November 7, 1983: ‘May 19th Communist Organization (M19)’ Detonates a Bomb in the U.S. Capitol to Kill Republicans

“Those who cannot remember the past are condemned to repeat it.” – George Santayana

Members of Congress and the media seems to confuse real insurrection with what happened during the “mostly peaceful” protest in Washington, D.C. on January 6, 2021. These same members of Congress and their media allies have conveniently forgotten history.

One example is the November 7, 1983 attack on the U.S. Capitol by the ‘May 19th Communist Organization (M19)’ which was intended to kill Republican members of Congress. M19 was made up and led by women who were hard core Communists.

The Smithsonian Magazine in an article titled “In the 1980s, a Far-Left, Female-Led Domestic Terrorism Group Bombed the U.S. Capitol” outlines historian William Rosenau investigation of the little-known militant group M19’s bombing attack on the U.S. Capitol.

Amidst the social and political turmoil of the 1970s, a handful of women—among them a onetime Barnard student, a Texas sorority sister, the daughter of a former communist journalist—joined and became leaders of the May 19th Communist Organization. Named to honor the shared birthday of civil rights icon Malcolm X and Vietnamese leader Ho Chi Minh, M19 took its belief in “revolutionary anti-imperialism” to violent extremes: It is “the first and only women-created and women-led terrorist group,” says national security expert and historian William Rosenau.

M19’s status as an “incredible outlier” from male-led terrorist organizations prompted Rosenau, an international security fellow at the think tank New America, to excavate the inner workings of the secretive and short-lived militant group. The resulting book, Tonight We Bombed the Capitol, pieces together the unfamiliar story of “a group of essentially middle-class, well educated, white people who made a journey essentially from anti-war and civil rights protest to terrorism,” he says.

According to Rosenau:

Just before 11 p.m. on November 7, 1983, they [M19] called the U.S. Capitol switchboard and warned them to evacuate the building. Ten minutes later, a bomb detonated in the building’s north wing, harming no one but blasting a 15-foot gash in a wall and causing $1 million in damage. Over the course of a 20-month span in 1983 and 1984, M19 also bombed an FBI office, the Israel Aircraft Industries building, and the South African consulate in New York, D.C.’s Fort McNair and Navy Yard (which they hit twice.)

M19 and the Weather Underground

Smithsonian magazine asked Rosenau about other left-wing extremist groups,

Where would you position M19 relative to groups that people may be more familiar with, like the Weather Underground?

They are sort of an offshoot of the Weather Underground, which essentially cracked up in the mid 1980s. These women decided to continue the armed struggle. Many of them had been in the Weather Underground, but they thought the Weather Underground had made important ideological mistakes, that the Weather Underground saw itself as a vanguard of revolution, when in fact the real revolutions were going on in the third world. Or in the United States itself, in places like Puerto Rico or among Native Americans.

But the real revolutionaries were these third-world freedom fighters. And it should be the job of North American anti-imperialists, as they called themselves, to support those liberation movements in whatever way they could. So if that meant bombing the Navy to protest the role of the United States in Central America in the early 1980s, they would do that. If it meant attacking the South African consulate in New York that represented the apartheid regime [which they did in September 1984], they would do that.

They really saw themselves as being as supporters and followers of these third-world struggles in the Middle East, in southern Africa and in this hemisphere particularly. They talked about themselves as being in the belly of the beast, being at the center of this imperialist monster. So they had a particular responsibility, in their view, to carry out actions to bring this monster to heel.

Remember that Bill Ayers was the co-founder of the Weather Underground and Communist Bernardine Dohrn were friends of Barrack Obama in Chicago.

Today we have off shoots of M19 and the Weather Underground. Today they are know as Black Lives Matter and Antifa. Same ideology, same tactics, same goals.

Rosenau stated:

Historical context is absolutely paramount. We kind of lump terrorism together, like groups as disparate as Students for a Democratic Society, Al Qaeda, Red Army Faction, Aum Shinrikyo, but these are all products of particular times and particular places.

BLM and Antifa are products of our particular times and particular places. BLM and Antifa are products of Democrat Party rhetoric and incitement. They are part of the hate America, hate Trump and hate capitalism movement that dates back to the Russian Revolution. The times change but the failed Marxist ideology doesn’t.

Time for Americans to understand how history in now repeating itself.

©Dr. Rich Swier. All rights reserved.

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