IV. Apprenticeship with Foundation-Funded Terrorists: Ayers and Dohrn 153During the engineered breakup of SDS, Klonsky was a leader of the tendency called
Revolutionary Youth Movement I (RYM-I), a less extreme competitor of the Ayers-Dohrn-Mark
Rudd-Jeff Jones-John Jacobs-Ted Gold Revolutionary Youth Movement II (RYM-II), which
became the Weathermen and later the Weather Underground, otherwise known as Weatherpeople,
Weather Bureau, etc. Klonsky and Ayers appeared for a time as bitter factional opponents, but at
bottom this was simply role-playing, with Klonsky picking up the radicals who were only half-
demented, and thus not crazy enough to join the kamikazes of the Ayers-Dohrn clique. If Ayers was
known in SDS as a likely spook and provocateur for the intelligence community, Klonsky was
regarded as a submarine for the Communist Party, USA, whose leaders were then in turn controlled
by the FBI. During the lean years that followed, Klonsky tried Maoism.
The cooperation of Ayers and Klonsky in favor of Obama’s seizure of power reproduces the old
CP-anarchist alliance, which was a common wrecking plan for SDS chapters in 1969-1970. When
Klonsky’s role in the Obama campaign’s internet effort became widely known, the Illinois Messiah
was quick to cut his losses so as to avoid the specter of yet another explosive flare-up of negative
publicity on the models of Rezko, Wright and Ayers. ‘No sooner than Global Labor blogged ...
about the role in the Obama campaign of Mike Klonsky, former Weather Underground leader Bill
Ayers’ longtime comrade-in-arms from their days in SDS to the Chicago School Wars they fought
in the 80s and 90s alongside Barack Obama, and presto he’s gone. As of this evening, Klonsky is no
longer blogging on the Barack Obama for President website.’ (Steve Diamond,
http://globallabor.blogspot.com/, June 25, 2008)
Another fanatical Obama backer with SDS connections is Tom Hayden, the SDS co-founder
who helped promote the 1968 Democratic National Convention riots in Chicago. Hayden, a former
California state senator and ex-husband of radical chic Jane Fonda, has endorsed Sen. Obama. So
has Jane Fonda. Hayden authored the SDS political manifesto, known as the Port Huron Statement,
which the group’s founding members adopted in 1962. This document condemned the American
political system as the cause of international conflict and a variety of social ills — including racism,
materialism, militarism, and poverty. Instead, it offered the vacuous petty-bourgeois slogan of
“participatory democracy,” while offering no analysis and making no demands for labor rights,
rebuilding the inner cities, third-world economic development, or other urgent economic issues of
the day.
SDS derived from a group called the League for Industrial Democracy (LID), a transparent cold
war anti-Soviet CIA front group made up of right-wing social democrats. LID has a student and
youth branch called Student League for Industrial Democracy (SLID). SLID was running out of
steam in the early 1960s, so the intelligence community decided to re-invent it in the trendier format
of SDS. The name may have been taken from German SDS (Sozialistischer Deutscher
Studentenbund), the successful pseudo-radical student group of Willy Brandt’s German Social
Democratic Party (SPD), which many CIA officers had been able to observe first-hand during their
frequent postings in West Germany, the hub of the cold war.
During the course of the 1960s, large parts of the SDS membership would escape ruling-class
ideological control, which is what gave SDS the potential that had to be destroyed. But the SDS
leadership was confined to narrow cliques with strong intelligence community input, who were
easily able to defeat challengers and insurgents in conformity with Roberto Michels’ Iron Law of
Oligarchy.
Todd Gitlin, the SDS president from 1963 to 1964, has also been well taken care of, and now
serves as a tenured professor of journalism and sociology at Columbia University. Giltin is a regular