Tom Hayden on the Weather Underground's "revolutionary violence"

Mark Rudd in 1968 as a leader of the Columbia University strike

After seeing the German film Der Baader-Meinhof Komplex last year, which tells the story through 1977 of the far-left German terrorist group the Rote Armee Fraktion (RAF), I've been reading quite a bit about the RAF and related themes from the 1960s and 1970s in Germany. The RAF's story didn't end then. The "third generation" of the RAF were still operating in the early 1990s and formally disbanded in 1998.

The Weather Underground Organization (WUO) was an analogous American group to the RAF, although after an accident during the construction of a bomb killed three of their own members, the WUO gave up any further plans of killing people. Those three were the only known fatalities directly connected to the WUO, though some former members became involved with groups like the Black Liberation Army that did commit homicides. The RAF, on the other hand, was considerably more lethal in its actions. The WUO mainly concentrated on bombing bathrooms in public buildings, including the Pentagon and the US Capitol.

Tom Hayden was written a long review of a recently-released memoir by Mark Rudd, a former WUO member and leader: Tom Hayden on Mark Rudd Truthdig.com 05/08/09. While Hayden was supportive of the concept of violent political action under certain circumstances during the 1960s, his own efforts concentrated on nonviolent forms of protest. As he mentions in this essay, the concepts of protest, resistance and revolutionary action were seen by left radicals in those days as distinct political strategies.

Since Terrorism is now the main marketing tool justifying the US keeping a military budget equal to the rest of the whole world's combined, long after the fall of the "evil empire" of the Soviet Union, I think there's some real value in understanding earlier experiences of Western countries with terrorism.

Hayden's take on Rudd brings his own experiences to bear, as well as his decades-long acquaintance with Rudd, his own experiences in debates over political violence, and his own studies of urban violence, including gang violence, such as Street Wars: Gangs and the Future of Violence (2004) and Rebellion in Newark: Official violence and ghetto response (1967). The text of the latter first appeared in the New York Review of Books under the title The Occupation of Newark, where as of this writing it is publicly accessible.

Hayden seems to agree with Rudd characterization of the WUO as a cult:

But most of what Rudd tells is deeply disturbing, though illuminating, in its unemotional matter-of-factness. In describing the Weather Underground as a cult, Rudd writes: "I knew that the whole thing was nuts but couldn’t intervene to stop it. … I believed as much as anyone else, perhaps more so, in the need to harden ourselves through group criticism." Feeling "addled," he agrees to take a break from the national leadership and accept demotion to its New York collective. He is unable to tell us exactly why, writing only that he was experiencing "the competitive world of the Weatherman hierarchy from the underside now." Yet he "couldn't allow my conscious mind even a tiny doubt as to the direction of the organization." [my emphasis]

"Cult" is a word that is sometimes carelessly tossed around. A group can be violent and fanatical without being a cult. But cults have a strong tendency to become violent and fanatical.

I believe that both the WUO and the German RAF were cults. One characteristic they shared was that by going "underground", which meant changing identities and attempting to drop of the radar of the law, both groups isolated themselves severely from normal social contacts, including political contacts. Without making a judgment on whether they were cults or not, groups like the Irish Republican Army, Hizbollah and Hamas all had military wings that carried out violent actions but also functioned in some real sense as part of a larger organization which had distinct political components not immersed in violent action or isolated in secrecy. In Weimar Germany, the Social Democrats (SPD), the Communists (KPD) and the Nazis (NSDAP) all had both violent groups of some kind or another but also functioned as political parties in election campaigns and in Parliament.

For the WUO as for the RAF, the "armed struggle" itself was their politics. I don't want to give the impression their ideologies were identical, they weren't. But both groups saw themselves as revolutionary vanguards inside imperialist countries acting as allies of Third World revolutionary movements in Vietnam, Latin America and elsewhere. Both groups embraced some form of the interpretation of the Cuban Revolution promoted by Che Guevara and Regis Debray, the French leftist writer who elaborated the Guevarist theory in his book Revolution in the Revolution? (1967). The essential notion was, make armed struggle and supporters will come.

Tom Hayden

The notion was a spectacular misjudgment of the political situation in the United States for the WUO, as it was for the RAF in Germany. Consequently, the ideas of the groups became closed within the group and reinforcing, in conditions encouraging political paranoia. As Hayden points out:

Ironically, the Justice Department dropped federal charges against Rudd and the Weather Underground for fear of revealing their undercover techniques, and in 1978 federal prosecutors actually brought charges against the FBI for their Weathermen probes.

So there was an element of "just because you're paranoid, it doesn't mean they're not after you" in the WUO's situation. A number of leading figures among the militant Black Panthers died in extralegal killings by police. And, of course, the 1960s in the US were marked by some very high-profile political assassinations.

Still, this self-imposed isolation doomed the WUO's larger political aims from the start. Sara Robinson of the Orcinus blog and the Campaign for America's Future has done an important post on The Far Right's First 100 Days: Shifting Into Overdrive 04/29/09 analyzing the stages which analysts and law-enforcement need to watch in the radicalization of groups. She is focusing in particular on far-right groups in America, and the particulars of a group's ideology and home country politics are important factors. I don't want to suggest that extremists groups on the far right and the far left are somehow interchangeably, a persistent but potentially bad misleading concept. Still, some basics of group dynamics cross a lot of ideological lines. Or, as she explains it:

We need to look at what long experience has taught us about the past escalation patterns of right-wing rhetoric and violence, and figure out where we currently stand within those patterns.

We actually know quite a bit about this. Most national agencies tasked with keeping tabs on political and religious extremist groups look for specific signs that help them sort out who's just talking the talk, and who's actually getting ready to walk the walk. The criteria vary from agency to agency; and our collective insight into these patterns changes and deepens every year. But there are some generally-accepted principles ...

And she emphasizes:

One of the watershed moments in the development of a religious or political radical group is the day they decide to go upcountry, building some sort of secluded retreat or community away from the prying eyes of the authorities. The Aryan Nations, the Fundamentalist Mormons, Jim Jones....the list is long, because this is such a universal moment in the radicalization process. It's also the next place the gears shift.

In the case of the WUO and the RAF, going "upcountry" took the form of cutting themselves off from any normal social and political context and going underground.

This is a dangerous development. Groups that try to separate always claim that they're retreating to "live in peace" - but too often, peace is about the last thing that results from this. Goin' up to the country is an overt declaration that the group believes that the mainstream culture is "out to get us," and is now asserting its right to live outside the law. There's an unquestioned conviction that the outside world means them harm - and that they must organize and arm themselves for the coming showdown.

The isolation also allows high-dominance leaders to concentrate their power over group members, without any pesky social or legal recourse to fairness. Suspicion and dependency flourish. People learn that might makes right, and come to accept violence as a natural and proper way to deal with conflict. This is why law enforcement groups consider the moment of physical retreat as sort of Rubicon beyond which the likelihood of violence increases dramatically. We should be very concerned that the right wing seems determined to go there.

The one caveat to Sara's analysis I would make in the context of the WUO and the RAF is that they didn't claim to be looking to "live in peace", nor did they perceive themselves that way. Their "goin' up to the country" leap into illegality was expressly designed to make armed warfare on their respective states and economic elites. But their version of going upcountry fit the pattern she describes here: it let pathological leadership factors flourish, it put an emphasis on violence, and it often made normal critical judgment or realistic evaluations of their situation impossible. As Hayden says of Mark Rudd in his WUO phase, "Rudd, by his own account, often seems to be under the spell of charismatic, authoritarian leadership, vulnerable to the most fanatic of the fanatics, severed from his realities of only two years before."

Despite Hayden finding Rudd's behavior during this period "deeply disturbing", he also writes:

Yet I know Mark Rudd to be a good man, a useful person despite all this, and one must ask, how can that possibly be? Partly it is because I believe individuals are capable of surprising changes. I have befriended, and worked with, numerous people who have inflicted enormous damage on themselves, their loved ones, and society at some stage in their past lives. They include strung-out returning soldiers, prison inmates, former gang members, addicts, suicidal personalities of all kinds. Some of them have killed people. They have done unspeakable things but are not incorrigible. As the woman character says in Bernard Malamud’s "The Natural," "We have two lives ... the life we learn with and the life we live after that. Suffering is what brings us towards happiness."

I don't know if Mark Rudd will or even should be happy, but he is living a life of amends.

Despite the valid generalizations that can be made about the aspects of groups like the WUO or the RAF or violent far-right groups in terms of their criminal behaviors or the cult dynamics in some of these groups, the political context of their actions is also important to understand what they are doing. In the case of RAF leaders like Andreas Baader or possibly Horst Mahler and religious cult leaders like Jim Jones and David Koresh, their involvement with their particular groups may have been more opportunistic, in the sense of incorrigibly criminal characters hooking up with a group that meets their pathological needs.

But its a mistake to think political terrorist groups as primarily pathological nihilists, though some come closer to that condition than others. That's also true of criminals who expressly give far-right political reasons for their crimes. It matters in terms of understanding how to limit the harm such groups can cause in a democratic society. But it also addresses the phenomenon Hayden highlights with Mark Rudd: someone capable of plotting to commit terrible crimes or even doing so isn't necessarily an incorrigible criminal. Hayden:

As the research and writings of James Gilligan demonstrate, violence is more situational than innate. Violence and shame are closely connected. The acceleration to violent behavior can be breathtaking. The violence of the young signals a dysfunction of the elders, not a nihilist seed. [my emphasis]

He also make a provocative point with this observation:

That may be more books than those devoted to such organizations as the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee or the Students for a Democratic Society, not to mention community organizing or the farmworkers’ movement of those years, and the genre is likely to grow, revealing an abiding fascination with the question of why it was that some peaceful dissenters turned to violence so suddenly in the late ’60s. The Weather Underground took credit for 24 bombings altogether and, according to federal sources, there were additionally several thousand acts of violence during the same years. In 1969-70 alone, there were more than 550 fraggings by soldiers, according to one authoritative historian of the Vietnam War.

The fascination with such violence is not new. Similar themes can be found in Fyodor Dostoyevsky’s 19th-century novel about young Russian nihilists, "The Possessed," in Joseph Conrad’s "Under Western Eyes," Henry James’ "The Princess Casamassima," Andre Malraux’s tale of the Shanghai uprising, "Man’s Fate," and, of course, Ernest Hemingway’s stories of the Spanish civil war.

What explains the enduring interest in such radicals? I believe it has something to do with exploring the extremes of personal commitment. To fail heroically, though miserably, is seen by many as attaining a greater glory than the rewards to be had from the mundane life of patient political work. As Karl Marx wrote of the Paris Commune, the French Communards at least had stormed the heavens. And as Rudd quotes Erich Fromm quoting Nietzsche, "There are times when anyone who does not lose his mind has no mind to lose." [my emphasis]

I don't know if his quantitative observation about what has been written on these subjects is correct. But there certainly is an enduring interest in the topic of violent fringe groups that goes beyond the extremely limited political influence they had in any normal sense of the word. The aspect of extreme commitment is surely one part of the interest. After all, their are roles in society in which extreme commitment is not only expected but highly honored: soldiers, police, firefighters, spies.

Part of it is also that the story of the WUO, like that of the RAF, is simultaneously a political story and a crime drama. And there's the aspect I mentioned at the start of this post. Terrorism is a major policy concern right now. It seems perfectly normal and understandable that lots of people would be interested in understanding more about it.

Tags: mark rudd, raf, rote armee fraktion, terrorism, tom hayden,
weather underground

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Tags: bernardine dohrn, weather underground

Contemporary 1975 account of a Weather Underground bombing

The McCain campaign has made Bill Ayers into the "Willie Horton" of the 2008 Presidential campaign.

Here is part of the text of a robocall being used by the McCain campaign. Chris Wallace confronted McCain with it on FOX News and McCain not only affirmed it was his campaign's material but defended its use with McCarthyist guilt-by-association insinuations against Obama.


I looked up a 1975 hearing of the Internal Security Subcommittee of the Senate Judiciary Committee dated 01/31/1975, titled "State Department Bombing by Weatherman Underground". It concerned a bombing at the State Department for which the Weather Underground (WU) organization took responsibility. The Internal Security Subcommittee investigator that Sen. Strom Thurmond had there to testify, Robert James Short, was already convinced that the WU were responsible. They had delivered a 12-page communiqué about the action and they already had an established modus operandi by this point. So their responsibility was not in question.

When I first saw this hearing transcript, I thought I should probably wait until after Nov. 4 to post anything about it so that the focus would be more clearly on the actual historical events rather than election-related. But it only took a few seconds' reflection to recall that the loons are going to believe what they want to believe, especially since McCain has made this a central argument in his campaign.

So I decided I would proceed with a reality-based post (or maybe more than one) about the WU. I've posted historical material about the group before, including Terrorism, the old-fashioned kind 06/04/07 and Was the antiwar movement against the Vietnam War counterproductive? 08/04/07, both of which preceded John McCain adopting Bill Ayers as his campaign mascot. But the latter post in particular dealt with how "the Sixties" figures in the Republican/Christianist "culture war" narrative.

Below is the full text of a contemporary news report of the State Dept. bombing, "Weather Underground Strikes - Bomb Set Off At State Department" by Lance Gay and Brad Holt Washington Star-News 01/29/1975, as it appears in the official subcommittee report.

Several items stand out in looking at this news report now:

• No one has ever seen Barack Obama engaging in, encouraging or in any way supporting a violent political action of this type. Just reading the article makes that clear to anyone whose brain hasn't been pickled in OxyContin.

• The WU were technically good at the terrorist tactic they used. As Gay and Holt report of the State Department bombing, "The building is one of the most closely guarded government buildings in the Nation's Capital."

• No one was injured in the bombing. And it was clear that the WU did not intend to injure anyone. They phoned in a bomb warning before the blast was set to explode.

• The WU had engaged in a series of bombings of the same type, all aimed at facilities they took to be symbols of bad acts of American imperialism.

• The State Department bombing was specifically described as a protest against continuing aid to the governments of South Vietnam and Cambodia, which the WU claimed were violations of the Paris Peace Accords.

• The WU's ideology was secular and political, not religious.

• The active members of the WU were a small number, at most a few dozen. Gay and Holt report at the time that FBI "estimates that it consists of 20 to 30 persons".

After the fall of Saigon and Phnom Phen later in 1975, the WU rapidly dissolved into internal factional fights. Despite their sweeping revolutionary rhetoric, the Vietnam War was always their primary focus. As former WU member Brian Flanagan said in a 2003 documentary on the group, "I think that the Vietnam War made us all a little crazy." In that same documentary, the now-newly-infamous Bill Ayers says, "I think the war was what unified us. And when the war ended, it was hard to go on."

Weather Underground terrorist attack on State Dept. men's room, Jan. 1975

As I've said before, even though the Obama campaign understandably wants to avoid saying anything that could be "spun" as defending the WU and their actions, that doesn't get the media off the hook for failing to do elementary fact-checking. And I do think that it's wrong to falsely accuse people of killings, as the McCain robocall depicted above does. As Andrew O'Hehir writes in When terrorism was cool Salon 06/07/03, the only deaths caused by the WU were two of their own members, killed accidentally while assembling a bomb:

As misguided and counterproductive as the Weather Underground's activities may have been, after the townhouse bombing [1970] the group never again planned attacks against human beings. Their post-1970 bombings were symbolic in nature and happened at night when the buildings were empty. For all the vitriol heaped on the Weather Underground by other leftists - and especially by ex-leftist neocons like David Horowitz and Ronald Radosh - it never killed or injured anyone except its own members. (In this regard, it's striking that right-wingers routinely employ the excesses of Weatherman to paint the entire left as anti-American terrorist sympathizers, while the left is either too civil or too cowardly to use the hateful acts of Timothy McVeigh, Eric Rudolph and James Kopp to attack conservatives in general.) [my emphasis]

In 1975, Lance Gay and Brad Holt reported very straightforwardly that the WU at that point had claimed responsibility for seven bombings. "None of the previous explosions - one of which was in a washroom at the Capitol, and another in a restroom at the Pentagon - resulted in any injuries." Why can't the press today handle such basic fact-checking and background reporting?

Below is the text of the Gay/Holt article as it appears in the Subcommittee report, except that I've emphasized some passages in bold:

[From the Washington Star-News, Jan. 29, 1975]

WEATHER UNDERGROUND STRIKES—BOMB SET OFF AT STATE DEPARTMENT
(By Lance Gay and Brad Holt)

An explosion ripped through a third floor men's restroom at the State Department early today moments after callers here and in San Francisco claiming to represent the anti-war Weather Underground group said they had set bombs in government buildings to protest continued U.S. involvement in Indochina.

No one in the heavily guarded building was injured in the blast, which came at 12:56 a.m. today in a restroom next to the Sahelian Drought Emergency desk - the State Department office coordinating American relief aid to drought-stricken areas of the Sahara Desert.

The explosion tore through two adjoining bathrooms and ripped out parts of the ceiling, breaking water pipes and causing both heavy structural and water damage to the third floor and the two floors below which include the State Department's security offices.

About 19 minutes before the explosion, the Washington office of the Associated Press said it received a call telling the news agency that a "communique" had been left in a telephone booth near the AP office "Tonight we attack the AID (Agency for International Development) in the State Dept. Headquarters in Washington D.C. and the Defense Department in Oakland, California," the 12-page typed letter said. The AID offices are located on the third floor of the State Department complex at 23rd and C Streets NW.

The Washington Post said it also received a call about 12:35 a.m. from a female caller who claimed to be from the Weather Underground and who told the newspaper that a bomb had been placed in the west wing of the State Department. The newspaper contacted D.C. police, who then notified the State Department.

A guard assigned to the building said a District policeman came to the building about 12:50 a.m. "He told me there was a bomb and I picked up the phone to call my office and the bomb went off just then," said the officer, who asked not to be identified. The officer noted the exact time of the blast 12:56 a.m.

There were only a few employees of the department in the tightly secured building at the time and those in the operations division on the 7th floor of the structure said they did not know of the blast until they were told by guards. The building was not evacuated.

"We only heard reports of it, we didn't hear a thing up here," said an employee in the operations division shortly after D.C. police and firemen rushed to the building following the explosion.

"The floor of the third floor looks like a river," said one guard. "Some of the ceiling is down but none of the walls was blown down. The damage is pretty extensive in three rooms." Among the rooms damaged were the offices of AID's African Affairs Division.

District police cordoned off the building and brought in dogs to search for more explosives, but found none. Police also searched buildings at 1901 Pennsylvania Avenue NW and 1875 Connecticut Ave., NW, based on a tip they received, but found no explosives.

Early today, the FBI brought in sifting equipment and were combing through the wreckage to try to determine what kind of explosive device had been used. District bomb squad officers said today that they believe the explosion was caused by a dynamite bomb of perhaps as many as 10 sticks.

In San Francisco, another bomb threat telephoned to the AP prompted officials to cordon off the Armed Forces Induction Center in Oakland, but a search of the sprawling facility failed to turn up any explosive device.

The 12-page letter the AP picked up in a telephone booth near its downtown offices here linked the bombing at the State Department to President Ford's request yesterday for a total of $522 million in arms aid for Cambodia and South Vietnam. Insurgents in both countries have recently achieved a number of military victories and administration officials have warned Congress that South Vietnam will go under unless it is given additional aid.

The Weathermen's statement said the Ford request is a "deliberate and outright sabotage of the Paris Peace agreement" that was signed two years ago. "The U.S. government continues to wage war against Vietnam and Cambodia," the communique continued. "Unable to resolve the deepening economic crisis at home, the imperialists mobilize for further war."

State Department officials said they don't know how anyone could get into the building to plant such a device. The building is one of the most closely guarded government buildings in the Nation's Capital and visitors must have a building pass at all times to get by a guard located in the front lobby. The building was being guarded at three open entrances at the time of the blast.

The early morning bombing marked the seventh time in four years that someone claiming to be from the Weather Underground has claimed responsibility for a bomb blast. None of the previous explosions - one of which was in a washroom at the Capitol, and another in a restroom at the Pentagon - resulted in any injuries.

On March 1, 1971, a time bomb of between 15 and 20 pounds of dynamite, was detonated in a ground floor lavatory at the Capitol, causing minor damage. The Weather Underground claimed responsibility for that explosion and said the act was in retaliation for U.S. foreign policies.

The bomb in the Pentagon was set off May 19, 1972 in a fourth-floor women's restroom of the sprawling complex and again the Weather Underground claimed credit, saying the act was in response to continued U.S. bombing and mining of North Vietnam.

The other bombings the group has claimed credit for were:

• The June 14, 1974 explosion at Gulf Oil's international headquarters in Pittsburgh, Pa., which damaged two floors of the 38-story building.

• The Sept. 28, 1973 explosion that demolished four rooms at the International Telephone and Telegraph Corp.'s Latin American division offices in New York City.

• The May 31, 1974 explosion in the California attorney general's office in Los
  Angeles that ripped off doors and tore holes in the office ceiling.

• The August 1971 explosion and fire that gutted two California prison system
  offices.

The Weather Underground originally called itself the Weathermen and had its origins in a left-wing splinter group of the radical, but generally non-violent Students for a Democratic Society in the late 1960's. The Weathermen took their name from a 1965 Bob Dylan song "Subterranean Homesick Blues." which includes the verse "You don't need a weatherman to tell which way the wind blows."

The Weathermen officially split off from the SDS in 1969 after a sometimes bitter dispute within SDS over tactics. The group then went underground and the FBI - which has been unable to penetrate the group - estimates that it consists of 20 to 30 persons. One of the group's leaders is Bernardine Dohrn, a fugitive since 1970 who remains on the FBI's "10 Most Wanted" lists.

Meanwhile, in an unrelated incident, more than 1,100 employees of the New Executive Office building near the White House, yesterday were evacuated from the building following a bomb threat. The 10-story building was evacuated for an hour yesterday afternoon while officials searched it and failed to discover anything unusual.

Tags: bill ayers, culture war, terrorism, weather underground

Four things that annoy me

Some things are such familiar parts of our political landscape these days that it's easy to forget how bad some of them are.

The Republican Party has internalized a cult-like definition of "patriotism" that means nothing more or less than "supports the Republican Party". Exhibit A, the White Princess:

Palin also made a point of mentioning that she loved to visit the "pro-America" areas of the country, of which North Carolina is one. No word on which states she views as unpatriotic. (To Avoid Being 'Depressed,' Palin Skimps on Campaign News by Juliet Eilperin, Washington Post The Trail blog 10/17/08)

I think all civilians should stop referring to the President as "Commander-in-Chief" unless they are specifically talking about the Constitutional role of the Executive: "The President shall be Commander in Chief of the Army and Navy of the United States, and of the Militia of the several States, when called into the actual Service of the United States", as the document itself says. As Glenn Greenwald spells it out, "under our Constitution and basic government design, people who aren't in the military don't have a 'Commander-in-Chief'."

How did we ever get to the point that we have to rely on comedians like David Letterman, John Stewart and Stephen Colbert to ask the tough, direct questions to candidates and political leaders on national TV? As Juan Cole puts it, "For laughs, you have to go to the candidates themselves." Could our national press be any more broken?

Speaking of the broken media, can reporters not do any fact-checking any more? I posted once before on Weather Underground veteran Bill Ayers and why I thought it was important to look at terrorism as realistically and unsentimentally as possible. And that goes for ideological sentiments that distort reality. Again, Juan Cole points out that in the recent discussions of Ayers, facts don't seem to have mattered to much of anyone:

There is reason to be skeptical about McCain's depiction of Ayers nowadays. Despite McCain's misquotation, did not say after 9/11 that he wished he had bombed more. He said he wished that the underground had done more to stop the Vietnam War, and he avers that he meant political action, not bombings. Ayers never was involved in killing anyone, contrary to the impression given by calling him a 'terrorist,' and erasing from the record all the regrets he has expressed about his involvement in violence. McCain also does not mention that charges were dropped against Ayers because the government itself engaged in misconduct with the COINTELPRO program. Ayers is now a respected professor of education who has been honored by and served on committees with prominent Republicans. [my emphasis]

If our "press corps" had the energy, incentive and ability to do a little work on these things, their readers might actually learn something. The COINTELPRO program conducted covert operations to disrupt radical groups, some but not all of which were engaging in violence. Like Abu Gonzales and Dick Cheney, the COINTELPRO people were known at times to regard the law as "quaint" and even acted as instigators of violence (provocateurs). It was a program of the kind that warms the hearts of the authoritarian-minded. But its disregard of the law wound up limiting its effectiveness in actually catching and prosecuting law-breakers.

I should add that some individual members of the Weather Underground did get involved with the Black Liberation Army (BLA) group that did kill people. One former WU member is serving a life sentence for being involved in a robbery with the BLA in which people were killed.

But Ayers was not one of them. As I said in the earlier post about him, It's bad enough that the guy, who has apparently lived as a perfectly law-abiding citizen for the last nearly three decades (however distasteful some of his current views may be to many) is being held up as a poster boy for Evil. The McCain-Palin campaign is also falsely accusing him of being an attempted murderer. The later was not just a matter of calling him a "terrorist" as Cole mentions. Palin has referred to him as "a domestic terrorist who tried to kill his own people" and linking that caricature of Ayers to Obama. Our "culture warriors" have long since stopped caring whether what they say is actually true. But the press ought to be a little more informative.

Tags: bill ayers, establishment press, mainstream media, mainstream press, weather underground

Bill Ayers

Bob Somerby on Tuesday took up the accusation that Obama once or twice talked to Bill Ayers, former Weather Underground (WU) member in his Daily Howler column of 10/07/08.

He makes the point that even if you think the Weather Underground were demons from Hail, Bill Ayers has long since become an active figure in establishment Chicago politcs. Somerby cites the following passages from Scott Shane's Obama and ’60s Bomber: A Look Into Crossed Paths New York Times 10/03/08:

Since earning a doctorate in education at Columbia in 1987, Mr. Ayers has been a professor of education at the University of Illinois at Chicago, the author or editor of 15 books, and an advocate of school reform.

“He’s done a lot of good in this city and nationally,” Mayor Richard M. Daley said in an interview this week, explaining that he has long consulted Mr. Ayers on school issues. Mr. Daley, whose father was Chicago’s mayor during the street violence accompanying the 1968 Democratic National Convention and the so-called Days of Rage the following year, said he saw the bombings of that time in the context of a polarized and turbulent era.

"This is 2008," Mr. Daley said. "People make mistakes. You judge a person by his whole life."

Joan Welch took up the issue in Ugly time Salon 10/06/08:

The McCain campaign may be going off a cliff. Sarah Palin hit a new low -- and that's hard for her -- when she smeared Barack Obama with his association with '60s radical Bill Ayers, by claiming that Obama sees America "as imperfect enough to work with a domestic terrorist who tried to kill his own people" -- as though Obama's concerns about American society led him to ally himself with terrorism. Break it down, folks, and that's what she's saying. Palin's got some syntax problems when she talks, so maybe she didn't mean it that way -- but I think she did. She's found slightly different ways to say the same thing two days in a row, even after multiple news organizations criticized her take on the Obama-Ayers connection.

Among other things, she points out that Obama was a child when the Weather Underground was bombing buildings. "Is Palin saying the Democratic nominee was a member of WeatherKids?" she asks.

But seeing the current film about the German Red Army Faction (RAF) and researching a bit about them for my post on the film, I'm reminded that the RAF's level of violence was really in a whole different league than the Weather Underground. The WU carried out some spectacular bombings, including one inside the Pentagon and one in the Capitol building. Plus they sprung LSD guru Timothy Leary from a low-security prison with no violence. They did not carry out kidnappings or assassinations, much less set of bombs in public places to deliberately kill and injure civilians, as the car bombers and suicide bombers so frequently do these days in the Middle East.

The only case in which a death may have been connected to the WU's actions was a bombing of the mathematics building at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, which has sometimes been linked to the WU, with what degree of credibility I don't know. A graduate student working at night in the building was killed.

So - not that any Democratic Party spokesman is going to make the point for fear of having it turned into a "gotcha" soundbite - Palin's statement calling Ayers "a domestic terrorist who tried to kill his own people" is also not true. It's bad enough that the guy, who has apparently lived as a perfectly respectable, law-abiding citizen for the last nearly three decades (however distasteful some of his current views may be to many) is being held up as a poster boy for Evil. The White Princess is also falsly accusing him of being an attempted murderer.

At the end of the film Der Baader-Meinhof Komplex, the Brigitte Mohnhaupt characters explains to her fellow RAF members in relation to their leaders who committed suicide in prison that they really had committed suicide, they weren't murdered as the RAF claimed, and tells them, you should look at them as something that they weren't. Which could also be the coda to the film.

It's a good guideline for the reality-based ín looking at terrorism. Let's look at the phenomenon and its practitioners for what they are, not just make up anything we find it comforable to think about them.

Previous related posts:

Terrorism, the old-fashioned kind 06/04/07

Was the antiwar movement against the Vietnam War counterproductive? 08/14/07

Remembering 1968: Ralf Fücks gives a Green view 05/14/08

"Der Baader-Meinhof Komplex" film 10/05/08

Tags: baader meinhof komplex film, baader meinhof gang, bill ayers, raf, rote-armee-fraktion, terrorism, weather underground

Remembering 1968: Ralf Fücks gives a Green view

Ralf Fücks, chair of the German Green Party and co-president of the Heinrich Böll Stiftung (Foundation)

The best of the ten essays in Dissent magazine's Spring 2008 symposium on "1968" is the contribution by Ralf Fücks (Dissent uses the Anglicized spelling "Fuecks" - and, no, it's pronounced more like "fooks" than what some of you are thinking). Fücks is the chairman of the Heinrich Böll Stiftung, the foundation aligned with the German Green Party. The Heinrich Böll Stiftung also has an English-language Web site, which features a copy of the Dissent article under the title 1968 and the Discovery of Politics.

Opening by observing that the year 1968 resonated in some "truly revolutionary" political and cultural develops, he proceeds in the second paragraph:

It is true that the protest movement of that year did not lead to a dramatic overturn of the political order like the French or Russian revolutions. The extent of violence and counter-violence of 1968 is not comparable to the excesses of past wars and civil wars. It was the Prague Spring - an event that is often ignored when we speak of 1968 - that came closest to being the revolutionary overthrow of a regime. A peaceful revolution began in Czechoslovakia, and it shook "really-existing socialism" to its foundations. The revolution was destroyed by the tanks of the Warsaw Pact. The tragic gravity of the Prague events went far beyond the symbolic actions and theatrical stage-managing of student protests in the West. The Soviet invasion buried hopes for "socialism with a human face." In fact, communist hegemony in Eastern Europe was doomed from that moment. It was only a matter of time until a system incapable of reform collapsed. If there is an inherent link between 1968 and 1989 it is that the defeat of the Prague Spring would lead one day to the collapse of the Soviet Empire. (my emphasis)

The German Green Party always opposed the hardline Cold War pressures for military buildups and political confrontation between East and West in Europe. But the Greens were also notable since their founding for their active solidarity with the democratic opposition in Communist East Germany (DDR, Deutsche Democratische Republik, English GDR, German Democratic Republic). In this way, they distinguished themselves from the two major German parties of today, the Social Democrats (SPD) and Christian Democrats (CDU). The Green Party supported the Ostpolitik initiated under the leadership of the SPD's Willy Brandt to make a de facto normalization of relations between East and West Germany. But, unlike the SPD and CDU in practice, the Greens understood Ostpolitik to include active solidarity and interchange with the grassroots democratic movements in the DDR, which organized around religious, peace and ecological issues.

The Greens' version of support for democracy and human rights in the Eastern bloc was not simply a slogan against The Enemy, as it was for hardline conservatives, for Realists, and too often for liberal internationalists in the West, including the US. It was a part of the Greens' core view of democracy and the peace movement and of their support for German unification.

His evaluation of the impact of "1968" on the West focuses largely on the experience of Western Europe. But the same analysis could apply in the United States and elsewhere, though it's too seldom formulated with this level of nuance:

In the West, things were different. The superiority of the capitalist democracies was demonstrated by their ability to absorb the momentum created by "1968," even against the will of the ruling elites who feared this would lead to the decline of the West. Open systems transform opposition into innovation. In other words, "1968" ended up giving Western societies powerful innovative momentum, extending from the triumph of popular culture and social emancipation of women to the emergence of new forms of political participation. The ideological recourse to Marxism, the admiration for the Chinese Cultural Revolution, and solidarity with the "anti-imperialist liberation movements" in Vietnam and Palestine disguised the fact that "1968" was actually reformist in character. As is often the case, there was great distance between the self-understanding of the historical protagonists and their impact on society. If the revolutionary rhetoric of the movement’s spokespersons is the benchmark, the ’68 generation failed. However, in terms of the cultural and political changes set in motion by the movement, it was highly successful.

While this is not a specifically Marxist view of the historical process, the Germans do have the benefit of a long democratic labor tradition that includes an Hegelian understanding of history that was also part of the Marxist tradition. And the dialectical Hegelian view of historical processes has a lot to recommend itself. (In the American context for something like this written for general consumption, it would require about ten pages of explanation to adequately troll-proof it, so I'm not going to bother.)

But that paragraph in itself is a reminder about how impoverished the American political vocabulary is in so many ways. When Fücks talks about the "superiority of
the capitalist democracies" in the West, note that he is talking about the ability of the democratic process to adapt to mass demands for change against the will of what would more traditionally be called the ruling class. He uses the more polite and ambiguous term "ruling elites". Something very like this is what is meant when people say - as some ornery Jacksonians are still known to do - that the New Deal of the 1930s saved capitalism from itself.

In his last book published during his lifetime, The Economics of Innocent Fraud (2004), John Kenneth Galbraith described how the word "capitalism" became increasingly uncomfortable for the defenders of the established order in the capitalist countries over the course of the twentieth century. Describing various earlier embarrassments to the system's reputation, not least of which was the widely-held perception in the 1920s that the Great War of 1914-18 had its source in "the rivalry between the great arms and steel combines of France and Germany", he continues:

Later, and more destructive to the reputation of capitalism in the United States, was the visibly insane Florida real estate speculation [of the 1920s], the rising corporate and industrial voice and, most important, the stock market explosion of the late 1920s. Then came the world-resonating crash of 1929 and, for ten long years, the Great Depression. Capitalism all too obviously did not work. So denoted, it was unacceptable.

There followed a determined search for a benign alternative name. "Free Enterprise" had a trial in the United States. It didn't take. Freedom, meaning for enterprise decisions, was not reassuring. In Europe there was "Social Democracy" - capitalism and socialism in a companionate mix. In the United States, however, socialism was (as it remains) unacceptable. In the next years reference was to the New Deal; this, however, was too clearly identified with Franklin D. Roosevelt and his cohorts. So in reasonably learned expression there came "the market system." There was not adverse history here, in fact no history at all. It would have been hard, indeed, to find a more meaningless designation - this a reason for the choice.

Conservatives of various kinds, not just the neocons who sometimes still cherish class concepts from a kind of mirror-image of Marxism, can still be heard to say that capitalism, or the "market system", produces democracy.

But that conservative version of economic determinism has to be justified by some purist, Libertarian-type economic dogma, not from actual history. Parliamentary democracy was the classic political demand of the rising capitalist class in the French Revolution of 1789 and the immensely important European revolutions of 1848, the latter which are very much remembered in European history and political theory but seemingly nearly forgotten in their American counterparts. Capitalism in Britain and and the US found democracy very consistent with capitalist development, though neither country could be said to be "pure" representative democracy in the 19th century by today's standards (e.g., slavery, property qualifications for voting, women deprived of the vote, etc.).

But in Germany and France, healthy capitalist economic development, and less robust versions of the same in the Habsburg empire, co-existed for decades with authoritarian systems (Bismarck's in Germany, that of Napoleon III in France). And the liberals who took their tradition from the capitalist advocates of 1848 often found themselves content with aspects of classical liberalism such as national unity and governmental secularism, without worrying excessively about the democratic parts. In most of Europe, certainly including the German and Habsburg empires, it was the social-democratic parties - which later split into Social Democratic and Communist Parties in the wake of the Great War and the Russian Revolution of 1917 - who were the chief advocates for democracy and individual political rights.

So there's nothing especially new or unusual about observing, as Fücks does in his essay, that "capitalist democracy" allows for expression of popular will, and in many cases effective expression of the popular will, against the consensus among the leading capitalists themselves. Capitalism and parliamentary democracy developed historically in close tandem. But they are not identical. And it became increasingly clear over the last century that there are actual contradictions (if you'll excuse another Hegelian concept) between democracy and capitalism. For myself, I have to credit that particular formulation, the contradiction between democracy and capitalism, to a business school professor of mine, David Palmer, a former investment banker. (It was a Jesuit school, what can I say?)

That was a long riff on a single paragraph of Fücks' essay, I realize. But it's a dynamic conception of history something like what I've described, that lets Fücks argue that even the adoption of very explicitly anti-capitalism ideologies "disguised the fact that '1968' was actually reformist in character." I would like to say he means that the movements of that time in Western countries were objectively reformist. But the neocons' propagandistic use of "objectively", as in "critics of the war are objectively aiding The Terrorists", may have ruined that particular usage for generations. That usage is part of the strong Trotskyist heritage of the neocons, though an Hegelian would probably say that it was a Troskyism that had undergone significant transformation. While less philosophically minded critics might wonder how great the transformation actually was, since the "left" nature of Trotskyism was always of a particular kind that maybe didn't need so much transformation to become neoconservatism. (Long story for another time.)

Fücks gives an orderly list of various long-term observable effects of "1968". The whole thing is definitely well worth reading. But his list includes: "an expansion of the political public"; "the expansion of democracy"; and, "the politicization of the private sphere".

I'll include here a couple of more passages I found particularly interesting. This one talks about the effects of some of the more Jacksonian aspects of American democracy on the present-day European Union democracies:

While American democracy was premised on a self-aware civil society and republicanism, Europe faced a legacy left by absolutist states. The postwar democratic order was conceived as resting on state institutions whose democratic authority came from elections. But in the 1960s, calls arose for democratization of schools and universities, for co-determination in industry, and for a deeper citizen involvement in the political process. The aim was to implant democracy more deeply into society. Above all, "1968" stands for a new political culture of democracy in practice, which also includes numerous self-administered projects and a plethora of nongovernmental organizations that have changed the political landscape.

Democratic virtues were, of course, not invented in 1968. But it was only after 1968 that European political culture became more defined by grassroots involvement, by the activism of citizen groups and the idea of self-determination. The American civil rights movement and its culture of nonviolent opposition had immense influence, as did new forms of political action that spread to Europe from the United States. A new political direction emerged in Germany and elsewhere in Europe, and it played a decisive role in forming a more self-confident civil society that looked the state "in the eye." (my emphasis)

Is it really so hard to write clearly like this? None of the other ten essays in this Dissent symposium comes close, and there's only one of the others that I found to be genuinely good, though. Some of the others had some decent observations, if you can wade through the fog surrounding them.

Fücks is also good on describing the relation of "1968" to the women's movement and also on describing the dark side of the 60s slogan, popular in the US as well as Europe, that the personal is political:

Domestic violence was no longer a taboo issue, patriarchy was pushed aside, paths opened for diverse personal approaches to life, and sexual minorities won equality. The year was a catalyst of the new women’s movement and gay rights.

But all this led also to unpredictable developments. Media focus on the private life of politicians is one consequence of blurring the difference between public and private persons. Another is the emergence of "identity politics." Demands for equal treatment now feature claims based on ethnicity, gender, or sexual orientation. Taken to an extreme, this tendency implies that everything in politics must be particularized. In this sense, identity politics conflicts with the idea of a republic of equal and free citizens, who formulate and express their political will in open debate.

Note that the last argument is a carefully formulated position from a democratic perspective, not a conservative slogan to try to discredit all "special interests" except those representing rich white people.

In the concluding section, he addresses some of the real problems of "1968", including the proliferation of small, often authoritarian leftwing sects and the unjustified resort to violence seen with groups like the Germany Red Army Faction (RAF, aka, "the Baider-Meinhof gang") or the Italian Red Brigades, though he does not specifically name those groups.

Since the "culture warriors" in the US are again wetting themselves this year over the long-disbanded Weather Underground (WU)organization in the US, it worth noting that the WU did not target individuals for kidnapping and assassination as did the RAF and Red Brigades. Their brand of terrorism (armed struggle, they called it) involved symbolic bombings of targets they took to be particularly representative of the ruling powers. Some of their own number were famously killed in an accidental explosion in a New York townhouse while building bombs. And there was a bombing of a mathematics building at the University of Wisconsin in which the WU may have been involved in which a student died, seemingly unintentionally from the bombers' viewpoint.

The kidnappings and deadly violence associated in Europe with the RAF and the Red Brigades were in the US more the work of groups like the Symbionese Liberation Army (SLA), which kidnapped Patty Hearst, and the Black Liberation Army (BLA). The Black Panthers wound up in gun battles with police. But however one evaluates their activities, they did not pursue the kind of violent terror strategy that the RAF did.

His concluding paragraphs are well argued. They represent some actual political-historical analysis, not just the burnt-out clichees featured in most of the other symposium essays:

The protest movement of 1968 was never a uniform phenomenon, and its members went off in all directions. These ranged from hippies and spiritualists, Maoists and orthodox Marxists, to citizens’ action groups, feminist projects, third-worldists, pacifists, and those engaged in diverse forms of militancy. Part of the movement drifted into a conspiratorial world of armed struggle and left a trail of blood. Imagining that a new form of fascism threatened, all means were justified. The most virulent forms of "armed struggle" were in two postfascist states. Neither Germany nor Italy had any adequate tradition of a civic political culture; militant leftists in both of them were suspicious of political institutions and imagined themselves as descendants of the "antifascist resistance."

There was no "Chinese Wall" between such "red terror" and other groups of the radical left at the time. Even so, it is false and absurd to brand the ’68 movement as a whole as the precursor of left-wing terrorism. This is bad teleology. While some did opt for revolutionary violence, the vast majority set up anti-authoritarian children’s day care centers; reformed schools; published alternative newspapers; founded free theaters, human rights groups, women’s shelters, and citizens’ action groups; concerned themselves with alternative medicine; or embarked on the long march through parties and parliaments.

The discovery of politics in everyday practice, the practical improvement of society from within and below, a cosmopolitan attitude, a passion for open politics, sustained social commitments, an insistence on self-determination and democratic participation. These, too, are legacy of 1968 - it’s a lot. (my emphasis)

Tags: 1968, culture war, ralf fücks, weather underground

Was the antiwar movement against the Vietnam War counterproductive?

Tom Hayden, post-1968

This is a view that even some careful researchers have rather amazingly come to accept. I've explained in a number of posts why I believe this view is seriously flawed.

For one thing, that view often seems to overlook the nature of protest itself. There's not nearly so much incentive to protest if most people already agree with you. The anti-Vietnam War protests were aimed at changing people minds. In other words, by their very nature many people would find the protest a pain in the rear. That not the same thing as saying that the protests were ineffective.

In his book The Year the Dream Died: Revisiting 1968 in America (1997), which I quoted in the last post, Jules Witcover interviewed Tom Hayden, who was one of the best-known figures in the 1960s antiwar movement and also a founder of the American Students for a Democratic Society (SDS). There was a German SDS, also called Students for a Democratic Society which in German happened to come out to the initials SDS also, but it and the American SDS were not part of the same group.

Witcover questioned Hayden as to whether "the excesses of the radicals of 1968, of whom he was a leader, fueled the rise of conservatism and the resurrection of the Republican party after the Goldwater debacle of 1964". Hayden rejected that argument "sharply". In his response, Hayden pointed to how strongly the image of what Digby calls DFH's, for "dirty [Cheney]ing hippies", continued to antimate the Republican Party in the late 1990s:

"Law and order meant the status quo at that time [1968] against the perceived threat of the blacks, the students, the women, the antiwar demonstrators," Hayden said. "You still see that today. It very much animates [Newt] Gingrich's consciousness when he talks about rescuing American civilization, or rescuing Western civilization. He's talking about rescuing his version of the status quo from what he perceives to be the Visigoths and barbarians at the gates, who are all these people from the sixties. (my emphasis)

People used to counsel African-Americans not to push too hard in the 1960s for their basic rights as citizens because they might provoke a "white backlash". Martin Luther King remarked at one point that it looked like to him that whites had been backlashing for quite a while already.

What Hayden points out there is accurate and important. The perennial Republican bogeyman of the DFH's is not just about white people with flower-power clothes demonstrating against the war. It's a mishmash of all sorts of "culture war" fears, not least of which is the image of black people being equal citizens. When Ronald Reagan in his 1966 campaign for California governor, before the Summer of Love in 1967 and before the various events of 1968, fired up his white audiences by telling him that hippies were people who "act like Tarzan, look like Jane, and smell like Cheetah", neither he nor his audiences were thinking only about pot-smoking white guys with shoulder-length hair.

In this case, other groups could have proposed a similar retort to Reagan and his culture-war fans as King posed. Should Vietnam veterans, religious activists and the others who opposed the Vietnam War have just shut the hell up the way Reagan and his supporters wanted them to? Who was being more sensible in 1966, the war critics who were pointed out problems? Or the cheerleaders who just swallowed those over-optimistic assessments of progress from the Johnson administration and the happy-talk generals?

Hayden points to the Vietnam War itself as a decisive factor in the political rebound of the Republicans. After all, it was the Democratic Johnson administration that had placed half a million US troops in Vietnam:

"But there's quite another way to look at it, a better way," he said. "The United States never should have been involved in the war in Vietnam. That's the root cause, because it created a sea of blood that created lasting emotions, feelings and resentments. It prevented the possible completion of the antipoverty effort and the urban agenda which led directly to the conditions for the black riots, the insurrections, further bloodshed and creation of a climate of law and order.

"If there's blame, and I'm only responding to those who want to blame the New Left, the root responsibility was the decision to continue escalating the war in Vietnam in 1963, 1964, 1965. ... If you want to place a date when it ill went wrong it was the Gulf of Tonkin decision in August 1964. That was it. So all the conservatives, the people who blame the New Left, are doing is focusing on a later set of events that brought about the beginning of a Republican ascendancy. ...

"If you go back four years earlier, if you want to get down to what really divided the country, what caused the reform-minded students to become revolutionaries, what caused a breakdown of trust, what caused the racial violence, it was the escalation of the war in Vietnam. ... If Johnson had acted on the recommendations of his advisers who wanted to emphasize the Great Society and deal with the unrest in the cities, [the riots] might not have happened." (my emphasis)

We should remember that urban riots in predominantly black ghettos in the cities were very much on people's minds in 1968. After Martin Luther King's assassination on April 4, 1968, riots broke out in over 100 cities.

Marvin Gettleman and his fellow editors wrote in their notes to Vietnam and America: A Documented History (1985):

The nationwide reaction to the murder of Dr. King in some ways rivaled the Tet Offensive, to which it bore similarities by no means purely coincidental. Between April 4 and April 11, 1968, rebellions broke out in 125 US cities and towns.

They go on to point out that Westmoreland had requested an additional 206,000 troops for Vietnam. Part of the military's thinking in that request, as Jeffrey Record has described, was to force Johnson to mobilize the reserves, which they believed would not only provide better troops than they were getting through the draft but would also bolster public support for the Vietnam War. Gettleman, et al, write:

The uprisings [urban riots] of early April realized [the] worst fears [of "worried decision-makers in the Pentagon and the White House"]. In that cataclysmic week, 55,000 troops had to be mobilized alongside tens of thousands of police. Television viewers around the world saw Washington itself defended by federal combat troops, while columns of smoke from burning buildings towered above the Capitol. On April 11 came the biggest call-up of the reserves during the Vietnam War.

Protests followed at many colleges and universities around the country, with events tending to link the issues of the King assassination, civil rights and the Vietnam War in the minds of both protesters and the public.

And there were violent protests occurring in other contexts, as well. In 1969, for instance, there were around 5,000 protest bombings in the United States, something rarely heard of these days. We should note that over 60% of those bombings were related in some way to labor conflicts.

My point in describing this context is not to justify riots or to romanticize the use of Molotov cocktails. It's to say that there were a lot more social conflicts going on than hippies smoking dope and the occasional antiwar demonstrators getting rowdy.

And to meaningfully understand the political dynamics of that period, it's necessary to ask, for instance, since the Vietnam War was being waged by a Democratic administration and the Presidential candidate (Nixon) elected in 1968 was a Republican who assured voters he had a secret plan to end the war, how does that translate into antiwar protests being counterproductive?

And if the public saw a Democratic administration calling out troops to quell rioting black people in 1968, why is it that "backlashing" Southern whites who supported the Vietnam War being waged by that same Democratic administration were repelled by that same administration?

The answers to those questions aren't simple, either. But they do suggest how lacking the simple-minded assumptions of the conventional wisdom about that period really are. Not to speak of the assumptions of Christian Right culture warriors.

Hayden's comments to Witcover about the violent radical group the Weather Underground, which was similar in ideology to the German Rote Armee Fraktion (RAF), but unlike the RAF did not use kidnappings or murder as part of their repertoire, are also notable.

Even before the disillusionment of 1968, Hayden said, the Students for a Democratic Society of which he had been a founder and intellectual voice "was cracking up. The first wave of radical reformers like myself had gone. ... A new, more disillusioned radicalism was sprouting, from 1965 to 1968, and in the wake of 1968 you had a further splintering into what became the Weather Underground, which had concluded that only by violent disruption [could change be achieved].

"This was not a completely mindless approach," he said. "The new leaders of SDS who became the Weather Underground were the younger brothers and sisters of the people who had started SDS in a rosier time. You know how you get into fights in a family. Well, they felt that our generation had failed. By that they meant reform had not occurred. In fact, more people were getting killed in Vietnam, and people trying to reform the system in Mississippi had been denied, and in Chicago had been beaten up with clubs. So they took the leap from that to the conclusion that the establishment didn't listen to reason, or morality or to marching feet or even to votes. The change would only come about if the establishment faced a continual low-grade, violent headache at home.

"And so you started to get these bombings of power lines, ROTC buildings. But never before, in many years, [except] maybe in labor strikes, had there been this much violent disruption in America. If you look at it amorally as a historian would, you'd have to say they had some effect. They may not have brought about reform and they certainly didn't bring about the good society or the blessed community. But they did add, just as they thought they would, to the burden of the establishment going on with the Vietnam War. It became clearer and clearer that if you went on with the Vietnam War, you were creating more and more of this chaos at home." (my emphasis)

Again, no simple answers. I would add that the electoral presence in American politics of any group that shared the ideology of the Weather Underground was pretty much precisely zero. What the effects of their violent activities - like successful symbolic bombings (i.e., symbolic in being non-lethal by design) - may have been, it's hard to say. I don't recall ever seeing any polls that attempted to measure that, but there probably were. As Hayden indicates, they did add some element of disruption to the political scene.

I suppose I should also add that I don't see Hayden's comments as in any way approving of the Weather Underground's particular approach, although that should be clear from the passage I quoted itself.

Now, in the fevered minds of Republican culture warriors, there is little or no distinction between Congressional war critics, underground Marxist-Leninist sects, scary rioting Negroes, and Sunni Salafist suicide bombers. And that strange identification of wildly disparate groups in their ideology and political imagery is a fact in itself that has to be taken into account.

It just shouldn't be confused with reality-based history.

Tags: antiwar movement, antiwar protest, tom hayden, vietnam war, weather underground

Terrorism, the old-fashioned kind

There's a good slideshow (with German captions) summarizing the history of the Rote-Armee-Fraktion (RAF), aka, the "Baader-Meinhof gang", Germany's best-known domestic terrorist group from 1970-1998, in Die Opfer, die Täter, der Terror Süddeutsche Zeitung 01.06.07. The RAF is a good reminder that "terrorism" is a technique of violence and warfare, not a movement or an ideology in itself.

The RAF is getting retrospective stories in the German press for several reasons: the 40th anniversary of the death of Benno Ohnesorg, killed by police in a demonstration in (West) Berlin against the visiting Shah of Iran on 06/03/67, a key event in the growth of radical protest in Germany; the 30th anniversary of 1977's "German Autumn" series of RAF attacks, which were hyped hysterically by the outlets of the rightwing Springer press; the release from prison of Brigitte Mohnhaupt in March of this year after more than two decades; and, the public discussion of the possible release from pirson of Christian Klar, about whose conviction new questions have recently become public in Der Spiegel about possible prosecutorial misconduct.

Klar, along with Birgit Hogefeld and Eva Haule-Frimpong, are the only three remaining RAF prisoners in Germany.

The group formally dissolved itself in 1998.

For more on Benno Ohnesorg's death and the political significance it had at the time, see Polizeipräsident legt Kranz für Ohnesorg nieder von Oliver Das Gupta Süddeutsche Zeitung 02.06.07, and especially Der Tag, der die Republik veränderte von Volker Ullrich (a leading German historian) Die Zeit 17.05.07.

The closest American equivalent of the RAF was probably the Weather Underground, who saw themselves as a similar organization. The RAF, though, carried out kidnappings and assassinations. The Weather Underground didn't do those kinds of actions, though they did plant bombs in buildings considered to be sympathetic targets. So far as I'm aware, only one bombing possibly related to that group killed someone in a building. Three of the group's members blew themselves upaccidentally while building bombs in a townhouse in 1970. One of their most daring and famous actions was springing LSD guru Timothy Leary from prison that same year.

The FBI Web site has articles on the latter group. Obviously, the FBI is not an entirely disintered group when it comes to that subject. The articles include:

1975 Terrorism Flashback: State Department Bombing 01/29/04 (The paragraph called "The Chase" is pretty garbled.)

Weather Underground Organization (Weatherman), a 1976 official FBI Chicago Field Office report of 420 pages. Page 3 of this report (in the Part 1a) link show some of the FBI obsessions of the time. Though the Weather Underground, like its European counterparts, held the orthodox Communist Parties of the time as hopelessly "revisionist" and ineffective or worse, just on that first introductory page, we get citations about the American Communist Party ("CPUSA", in FBI jargon) and even Whittaker Chambers' book Witness, one of the favorite conservative books of the 1950s and, I suppose, even to this day.

Here are some reviews of the well-regarded documentary about the group, titled "The Weather Underground".

The Weather Underground by Rob Nelson Mother Jones Mar/Apr 2003

Notes From the Underground by David Greenberg Slate 06/06/03

For 11 years, Bernardine Dohrn and Bill Ayers were on the run from the FBI. In the film 'The Weather Underground,' the anti-war activists explain why they fought the law - and why they have no regrets by Edward Guthmann San Francisco Chronicle 07/21/03

When terrorism was cool by Andrew O'Hehir Salon 06/07/03. O'Hehir writes:

As misguided and counterproductive as the Weather Underground's activities may have been, after the townhouse bombing [1970] the group never again planned attacks against human beings. Their post-1970 bombings were symbolic in nature and happened at night when the buildings were empty. For all the vitriol heaped on the Weather Underground by other leftists - and especially by ex-leftist neocons like David Horowitz and Ronald Radosh - it never killed or injured anyone except its own members. (In this regard, it's striking that right-wingers routinely employ the excesses of Weatherman to paint the entire left as anti-American terrorist sympathizers, while the left is either too civil or too cowardly to use the hateful acts of Timothy McVeigh, Eric Rudolph and James Kopp to attack conservatives in general.)

Tags: raf, rote-armee-fraktion, terrorism, weather underground