Supporters call for release:
Free Austin’s Marilyn Buck!
For her acts of selfless courage on behalf of victims of American criminal behavior, Marilyn has spent 25 years as a political prisoner of the United States government.
By Mariann G. Wizard / The Rag Blog / May 19, 2010
AUSTIN, Texas — Marilyn Buck and I have been friends since 1966, a world or so ago. For the two and a half decades that her life has been narrowly circumscribed by a prison cell, our friendship has remained strong through all too few visits, many letters, phone calls, books shared, other friends met, and poems critiqued.
But before that, there were her fabulous boots, working together on The Rag (Austin’s pioneering underground paper), Students for a Democratic Society, my husband George Vizard, our well-meant matchmaking, George’s death, GI organizing, hippie dancing, every visit I ever made to San Francisco, and unconditional love.
For all its state-imposed limits, Marilyn is one of my closest and dearest friends, one of those, for me, of whom The Who sang, “You can count ’em on your one hand.” I mention this only to let you know up front that mine is not an unbiased report. And there are hundreds of people around the world who love her as much as I do. She has earned every bit of our affection.
Marilyn Buck dared to dream of a world without racism, without American imperialism. More important, for those who dream this dream today, she dared to act. She dared to try to make this dream a reality. For her acts of selfless courage on behalf of victims of American criminal behavior, Marilyn has spent 25 years as a political prisoner of the United States government.
A year ago, it looked as if Marilyn’s long exile from the free world was coming to an end. After uncounted rejections, a new hearing brought a positive decision: she would be released on parole in August 2010! Supporters in the Bay Area began to raise funds for her expected transition.
She’d never talked about what she would do when — or if — she was released. When you’re doing an 80-year sentence, you do it, as they say, “one day at a time.” Suddenly she was full of questions: “What kind of computer should I get, a laptop or a desk top?” Like most prison inmates, she’s never been in cyberspace. (I told her to get a smart phone for the first six months and see if she even needs a computer.)
Unconvinced that digital cameras are now as good as film, the gifted photographer talked about how she might find work in a darkroom. Although she’s tried hard to stay in touch with social and technological changes, it’s hard to do so behind the bricks and razor wire fence, with your legs in shackles any time you’re moved, restricted in every daily choice.
But she was coming out. Nothing else mattered.
Then, last December, right around her 62nd birthday, she was diagnosed with a rare form of uterine cancer, a sarcoma, dangerous as a rattlesnake, potentially lethal. Another friend sent me a clinical description of the disease, but I couldn’t bear to read it all the way through.
Marilyn had symptoms for months before diagnostic tests were made, but not wanting any “fuss” over herself, not wanting to worry her friends, she kept her “health issues” vague and low-key with most people she spoke to or corresponded with, while she and her lawyer tried to get medical tests done.
Health care in the federal Bureau of Prisons is not renowned for its excellence. But, as her friend Penny Schoner reminded me gently, “This is a woman who wakes up every morning thinking about the plight of women in Afghanistan and Palestine, not about herself.”
Marilyn had surgery in the Bay Area pretty quickly after the diagnosis was made and should have started chemotherapy six weeks later, when the surgical wounds had healed. But when she was finally admitted in mid-March to Carswell Federal Medical Center in Ft. Worth, where thousands of seriously ill federal prisoners are treated, the tests performed revealed new tumors and growths outside the original cancer site.
Now at last, the chemo has started, and she is full of hope. She has so much pent-up energy, so many dreams, desires, abilities, concerns — so much life to live! Her experiences in America’s prisons have illuminated a hundred worthwhile projects and pressing needs to which she wants to contribute, as well as a whole new world of experiences that so far she has been denied.
Marilyn was accused of sensational acts of insurrection — including jail break, bombings, and a robbery attempt in which two police officers were shot and died. Many otherwise liberal-minded Americans are unable to get past the violence of the confrontations between the police and the small groups of Black and white revolutionaries with whom Buck was linked. Many committed leftists criticized the militants as foolhardy adventurists.
Neither give due weight to the extraordinary repressive measures undertaken by the U.S. government to crush lawful dissent against unjust policies at home and abroad. Behind the shadow of COINTELPRO (the FBI’s Counter Intelligence Program), law enforcement agencies operated outside the rule of law against Movement activists.
To be an African-American dissident, especially, meant walking around with a “shoot-to-kill” sign pinned on your chest. Being Black or Brown or Red, or even white and “hippie-looking,” was to face hatred and brutality (and possible death) day and night at the hands of racist white police and their allies in the U.S. Justice Department.
Marilyn Buck saw her friends being hunted down like dogs on the streets of Oakland. It may be that the murder of her friend (and my husband) George Vizard, in the summer of 1967 in Austin, by person or persons then unknown, also led to her belief that right action lay in helping victims of oppression defend themselves, as the saying went, “by any means necessary.”
Part of Marilyn’s story is told on a website, Friends of Marilyn Buck, created by friends and supporters. There is a lot more to her story of activism, self-sacrifice, and achievement. But it is her story to tell, and she’s not yet able to tell it — and, until she is free, perhaps not yet able to see it whole.
Meanwhile, the simple facts, and a few errors (e.g., she was born in Temple, Texas, not Jasper, as Wikipedia reports), are scattered in bits and pieces through Wikipedia entries, New York Times archives, and websites or various organizations supporting the rights of political prisoners in the U.S. and abroad.
After a 1973 arrest for buying two boxes of ammunition under a false name, Marilyn Buck was sentenced to 10 years in federal prison. It was a harsh sentence for the actual crime, but those were harsh times.
It’s not unreasonable, given the circumstances, to suspect that the real accusation against Buck was that a middle-class, educated white woman had acted as quartermaster for the Black Liberation Army, an offshoot of the Black Panther Party. She was charged and convicted for the same reason that University of California professor Angela Davis had been arrested: she gave material support to Black people to defend themselves against white supremacist attacks and the racist police who allowed and, in some cases, even enabled them.
After four years at Alderson (West Virginia) Federal Women’s Prison — and after being denied parole for, I think, the third time — Marilyn was given a furlough to consult with her lawyers. She didn’t come back.
During the next few years Marilyn allegedly participated in the prison escape of BLA leader Assata Shakur, a bank robbery to assist the New Afrikan independence movement, and, with other militant activists, was involved in a concussion-bombing of the U.S. Capitol to protest the U.S. invasion of Grenada and the bombing of Lebanon by U.S. warships.
When she was captured in 1985 and charged in what became known as the “Resistance Conspiracy case,” she and three women co-defendants took a plea to secure the release of a male co-defendant, a physician whose non-Hodgkin’s lymphoma had recurred in prison. Marilyn received a total sentence of 80 years.
As a prisoner, Marilyn has always embodied the old-school principle, “Don’t mourn, organize!” Ever since her first arrest, she has steadfastly resisted diverting “movement resources” to her defense or benefit. In her interactions, she directs attention away from her personal inconveniences as a high-security prisoner (she is considered a “terrorist” by the government) to social and political issues — or at least to the personal lives of her friends and correspondents with whom she unfailingly empathizes, even when pointing out occasionally that I’m being whiny.
Her character is like the finest steel: it resists corrosion, shakes off the grime of daily use, and shines forth. Her level-headedness alone is enough to make her a valued friend!
Despite her selflessness, an active support group has grown up with members all over the world. It is centered in San Francisco, across the bay from Dublin Federal Correctional Center where Marilyn was sent after human-rights lawsuits forced the closure of a brand-new “supermax” prison in Marianna, Florida, where she began her second incarceration.
She has been upheld throughout her captivity by a multicultural, multi-gendered group of working class supporters, poets, former prisoners, prison reform activists and others, enabled to buy postage stamps, prepaid phone minutes, paper and pens, and kept in books and periodicals (she’s a daily reader of the New York Times).
During those years, Marilyn became an accomplished, highly acclaimed poet and translator, the result, she says, of being “a censored person. In defiance, I turned to poetry, an art of speaking sparely, but flagrantly.” Marilyn’s poems can be found in many collections, in her chapbook, Rescue the Word, and on her CD Wild Poppies. She was awarded the P.E.N. American Center poetry award in 2001.
Marilyn has developed a significant artistic talent as a sculptor; organized prisoners to raise funds for AIDS education through a pledge walk-a-thon; and taught untold hundreds of other women how to read, how to think things through, and how to survive and even transcend their prison sentences. She has mentored and inspired scores of poets inside and outside the walls.
All along, her principled conduct has brought many new friends and supporters along with the old. She had a steady stream of visitors at Dublin FCI, including Sixties radical icons and the now-grown children of friends and former neighbors. She corresponds with poets and artists around the world. Thirty or more poets participated in making Wild Poppies, including South Africa’s liberation laureate Dennis Brutus and Amiri Baraka (formerly known as LeRoi Jones), who introduces the compilation.
Both of Marilyn’s parents passed away during her incarceration, and she could neither see them before their deaths nor attend their funeral services. There have been other serious personal hardships, but that was, I think, the most difficult for her to bear. Even the shock of the 9-11 terrorist attacks in 2001, when Marilyn — along with scores of other prisoners in many facilities around the country, completely uninvolved in the attacks — was suddenly removed from her cell and placed in solitary confinement, without access to her attorneys for many days, didn’t really compare with not being able to properly mourn her parents.
Marilyn’s Episcopal minister father, Louis Buck, was a noted Austin civil rights activist when I first got involved in that cause as a college freshman in 1965. I heard about Dr. Buck, and met him once or twice, before I ever met his daughter. Marilyn had an upper-middle-class private school education, but crosses had been burned on the family lawn north of the University of Texas campus. When her father’s denomination defrocked him because he started an integrated congregation that still exists today, Austin’s St. James Episcopal, he became a veterinarian to support his family.
Early on, Marilyn saw that racism was wrong, that she needed to oppose it, and that those with the political power to make changes could not be counted upon to do the right thing. Ironically, her dad sent her to college at the University of California at Berkeley to keep her away from the crazy radicals (SDS and others) at UT Austin. Smart as a whip and curious about everything, the innocent young lady who went to “Berzerkly” soon discovered psychedelics, rock music, and “high” society.
Despite the protection the elder Bucks attempted to provide their daughter, there was no hiding place for anyone with a minimal curiosity about national and world affairs on the college campuses of 1965-66. When she returned to Austin the following summer, she and I, and George, became fast friends. We were fascinated with her West Coast sophistication; she with our close-knit and eclectic community of activists, artists, musicians, and dopers. It was in Austin that she joined Students for a Democratic Society (SDS), worked on The Rag, and met a national SDS organizer on his way out of town. She went with him.
In Chicago, she worked in the SDS National Office and edited New Left Notes, the group’s national news organ, then returned alone to the Bay Area, with a sharply honed and newly militant outlook on the state of the world and what needed to be done to change it.
There she worked with Third World Newsreel; this was back when video cameras weighed 30-plus pounds and needed two people to operate, running in tandem through the tear gas-choked streets, taping demonstrations as the San Francisco TAC Squad closed in! It wasn’t long before she met and became friends with members of Bay Area Black liberation groups.
Nor was it long before she emerged as a target of special interest in FBI COINTELPRO operations against the Black Panthers and other anti-imperialist organizations.
So why, now, with parole already scheduled and her serious illness, is she still imprisoned at all? She’s been incarcerated longer than most other political prisoners of the Sixties. Former Chicago Black Panther, working class artist, and Houston’s “Mayor of da 5th Ward” Robert al-Walee says, “If Marilyn was a Black woman, she would be free by now; there would have been a public outcry for her release.”
Lee compares Buck to famed abolitionist leader John Brown, demonized in the American historical record. Whites who stand steadfastly against racism and discrimination become “race traitors,” and the label of “terrorist” — by which Brown was also known — drives away liberal support.
Assata Shakur, who has lived in exile in Havana, Cuba, for many years, agrees. She wrote,
When I think of Marilyn as a preacher’s daughter, I think of her as someone who wrestled with the moral problems of our times and who was not afraid to take principled positions around those issues.
Marilyn had a choice. She could have remained silent; she could have reaped the benefits of white-skin privilege. But instead she chose the path of righteousness. She has defended the have-nots, the powerless, and as a woman she has struggled for the liberation of all women. The only reason that she remains incarcerated is because of her political activism.
She needs and deserves the support of all those who are committed to freedom and the abolition of pain and suffering on this earth. She deserves to be supported, she deserves to be respected, and she deserves to be free.
Austin author and “candyman” Robert King, a former prisoner and Panther activist at Louisiana’s notorious Angola Prison, where his two comrades from the Angola 3, Herman Wallace and Albert Woodfox, remain imprisoned, expressed his wishes for Buck’s recovery and remarked on her “indomitable spirit.” He says,
Marilyn’s self-directed commitment shows her evolution towards the ideal of the revolutionary ‘New Wo/Man’ of whom George Jackson spoke. This is what enables her to weather the storms of life. She has given so much and has asked for nothing. She has kept the faith and continues to fight the good fight. She will always have my love and respect.
Kathleen Cleaver, professor of law at both Yale and Emory Universities and a veteran of both the Black Panther Party and the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee (SNCC), states that “Marilyn has always been stalwart and devoted in her dedication to the liberation of Black and all oppressed peoples. Unlike some, she never withdrew from that struggle.”
Akwasi Evans, editor and publisher of Austin’s NOKOA: The Observer, is another long-time admirer. He says,
Marilyn Buck is a truly courageous woman who sacrificed her liberty in the struggle for the liberation of all of America’s oppressed. She has paid a great price for her crimes against capitalist exploitation and ought to be released from prison now so she can fight her cancer in freedom instead of incarceration!
Marilyn’s support has always been strong in the Black community and among “minorities” in general. But some of us, her white sisters and brothers, may have let her slip from mindfulness. She dared to support with deeds what we only said we supported: the right of oppressed people to defend themselves.
Her experience underground, after her 1977 escape from prison, is of special relevance today. Marilyn has had a long time to meditate upon the mutually reinforcing beliefs, held then by some, that armed revolution was imminent and that the duty of the revolutionary was to make a revolution. Reading her letters, poems, and essays over all these years, I’ve seen her extraordinary evolution, witnessed the maturation of an articulate, responsible, disciplined, ethical mind.
In her 1999 master’s thesis in fine arts (she’s earned undergraduate and graduate degrees by correspondence while incarcerated), she wrote,
The artist creates the concept and framework for a different cultural paradigm. Political speeches, leaflets, and pamphlets that exhort and condemn the old oppressive order rarely do that. Without the imagination, there is little daring to confront the old.
We need her out here in the world; need her insight, her experience, and her creative imagination. I can’t wait to hear her speak freely.
James Retherford and Sarito Carol Neiman contributed to this article.
[Mariann Wizard, a Sixties radical activist and contributor to The Rag, Austin’s underground newspaper, is a poet, a professional science writer specializing in natural health therapies, and a regular contributor to The Rag Blog.]
Free Marilyn Now!
There will be a “Free Marilyn Now!” benefit in Austin on Friday, June 25, from 7 – 11 p.m., at 3105 E. Cesar Chavez Street, with a suggested donation of $10 at the door, and all proceeds from food, refreshments, an art sale, and other events going to Marilyn’s freedom fund.
Bands are still being confirmed at this time, but a diverse lineup is planned, along with healing meditation exercises and special guests.
Marilyn will need medical monitoring and care while she convalesces, and for a good while to come, and her plans for working right away will need to be put on hold. She needs some good nutrition, too, after 25 years of prison chow, and for crying out loud, this woman is going to need some good new boots!
Sponsors are quickly coming on board for the event, but include The Rag Blog, NOKOA News, Resistencia Bookstore/Red Salmon Arts, OneLove Kitchen, Ex-pinta Support Alliance (ESA), Texas Jail Project, Austin Cab, and Youth Emergency Service/Phogg Phoundation — that I know of so far.
Save the date and start saving your pennies! Have something cool to donate? Willing to volunteer? Watch The Rag Blog for more details!
— MGW
The Rag Blog
What a wonderful tribute you've written to your friend! Hermit's gonna leave the cave for the benefit. Thanks, Mariann.
Larry P.
Thank you, Mariann! I have been curious about Marilyn Buck for some time. The photos reveal that she is expressive, loving and principled. I wish her well.
A terrific write-up!
Thank you, thank you for this beautiful, from-deep-in-the-heart description of Marilyn. And for organizing support for her in Texas. From one of the many around the world who love Marilyn.
diana block
Yes, yes, yes! Thank you!! Marilyn has taught and given us so much! Beauty, truth, courage, generosity, spirit!
thank you so much for sharing photos truly i have not seen before, she is forever beautiful then and now inside and out in so many more ways than one.
i spent a few short years in Dublin fci with Marilyn and thanks to her survived a system that has failed to crush women of strength, Marilyn will survive too and will continue to end our sentences for us…
Caribbean wishes from the
Thank you Mariann for the way you have described Marilyn who I have known and watched grow and develop as a human being over the years to the point where there are no prisons walls that can ever contain her.
Now we have bring our sister, Marilyn, through this difficult time to wellness and to the freedom that she has been so long denied.
Mariann, I'm so grateful for your loving tribute to Marilyn, written as only a long-time friend could.
Thank you!
Donna
Beauty, truth, generosity, courage, expressive, loving, principled?
Obituary for Waverly Brown
Obituary for Edward OGrady
Thanks for writing and sharing this! I first started corresponding with Marilyn Buck in late 1995/early 1996.
I had read that Marilyn had taught photography at some point before her incarceration 3, so I began sending her samples of my work. In retrospect, they were awful. Protest shots largely consisted of far-away shots with lots of the backs of people's heads. Others were,
Marilyn Buck was a beautiful, compassionate, warm, caring, intelligent and highly effective and capable person. I truly believe that she could and should have had a stellar political career. She could have made a real, lasting and powerful difference in American life.
What happened? She allowed herself to be used and abused by ambitious, unscrupulous men in support of some very dubious, questionable causes. She acquired the weapons, ammunition, vehicles, safe houses, and other equipment used by the killers in the armoured car robberies. She bought the cocaine which they used before the robberies to give them their Dutch courage but which affected their minds and their judgement. I
It makes me very sad – a beautiful person and a beautiful mind, and so much talent both perverted and wasted. Rest in peace Marilyn. I love you.
Yeah, man. Beauty, truth, generosity, courage, expressive, loving, principled .
You can’t understand ? Of course ! You’re sweating with hate.
I am sure Ms Buck has many wonderful qualities as the author did attest. But the statement acts of selfless courage on behalf of victims of American criminal behavior is pretty self serving when you take into account it was Ms Buck's criminal behavior that contributed to the death of two police officers. Or perhaps its just that the lives of the police are somehow less important than
Extremist — it is the unintended consequences of acts undertaken in good conscience and with the best of intentions that are the most haunting to any principled person.
It is Mairlyn's acceptance of personal responsibility for the mistakes she made that has earned her such widespread respect.
In retrospect, her desire to carry out an unripe revolution, and to support
Say — thanks to everyone who helped with this article, especially thorne, who spent a ton of time on it — and I know it's really long, but something important got left out in the editing process and I only now realized it.
Marilyn's friends and supporters around the world are meditating with her at 7 a.m. every morning, Texas time (CST), for her health, healing, and freedom.
Mariann,
Thanks for the article, Marilyn has been a legend and a myth for so many years, you have brought her to life..great pictures.
She is the spirit of our revolution long delayed.
Marilyn has stood fast all these years while others opted to play footsie with the government and took an amnesty.
Richard — I believe that when the amnesty of which you speak was on offer, Marilyn was already incarcerated at Alderson, on those early “ammo-under-a-fake-name” charges. So there was nothing for her to be amnestied for; they had her.
btw, I’ve never really understood those charges. During the same period, I often bought ammunition — small caliber shells ranging from .22s to .38s — at convenience stores, and was never asked for ID. In addition, Marilyn was tried multiple times, in several states, on similar charges (one trial was held in Austin). But so many activists in so many places were under so many legal and extra-legal attacks at the time, that early case never got the scrutiny it deserved.
I, too, think it odd that some people who were leaders in the underground, and who subsequently received very light sentences, or probated sentences, seem to have little to say about those who are still doing time. Fortunately, groups like All of Us or None exist, consisting of former political prisoners working for the rights and release of others. Locally in Austin, many ex-prisoners are committed to this struggle, such as former Angola 3 member Robert King and the Ex-pinta Support Alliance (ESA).
There’s a public domain biographical folk song about Marilyn Buck posted on the following link, that might interest readers who are able to access the http://www.last.fm music site:
http://www.last.fm/music/Bob+A.+Feldman/Biographical+Folk+Songs/Marilyn+Buck
Every young leftist militant, hell, every old leftist militant and even those who have lost their way since the 1960s and forgot what we were figthing for then, and now, should read this story. It tells two tales-if you go up against the American imperial state you better be ready to win, or else. And it also tells that there really was some very, very good human material, like Marilyn Buck, in the 1960s with which we could have built that better world we were fighting for if we could have understood the first tale better. I wish, and I wish like crazy, that we had a few more, actually quite a few more, militants like Marilyn Buck these days. Let’s get moving. All honor to Marilyn Buck and the other fighters, like Mumia, still behind bars for “seeking that newer world.” Free Marilyn Buck Now!
BF — wow, I had not heard that song before — nice! You probably know The Dicks did one about Marilyn as well, with the same title. She has been written about by many poets as well, including yrs truly.
I think that no song yet has celebrated Marilyn exactly right, though — a corrida would be the perfect form.
Thank you so much for sharing these wonderful memories of Marilyn who has touched so many of us in different ways. This is an absolutely beautiful testament to the warrior life and spirit Marilyn has given us so selflessly. Thank you again and again for allowing us to remember Marilyn’s sacrifice.
A number of Marilyn’s poems and essays can be found at marilynbuck.com/publications.html as well as links to her other publications. Thanks again Mariann and Ragsters.
Mariann, thank you for this loving, heartfelt map of Marilyn’s heart, and log of her struggles. Special thanks for the photos, many of which were new to me.
Those who doubt that Marilyn is a political prisoner should know that the same month she was sentenced to ten years in prison for buying ammunition (which is all she was convicted of), Dean Martin’s son was sentenced for selling machine guns to under cover agents. Dean-Paul Martin had mortars, bazookas, and an armored personnel carrier. His sentence? Probation and a $200 fine!
There can be no doubt — Marilyn is a modern-day Jane Brown and has paid dearly for it. That she has kept an open heart and a lively mind through it all is humbling.
Namaste!! Marilyn is in short form- my SHERO! As a fellow activist, organizer and poet her work is my inspiration and motivation on many days I have wanted to just give up the important work she and so many others have dedicated their lives to.
May I humbly walk in her shadow down the path she has selfishly laid is my supplication.
Thank you for this beautiful insight.
Satori
Hi Mariann,
I am a college student at San Jose State University and admirer of Marilyn Buck. Although I live in San Jose, I sometimes visit San Francisco and see "Free Marilyn Buck" signs posted in various windows, such as on Van Ness street. Recently, I had to write a research paper in a particular class and decided to write about Angela Davis, Assata Shakur and Elaine Brown.
Jearenna — gotcha covered, dear! Sent you a long e-mail.
For everyone, you can contact Marilyn’s main support group in the Bay Area through her web site, http://www.MarilynBuck.com.
They had a fabulous benefit for her, “Sparks Fly”, last March, that in part inspired our efforts here.
Having recently read Assata’s biography, I immediately in fell in love with Marilyn for helping her escape to Cuba. Now, however, I would like to offer a truly revolutionary concept for her future health.
Please, Marilyn, look into the website Gerson.org for a way to help yourself and others to find healing through proper diet.
richard@ecovillage.ithaca.ny.us
Ms. Buck lived 29 years longer than Waverly Brown, Edward O’Grady & Peter Paige, the three men who were killed in the 1981 Brinks robbery , which Ms. Buck was involved in. Had she bothered to see any of these people as individuals and not “pigs”, she might have found out that Waverly Brown was an African American policeman who in 1966 became the first African American policeman hired in Nyack, NY. She also might have found out that Nyack, NY is an amazingly integrated town and a very unique place. She might have found out that that regular working people of all races and backgrounds were employed at that mall, including Peter Paige, the Brinks guard who was gunned down in his truck, and that most worked for low wages to earn for their families.
The logic in committing violent crimes such as robbery and murder in the name of combating oppression of minorities has always escaped me, and always will. There are far many dedicated people who have done much more in their lives to combat oppression, poverty and economic injustice through peaceful means that Ms. Buck ever did with her violent actions. All of the blogs and webpages that cast her as a political prisoner uniformly neglect to mention the three people that died on that day in 1981, just because they had the misfortune to show up to work when Ms. Buck and her cronies robbed that armored truck. Their families and loved ones have been suffering their loss for years as Ms. Buck continued to write poetry and be visited by loved ones and friends.
Mariann wrote this back in May.
it is the unintended consequences of acts undertaken in good conscience and with the best of intentions that are the most haunting to any principled person. …. In retrospect, her desire to carry out an unripe revolution, and to support an oppressed group that she was not born into, and the crimes that thus landed on her shoulders forever, led her to the issues that have rightfully been her field of struggle for 25 years.
In AFG and Iraq, the US sought to overthrow a brutal dictator/regime, provide liberties, freedoms and justice to an oppressed populace (especially women)and create an environment where education, healthcare, and commerce could take hold.
Both with Ms Buck and with the US Government, they acted with “good intentions”, at least in their minds. Both parties felt it necessary to kill the very people they claimed to be fighting for. Both parties have paid a heavy price for their choices.
Mariann’s comments apply equally well to the life of Ms Buck as it does to the US war in Irq and Afghanistan, However, progressives respond to the two cases very differently.
Sorry, but that comparison just does not cut it with me. I look at the life of Ms. Buck’s fellow WU colleague, Kathy Boudin, and see someone who understood her responsibility for taking and affecting lives, and who has spent her years of incarceration and freedom trying to make amends, improve the lives of the sick and disadvantaged and atone for her actions.
Best of intentions don’t count when the logic is insane. There was never, ever any large movement of popular support among the masses during the 1970s and 1980s for armed revolution against our government, it only existed within fringe groups such as the WU and BLA. I will never be convinced by anyone that the cold blooded killing of innocent people can bring about peace and equality. This is the reasoning of zealots who lack perspective, empathy and a knowledge of history. You can justify any horrific action in any way you want, but if I had ever heard any expression of regret pass through Ms. Buck’s lips, I might have thought more highly of her.
I only know Marilyn Buck’s crimes: crimes against America, crimes for socialism and against capitalism, crime against humanity’s very self, for if you’re not down with capitalism, you’re not down with the stuff and breath of life. (Most who crab at capitalism immediately point at its cheaters — these are people who would cheat regardless of whether they lived by capitalism or by something less, like socialism — which has killed about a hundred and twenty millions in peacetime for being unpopular with socialists, basically.)
Radicals tend to be foolish. Leftist radicals are foolish almost beyond imagining. If they thought like adults, they’d turn libertarian — if they simply must be radical.
She’s gone to her reward. What will yours be?
I fell in love. I am hopelessly smitten with one I regret I’ll never get to meet. Alas Marilyn, how I wish I’d known you! May God give your beautiful spirit wings, and your soul peace. God bless you, and those who cared for you and the causes you embraced. I am one of those. VIVA CHAVEZ! From a Venezuelan-American admirer.
Marilyn Buck and her socialist terrorist were criminals, plain n simple. They wasted their lives in prison (where they belonged to protect socity) and in her case died a painful death from cancer. There will never be a black country in the United States. People were ignorant to believe that was even possible as blacks make up only 13% of the population here (thank God). Matylan Buck is a murderer
To the person who posted the racists comments above me, I hope you pay for your remarks dearly.
The person who made those truly ugly comments in summer 2011 already started paying for them — and a dear price, indeed. While Marilyn Buck showed forth grace, love, self-sacrifice to the end of her remarkable life, the hateful commentor displays a stunted blackness of the soul. He or she is seething and burning in a private hell of hatred. Yeah, that’s hell on earth! And the qualities that are cherished by the Lord are the very ones that Marilyn displayed. So, let’s remember to pray for the one who is caged in a private hell of hatred.