Saikat is too young to remember the 70s, as am I. But from what I read, it was not like this at all. There was the Vietnam War, Watergate, stagflation and Malaise. There was a lot of unrest and far-left groups like Black Panthers/Black Liberation Army and Weather Underground that did things like setting bombs.
It's telling that Derec admits he is too young to remember the 1970's.
I wonder how old you were in the 1970s.
Obviously his prejudices warp his understanding.
I think you are projecting. The point of my post was to point our how unrealistically rosy Saikat's view of the 70s was. The left-wing violence and unrest was just one plank of my response.
He worries about the Weather Underground. If Google is to be trusted, only three souls were killed by that group's violence and all three were Weathermen accidentally killed by their own bomb!
Google itself can be trusted, but your google-fu leaves much to be desired.
You are probably referring to the
Greenwich Village townhouse explosion in 1970. That bomb indeed blew up prematurely, killing three of the terrorists in that WU cell. But the bombs they were building were intended to blow up a dance at the Fort Dix base in New Jersey (the same base that was targeted by Islamic terrorists more than three decades later) and a building at the Columbia University. People at these targets were just lucky that the terrorists were hoist by their own petard so to speak. But it was still a house in the middle of NYC that was blown up due to left-wing terrorist activity.
But that was not the only WU operation.
Yale University Press said:
In protest of American racism and the Vietnam War, they detonated more than two dozen dynamite bombs between 1970 and 1975, and hit some spectacular targets, including the Pentagon, the State Department, and the U.S. Capitol Building.
[...]In early 1970 the leaders did plan bombing operations that would have killed dozens of American citizens (in Berkeley, in New York/New Jersey, and in Detroit); but in May 1970 they decided to restrict their attacks to property destruction alone. This decision was crucial to the longevity of the group. It came partly in shocked response to an accidental explosion in which three Weatherman leaders blew themselves up.
So let preempt your inevitable objection that WU bombings only targeted property, as if that was somehow ok, or in any way refuted my point about how bad Saikat's take on the 70s was. Initially they planned to kill people with their bombs, and the only reason they switched up was the premature explosion in NYC. Those bombs certainly would have killed innocent people had they been deployed.
Similarly the Black Panthers were never the bugaboo that Derec enjoys imagining. The Panther promoted programs like the Free Breakfast for Children Program.
And they also killed people, as did its offshoot, the "Black Liberation Army". In fact, BLA worked together with WU. No longer 1970s, but in 1981 members of WU and BLA robbed a Brink's armored car and murdered one of the armored car's guards and two police officers. One of those WU members was Kathy Boudin who was one of the WU terrorists who survived the NYC townhouse bombing.
It was the FBI and the Chicago Police who broke laws and committed assassinations against the Panthers.
So your contention is that Panthers did nothing wrong; that it is the police/FBI who are wrong?
Even though for example Eldridge Cleaver later admitted that he and his fellow Panthers ambushed Oakland police in 1968? Even though they tortured and murdered one of their own because they thought he was an informant?
Civil rights workers and innocent black children were killed in the South. The FBI broke laws in its persecution of, and helped incite opposition to Martin Luther King, Jr. Protests against racism and the Vietnam War are now regarded as appropriate, while the My Lai massacre can be blamed on "establishment values." It tells us much about Derec that he gets all this exactly backwards.
I fail to see how that justifies the crimes and violence by the likes of WU, BPP and BLA. Or how it undermines my point that the 1970s were a very tumultuous decade, contrary to Saikat's rosy picture of it. You are actually proving my larger point, even if we disagree about the particulars. Again, here is what I wrote:
Saikat is too young to remember the 70s, as am I. But from what I read, it was not like this at all. There was the Vietnam War, Watergate, stagflation and Malaise. There was a lot of unrest and far-left groups like Black Panthers/Black Liberation Army and Weather Underground that did things like setting bombs. Not to mention Iran falling to the Islamists and our embassy personell being taken hostage.
Even if you think I got it backwards, I do not see how anybody can argue that the 70s were not a decade where the US "felt unstoppable".
The US stock market WAS "in the doldrums" throughout the 1970's; perhaps to Derec that fact is the most important tidbit.
Not just the stock market, the whole economy was in doldrums of stagflation. Both oil crises (1973/74 and 1979) were in that decade too. Economy was a big reason for the "malaise" that characterized the decade contrary to Saikat's idiotic claim that US "felt unstoppable".
