IN JUNE I SAW DWIGHT ARMSTRONG'S OBITUARY IN THE NEW YORK TIMES. HE WAS ONE OF FOUR MEN WHO BOMBED THE ARMY MATH RESEARCH CENTER, AT THE UNIVERSITY OF WISCONSIN, IN 1970.
I know who Dwight Armstrong was.
A MAN WAS KILLED IN THAT BOMBING. WHEN DWIGHT ARMSTRONG WAS ARRESTED IN APRIL OF 1977, HE PLEAD NO CONTEST TO A MURDER CHARGE, AND GUILTY TO FEDERAL CHARGES OF CONSPIRACY, BUT HE WAS PAROLED IN 1980. ARMSTRONG'S BROTHER, KARL, WHO WAS ALSO INVOLVED IN THE BOMBING, WAS BUSTED IN 1972, SENTENCED TO 23 YEARS, BUT THEN ALSO PAROLED IN 1980. I KNOW THAT YOUR CASE AND THEIRS ARE NOT INTERCHANGEABLE, BUT THERE ARE CERTAINLY SIMILARITIES. (NOBODY WAS EVER KILLED IN A BOMBING THAT LEVASSEUR AND THE UNITED FREEDOM FRONT WERE CONVICTED OF PERPETRATING; ONE MAN DID LOSE A LEG IN THE 1976 SUFFOLK COUNTY COURTHOUSE BOMBING.) I WONDER HOW YOU FEEL ABOUT THOSE SENTENCING NUMBERS, GIVEN ALL THE TIME YOU SPENT IN JAIL? WHY DO YOU THINK THE HAMMER GOT DROPPED ON YOU SO HARD?
Part of it was the particular time, place and conditions. Now you've got animal rights and environmental activists getting bigger sentences than Dwight and Karl Armstrong did back then. I was looking at something the other day. Someone had a five-year sentence for releasing minks from their cages, and (government authorities) were able to get this kind of time using these terrorism enhancement states now. That was considered an act of terrorism, letting minks out of their cages. You're talking about a property crime, at most. And even with some of the Weather Underground people that were carrying out various actions, and who received very light sentences. I think part of that is based on class privilege. They didn't burn their bridges. When they left a certain class and gravitated to something else for a while; when things got too hot they could go back across those class bridges to where they came from, and benefit from those resources. I think that with us, we weren't university radicals. We were working-class people, Vietnam vets, ex-cons, and when they look at that kind of background and they know that these are not the kind of radicals that get involved with something for three or four years while they're running around campuses, and then gravitate to a professional position somewhere. We're people that don't have a lot of bridges to go back across, in terms of protection and privileges, and so they saw us as radicals. Not so much radicals, as revolutionaries. People who were committed to substantial and radical political and economic change, and when you take that position coming out of prison cells, war zones and factories, it takes on a different light than it would if you were coming off a campus.
WHAT'S YOUR OPINION OF THE STATE OF ACTIVISM IN AMERICA TODAY?
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