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BOMB_WEATHER
July 01-12, 2015
Originally published:
http://www.dailykos.com/story/2015/07/12/1401500/-Bomb-Weather-Radical-Extremists-of-the-70s
Into the raging 70s...
A new book by Bryan Burrough, "Days of Rage", very
thoroughly covers the history of a style of violent https://books.google.com/books?id=QPUVBAAAQBAJ&printsec=frontcover
radicalism that grew out of the 60s. It discusses
groups active in the 70s (most famously, The
Weathermen), who were planting bombs, shooting it
out with cops, and trading venereal diseases, all
nominally in the cause of fomenting revolution in
the United States.
I've got two main things to talk about here
(and they're only slightly contradictory for once):
o is it at all possible that these militant
groups had any positive effect?
o how did they get involved with this crazy
extremism?
I learned of this book from two reviews in the Nation.
One was by Eric Alterman, the other by by Rick Perlstein:
http://www.thenation.com/article/remembering-left-wing-terrorism-1970s/
http://www.thenation.com/article/210161/ignorant-good-will
(I was really confused for a while before
I realized there were two of them).
Everyone-- including me, I guess-- believes that that
these radical bomber types were just stupid, crazy
and/or evil, but unlike most I'm not sure that the
case against them is quite so open-and-shut. I could
work up a defense along the lines of "yeah, they were
bad guys, but they made the good guys look really
good".
And in any case, I'm very interested in precisely
how they ended up doing the things that they did:
that seems to be a question we don't have a very
good answer to.
Following Bryan Burrough, Perlstein sketches out a
model that has three concentric rings, an inner core
that lived well off of the revolution business, a
second circle of foot soldiers who were often
struggling along in poverty, and a surrounding
network of sympathizers who were very useful as
fronts (and patsies) in dealing with the straight
world. That outer surrounding group of sympathizers
are where Perlstein directs most of his scorn-- They
were well-meaning, left-wing folks but they weren't
quite bright enough to pick up on the fact that the
projects they were enabling were bad news. In this
view, these were the kind of people who were easily
impressed by the "radical chic" that Tom Wolfe made
fun of in 1970:
"[...] ...and now, in the season of Radical Chic,
the Black Panthers. That huge Panther there, the
one Felicia is smiling her tango smile at, is I wonder what he's
Robert Bay, who just 41 hours ago was arrested in getting at, describing
an altercation with the police, supposedly over a the Panther as "huge".
.38-caliber revolver that someone had, in a parked
car in Queens at Northern Boulevard and 104th Big blacks seducing
Street or some such unbelievable place, and taken our white women?
to jail on a most unusual charge called 'criminal
facilitation.' And now he is out on bail and
walking into Leonard and Felicia Bernstein’s
13-room penthouse duplex on Park
Avenue. Harassment & Hassles, Guns & Pigs,
Jail & Bail-- they're real, these Black
Panthers. The very idea of them, these real
revolutionaries, who actually put their lives on
the line, runs through Lenny's duplex like a rogue
hormone." Um: "rogue hormone"?
http://nymag.com/news/features/46170/
http://www.leonardbernstein.com/person_radical_chic.htm
There is however, a counter-argument
that this Tom Wolfe piece was
essentially an elaborate conservative
smear, and the event he was making fun
of was a very serious fund-raiser for https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Panther_21
the defense of the "Panther 21" who
indeed were later acquitted as victims
of FBI entrapment.
(rev: Dec 18, 2021)
Looking backward on those days my opinion
of the Black Panthers has shifted back
and forth. There's an accusation https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Murder_of_Betty_Van_Patter
(largely from David Horowitz) that the https://www.salon.com/1999/12/13/betty/
Panthers killed their accountant Betty https://historynewsnetwork.org/article/695
Van Patter. I see some reports of
"confessions" about this from the likes
of Bobby Seale and Huey Newton, but the
reports seem oddly sketchy. I could
believe the Panthers were more dubious
than a lot of us realized, but I could
also believe these stories are played up
by the great conservacon...
Even given this though, I wouldn't say the Panthers
deserve to be dismissed as quickly as, say, the
Weathermen (and Bryan Burrough doesn't put them in
the same class, either). The Black Panthers at least
had some stated aims that made sense (they wanted to
act as a check on police violence against black
people), and the Panthers did some things that look
very positive by anyone's standards (a breakfast
program for children, for example).
The Panthers also had some very real enemies in
the FBI's COINTELPRO operations-- and it's at
least worth thinking about what kind of group they
might've been without continual attempts at
subversion by the FBI.
In general, I'm inclined to agree with the
judgement that the groups Bryan Burrough has
written about were "crazy", it is at least
worth a thought that this view may be too
one-sided.
This is a problem I often have in trying to
evaluate the efforts of activists-- even if what
they do seems stupid and extreme, there's always
the possibility that this is just what's needed to
be effective at capturing the attention of the
public. A point that I think is often missed is
that the public may judge an activist group
harshly, and still feel their influence-- if we
all go from ignoring an issue to debating it, if
we start looking for another faction to support
rather than those damn extremists, then you can't
say that the extremists were completely ineffective.
A letter in The Nation, commenting on http://www.thenation.com/article/letters-510/
the Eric Alterman review refers to an
editorial by I.F. Stone from 1970, which
I see is available on-line in pdf form:
http://www.unz.org/PERIODICAL/PDF/IFStonesWeekly-1970mar23/1-2/
http://www.unz.org/PERIODICAL/PDF/IFStonesWeekly-1970mar23/3-4/
That I.F. Stone write-up is an interesting piece: he
tries to understand the Weathermen without
necessarily supporting their actions:
"A movement which has no faith in the masses seeks
out the desperate few idealists willing to sacrifice
their lives in gestures they realize may be futile.
Some of our young revolutionaries are chillingly
sober and disconcertingly sensible. Their criticism
of conventional dissenters like myself and our
futility, as the war goes on, is hard to rebut.
Others in recent months have displayed a morbid
development, a tendency to glorify violence for its
own sake, as when they make Manson a hero ..."
And in this context, Stone quotes an opinion of an unamed,
more conventional activist who appreciates the efforts of the
impatient kids: "If they stop acting up, we'll never get the
Establishment to budge."
In a different letter to The Nation, http://www.thenation.com/article/letters-508/
someone advances that theory seriously:
We had been marching to get the United States out of
Vietnam for years. If the purpose was to end the war,
chanting 'Bring the troops home' was not working. 'Bring
the war home' changed the picture. The idea that a few
casualties here might spare thousands in Vietnam was
compelling. Young Americans came to the view that, if we
had to have a war, we might as well have it here. This
helped scare the country to its senses. It changed the
conversation. The actions of the Weathermen that the
author describes as 'idiotic' helped to bring the war on
Vietnam to an end.
In response to this, all Eric Alterman can do is dismiss it with a joke:
"In the words of that immortal moral philosopher
Ricky Ricardo, 'I don thin so...'"
I would not say I disagree with Alterman, but as answers go,
that strikes me as somewhat "thin". It would be nice if we
could do better than that-- though it isn't so easy to see how.
To my eye, there's a contradiction in Bryan Burrough's
attitude toward his subject-- on the one hand, he regards
them as deluded, arrogant and ineffective, but on the
other hand he wants us to see them as an important,
neglected subject:
"... there was a moment when the radical underground seemed
to pose a legitimate threat to national security, when its
political 'actions' merited the front page of the _New York
Times_ and the cover of _Time_ magazine and drew constant
attention from the White House, the FBI, and the CIA. To
the extreme reaches of the radical left, to those who dared
to believe that some sort of second American Revolution was
actually imminent, these years consituted a brief shining
moment, perhaps its last. ... "
Bryan Burrough also points out:
"During an eighteen-month period in 1971 and 1972,
the FBI reported more than 2,500 bombings on
U.S. soil, nearly 5 a day.
And consider that within a few years the US had withdrawn from
the Vietnam War. There may be no connection between these events,
but proving that there wasn't would've required reading Nixon's mind
(which would not have been a project for the faint-hearted).
But okay, for the moment, let me drop the quibbling about the
issue of the effectiveness of these rad bombers-- (I'm actually
not a fan of people who glorify violent rebellion. I'm often
annoyed by people who are into the manifestos of people like
like the Unabomber or Valerie Solanis... killing people doesn't
make you a serious philosopher, it just makes you a killer.)
If you start with the consensus view that these
underground revolutionaries should be filed away
somewhere in the stupid-evil-crazy triangle, we get to
one of the main reasons I'm interested this phenomena:
these idealists who ended up doing some very stupid and
evil things seem like a prime example of a kind of
cognitive failure: a group of people who should've known
better who fell into a trap in the intellectual landscape.
Eric Alterman's review states that the nature of that trap
isn't well-examined by "Days of Rage":
"But Burrough’s story is also annoying, because it does
so little to explain what drove these people to such
self-destructive extremes. We learn nothing of their
childhoods. We read next to nothing about the politics of
the era, with barely a mention of the madness under way
in Indochina. ... he doesn’t even try to interrogate the
sources of their descent into fanaticism."
Eric Alterman goes on to point at some possible
intellectual influences:
"It was popular in those days to quote The
Wretched of the Earth, Frantz Fanon’s paean
to the 'cleansing' properties of revolutionary
violence. This theme was further explicated in
Jean-Paul Sartre’s egregious preface ('Make no
mistake about it; by this mad fury, by this
bitterness and spleen, by their ever-present
desire to kill us, by the permanent tensing of
powerful muscles which are afraid to relax, they
have become men')."
Actually, the problems with Brian Burrough's book are not
that bad. He does mention Frantz Fanon, for example, in a
list of intellectual influences on the Black Panthers. He
says that Huey Newton and Bobby Seale--
"Both were smitten by the entire canon
of revolutionary literature circa 1966,
especially Negroes with Guns,
Frantz Fanon's The Wretched of the
Earth, and anything written by Che
Guevara. They read everything Mao
wrote. but their idol was Malcom, whose
every word they treated as scripture."
(p.43, hc)
Discussing the attitudes of the more radical people in the
SDS in the late-60s, Bryan Burrough's says:
"Apocalyptic revolutionaries represented a strident new voice
in the Movement, but they were able to draw from a wellspring
of ideas that weren't entirely new: philosophies, arguments,
books, and films that had sprung up around armed-resitance
movements worldwide. They studied Lenin and Mao and Ho Chi
Minh-- it went without saying that revolutionaries were almost
always communists-- but their favorite blueprint was the Cuban
Revolution, their icon Ernesto 'Che' Guevara, Castro's
swashbuckling righthand man. A handsome doctor, Che
represented the thoughtful, 'caring' revolutionary who resorted
to violence only to fight an unjust government ... The
apocalyptic revolutionary's favorite movie was The Battle of
Algiers, a 1966 film that portrayed heroic Algerian
guerillas doing battle against their French occupiers. In
time, once people actually began going undergound, their bible
would become Mini-Manual fo the Urban Guerilla, written
in 1969 by a Brazillian Marxist named Carlos Marighella ..."
(p. 62-63, hc)
And further:
"... Known as the foco theory, it had been advanced in a
1967 book, Revolution in the Revolution?, by a French
philosophy professor named Régis Debray. A friend of
Guevara's who taught in Havana, Debray argued that
small, fast-moving guerrilla groups, such as those Che
commanded, could inspire a grassroots rebellion, even
in the United States. Debray's theory, in turn, drew
on what leftists called vanguardism, the notion that
the most politically advanced members of any
'proletariat' coiuld draw the working class into
revolution." (p.65, hc)
In general, Brian Burrough paints a portrait of people impatient
for change, who've become disenchanted with the non-violent
approach, and who really and truly believe it's necessary and
possible (and even inevitable) to have a revolution overthrowing
the establishment in the United States and other Western powers.
Bryan Burrough's quotes Kirkpatick Sales book on the SDS:
"... those who wanted peaceable change, who tried to work
through approved channels, seemed to be systematically
ignored, ostracized, or-- as with the Kenedys and King--
eliminated." (p.62, hc, Days of Rage)
Through out Burrough's book, different figures see an analogy
with Nazi Germany, they worry that passively going along with
US policy is being a "Good German".
Perlstein seems to take it as a given that that these
"revolutionaries" were all simply crazy. He sneers at a
former Weatherman, Bill Ayers, who "wraps the US massacres in
Vietnam around himself as if they gave him a snow-white blanket
of moral innocence". Myself I'm not interested in defending
Ayers pronouncements (they're an odd mix of apologies, excuses
and reaffirmations), but I'd prefer to look a little more closely
at the logic of political violence: think about the sheer scale
of death and destruction of something like the Vietnam war. If
you really *could* prevent something like that by planting a few
bombs, that might look like a really good deal. That is after
all, the same sort of logic used to justify things like the
Vietnam war in the first place-- it's always all about killing
for peace, engaging in a terrible evil now in hopes of preventing
greater evils later.
(Actually, Bryan Burrough argues that the Vietnam war was less of
a motivating issue than the Black Power movement. I don't think
that changes the which-ends-justify-which-means issue I'm talking
about, though.)
The powers-that-be appeared to be shrugging off all the
non-violent protests and ignoring the rising public
opposition-- faced with that context, what do you do? You or
I might say "be patient, stick with the non-violent methods,
large democracies are slow to turn, but they can be turned"
and so on, but in the mean time people are dying, and the bad
guys are getting away with it. We can look back in
retrospect and say those mad-bombers were arrogant and
delusional, but if you put yourself back in their position,
and look forward, can you really swear that what they were
attempting was inherently evil? Yes, they sometimes killed
innocents, but weren't the opposition also killing innocents,
and many more by orders of magnitude? I have some respect
for the extreme position that violence is never justified,
but people who really believe that and live that way are
vanishingly rare.
Myself, I think you have to conclude that the central trouble
with the militant revolutionary schemes of the 70s is that they
were so stupid, they seem so useless for accomplishing their
stated goals that any attempt at justification falls flat.
But try to put yourself in their place... how do you think they
fell into the trap? Would you have dodged it?
https://books.google.com/books?id=QPUVBAAAQBAJ&printsec=frontcover
From Days of Rage:
"Even though every nerve in her body told Jane [Alpert]
not to, she agreed to help. She did it, she told herself,
out of love. The real reason, though she couldn't admit
for years, was the excitement. She was involved in
something bigger than herself. They were changing the
world. This was justified. This was important."
Bryan Burrough makes it clear that you're supposed to regard
this as delusional self-aggrandizement, the question I would
ask is how much different is this from, say, Obama's
justification for kill-lists, or drone attacks?
(To my eye, there's an odd attitude about these things where the
big boys are allowed to do sleazy, murderous shit-- that counts
as legitimate-- but if the little people respond in kind, well,
how dare they? Who do they think they are?)
Rick Perlstein does touch on the
kind of issues I'm talking about:
"Another lesson is about the counterproductive patterns
of thought and action recognizable on the left today,
such as the notion that there is no problem with
radicalism that can’t be solved by a purer version of
radicalism, or that the participant in any argument who
can establish him- or herself as the most oppressed is
thereby naturally owed intellectual deference, even
abasement, or that purity of intention is the best
marker of political nobility. These notions come from
somewhere; they have an intellectual history. The sort
of people whose personal dialectic culminated in the
building of bombs helped gestate these persistent
mistakes."
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