denials from the Left that the Rosenbergs and Alger Hiss and other Soviet spies were innocent, a cherished canticle of the anti-American manifesto. This crowd should have capitulated after the revelations in the Venona Files, released in 1995 by the NSA and CIA, announcing the US intercepted cable traffic from Moscow to their American operatives from 1942 to the early ’60s.

Now the truth of Venona is corroborated by Haynes and Klehr and co-author Vassiliev, a former KGB officer turned journalist who had access to complete Stalin-era records of Soviet intelligence. Using Vassiliev’s detailed notebooks, the book puts to rest the Rosenberg and Hiss claims of innocence and verifies the guilt of hundreds of other spies who worked in the US government in the ’30s and ’40s.

The book also serves up some delicious new details, including the role of Ernest Hemingway — code named Argo — as a Soviet asset; that Julius Rosenberg recruited a previously unknown accomplice; that atomic bomb scientist Robert Oppenheimer was not a Soviet spy; and includes many other new discoveries, including the goods on IF Stone, whose role as a KGB and GRU asset had a dramatic influence on American media.