Jeremy Varon (18 page)

It may therefore be only a poor servant of justice. The ethic of responsibility concerns itself solely with the consequences of action. Sanctioning unsavory means in the service of moral ends, it too may sacrifice justice—

this time in the here and now—to its overarching calculus. For Gilbert, the nonviolence practiced by pacifists represented the ethic of ultimate ends. The ethic of responsibility, with its heightened moral risk, was the domain of those who, like the Weathermen, chose violence.

Robin Palmer began bombing buildings in New York City in 1969 before joining Weatherman in the summer of 1970. When asked years later why he had opted for armed struggle, he recalled the lines of a song of a San Francisco humor troupe that parodied what it saw as the hypocrisy and parasitism of white radicals: “Pull the trigger nigger / I’m with you all the way / right across the Bay.” (The Panthers were based in Oakland, on the other side of San Francisco Bay.) Speaking more soberly about the pressure exerted by his own rhetoric, Palmer added, “I felt the only thing I could do was either shut up or start bombing, so [I] started bombing.”62 For Ono, violence transformed solidarity into a visceral sense of identification. As the Weathermen merely contemplated fighting in the Days of Rage, Ono reports, “the abstract phrase ‘international solidarity’ began to have a real meaning. We began to feel the Vietnamese
in
ourselves.
”63 Fighting, in Ono’s fanciful view, made solidarity concrete in the medium of the body.

In light of Gilbert’s and Palmer’s testimony, violence appears less a way of achieving personal purity than of establishing
consistency
of thought and action; less a way of relieving guilt than of making a “real”

contribution to the struggle of others. (Weatherman’s opponents, in their own way, credited the group with meeting the demands of revolutionary practice. Describing his shock at the Days of Rage, a Chicago official confessed: “We never expected this kind of violent demonstration. There has always been a big difference between what [the protesters] say and 92

The Importance of Being Militant

what they do.”)64 Gilbert’s and Palmer’s reflections challenge, in addition, the notion that Weatherman equated the struggle of white radicals with that of blacks or the Vietnamese. On the contrary, Weatherman’s sense of unity with other guerrillas was based on the reasoning that because blacks and Vietnamese had little choice but to fight, white radicals should actively choose violence to destroy the system responsible for their oppression. Within this logic, solidarity was driven by the recognition of the differences between the forms of adversity faced by American whites and other racial and national groups.

The challenge of “proving oneself” as a white activist could take on disturbing forms. Among radicals, physical courage served as a crucial measure of one’s commitment and capacity for solidarity. The practice of “gut check,” performed by a host of movement groups, ritualized this connection between risk and personal dedication. Gut check was a way of pressuring members who opposed or hesitated to participate in an action, whether violent in intent or not, that held the prospect of arrest or injury. Palmer, who was arrested no fewer than seventeen times for protest activity, recounted the substance and tone of a gut check: If you don’t do it, you’re a coward. If you don’t do it, you’re not thinking of the Vietnamese. . . . You’re a racist because the blacks have to live like this in the ghetto all the time. You’re a racist because the Vietnamese are getting bombed like crazy all the time. Children mangled, women raped. . . .

And you’re worried about getting arrested?! And you’re worried about getting hit by a cop over the head with a billy club?!65

In Palmer’s account, gut check used the themes of race and privilege to shame and intimidate those experiencing doubt about taking some risk; heeding that doubt amounted to cowardice, hypocrisy, or even complicity in oppression. Shortly after the Days of Rage, Jeff Jones drove this race-based imperative to be militant to confounding extremes. Because of their oppression, blacks should be free to pursue a variety of political strategies, he said. “But for white people, there’s only one form—only one form—and that’s to pick up the gun.”66 Because of their privilege, whites must not merely match but
exceed
the daring of blacks. Militancy, at its best, served as a way for activists to draw closer to one another, overcome personal barriers, and honor their deepest commitments through acts of self-sacrifice. But for those who succumbed to the pressure of gut check and took risks for which they were not properly prepared, militancy was a cause of self-estrangement.

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Reflecting years later on Weatherman’s politics, Gilbert affirmed many of the charges of the group’s early critics. He described gut check as an unfortunate expression of “macho culture,” which issued the core challenge: “Are you man enough to stick your head in the lion’s den? Do you have the courage to do this?”67 He also saw in the Days of Rage “a strange moralism,” in which the Weathermen sought to prove they were “better” than the rest of the white left.68 That conviction lay at the heart of Weatherman’s “arrogance” and active “contempt” for whites who did not join the armed struggle. Criticism of the group only reinforced that contempt. In its most dogmatic phase, Gilbert concedes, Weatherman addressed the movement by saying: “We’re ready to fight and die. We’re ready to do anything, and you’re either on our side or you’re on the side of the pigs.”69 In Hirsch’s characterization, the message was “either you take this stand with us, or ‘fuck you’”; if they didn’t, “it was their problem, it was never our problem.”70 Militancy, in this unforgiving di-chotomy, failed to inspire, enlighten, or produce unity. It functioned instead as the basis for a crude dualism that separated the saved from the damned.

.

.

.

The truth was obscure, too profound and

too pure, to live it you have to explode.

In that last hour of need, we entirely agreed,

sacrifice was the code of the road.

Bob Dylan, “Where Are You Tonight?

(Journey Through Dark Heat)”

Militancy allowed New Leftists to get at what they understood as the

“real” of politics. Many young radicals viewed power and violence as the foundations of capitalism, as both Marxism and experience had taught them to do. These were manifest not only in wars, police brutality, the treatment of prisoners, and the oppression of people of color, but also, if less openly, in market and class relationships, in ideology, and in the modes of authority and discipline in schools, workplaces, and even families. Todd Gitlin, a former SDS president, drew on these premises to convey the role of militancy for the New Left:

Confrontations were moments of truth . . . bisecting life into Time Before and Time After. We collected these ritual punctuations as moments when 94

The Importance of Being Militant

the shroud that normally covers everyday life was torn away and we stood face to face with the true significance of things. Each round was an approximation of the apocalypse, in the original meaning: the revelation of things the way they actually stand.71

By making what was latent or obscured apparent, militancy could induce a near-religious revelation of
social
truth—moments of potentially terrifying clarity in which the real nature of “the system” and the stakes of political conflict were laid open to be experienced and understood.

For Jeff Jones, the protests at Columbia University had precisely this effect by showing that,

If you could create a confrontation with the University administration, you could expose . . . the interlocking network of imperialism as it was played out on the campuses. You could prove that the University was working hand-in-hand with the CIA, that ultimately the campuses would resort to the police to resolve their problems, . . . when you really pushed them they . . . would call upon all the repressive apparatuses to defend their position from their own students.72

Jones’s experience mirrored Louis Althusser’s view—one influential among leftist intellectuals in the 1960s and 1970s—of the relationship between capitalism and the state. According to Althusser, capitalism reproduces itself through the combined functioning of “Ideological State Apparatuses,” such as schools, the family, and the media, and “Repressive State Apparatuses,” such as the police and the court system.73 The primary role of such presumably benign institutions as universities is actually to maintain established patterns of ideological hegemony and political authority. But when they fail in their mandate or their true function is exposed, the state intervenes with repression. Violence, from Althusser’s perspective, thus serves as the ultimate basis of institutional authority.

Militant confrontation at Columbia made that “truth” apparent to Jones.

Confrontation could also reveal something fundamental about inner reality and human existence generally. Susan Stern reported having a profound catharsis at the 1968 Democratic Convention, akin to a conversion experience. Observing rows of riot police attacking protesters, bloodied from the previous days’ battles, Stern recalled:

I lay down shuddering on a piece of blanket, and looked at the clouds gauzy in the blue sky. I thought about bullets ripping through flesh, about napalmed babies. I thought about Malcolm X and lynching and American Indians. Lying there, sweating from doses of speed and terror, I thought about Auschwitz, and mountains of corpses piled high in the deep pits dug The Importance of Being Militant

95

by German Nazis. . . . A new feeling was struggling to be born in me. It had no name, but it made me want to reach beyond myself to others who were suffering. I felt real, as if suddenly I had found out something true about myself; that I was not helpless, that life meant enough for me to struggle for it. . . . [N]ow I would fight.74

In her trembling mind, a continuum of oppression linked past evils with the aggression in Vietnam. The grim images and the vision of impending battle evoked in her an uncanny sense of compassion, purpose, empowerment, truth, and realness. Fighting, which the hobbling Stern would do during the remainder of the convention, consummated her epiphany.

She emerged from her awakening convinced that life became meaningful in struggle—
that life itself was struggle.

Art Johnson, reflecting on a somber march ringed by armed National Guardsmen following the battle over People’s Park, reflected: Fifty thousand people marched under the guns of death in the streets of Berkeley on Memorial Day[,] ready to lay down their lives. . . . The scene was a death trip for us all. We had been through death before, sure, on acid, in motorcycle wrecks—but here it was, our real blood, baked dry on the white flags of hope. Brother James [Rector] is dead, the first white youth to die in our fight to defend our own emergent culture. [His death]

was the turning point [that] marks for white youth the transition from rebellion to Revolution—the emergence of a sense of common destiny, of a common culture, value system and life style which is dramatically opposed to the materialist, individualist, and corrupt values of this society.75

Creating a hierarchy of experience, Johnson contrasts the abstract or figurative death of a bad LSD trip with the materiality of “real blood.” Violence, culminating in literal death, realized the meaning of death—and life—for the demonstrators. The stains of blood, much like stigmata on their white bodies, marked their resistance as genuine. Marching “under the guns of death,” they also felt an unprecedented sense of cohesion and purposefulness. Violence, finally, induced in Johnson a Manichean illumination of two sides in total conflict with each other.

Johnson’s comments also reveal the hazards of militancy. After recommending armed self-defense of “our way of life,” he echoes Weatherman’s extreme pragmatism, which was suspicious of words and privileged acts:

“We must trust our real brothers—those we are bound to through real life activity—working, eating, fucking, doping, brawling—not to those who would involve us in some ego-media-power-theoretical bullshit! We don’t need to be ‘organized’ and ‘radicalized’ by any theoreticians. We 96

The Importance of Being Militant

can learn from our brothers who are Doing It!”76 The clumsy opposition of “real” and “unreal” life virtually annihilates the capacity for critical reflection by declaring it irrelevant, or worse; theory becomes the mortal enemy of practice— conceived as
pure vitalistic activity
—by destroying the budding revolution. Johnson ultimately provides an im-poverished vision of the New Left’s body politics. In a more or less indiscriminate celebration of the body, he lists a series of activities—each implying a related appetite—that have no intrinsically political substance.

They offer, as primitive expressions of eros, only crude compensation for the alienation from the body seen by leftists as defining mainstream culture. Moreover, he ignores the fact that eating, having sex, and fighting were hardly exclusive to the counterculture, making the image of the total opposition of cultures a mirage. Militancy promised to yield true knowledge of society and the nature of political conflict; when promoting reductive analyses, it clouded the New Left’s understanding of its own rebellion.77

The themes of courage, danger, violence, realness, and death abounded in the theory and practice of the New Left. Focusing on how these terms functioned within the language of the New Left helps us understand their connection to one another. Since to be “real” meant to be “brave, courageous, or tough” according to Larkin and Foss’s dictionary, showing physical courage was a way of demonstrating one’s realness. New Left ideology enhanced this linkage between militancy and reality. If, as many young radicals held, power is the foundation of social existence, then courage—which impels face-to-face confrontation with power—allows one to participate in that
essential
reality; one becomes, in the process,

“real.” But the term “real” was also used to describe situations that were