Jeremy Varon (19 page)

“
excessively
dangerous” (Larkin and Foss’s emphasis).78 In this rendering, “realness” reflected the more anxious perspective that “objective reality in the USA was a mere generalization of South Vietnam and Watts, that is, violent and perilous, with the outbreak of civil war imminent.” Excess and peril, chaos and conflict,
constituted
reality. To access this volatile and precarious reality required, in turn, embracing
extreme
danger.

The association of reality and peril becomes more vivid still in the idea of the “death trip.” A death trip, in radical parlance, was “a course of action” believed “to eventuate in catastrophe” and “with no counter-balancing gain” to show for it. The New Left, this definition makes clear, assessed acts of militancy by how well they served their political goals, measured against the sacrifice they demanded. The Days of Rage, were The Importance of Being Militant

97

a “death trip” in that they courted excessive danger for doubtful gain.

But Foss and Larkin list “excessive danger” as one of the definitions of

“real”; in this way they establish an equivalence between the terms “real,”

“objective reality,” and “death trip.” To the extent that radicals conceived of reality in terms of violence and danger, militancy tended toward death.

Black Panther leader Huey Newton spoke to this aspect of militancy with his concept of “revolutionary suicide.” For Newton, in an oppressive society, the purest or most decisive revolutionary act—one that answered the violence of the system with violence of one’s own—was necessarily a suicidal act. In existential terms, militancy represented a kind of “abiding with death” (Martin Heidegger’s phrase) as militants tried to live in acceptance of the perilous structure of reality as they saw it.

Given these high stakes, being militant was extremely demanding both politically and psychologically. Some activists developed the sense of being on a personal “death trip” as their protest evolved. Scott Braley had grown up in a small, straight-laced town in rural Michigan dominated by Dow Chemical. Drawn as a teenager to jazz (putting a “Diz [Dizzie Gillespie] for Prez” bumpersticker on his car was one of his earliest acts of rebellion), marijuana, and other deviant pleasures, he quickly graduated to more robust passions: stronger drugs, hitch-hiking west, and, while back in East Lansing, working with Michigan State SDS. From the Vietnam War, he concluded that America was “completely corrupt”

and rapidly “destroying the world,” demanding militant protest. “You might win, you might lose, but you have to fight,” he believed, to defend and advance your principles. Where the fight would lead, however, Braley did not know, and he developed early on the grim suspicion that he would likely not survive to find out. Even before joining Weatherman, he recalls, “I had had a pretty deep feeling” that “23 was going to be my cut off.”79

A sense of impending doom, though rarely so overtly expressed, laced the imagery of the New Left. A remarkable aspect of the 1960s was the intensity with which young people communicated with one another and the world. With its articles, poems, cartoons, and other graphics, the underground press proved a potent vehicle, not only for political analysis, but also for the projection of young leftists’ fantasies and desires. Overwhelmingly, the message was one of enthusiasm for the cause, contempt for the enemy, and confidence in eventual victory. Yet creeping into this presentation were morbid images, at once frightening and fatalistic, that provided a subterranean commentary on the New Left’s increasingly hazardous rebellion.

98

The Importance of Being Militant

The cover of
RAT
’s January 1969 issue pictures a reaper standing in a barren landscape, while an Asian sun rises—or sets—on the horizon.

One hand holds a scythe, stuck in a corpse wearing a sash marked “1968”; the other holds a chain encircling the neck of a frightened, vaguely Asian-looking baby labeled “1969.”80 The optimism of 1968—when each month seemed to mark a new victory for the left globally—here vanishes in the projection of the dominance of death and suffering in the year to come. A February 1969 cover of Detroit’s
Fifth Estate
shows a skeleton peering down from the center of a sun, in whose rays appears the text,

“A Philosophy of Life and Death: wars, crimes, divorce, prejudice and insanity are mirrored on a river of blood whose trickling is the music of a skulled violinist and it washes into the sea of fear within your own mind.”81 The synesthetic images describe mainstream American culture as one of violence, hatred, and separation from which there is no psychic escape.

Fifth Estate
’s cover a year later is even bleaker. A grotesque reaper, naked except for a tie in the pattern of an American flag, holds the severed head of a “longhair,” while dancing over e. e. cummings’s lines: “I don’t want to frighten you / but they mean to kill us all.”82 The overt

“message” is one of fear that the state will increasingly use lethal violence against the movement. Yet the image exceeds this sober prediction, providing instead the fantasy of an encroaching holocaust. The projection of limitless annihilation also has a self-punishing quality, revealing both narcissistic and masochistic impulses within the New Left. The implication of the graphic, on one level, is that the New Left’s rebellion is so threatening that it could elicit a response of mass murder. On another level, the graphic potentially conveyed young radicals’ unconscious guilt over their rebellion against the system—the great, impersonal societal father—and the attending “desire,” surely covert, to be punished. Extending the psychoanalytic model closes the circle. The desired punishment is only the introjection of New Leftists’ “original” anger at the authorities presiding over a world deemed rotten.83

The Days of Rage highlight, finally, the relationship between militancy and ethics. Some leftists condemned the protest politically while praising it as an act of principle. Most provocatively, Stew Albert declared the Weathermen morally “perfect” by comparing the United States to Nazi Germany, the Vietnamese to the Jews, and Nixon to Hitler. He thus cast the Days of Rage as an expression of the Weathermen’s desire, voiced by Dohrn, not to be the equivalent of “good Germans.” At the same time, in its evident hyperbole and slippage between historical settings, his anal-The Importance of Being Militant

99

ogy illustrates the dubious extremes to which the left went in communicating its sense of moral urgency. (Young militants were not the only ones drawing such analogies. John Fernandez, co-director of a prominent religious antiwar organization, commented that Nixon “may be worse than” Hitler, making Americans “worse than the good Germans.”

Rabbi Heschel, another antiwar leader, confronted Henry Kissinger in 1969 by suggesting that America would “look more and more like Nazi Germany” if it continued attacking Vietnam.)84 By any measure, the United States of the late 1960s was not the equivalent of Nazi Germany.

The left’s comparison of the two societies might therefore be dismissed as a specious conflation of contexts, or even political abuse of the memory of the Holocaust.85

The invocation of the negative icon of the “good German” did not, however, depend entirely for its validity on a comprehensive similarity between the United States and Nazi Germany. Rather, it could express the conviction that the morality of assassination and atrocity is absolute, not relative. These crimes were persistent features of the war in Vietnam and, to a lesser extent, of the state’s campaign against black radicals. The very existence of such crimes—in whatever quantity—issued a categorical imperative, such as the Germans had faced and overwhelmingly failed to honor under Hitler, to take an emphatic stance of opposition. Palmer stressed the role the Vietnam War played in inciting the forceful language and radical acts of the left:

It was the Vietnam war that really triggered what happened in the 60s. . . .

Without the Vietnam war I think the civil rights movement would have gone through with its relatively staid and almost monotonous seriousness and would not have involved “taking up the gun.” . . . The war was so outrageous. . . . There was nothing more hypocritical, there was nothing more devastating to the sense of patriotism, the sense of American consciousness. . . . We compared the United States to Nazi Germany. We compared Lyndon Johnson and Richard Nixon to war criminals. . . . We were behaving as a country the same way as Nazi Germany behaved—

a war criminal way.86

Palmer conceded that the Vietnam War was not neccessarily the greatest outrage in U.S. history, let alone world history. (Slavery, he stressed, was likely more horrible.) But the war was so compelling for the 1960s generation “because it was happening NOW!” It instilled in Palmer the sense that “this is the testing time for all mankind. This is the testing time for all Americans.”

The comparison of the United States and Nazi Germany also suggested 100

The Importance of Being Militant

that one had a duty to engage in resistance to injustice
regardless
of its ability to alleviate suffering or even move the public. “I don’t expect to have an effect,” the antiwar leader Bettina Aptheker remarked. “I thought you protested something because it was wrong. Even if nobody listened.”87 New Leftists reasoned: Were the “good Germans” not the

“silent majority” in their own country? Conceived in absolute terms, the morality of resistance escapes comparative and utilitarian considerations.

As a result, one could speak of the moral statement made by the Days of Rage, despite the action’s political failure.

The Weathermen themselves were generally loath to stress the ethical current of their politics. They saw moralizing about the war as the domain of pacifists and liberals and promoted militancy primarily on political and strategic grounds. Ethical discourse clashed also with the ul-tramilitant style Weatherman initially projected. One journalist observed that “the Weathermen think that anything on the moral level is ‘sissy talk.’”88 Hindsight has shifted their perspective. In the 1980s, Jeff Jones counted the Days of Rage among the group’s greatest political failures, joking, “Thank God the Vietnamese weren’t counting on us” to actually stop the war.89 Yet he implicitly defended its moral impulse: The point of [the action] was that if they’re going to continue to attack the Vietnamese and to kill the Panthers, then we as young white people are going to attack them behind the lines. . . . That’s why we . . . smashed up people’s private property, their cars, their windows, and fought the cops. . . . The situation was so grave, what the U.S. was doing—this of course was true—that we had to take extreme measures.90

Wilkerson used a language of paradox to describe how political senselessness and moral sense combined in the Days of Rage:

It was just pure insanity. . . . [F]rom the standpoint of rational politics and organization we were out of our minds. We were as bad as the most psychotic religious . . . sects. Some brainwashed bunch of lunatics. On the other hand, as a response to what was going on in Vietnam, it was a response of total outrage. . . . At the time it didn’t seem like we were having any impact at all, and it was a gesture of total frustration, which was to go bananas, and as such was a very sane response. And so even though it was totally crazy as a political act, history can’t, doesn’t, hasn’t condemned it.91

For her, the Days of Rage were a desperate spasm, at once ludicrous and just, in the midst of a moral and political crisis. Her testimony, read The Importance of Being Militant

101

against Gilbert’s reflections, reverses the application of Weber’s terms to New Left activism. As an act of moral outrage, violence conforms to the ethic of ultimate ends, whose main obligation Weber describes as “seeing to it that the flame of pure intentions . . . protesting against the injustice of the social order” burns brightly.92

Whatever the judgment of history, Wilkerson’s contradictory verdict illustrates how militancy raised vital questions regarding the ethical and political limits of protest. The Weathermen certainly had no monopoly on moral indignation. Activists whose passion was just as strong could question not only the political sense but also the
ultimate
morality of righteous acts that hurt the goals of the movement or that increased repression and suffering. Was an ethically courageous act necessarily a good act? Could any act of rebellion—whatever the consequences and whoever its victims—be justified by pointing to the greater violence of the state? Weber’s meditation on the morality of politics is once again relevant. In distinguishing the ethic of ultimate ends from the ethic of responsibility, Weber speaks of the “abysmal contrast” of these “irreconcilably opposed” orientations.93 One privileges justice in the present over that in the future; the other privileges justice in the future over that in the present. Each contradicts the other, and neither can bring ends and means into harmony. Violence, which Weber describes as the “decisive means” of politics, makes the distance between the two ethics infinitely great.94 In converting their outrage into violence, New Left radicals suffered the tragic measure of that irreconcilability.

.

.

.

Well, I sure don’t know

What I’m going for,

But I’m gonna go for it,

That’s for sure.

The Grateful Dead, “Saint

of Circumstance” (lyrics

by John Perry Barlow)

Additional insight into the power and seductiveness of militancy for New Leftists comes from an unlikely source. During the upheavals in Paris in May 1968, Michel Foucault was in Tunisia on an academic assignment.

While there, he witnessed the political struggle of students, for whom

“physical commitment was implied immediately” by the oppressive con-102

The Importance of Being Militant

ditions of neocolonialism.95 Foucault found himself “profoundly struck and amazed” that the students, who faced years in prison simply for distributing leaflets, would put their “freedom,” “bodies,” and “lives” at risk in such a radical way. For the students, Marxism was not “merely a way of analyzing reality; it was also a kind of moral force, an existential act that left one stupefied.” Foucault contrasted their passion with the sterile “hyper-Marxistization” and “indomitable discursivity” of French student radicals, trapped in endless debate and essentially free of any consequences for their dissident ideas. The Tunisians ultimately inspired in Foucault the desire to have a “total experience” and “accomplish a series of actions that would imply a personal, physical commitment that was real.”