A new book by Bryan Burrough, Days of Rage, very thoroughly covers the history of a style of violent 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 different things I'd like to talk about here (and they're only slightly contradictory for once):
- is it at all possible that these militant groups had any positive effect?
- 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 most recent was by Rick Perlstein (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, probably 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.
Folowing 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 Robert Bay, who just 41 hours ago was arrested in an altercation with the police, supposedly over a .38-caliber revolver that someone had, in a parked car in Queens at Northern Boulevard and 104th Street or some such unbelievable place, and taken 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.
There is however, a counter-argument that Wolfe's piece was essentially an elaborate conservative smear, and the event he was making fun of was a very serious fund-raiser for the defense of the Panther 21 who indeed were later acquitted as victims of FBI entrapment.
Looking backward on those days (with information that most people back then didn't possess), I'm inclined to regard The Black Panthers as a very dubious group with some well-documented complicity is some very nasty crimes, including murder and torture-- but they don't 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). They 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.
Similarly: while 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 the Eric Alterman review refers to an editorial by I.F. Stone from 1970, which I see is available on-line: pages 1-2 (pdf) & pages 3-4 (pdf). 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 unnamed, 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, 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 constituted 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 stuff like the manifestos of people like the Unabomber or Valerie Solanis...). 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 fell into a trap in the intellectual landscape.
Eric Alterman's review claims 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 points 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-resistance 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 guerrilla's doing battle against their French occupiers. In time, once people actually began going underground, their bible would become Mini-Manual of the Urban Guerrilla, written in 1969 by a Brazilian Marxist named Carlos Marighella ... (p. 62-63, hc)
And further: (update):
... 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 Unites 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 Kennedys and King-- eliminated. (p.62, hc, Days of Rage)
Through out Burrough's book, different people bring up 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 often 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?
From The 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.