To: H-1960S@H-NET.MSU.EDU
Subject: Re: Varon discussion

In constructing a comparative study of New Left armed struggle in the United
States and Germany in the 1960s and 1970s in _Bringing the War Home, the
Weather Underground, the Red Army Faction, and Revolutionary Violence in the
Sixties and Seventies_, Jeremy Varon sets an ambitious agenda for himself.
 First, he seeks to better understand the larger phenomenon of New Left armed
struggle in advanced capitalist nations; second, he looks to discover what was
really particular about these movements; third, he seeks to debunk explanations
that root these armed struggle movements in distinctly American or distinctly
German terms.  Finally, Varon seeks to understand "the origins, purpose and
effects of political violence" and the broader significance that political
violence has for contemporary social movements.  Perhaps because these goals
are so ambitious, Varon is only partially successful in his efforts.

Varon's study is important for a number of reasons.  First, Varon challenges
the
predominant schools of thought on New Left groups like Weatherman.  He
successfully argues that both Weatherman and Germanyıs Red Army Faction (RAF)
were not aberrations or "fringe phenomenon," but instead represented the
playing out of a political and cultural logic that was "deeply embedded in both
the American and West German New Left movements."   I suspect that one of the
reasons that in the US, for example, so many activists hated Weatherman so
vehemently was precisely because they knew just how closely their
understandings of the world stood to those understandings underlying
Weathermanıs practice.

Varon's study is also important because it introduces the Red Army Faction and
the German New Left to a wider audience of American readers.  Varon does an
excellent job of demonstrating how Germany's Nazi past drove the RAF.  Growing
up as the sons and daughters of men and women who had participated or
collaborated in genocide, and who refused to speak of their Nazi history,
German youth desperately attempted to distinguish themselves from their
parents' generation.  That generation had been silent in the 1930s and the
1940s, and with America's brutal war against Vietnam, it was silent again.
 Said one German armed struggle advocate: Germans "should have been the first
to start shouting about Vietnam.  All the Germans, not merely a few leftists.
 They did nothing.  Arguing didnıt move them, pamphlets didnıt convince them,
they got used to broken windows. So there came a points when something new had
to be found" (Varon, 248).  Moreover, in taking up armed struggle against the
German State, -- physically attacking and killing Germanyıs political and
economic elite, many of them deeply implicated in the Third Reich -- the RAF
directly challenged the Nazi past.  In short, Varon has convincingly shown how
Germanyıs recent past so completely shaped the sixties generation of Germans,
both left and right.

To be sure, understanding RAF and its relationship to the past in no way
justifies or even suggests that RAF's violence was particularly effective in
transforming German social realities.  On the contrary, Varon demonstrates that
RAF's violence was largely counterproductive: the German State suspended civil
liberties in order to get at RAF, and the German public largely went along with
this, just as that public had done in the past.  RAF, it seems, was trapped by
the past, and the violence of its practice may well have flowed from some deep
recognition and denial of that fact.

One wishes that Dr. Varon had more thoroughly pursued his insight on the
relation between the German New Left and Germanyıs past in his analysis of
Weatherman.  If Weatherman and the New Leftıs young activists did not have the
Nazi past driving them, shaping their consciousness, nonetheless, New Leftists
had hundreds of years of white and male supremacy defining their identities,
and, in Weathermanıs case, defining its particular practice.  Weatherman
activists, strove, by might and main, to overcome their past; but their frantic
practice, particularly through the latter part of 1969 and into the winter of
1970, demonstrated that they too were trapped by their history.  In place of a
very specific analysis rooting Weatherman in American history, and
specifically, rooting Weatherman activists as young white people, Dr. Varon
offers a more generalized understanding that misses some of the most important
realities of Weatherman history.

For example, in his discussion of Weatherman and the anti-war movement, Dr.
Varon hinges a good part of his discussion on the question of violence v.
non-violence and argues that the totality of antiwar activity, including
widespread violence, constrained the US governmentıs hand in its prosecution of
the Vietnam War.  He suggests, therefore, that the anti-war movement's
"excesses," i.e., violence, had real impact in slowing the War. This is an
important point and hardly contestable.  Campus destruction of hundreds of ROTC
buildings, militant demonstrations against military and military-industrial
recruiters, fighting with police to free seized comrades, all these and other
forms of action undoubtedly contributed to a growing climate of instability in
the United States and occurred with increasing frequency from the fall of 1967
onward. As Varon suggests, policymakers did fear this increasing level of
violence and instability and factored that fear into their calculations of what
kinds of escalation they could successfully carry out in Vietnam.  Thus, Varon
implicitly defends or vindicates a portion of Weathermanıs practice.
 Certainly, Varonıs position here is an important one in the face of the
predominant historiography of the era, which condemns anti-war violence out of
hand.

Nevertheless, in evaluating Weatherman's significance to the anti-war movement,
the question is not one of violence v. non-violence.  The question is the
nature of Weathermanıs violence.  And we cannot look at that question without
examining a number of other related questions: What did Weatherman's use of
violence mean given Weathermanıs location at the head of the largest radical
anti-war organization in the country?  What did it mean given that it used
violence not as a complement to other forms of struggle, but in opposition to
other forms of struggle?  And what did Weathermanıs use of violence mean given
the organizationıs claims that such violence was what the Vietnamese themselves
were demanding of the anti-war movement?   Here, in the specific evaluation of
Weatherman's violence, Iım afraid that Varonıs book falls short.

We cannot disconnect Weatherman's practice from its leadership over the
Students
for a Democratic Society. In the discussions weıve had on this list, a number
of people, Dr. Varon included, emphasized just how important SDS was to the New
Left.  And SDS, I must emphasize, did not dissolve or disintegrate on its own.
Weatherman leaders Bill Ayers, Mark Rudd and Jeff Jones were elected the three
national secretaries of SDS at the SDS National Convention in June 1969.  Under
their leadership of SDS, Weatherman self-consciously scuttled the organization.
 It scuttled SDS because SDS was a mass democratic organization and Weatherman
held that organization in open contempt, especially after the overwhelming
majority of SDSers refused to follow Weatherman leadership into the Days of
Rage.  Indeed, SDS and "the movement" were the racist and imperialist "other"
to Weathermanıs purity and Weatherman demonstrated its purity through its
commitment to violence.  Weathermanıs destruction of the organization followed
inexorably from this opposition.  In other words, in order for Weatherman to be
the exceptional whites that they saw themselves as, SDS would have to become
the enemy.   Unfortunately, Bringing the War Home does not enter into any
significant discussion of this destruction of SDS or of its consequences.

Also revealing was Weatherman's specific rationale for violence.  This
rationale, which I believe Varon accepts at face value, was that its violence
derived from an overwhelming desire to stop the war and act in solidarity with
the Vietnamese and with Black revolutionaries.  The evidence, some of which
Varon presents but does not sufficiently analyze, tells us something different.


Weatherman and other SDS activists met with Vietnamese revolutionaries in
Havana
in July 1969.  As they had at all previous meetings with US anti-war activists,
the Vietnamese urged SDSers to make Vietnam an issue again, to raise the slogan
of Immediate Withdrawal, and to use Vietnam as a means of exposing the
character of American society.  In other words, the Vietnamese looked to SDS to
build a broad anti-war movement while simultaneously working to deepen that
movementıs understandings of the nature of the society waging that war.
 Weatherman leader Bernardine Dohrnıs notes from that meeting encapsulated the
Vietnamese line.  Dohrn reported that the head of the North Vietnamese
delegation argued that in their experience with the French in the anti-colonial
war, it had been essential to make the French people "understand the true
nature of the war organizers must go deep into the masses; many diff forms of
organizations; if we put forward a slogan which is too high for people, will
not have broadest possibility of unity; must carefully study the situation."

Weatherman returned from that meeting ­ Varon describes the meeting in a
sentence or two ­ arguing the exact opposite of what the Vietnamese had urged
on them, and doing so in the name of solidarity with the Vietnamese.  Said
Weatherman at the time:  "We understood that the reason the Vietnamese called
the meeting was to get us moving against the war again. The Vietcong were
giving us a kick in the ass at a time when theyıve defeated the US militarily.
Kicking us in the ass so we could start kicking ass inside the monster."
  Thus, when the New Mobe asked Weatherman to cooperate in building the
November 15 1969 Washington demonstration against the war, Weatherman leader
Mark Rudd denounced the Immediate Withdrawal slogan as liberal and insisted
instead that the demonstration organize to "Bring the War Home."  After the
November 15 demonstration was over ­ it was the largest demonstration in the
nationıs history ­ Weatherman, which had participated in contingents trashing
windows in Washington, ostentatiously declared that "THE WAR ISN'T THE ISSUE
ANYMORE."  According to Weatherman, the issue was violence. So Weatherman
carried its Vietcong banners and trashed windows in the name of fighting on the
side of the Vietnamese, even as it studiously ignored and distorted the real
message and thinking of the people it claimed to be in solidarity with.

Similarly, Weatherman fought under the banner of black liberation, even as it
ignored and presumed its revolutionary superiority to existing black
revolutionary leadership.  Varon presents more evidence here, but again, does
not bring his analytical skills to bear on this rather significant
contradiction.  And I stop here to insist that this is not one of those
quibbles that we often hear about authors ­ "well, he talked about all this
other stuff but didn't talk about what interests me."  No, if understanding
"the origins, purpose and effects of political violence" is one of Varon's
goals, then examining and understanding the relationship that Weatherman had
with the Black Panthers and black activists more generally is not auxiliary to
his project: it lies at the center of that project.  Weatherman consistently
acted in the name of following black leadership, it carried out its actions in
the name of supporting black liberation, and it designated the black struggle
as the vanguard of revolution in the United States.  Moreover, SDS's turn to
greater and greater militancy followed closely in the wake of the growing
militancy of the black social movement of the 1960s.

Varon gives limited, but significant evidence concerning Weathermanıs
relationship to the Panthers and characterizes it as "close but strained."  We
know from Varon's evidence that Black Panther Fred Hampton 1) denounced
Weatherman's Days of Rage; 2) decked Mark Rudd with a single punch when Rudd
questioned Hampton's revolutionary commitment; 3) led an attack by BPP members
on Weathermanıs print shop; and 4) in that attack Hampton himself beat one of
the Weatherman with a 2X4.  Varon also lets us know that the police
assassination of Hampton was a turning point for Weatherman ­ it was at this
point that Weatherman determined to go underground.  This is a rather telling
contradiction, one deserving of exploration simply on the basis of the facts
presented.

But one more fact is necessary to complete the picture: Hamptonıs
characterization of the Days of Rage as "anarchistic, adventuristic and
Custeristic" arose from an important critique that both Hampton and the
national Black Panther leadership had of Weatherman.  In contrast to
Weathermanıs "fight the pigs" practice, Hampton and the BPP leadership insisted
that Weatherman organize white communities in support of Black Liberation.
 Within the context of taking on that task, a white group might have room for
developing militancy.  On the other hand, militancy in the absence of tackling
that task was an abdication of the real responsibility that white radicals had
for making social change in the United States.  This is what the Panthers and
Fred Hampton were telling Weatherman, in no uncertain terms.  If Weatherman had
no interest in following the lead of Fred Hampton in life, however, in death,
Hampton became the ideal black revolutionary leader.  Weatherman would rally
its troops around avenging Hamptonıs death, carrying out the very practice that
Hampton had condemned in his life, and Hampton could say nothing more about it.


Weatherman's relationship to the Vietnamese Revolution ran exactly parallel to
its relation to the Black Liberation Movement.  Weatherman whipped its own
troops into line, and berated its opponents for failing to follow Black and
Third World leadership.  Yet the Black and Third World leadership that
Weatherman followed was a leadership that Weatherman largely invented. If we
want to understand Weathermanıs politics, strategy, and, more importantly, the
deeper sense of historical self that drove Weatherman, understanding this
contradiction would be a good place to start.

Please forgive me for this too long/too short comment.  Much more needs to be
said on the subject that Jeremy Varon has so courageously taken up.

David Barber
University of California, Davis

Humanities & Social
Sciences Online

Copyright © 1995-2006 - Contact Us
RSS | Validate: XHTML | CSS