Jeremy Varon (58 page)

Notes

i n t r o d u c t i o n

1. George Katsiaficas describes the New Left activism of the late 1960s as

“world-historical” and suggests that it eclipsed the European uprisings of 1848–

49 in breadth and significance (Katsiaficas,
The Imagination of the New Left: A
Global Analysis of 1968
[Boston: Beacon Press, 1987], 3–13). Katsiaficas includes student and youth movements throughout the world under the rubric “New Left.”

I use the term only to describe those movements in the United States and western Europe, where youth protesters were commonly described as making up a

“New Left.” Moreover, I do not treat African-American radicals, who saw themselves as distinct from the overwhelmingly white student movement and counterculture, as part of the American New Left, though white and black activists certainly at times collaborated.

2. Though David Caute’s
Sixty-Eight: The Year of the Barricades
(London: Hamish Hamilton, 1988) and Ronald Fraser’s
1968: A Student Generation in Revolt
(New York: Pantheon Books, 1988) adopt an international perspective, they provide mostly discrete portraits of the student movements in several countries and do little to articulate the connections between them. More genuinely comparative studies include Paul Berman,
A Tale of Two Utopias: The Political Journey of the Generation of 1968
(New York: Norton, 2000); Karl-Werner Brand, ed.,
Neue soziale Bewegung in Westeuropa und den USA: Ein internationaler Vergleich
(Frankfurt a.M.: Campus, 1985); Carole Fink, Philipp Gassert, and Detlef Junker, eds.,
1968: The World Transformed
(New York: Cambridge University Press, 1998); Ingrid Gilcher-Holtey, ed.,
1968: Vom Ereignis zum Gegenstand der
Geschichtswissenschaft
(Göttingen: Vandenhoeck & Ruprecht, 1998); and Arthur Marwick,
The Sixties: Cultural Revolution in Britain, France, Italy, and the United
States, 1958–1974
(New York: Oxford University Press, 1998).

313

314

Notes to Pages 2–5

3. In the ideologically charged discourse on political violence, choices of terminology are controversial, as they imply political positions. The term “terrorism” is especially charged, because it declares the violence to which it refers to be both politically and morally illegitimate, if not outright evil. I mostly use the term “armed struggle” to describe the violence of Weatherman and the RAF. Both were involved in political struggle, and they were indeed armed. This may, however, seem too exalted a term for violence that did not enjoy the popularity and, most argue, lacked the legitimacy of armed “liberation struggles” in places such as Vietnam and Cuba. The use in Germany of the phrase
bewaffneter Kampf
to describe left-wing violence is widely considered an implicit expression of sympathy for the RAF. I describe members of the RAF and other German groups variously as guerrillas or terrorists, depending on context. The former term is their self-description and the latter is that of their detractors. Using both, I seek to reproduce some of the ambiguities that defined the group’s existence and that haunt efforts to reach definitive judgments on political violence. I do not call the Weathermen terrorists, for reasons that will become clear. Discussions of how to define “terrorism,” as well as what makes any stable definition so elusive, are common in the vast literature on the subject. See, inter alia, Martha Crenshaw,
Terrorism in Context
(College Station: Pennsylvania State University Press, 1995); Bruce Hoffman,
Inside Terrorism
(New York: Columbia University Press, 1998); Harvey W. Kushner,
Terrorism in America
(Springfield, Ill.: Charles C. Thomas, 1998); and Walter Laqueur,
The New Terrorism: Fanaticism and the Arms of
Mass Destruction
(Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1999).

4. Kirkpatrick Sale,
SDS
(New York: Random House, 1973), 632.

5. See esp.
Violence in America: Historical and Comparative Perspectives: A
Report to the National Commission on the Causes and Prevention of Violence,
June 1969,
ed. Hugh Davis Graham and Ted Robert Gurr (New York: New American Library, 1969). Contrary to common impressions, the study showed that the period from 1939–68 was among the least violent in U.S. history. Even so, the late 1960s witnessed a marked rise in political violence from the immediately preceding years, and the research did not include the years 1969–71, during which the protest violence of the era peaked. See Sheldon G. Levy, “A 150-Year Study of Political Violence in the United States,” in ibid., 84–100.

6. Separate essays on violence in the United States and West Germany are to be found in Donatella della Porta, ed.,
Social Movements and Violence: Participation in Underground Organizations
(Greenwich, Conn.: JAI Press, 1992). In
Social Movements, Political Violence, and the State: A Comparative Analysis of
Italy and Germany
(New York: Cambridge University Press, 1995), della Porta concludes with a very brief comparison of violence in the United States, West Germany, and Italy.

7. These interpretations circulate, often in combination, in virtually all of the literature on Weatherman. The principal works are Sale,
SDS;
Thomas Powers,
Diana: The Making of a Terrorist
(Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1971); Dave Dellinger,
More Power Than We Know: The People’s Movement towards Democracy
(Garden City, N.Y.: Anchor Press, 1975); Todd Gitlin,
The Sixties: Years of
Hope, Days of Rage
(New York: Bantam Books, 1993); and Ron Jacobs,
The
Way the Wind Blew: A History of the Weather Underground
(New York: Verso, Notes to Pages 5–11

315

1997). These works often blend personal accounts with historical analysis and give only limited treatment to Weatherman in the context of larger narratives of the decline and fall of the New Left.

8. This is a feature of most of the major works on the RAF, which include Stefan Aust,
Der Baader Meinhof Komplex
(Hoffmann & Campe, 1985; rev. ed., 1997), trans. Anthea Bell as
The Baader-Meinhof Group: The Inside Story of a
Phenomenon
(London: Bodley Head, 1987); Uwe Backes,
Bleierne Jahre: Baader-Meinhof und danach, Extremismus und Demokratie,
no. 1 (Erlangen: Staube, 1991); Jillian Becker,
Hitler’s Children: The Story of the Baader-Meinhof Terrorist Gang
(Philadelphia: Lippincott, 1977); Peter Brückner,
Ulrike Marie
Meinhof und die deutschen Verhältnisse
(Berlin: Klaus Wagenbach, 1976); Hans Josef Horchem,
Die verlorene Revolution: Terrorismus in Deutschland
(Herford: Bussee Seewald, 1986); Butz Peters,
RAF: Terrorismus in Deutschland
(Stuttgart: Deutsche Verlags-Anstalt, 1991); Bernhard Rabert,
Links- und Rechtsterrorismus in der Bundesrepublick Deutschland von 1970 bis heute
(Bonn: Bernard & Graefe, 1996); and the multivolume series Analysen zum Terrorismus, vols. 1–4

(Opladen: Westdeutscher Verlag, 1981–85).

9. For sophisticated comparisons of the Italian and German cases, see Iring Fetscher,
Terrorismus und Reaktion
(Reinbeck bei Hamburg: Rowohlt, 1981) and della Porta,
Social Movements, Political Violence, and the State.

10.
Ann Arbor Argus,
November 18–December 11, 1969, 8–9.

11. This view is prevalent in the works on the American New Left cited above.

On the West German New Left, see Gerd Langguth,
Die Protestbewegung in der
BRD, 1968–76
(Cologne: Wissenschaft und Politik, 1976); Gerhard Bauß,
Die
Studentenbewegung der sechziger Jahre in der Bundesrepublik und Westberlin
(Berlin: Pahl-Rugenstein Verlag, 1977); Richard McCormick,
Politics of the Self:
Feminism and the Postmodern in West German Literature and Film
(Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1991); Andrei S. Markovits and Philip S. Gorski,
The
German Left: Red, Green and Beyond
(New York: Oxford University Press, 1993); and Sabine von Dirke,
“All Power to the Imagination”: The West German Counterculture from the Student Movement to the Greens
(Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1997).

12. The phrase was used by Bill Ayers in “A Strategy to Win,” in
Weatherman,
ed. Harold Jacobs (Berkeley, Calif.: Ramparts Press, 1970), 190.

13. Ulrike Meinhof, “rede von ulrike zu der befreiung von andreas, moabit 13. september 74,” in RAF,
texte: der RAF
(Malmö, Sweden: Bo Cavefors, 1977), 68. From 1973 on, as part of its rebellion against “authoritarian” structures, the RAF stopped capitalizing nouns as conventional German requires.

14. RAF, “April Erklärung—1992.” The untitled statement was issued on April 10, 1992, and is commonly referred to as the “Aprilerklärung.” It can be found at www.rafinfo.de/archiv/raf/raf-10–4-92.php and in translation in Bruce Scharlau and Donald Philips, “Not the end of German Left-Wing Terrorism,”
Terrorism
and Political Violence,
Autumn 1992, 110–15. Despite the statement, a faction in the RAF and other small groups continued to commit sporadic acts of violence.

15. The communiqué was issued in March 1998. It has been reprinted in English as “The Urban Guerrilla in History,” in
Arm the Spirit: Autonomist/

Anti-Imperialist Journal
(Toronto), no. 17 (Winter 1999/2000): 57–61. On vio-316

Notes to Pages 12–21

lence in the 1990s, see Uwe Backes and Eckhard Jesse,
Politischer Extremismus
in der Bundesrepublik Deutschland, Neuausgabe 1996
(Bonn: Bundeszentral für politische Bildung, 1996), 244–51.

16. Jochen Reiche, “Zur Kritik der RAF,” in
Jahrbuch Politik 8
(Berlin: Klaus Wagenbach, 1978), 22.

17. See Analysen zum Terrorismus, vols. 1 and 3, and Becker,
Hitler’s Children
.

18. Hans-Joachim Klein,
The German Guerrilla: Terror, Reaction, and Resistance,
conversations with Jean-Marcel Bougereau, trans. Peter Silcock (San-day, U.K.: Cienfuegos Press; Minneapolis: Soil of Liberty, 1981), 50.

19. The state’s relative leniency toward left-wing armed struggle groups proved short-lived. Under President Ronald Reagan, a handful of small groups committed bombings, bank robberies, and (unintended) killings. New counter-terrorist legislation, executive orders, and state organizations were used to capture and sharply punish those active in the 1980s. Gilda Zwerman, “Domestic Counterterrorism: U.S. Government Responses to Political Violence on the Left in the Reagan Era,”
Social Justice
16 (1991): 31–63.

20. Bill Ayers’s 2001 memoir
Fugitive Days
(Boston: Beacon Press, 2001) was the first by a group member in nearly three decades. Released just before the World Trade Center attack in September, it received many scathing reviews for its allegedly glib attitude toward violence.

21.
The Weather Underground,
by Sam Green and Bill Siegel (The Free History Project, 2003). For short retrospective histories of the group spawned by the film, consult www.theweatherunderground.com. For recent perspectives on the Weather Underground, see also Neil Gordon’s novel
The Company You Keep
(New York: Viking, 2003).

22. Powers,
Diana,
xiv.

23. Iring Fetscher, “Ideologien der Terroristen in der Bundesrepublik Deutschland,” in id., Günther Rohrmoser, et al.,
Ideologien und Strategien,
Analysen zum Terrorismus, vol. 1 (Bonn: Opladen, 1981), for example, argues that the RAF’s use of ideology to rationalize its conduct was rooted in a virtually apolitical zeal for combat.

24. On the role of religion in recent terrorism, see Mark Juergensmeyer
, Terror in the Mind of God: The Global Rise of Religious Violence
(Berkeley: University of California Press, 2002). Although he focuses on the violence of overtly religious groups, Juergensmeyer suggests that virtually all political violence is informed by the logic and symbolism of the sacred.

1 . “ a g e n t s o f n e c e s s i t y ”

1. Susan Stern,
With the Weathermen: The Journey of a Revolutionary Woman
(Garden City, N.Y.: Doubleday, 1976); epigram before book text.

2. “Bring the War Home,”
New Left Notes,
July 23, 1969.

3. RAF, “Rote Armee Fraktion: Das Konzept Stadtguerilla,” in RAF,
texte,
360. This important text has been translated as “The Concept of the Urban Guerrilla,” in
Armed Resistance in West Germany: Documents from the Red Army
Faction
(N.p.: Stoke Newington 8 Defence Group, 1972). Hereafter, I shall refer to the translated version.

Notes to Pages 22–32

317

4. See Daniel Bell,
The End of Ideology: On the Exhaustion of Political Ideas
in the Fifties
(Glencoe, Ill.: Free Press, 1960). On the New Left’s intellectual and cultural origins, see James Miller’s
“Democracy is in the streets”: From Port
Huron to the Siege of Chicago
(New York: Simon & Schuster, 1987), Doug Rossinow,
The Politics of Authenticity: Liberalism, Christianity, and the New Left in
America
(New York: Columbia University Press, 1998), and Kevin Mattson,
Intellectuals in Action: The Origins of the New Left and Radical Liberalism,
1945–1970
(University Park: Pennsylvania State University Press).

5. “The Reminiscences of Jeff Jones,” from “Student Movements of the 1960s,” Columbia University, Oral History Research Office (hereafter cited as Columbia), 17, 6–7.

6. Most dramatically, the Student Non-Violent Coordinating Committee expelled whites in 1966.

7. Paul Jacobs and Saul Landau,
The New Radicals: A Report with Documents
(New York: Vintage Books, 1966), 40.

8. Gitlin,
The Sixties,
177–78, 184.

9. Carl Ogelsby, “Liberalism and the Corporate State,” in Jacobs and Landau,
New Radicals,
258.

10. Interview with Scott Braley.

11. Caute,
Sixty-Eight,
141–58.