Jeremy Varon (17 page)

In the immediate wake of the protests, journalists from several underground papers held a roundtable discussion about the Days of Rage, titled with honest wonder “What Was Chicago?” Their conversation was a mosaic of ambivalence, in which optimism and skepticism, excitement and dread combined in efforts to solve Weatherman’s enigma without resort to dogmatic dismissal. One sympathetic reporter gave an achingly conflicted appraisal of the action: “It was a tremendous loss, but it was 86

The Importance of Being Militant

a victory because we’ve been talking for years about armed struggle, in a context that has always been completely abstract. Nobody ever knew what it meant. It still isn’t what we mean . . . but the thing is that much less abstract.”

The Yippie Stew Albert used a dramatic, if questionable, analogy in defending the moral impulse of the protest, regardless of its political consequences:

What if you picked up a history book and read that in 1938 a thousand University of Berlin students ran through the streets on behalf of the Jews in the concentration camps, breaking car windows, knocking over fat, old German ladies, and beating up members of the Gestapo? . . . These guys, no matter what came out of their actions in a tactical sense—they might have even speeded up repression, Nixon may have become even more paranoid, you might have speeded up the flow of Jews into the concentration camps and some of the Jews might have hated “The Vethermen”—but they would still be the moral heroes of the 20th century. The Pope would bless them, Mao would write an essay on them, Nehru probably would have liked them, trees would be planted in Israel for them, even Nixon would have dug them. On a moral level, they’re perfect.47

Finally, the roundtable participants granted a certain credibility to Weatherman’s contention that behind the reluctance of whites to risk injury or death lay the assumption that their lives were somehow worth more than those of Vietnamese and blacks, although one objected, “You can’t organize whites around dying.”

.

.

.

Paradise, sacrifice, mortality, reality.

But the magician is quicker and his game

Is much thicker than blood and blacker than ink

And there’s no time to think.

Bob Dylan, “No Time to Think”

The Days of Rage and the debates surrounding them reveal the importance of militancy not only for Weatherman, but for the New Left as a whole. By giving substance to the notion of a white army, Weatherman represented a transition from abstraction to reality for a movement fever-ishly trying to develop “a strategy to win.” But Weatherman’s combat was impressive to some observers for having accessed “reality” in deeper senses.

Stressing the existential roots of 1960s protest, Doug Rossinow as-The Importance of Being Militant

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serts that “the search for authenticity lay at the heart of the new left.”48

In that search, young people reacted against what they saw as a dominant culture of “death and artificiality,” “fronts and disguises,” and sought through the politics and culture of protest experiences defined by conviction, cooperation, and “a sense of vital life . . . in touch with the

‘really real.’” The desire for authenticity was pervasive, informing the activism of everyone from SDSers to left-wing Christian students and politically inclined hippies. It certainly was a driving force behind the militancy of the 1960s.

Activists increasingly embraced militant action partly as an answer to the perceived limitations or even debilitating effects of language. Phoebe Hirsch, who attended the University of Wisconsin, recalls a professor challenging her during a semester in Paris in 1965 to “take a stand” on the budding conflict in Vietnam. Back at Wisconsin, she found herself put off by the ceaseless debating of the male-dominated campus left. Deciding that one “just couldn’t talk” any longer, she and several other women activists took the bold step of lying down in front of buses carrying troops eventually bound for Vietnam. However strong her fear, the act felt like “totally the right thing to do.”49

Bill Ayers, contrasting the militancy of the New Left with the theoretical wrangling and complacency of the Old, juxtaposed words and action, theory and practice in the following way:

You had a responsibility to link your conduct to your consciousness. . . .

If you believed something, the proof of that belief was to act on it. It wasn’t to espouse it with the right treatises or manifestos. We were militants. That’s what we were. We were militants before we were thinkers. . . .

Militancy is a stance in the world, a way of being in the world that says that I’m going to put my body somehow in the way of the normal functioning of things, and I’m going take the consequence of having done that. . . .

The statement is my body standing in the way, and once that statement is made, you open up a public space where lots of people have to think and act differently. . . .
Militancy was the standard by which we measured our
aliveness.
50

Ayers first experienced the power of militancy directly while participating in a sit-in at the Ann Arbor Draft Board in 1965. Even the on-lookers who “wanted to kill us,” he recalls, were forced to ask themselves what principle would drive him and other students to risk their educations and futures. Hirsch’s experience and Ayers’s reflections describe well the ethic of resistance that began in the defiant acts of the civil rights movement and ran through various forms of nonviolent di-88

The Importance of Being Militant

rect action practiced by the New Left and the antiwar movement, such as sit-ins, blocking traffic, and burning draft cards. The rapid mobilization of millions of people into the civil rights, antiwar, and student movements testified to the educational and catalyzing effect of action.

In short, 1960s activists practiced a kind of “body politics,” in which the body functioned both as a potent means of transforming the public sphere and as the ultimate marker of political engagement and individual vitality.

The New Left established the connection between militancy and authenticity, or “realness,” in its use of language. In their fascinating “Lexicon of Folk-Etymology,” Ralph Larkin and Daniel Foss describe the values and spirit of the New Left by defining its key terms.51 The entry for “real” is instructive. To be “real” for New Leftists meant “being what one becomes upon rejection of the conventions” learned through one’s mainstream socialization. “From one’s current perspective,” these “amounted to ‘bullshit,’ ‘lies,’ ‘brainwashing,’ a ‘phony-mindfuck,’ etc.” The existentialist premises of this formulation are striking. In his preface to Frantz Fanon’s
The Wretched of the Earth,
Jean-Paul Sartre wrote: “We only become what we are by the radical and deep-seated refusal of that which others have made of us.”52 For New Leftists, militancy enhanced or expedited that process of becoming. According to Larkin and Foss, to be real also meant in radical parlance to be “brave, courageous or tough.” These attributes applied especially to those who embraced confrontations with authorities that held legal or physical risks. Militancy, in short, was an experiential crucible for the forging of one’s authentic self.

The New Left’s skepticism about language intensified toward the end of the 1960s. With whatever irony, young activists responded to the escalation of police violence and the war in Vietnam with a dizzying explosion of discourse, in which they exhorted one another to greater resistance. Guns and bombs entered the imagery of the more radical sectors of the movement and became standard in the graphics of underground newspapers. It was as if the New Left were trying, through the sheer accumulation of subversive words and images, to will a new world into being.

But New Leftists also expressed impatience with the perceived limits of their largely verbal protest. A great part of the frustration was practical.

“The need to fight . . . came out of many demonstrations in which you’d talk and talk and . . . they’d essentially say, ‘Nice boy, go away,’” the Weatherman Scott Braley explained.53 Some felt that their discourse amounted to mere verbiage bereft of agency—tokens of an inauthentic The Importance of Being Militant

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and ineffectual politics, removed from edifying danger and of little use to those whose suffering was immediate and severe. In Rossinow’s phrasing, merely “talking about change was somehow unreal.”54

Marcuse persistently pleaded with the young not to sacrifice critical thought to impulsive action. Yet even he acknowledged that the argument against words could appear “overwhelming.” He elaborated: Bertolt Brecht noted that we live at a time where it seems a crime to talk about a tree. Since then, things have become much worse. Today, it seems a crime merely to
talk
about change while one’s society is transformed in to an institution of violence, terminating in Asia the genocide which began with the liquidation of the American Indians. Is not the sheer power of this brutality immune against the spoken and written word which indicts it? And is not the word which is directed against the practitioners of this power the same they use to defend their power? There is a level on which even the unintelligent action against them seems justified. For action smashes, though only for a moment, the closed universe of suppression.55

Weatherman tried to overcome the limitations of discourse in part by instrumentalizing language. The quasi-scientific analyses in its founding manifesto issued a call to arms. Its crude talk vilifying “pig Amerika,”

triumphant slogans, and speeches like those made at the Days of Rage all aimed at strengthening the resolve of its members to use militant action to accomplish what words alone could not. Ono practically sneered at the impotence of language:

Words, words, words. Mere words, however persuasive, mere ideas, however true, cannot make even a dent in an ingrained psychic structure like racism. To see a group of other whites willing to fight to the very end on the side of blacks will be a shocking experience for most whites. . . .

Actually seeing [us] fight will hit hard at the core of their racist being in ways no words or analyses alone can do.56

Granting violence singular power to transform thought, Ono echoed the revolutionary wisdom of his day. Frantz Fanon, the lodestar of revolutionaries worldwide, had said with respect to anticolonial rebellion: “Violence alone . . . makes it possible” for “the people” to “understand social truths.”57 Violence, in sum,
realized
social theory by consummating the revolutionary word in the radical deed.

Weatherman’s indictment of the reluctance of whites to assume physical risks points to another important dimension of militancy. Part of the frustration with discourse for New Leftists lay in the perception that they had the luxury of words without accountability—that in light of the violence suffered by the Vietnamese and American blacks there was some-90

The Importance of Being Militant

thing disingenuous about rhetorical and other forms of passive support for the struggles of America’s most obvious and abused victims. That sense, as Weatherman converted it into a call to arms, formed the basis of the common accusation that Weatherman’s politics were rooted in

“white guilt.”

The charge of “white guilt” held that Weatherman’s violence was only secondarily motivated by a desire to help blacks and Third World liberation movements, and that it sprang primarily from the Weathermen’s own need—whether conscious or not—to alleviate the psychological burden of their social and economic privilege. Violent action, insofar as it promised absolution, was something the Weatherman did, in essence,
for
themselves.
By extension, the critique of “white guilt” held that violence failed as a form of genuine solidarity or even resistance; based in self-serving motives, it remained of a piece with the individualism of liberal, capitalist culture. In this vein, the former SDS president Greg Calvert criticized the Weathermen as exemplars of what he called “the politics of proving,” whereby New Leftists preached or engaged in violence to demonstrate that they were “as revolutionary” as “the blacks, Cubans, or Vietnamese.”58 As part of a “politics of proving,” violence implied an ultimately false and potentially offensive equivalence between white militants and the various groups they sought to join in combat.

But beyond guilt, one can discern in those adopting violence more conscientious efforts to determine the nature of their responsibility to aid the plight of others and to reconcile their actions with their beliefs. David Gilbert recalled that his transition from pacifism to support for violent revolution, had been

incredibly difficult. I’ll use the word traumatic. I don’t like psychological terms that much, but it was traumatic for me because being a pacifist gave me a certain moral certitude as an individual. I know that I’ll never do anything that’s wrong, living my life as an individual purely. That’s fine . . . if the main thing you want to say is, I’m a morally pure person. But what had motivated me was the conditions of life of most people . . . and not to be willing to fight against the forces who actively use . . . violence to maintain these social conditions, was acquiescing to more violence. . . . I identified enough with other people that I said, well, if it’s right for them to fight and die and it’s my government and the businesses here that are the main source of the problem, I can’t just say, well it’s all right for them. . . . If that was my position it also had implications for how I acted.59

Reversing the terms of “white guilt,” Gilbert presents
non
violence as a means of remaining pure and accepts that violence holds the possibility The Importance of Being Militant

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of a fall from grace. To him, the charge of white guilt signaled primarily “how far people are from being able to identify with one another.”

He added: “If you live in an empire, I guess to feel guilty about that is a little more progressive than to feel arrogant about it, right?”60

Max Weber’s meditation on political morality helps to frame Gilbert’s views. Weber describes the “ethic of ultimate ends” and the “ethic of responsibility” as the competing moral foundations of politics.61 The first ethic, which seeks to bring means and ends into harmony, privileges the moral integrity of the act and the actor. But by restricting the available means to morally acceptable ones, it risks forestalling the desired ends.