Ward Churchill and the Weather Underground

WorldNetDaily informs us that disgraced Colorado University professor Ward Churchill used to train Weatherman terrorists in weapons and bombmaking. This raises an interesting question. If Churchill took part in Weather Underground paramilitary exercises, did he likewise partake of their psychological training?

According to the 1989 book Destructive Generation: Second Thoughts About the '60s by Peter Collier and David Horowitz, Weatherman trainees underwent grueling rituals of self-abasement and abuse in which their dignity, individuality and even sexual identity was brutally extinguished. On pages 84-87, Collier and Horowitz write;

"[The Weather Underground] initiated a `smash monogamy' campaign to destroy bourgeois sexual hang-ups… Once monogamy was smashed – couples who in some cases had been together for years were harangued until they admitted their `political errors' and split apart – the next logical step was group sex. … One of the last taboos was homosexuality, and the Weather command forced itself toward experimentation in this direction, instructing male and female cadres to `make it' with members of the same sex."

Collier and Horowitz report that, for many aspiring Weathermen, "this was one taboo that was hard to break." Good heavens. Can you imagine?

Ward Churchill's precise relationship to the Weatherman network remains unclear. The WorldNetDaily report fails to specify whether Churchill served as some sort of outside contractor to the group or whether he was a full-fledged member. However, it is known positively that several of Ward's fellow academics were high-level Weatherman leaders and terrorists, among them Professor William C. Ayers who teaches education at the University of Illinois at Chicago; his wife Bernardine Dohrn, a professor at Northwestern University Law School; and Susan Rosenberg, whom Hamilton College hired to teach a course in January 2005. These educators certainly would have taken part in the Weather Underground's program of abusive psycho-sexual conditioning. Indeed, Ayers and Dohrn reportedly pioneered the program, according to Collier and Horowitz, inflicting it on themselves as mercilessly as they imposed it on others.

Jamie, what do you think? Can we get these folks together for one of your online symposia? It might prove therapeutic for them. They must have a great deal of pent-up rage to work through – and I don't mean rage at the capitalist system.