Jeremy Varon (54 page)

and “anti-establishment radicals,” without any personal risk to themselves, they sought to make up for the absence of antifascism before 1945. In their

“defense of democracy,” the perpetrators and accomplices of the SS state saw themselves as resistance fighters and bathed in the illusion that they were now winning a struggle that they had in fact never begun. The people believed they were rushing to the barricades, when they were only limping along the path of ignoble revenge.111

In Bopp’s formulation, state and public opposition to the New Left was partly a form of compensatory antifascism directed against a displaced object. Guilt, not an abiding commitment to democracy, drove the condemnation of young insurgents. The “courage of intolerance,” in short, masked “ignoble revenge.”

Antiterrorism, as an especially intense form of hostility to the left, deepens the implications of Bopp’s analysis. As the terrorist conflict escalated, a vicious psychopolitical cycle set in. Guilt over the past fed the aggression of terrorism’s staunch opponents, making them by degrees again like that which they insisted they had never been. Repressive measures used to combat terrorism, in turn, strengthened the left’s charge of “fascist continuity.” This charge, which highlighted the involvement or complicity of Germany’s elders in the Nazi past, only compounded their (unacknowledged) guilt and dislike of the radical left. By these complex twists, the very desire of the state’s defenders to escape from, compensate for, or redeem their failures in the past led to new forms of denial and even the repetition of undesirable elements of that past.

Conclusion

Jean-Paul Sartre described the animating spirit of the 1960s as the liberation of the sense of the possible, captured by the French students of May ’68 in the slogan “L’imagination au pouvoir.” Sartre credited the Vietnamese above all for this global emancipation of the imagination.

He marveled, “Who would have thought that fourteen million peasants would be able to resist the greatest military and economic power on earth?

And yet, this is what happened.”1

Radicals in the advanced industrial world drew inspiration from the Vietnamese in believing that revolution was possible in their own countries. To the Weatherwoman Naomi Jaffe, the Vietnamese showed that America’s power “wasn’t infinite—that if you organized a strong ‘people’s movement’ . . . then military might wasn’t the last word.” Their resistance “was an incredible ray of hope that lit up brilliantly the sixties and seventies for many of us.”2 The Weathermen and the RAF participated in the idealism of the 1960s that defied conventional wisdom as to what was possible. In their minds, their leap into violence would help bring down an imperialist system whose collapse meant nothing less than the emancipation of humanity. Personal courage and an active sense of solidarity with liberation movements worldwide were to play a pivotal role in realizing this utopian vision. In an era of great dreams, theirs were among the most grandiose.

They were also destructive. Both Weatherman and the RAF converted the tantalizing sense of possibility into a dogmatic insistence on the im-290

Conclusion

291

minence of revolution, the emphasis on militancy into the denigration of critical thinking and the glorification of violence, and an ethic of solidarity into a mistaken sense of the parallels between the First and Third Worlds. The Weathermen’s excesses were most often rhetorical, and the greatest harm the group did was to itself. The RAF both hurt itself badly and left a trail of victims.

.

.

.

Shadowboxing the apocalypse, wandering

the land.

The Grateful Dead, “My Brother Esau”

(lyrics by John Perry Barlow)

The armed struggle movements in the two countries dealt in very different ways with their political failure. The Weather Underground Organization’s exit in the mid 1970s from the historical stage that it had briefly occupied was variously graceful, awkward, and volatile. The 1970

townhouse explosion marked a lasting shift in the group’s politics and tone, strongly evident in Weatherman’s internal culture. Gone, by and large, were the brutal criticism-self-criticism sessions, the bizarre sexual practices, and the bullying efforts to suppress doubts and disagreements.

Circumstances alone forced the cultivation of a more trusting and supportive environment: with three members dead from the townhouse explosion and federal indictments hanging over the group, the Weathermen had to rely on one another as never before for their safety, security, and sanity. But beyond this pressure, they recognized that their politics were inseparable from how they treated one another. In the early 1970s, Scott Braley, burnt out from years of activism, took a three-month leave, during which he traveled the California coast just to get his bearings back.3 Lesbian collectives formed in which Weatherwomen explored the connection of issues of sexuality to their broader politics. And the draft-ing of
Prairie Fire: The Politics of Revolutionary Anti-Imperialism,
the group’s major political statement of the 1970s, was a truly collaborative project involving all layers of the organization.

The WUO’s relationship to the left changed as well, with the group tempering the isolating arrogance of its early days and building relationships where and when it could. Simply surviving as a clandestine group was a great challenge, which required the procurement of false IDs for each of the four dozen or so underground members, the use of elaborate codes and decoys to arrange meetings, frequent shifting between 292

Conclusion

“safe houses,” and the raising of money. To do all this, as well as to stay in minimal touch with heartbroken family members, the Weathermen relied on hundreds of helpers (among them sympathetic doctors who, at great risk, provided free care to the Weathermen). Some were believers in the underground, while others were veteran activists who may have been ambivalent about or outright rejected armed struggle but remained loyal to individual Weathermen and respected the members’ resiliency.

Professor Jonah Raskin, the former husband of an underground Weatherwoman and a “courier” for the group, found himself arguing
against
the Weathermen when he was with them and vigorously
defending
the group to critics on the left.4

The WUO’s decision to reach out to other leftists was as much a political as a pragmatic one. In late July 1974, 5,000 copies of the 185-page
Prairie Fire
appeared in coffeeshops, bookstores, and other places where activists gathered in more than forty cities. The culmination of extensive debate,
Prairie Fire
inaugurated the WUO’s effort to build a legal arm and establish itself as a proper Marxist
party.
Announcing that

“Without mass struggle, there can be no revolution, without armed struggle, there can be no victory,” the Weathermen stressed the need for political education and conventional organizing and embraced a range of progressive initiatives.5 The group now described its bombings as “armed propaganda,” whose intent was to “arm the spirit” and “stir the imagination,” not to instigate a guerrilla war.6

Prairie Fire
’s tone matched its softened message. A left-wing newspaper in Madison praised the statement for its “tact, intelligence, and enthusiasm,” joking appreciatively that “pages go by without one ‘belly of the monster’ metaphor.”7 The Prairie Fire Organizing Committees (PFOCs), created in a half dozen cities following the statement’s release, soon had several hundred activists working aboveground to advance the WUO’s new political vision. On the strength of its revised message, the WUO built a broad range of contacts that spanned from Tom Hayden, now eager to establish himself on the left wing of the Democratic Party, to the Symbionese Liberation Army, which burst onto the national scene with its kidnapping in 1974 of Patty Hearst, an heir to the Hearst media fortune.8

The Weathermen, finally, recast their relationship to America. In part, they immersed themselves more deeply in the counterculture by growing their hair long, eating vegetarian food, and seeking periodic refuge in communes throughout the country. A related aspect of their journey was an evolving romance with the American landscape, whose lush, out-Conclusion

293

of-the-way places provided sanctuary and calm. The Weathermen, in short, came to see the underground as a “free space,” in which they could both lose and find themselves, while discovering—as fugitives, often taking low-wage jobs at the margins of the official economy—Americas they had scarcely known: the worlds of poor, undocumented workers, of petty criminals and drifters, of people of all kinds escaping their pasts in dramas of self-reinvention. Avoiding radical hotspots like Berkeley, where the risk of detection was high, the underground Weathermen came to understand intimately, perhaps for the first time, the texture of the lives of those they sought to emancipate.

As the 1970s ground on, the WUO saw both its survival and its continued, if sporadic, armed actions in largely symbolic and even mythic terms. The great theme of
Prairie Fire
was that the struggle must continue, both in light of and despite the U.S. defeat in Vietnam and Nixon’s demise following the Watergate scandal. (Weatherman saw both as

“reflection[s] of an empire in crisis,” which also threatened to give leftists a premature sense of victory.)9 To maintain the underground in a period of retreat was to keep hope alive. The theme of hope was even stronger in the 1975 movie
Underground
by Emile de Antonio, Mary Lampson, and the acclaimed filmmaker Haskell Wexler. The film, filled with long tributes to the African-American and Puerto Rican struggles, served as a visual counterpart to
Prairie Fire,
and the Weathermen participated in it largely to advance their political goals. The film shows U.S.

helicopters tumbling into the South China Sea, while the voices of underground Weathermen, interviewed in a Los Angeles safe house, explain that the WUO is only a tiny group. The clear message is that what seems utterly impossible today—as a Vietnamese victory once did—may be possible in some near or distant tomorrow. The film ends with a Native American watching the sun rise over a sprawling plain, while a song proclaims

“There’s a new day coming”; the WUO logo, a rainbow with a lightning bolt through it, then fills the screen.

With such imagery, the Weathermen cast themselves as the movement’s itinerant warrior-heroes, wandering the land to avenge the government’s misdeeds and will the revolution. “It was a time when a lot of people needed romantic notions to sustain them,” Russell Neufeld, aboveground in the 1970s, explained.10 Assessing their impact years later, former Weathermen stress the symbolism of both their actions and their very existence: the group, they claim, managed to pierce the government’s aura of invincibility, to show that the FBI didn’t always “get its man,” to prove, in Gilbert’s description, that if you can’t so easily overthrow the state, 294

Conclusion

you at least “
can
fight City Hall,” including by knocking out its windows. Robert Roth, who saw while underground the satisfaction with which many people reacted to news of the WUO’s bombings, concluded that the group “provided hope in being something the Establishment couldn’t control.”11

Yet the new Weathermyth, in many ways, belied the reality. Life underground could be tedious, lonely, and oddly depoliticizing, as participation in public forms of activism held great risk. Though less rigidly hierarchical, the group remained committed to “democratic centralism,”

and the leaders retained a great amount of power over the others. And though the group became more receptive to newer political currents like feminism, it still treated with suspicion anything that might challenge the preeminence of its “revolutionary anti-imperialism.”

Most important, the WUO had difficulty defining its purpose—and the function of violence especially—in an era of declining radicalism. On one level, it aspired to revitalize the left, chiefly by correcting for its dismissal of the working class and now embracing, if largely rhetorically, workers’ struggles (support for Third World rebellion remained a constant). In a statement that would have been unthinkable when it formed, the group announced in 1975 that “the task for revolutionaries” was to

“organize the working class to seize power and establish socialism.”12

In addition, the group now criticized violence based on the
foco
theory, such as that of the Symbionese Liberation Army, for assuming that “the existence of guerrilla struggle in and of itself politicizes the masses.”13 Yet whatever prestige the group had on the left was based largely on its militancy; it was the group’s illegality and violence that distinguished it, in the last instance, from a host of other radical groups committed to “party building.” The WUO publication
Osawatomie,
the central organ of the group’s own party-building efforts, employed a rather canned analysis of capitalism’s “contradictions” and used the “science of Marxism-Leninism”

to develop “correct politics” guided by the “correct line.”14 With such language, “ideology” of the sort that had wrecked SDS returned with an accumulating vengeance.

At the same time, some Weathermen feared that too great an emphasis on aboveground work would betray what they felt was the Weather Underground’s ultimate purpose as a clandestine armed struggle group.

The WUO thus continued in the mid 1970s to engage periodically in armed actions, such as the bombings of the ITT Headquarters in New York City in September 1973 (a protest against the U.S.-backed coup in Chile); of an office of the Department of Health, Education and Welfare Conclusion

295

in San Francisco in March 1974 (a strike against welfare policy); and of the headquarters of Gulf Oil in June 1974 (punishment for operations in Angola). Moreover, some Weathermen felt that they, as white radicals, had an obligation to support African-American and Puerto Rican armed struggle groups like the BLA and FALN. The great concern, in Braley’s words, remained: “[I]f the black movement is doing this level of struggle, who are we to do less?”15 As a result of this view, the WUO