4/1/2023 0 Comments Susan rosenbergWith all humility - as i have not done what she did, nor suffered what she suffered - these are not my politics. She not only describes armed struggle as a mistake, but more seriously (as far as i'm concerned) she argues that a key error of her section of the 70s/80s left was to become too distant from the mainstream of u.s. Indeed, Rosenberg repeatedly renounces these aspects of her previous politics. There may be reasons for this odd reticence to discuss the underground and the post-Weather anti-imperialist scene, but they are not given, or really even alluded to. Reading the book, one gets the impression that she didn't do anything against the law beyond illegally transporting some weapons and explosives. Rosenberg is similarly coy - some might say deceptively so - about the chain of events and political choices that led her to the underground. Rosenberg was one of the leaders of the May 19th Communist Organization, but the group gets barely a single mention in this book, and her own role within it goes unspoken. This book is not a history of the anti-imperialist left which Rosenberg played such an important role in before her capture. political prisoner Susan Rosenberg, who spent sixteen years behind bars for her involvement in the anti-imperialist underground in the early 80s, including at the experimental torture-unit for women at Lexington in the mid-80s. This is a prison memoir, by lesbian Jewish former u.s. Candid and eloquent, An American Radical reveals the woman behind the controversy-and reflects America's turbulent coming-of-age over the past half century. prison system, Rosenberg recounts her journey from the impassioned idealism of the 1960s to life as a political prisoner in her own country, subjected to dehumanizing treatment, yet touched by moments of grace and solidarity. Now, in a story that is both a powerful memoir and a profound indictment of the U.S. Rosenberg served sixteen years in some of the worst maximum-security prisons in the United States before being pardoned by President Clinton as he left office in 2001. I could not see the long distance I had traveled from my commitment to justice and equality to stockpiling guns and dynamite. While unloading the U-Haul at a storage facility, Rosenberg was arrested and sentenced to an unprecedented 58 years for possession of weapons and explosives. At twenty-nine, she was on the FBI's Most Wanted list. policies around the world and here at home. Raised on New York City's Upper West Side, Rosenberg had been politically active since high school, involved in the black liberation movement and protesting repressive U.S. I also believed that our government ruled the world by force and that it was necessary to oppose it with force. That night I still believed with all my heart that what Che Guevara had said about revolutionaries being motivated by love was true. In the back were 740 pounds of dynamite and assorted guns. At the wheel was a fellow political activist. On a November night in 1984, Susan Rosenberg sat in the passenger seat of a U-Haul as it swerved along the New Jersey Turnpike.
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