Jeremy Varon (36 page)

Excesses and Limits

just. The anarchists eventually kill a wicked nobleman, while going to great lengths to avoid harming his children. Once captured, the assassin, Stepan, refuses the Grand Duke’s wife’s offer of clemency and spiritual absolution, provided that he renounces his act and condemns his comrades. He then goes willingly to the scaffold. The point of the play, in Camus’s words, is to show “that action itself has its limits. [That]

there is no good and just action, but [that which] recognizes limits and, if it must go beyond them, at least accepts death.”206 (Camus’s concept thus has nothing to do with terrorist “martyrdom”; Stepan dies to re-pay a debt to humanity, not to express the depth of his sacrifice, nor to serve any God in hope of a divine reward.) Here Camus goes to the heart of his understanding of rebellion. In his philosophical writings, he describes rebellion as an act of radical solidarity—an affirmation of a principle or value that transcends the self and implicitly unites all human beings. The true creed of the rebel is: “I rebel, therefore we exist.”207

Killing another human being, however, is a breach of that solidarity, a shattering of the human bond, that negates one’s identity as a rebel. To accept one’s own death is to accept the loss of the claim of solidarity, even as one rebels in its name. Alluding to the violence of the twentieth century, Camus lamented, “Our world of today seems loathsome to us for the very reason that it is made by men who grant themselves the right to go beyond those limits, and first of all to kill others without themselves dying.”208

These may appear tortured constructions from Ayers and Camus. Grief for one’s own violence, compassion for the victim, and even the acceptance of one’s own death do not, in themselves, make violence just; that determination depends also on the motivation, target, kind, and consequences of the violence. Conversely, Camus may appear to make impossible demands of rebels. Accepting that violence is valid means accepting that people will be killed; for combatants to dwell on that loss, let alone cede their lives, would cripple their struggle. Yet Ayers’s and Camus’s reflections can be read less as a literal code of conduct and more as an injunction that political violence, whatever its aim, not be conceived of as a purely instrumental act or as something that ennobles and redeems its perpetrator.

Robert Roth, also reflecting on the townhouse explosion, spoke directly to the question of limits. Absorbing the deaths of his friends and comrades as “a tragedy,” he conceded that it also “would have been a tragedy” if they had succeeded in their plans. Their deaths led Roth and the Weathermen to ask,

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If you’re going to fight, how are you human as you fight. . . . How do you treat people who have doubts [and] fears, how do you examine who you are fighting against and who you’re not? . . . What’s your own morality?

Do you have morality? Do you care about other people? Do you think really long and hard before you put people in danger? Who do you put in danger? . . . If you try to change the society, how are you changing yourself? How are you becoming more human? . . . If moving towards armed activity means steeling yourself and hardening yourself in this way that cuts out all human feelings and emotion and care, then what kind of movement are you going to build? . . . Are you going to build a real community. . . .

Are you going to build a culture of resistance . . . without turning on each other, without burning to a crisp within a second.209

Roth’s commentary provides a striking counterpoint to Nechayev’s

“Catechism.” As against Nechayev’s cold-hearted certainties, which judge everyone and everything based on utility to the revolution, Roth offers a series of questions driven by concern for others, which amount to a “catechism of the rebel” in a Camusian sense: conviction is complicated by doubt, and the ultimate standard for judging action is how well it both serves
and reflects
the values in whose name one rebels.

How deeply the Weathermen should be credited for drawing sane conclusions from a disaster of their own making is debatable. At least some in the group
had
sought to attack “civilians,” and it was only their recklessness that spared them from becoming killers. Even after the townhouse explosion, the Weathermen minimized but did not eliminate the risk of injury; luck intervened to ensure that only property was harmed.

In addition, in the mid 1970s, the Weather Underground lent support—

rhetorical and perhaps more—to the Black Liberation Army (BLA) and the Puerto Rican independence group Fuerzas Armadas de Liberación Nacional (FALN), each of which engaged in lethal actions.210 However one may judge these groups—whose violence was very different from that of white radicals in its causes and character—the Weather Underground’s support for them potentially reveals that the Weathermen wanted to have it both ways: on the one hand, to continue to claim an exceptional status among whites by backing the militancy of people of color; on the other hand, to steer clear of the greatest hazards of armed struggle and to claim as their greatest defense that their own violence did no “real” harm. And some Weathermen, unwilling to abandon violence when the group disbanded in 1976, participated with remnants of the BLA in armed actions—such as a 1981 robbery of a Brinks armored truck to secure funds for “revolutionary” activities—that had deadly results.

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Excesses and Limits

Finally, the political concept behind the Weather Underground’s armed struggle may appear so flawed, so drastically out of touch with political reality, that it would seem hard to speak of the “morality” of the Weathermen’s violence. As Ayers repeatedly asserts in his memoir, metaphors may matter, and the Weather Underground may ultimately have functioned as one giant metaphor or symbol.211 But bad metaphors—ones that reduce the world to a comic-book morality—can be destructive, and some metaphors, to the extent that they serve as calls to arms, can wound and kill (“Off the Pig!” as opposed to “We Shall Overcome”). Furthermore, societies and governments are not simply monsters, even when they do monstrous things, and the struggle against them is not just a matter, as Ayers described Weatherman’s “metaphorical” understanding of the world circa 1970, of playing heroic Odysseus against the great Cyclops.212

Wilkerson, in a sharply critical response to Ayers’s memoir, focused precisely on the confusion in the group over what to make of the extreme language of its leaders. Ayers himself, she charges, “was one of the architects of much of the insanity he blames on others” by virtue of his incendiary speeches during Weatherman’s formative months. Wilkerson now believes that he “never took seriously [such] language himself,” but she says that most of the Weathermen “did not realize that he meant it only as talk.”213

The Weathermen
did,
nonetheless, assert the value of limits and restricted their violence accordingly. In this, they set a constructive example. The importance of limits is everywhere and tragically evident: in the tendency of revolutionary movements to perpetrate violence serving no emancipatory end or to perpetuate violence long after “liberation” has occurred; in the mass murders of the twentieth century, driven by the reduction of the victim to a thing and the exaltation of killing as a way of purifying the individual or the group; and in the recent rise of global terrorisms, executed with increasing brutality. The question of limits has relevance for Germany’s RAF, which in the 1970s embraced forms of violence that the Weathermen had long rejected. It has great relevance, finally, for U.S. conduct in Vietnam, which must figure into any comprehensive assessment of the Weathermen’s actions. The U.S. military and its political commanders institutionalized normlessness in the frequent commission of atrocities in Vietnam: the bombing of civilians, the use of chemi-cal weapons such as Agent Orange, and still uncounted Mai Lais. Much of the world judged the war criminal, and part of the private struggle of many Vietnam veterans has been to grieve over their own violence. That struggle became public through the efforts of some veterans to convince Excesses and Limits

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the nation that an aspect of their post-traumatic stress was what the war had turned them into. In one of the most disturbing “protests” of the era, some veterans actually tried in 1971 to turn
themselves
in for war crimes to the Pentagon. (A nervous Pentagon official referred them to the Justice Department.)214 It took America years to recognize the multifaceted suffering of the veterans. And the prosecutors of the war and their supporters, so concerned in the last years with achieving “Peace with Honor,”

failed to acknowledge, let alone memorialize, the Vietnamese victims.215

Tom Hayden, in defense of New Left radicalism, commented in early 1970 that its combined violence did not equal that of one bomb dropped from a B-52. Dellinger responded angrily that Hayden’s remark missed the point—that the left should hardly be proud that it had never developed the resources to do more damage.216 But here Dellinger dismisses Hayden’s point too quickly. The violence of the Weathermen and other New Leftists consisted, by and large, of bombing buildings, destroying offices, and breaking a great many windows. The death toll resulting from the thousands of violent acts, stood at three—Robert Fassnacht, killed in the Madison bombing; the Boston policeman killed in 1970; and a prison guard killed in 1972 by the small California-based group “Venceremos.”217 In all three cases, the deaths were unintentional. In contrast, the state violence that New Leftists opposed involved countless deaths, the toppling of governments, and deliberate assaults on domestic dissidents.

Even if, as Dellinger suggests, from his principled pacifist standpoint, the far greater violence of one’s adversary does not justify one’s own, Dellinger misrepresents the New Left’s relationship to violence. Overwhelmingly, New Leftists restricted their violence
by choice
and showed concern for the victims. The deadly Madison bombing led to a public declaration of grief by Karl Armstrong, the main perpetrator of the act.

On the witness stand, Armstrong defended the bombing and, to his lawyers’ dismay, insisted that under similar circumstance—believing, as he had, that the building was clear of people—he would do it again. But Armstrong also confessed that his “mind was literally devastated” by the death of Fassnacht,
which he felt could never be justified.
218 With Fassnacht’s death, the virtue of “doing no harm” had vanished. The last honor left to Armstrong was a public expression of sorrow and the private torment of regret. In his reaction lies a piece of the New Left’s honor.

c h a p t e r 5

Deadly Abstraction

The Red Army Faction and the Politics of Murder

Over the course of the 1970s, what turned out to be West Germany’s only war—that between the Federal Republic and self-styled “urban guerrillas” seeking its overthrow—grew dramatically in intensity. By 1976, the year the Weather Underground dissolved, the RAF’s leaders had been in prison for nearly four years. They were charged with bombings, attempted murders, and murders, stemming mostly from the 1972 “May Offensive,” in which the RAF targeted officials of the West German state and U.S. military personnel. Several dozen more members of the RAF

and other guerrilla groups were in prison, accused or convicted of acts of terrorism. Their capture and the passing of the Vietnam War hardly served to quell the conflict. As opposition to the war and imperialism receded, the focus of the guerrillas’ strongest anger shifted to the criminal justice system—in particular to the systematic abuse inmates alleged they suffered in prison. Prisoners from the RAF and other groups engaged in a series of hunger strikes to protest their treatment, culminating in the death by starvation in November 1974 of the RAF’s Holger Meins and a new explosion of anger on the left.

In the mid 1970s, the RAF and other groups committed brutal acts of violence, most often aiming to win the release of jailed members. These include the June 2nd Movement’s killing in 1974 of a West Berlin judge just after the death of Meins; its kidnapping in February 1975 of the Christian Democratic official Peter Lorenz, ending with the exchange of Lorenz for ten imprisoned guerrillas; and the RAF’s brief seizure in April 196

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of the same year of the German embassy in Stockholm, Sweden, during which two diplomatic staff and two RAF members died. The conflict further escalated in May 1976 with the death of Ulrike Meinhof by hanging in her cell in Stammheim prison. State officials, playing up speculation that she was in bitter conflict with the rest of the group, insisted that her death was a suicide. Many on the left contended that she had been murdered, giving rise to the great “Mord oder Selbstmord” (“Murder or Suicide?”) debate that raged for years in Germany.1 In retaliation, the RAF killed the federal prosecutor Siegfried Buback and Jürgen Ponto, chairman of the board of Dresdner Bank.

In April 1977, the two-year-long trial of the RAF’s Andreas Baader, Gudrun Ensslin, and Jan-Carl Raspe ended, with the defendants being found guilty of four murders, of twenty-seven attempted murders, and of forming a criminal association, for which they were given life sentences.

With legal options for the prisoners’ release exhausted, RAF commandos committed their most desperate and provocative acts. On September 9, the RAF kidnapped Hanns Martin Schleyer, president of the Employers’

Association of the Federal Republic and of the Federation of German Industry. It demanded the release of Baader, Ensslin, Raspe, and eight other RAF guerrillas. To his captors, Schleyer was a doubly appropriate target: not only was he an embodiment of “capitalist oppression”; he had been a member of the Nazi Party and an SS Hauptsturmführer in Czechoslovakia, where he served under the direction of the Sicherheitsdienst chief Reinhard Heydrich—one of the architects of the “Final Solution”—until Heydrich’s assassination by Czech partisans in May 1942. Schleyer appeared, in short, to be a living symbol of what the RAF asserted was the continuity between the Nazi Reich and the Federal Republic.