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To: h-1960s@h-net.msu.edu Subject: Fwd: Book Comments - J. Varon In "Bringing the War Home: The Weather Underground, the Red Army Faction, and Revolutionary Violence in the Sixties and Seventies," I provide the first systematic comparison of New Left "armed struggle" in the United States and West Germany by focusing on the most prominent armed struggle groups in each setting. The comparison itself is a vital aspect of the project. There scarcely exists a historiography on radical violence in America. The little commentary that exists describes it as an overwhelmingly, even quintessentially American phenomenon, rooted in American conflicts and sensibilities. In Germany, there is a sprawling literature on the Red Army Faction (the RAF), which typically adopts a strongly German lens. Comparative work on 60s violence, such as it is, typically clusters left-wing "terrorist" groups in West Germany, Italy, and Japan, arguing that these countries' recent experience with fascism and absence of long-standing democratic traditions account for the emergence of "left-wing extremism" in them. My goal, in schematic terms, was to discern the ideological, strategic, existential, and ethical logic of protest violence in America and Germany. Doing so, I found striking similarities in the theory, practice, and internal culture of Weatherman and the RAF, especially in their early days. So, I argue, armed struggle must be understood as a wide-ranging, transnational phenomenon - one whose adherents aspired to fight what they saw as a unitary, global imperialist enemy by a more or less uniform set of guerrilla tactics derived from anti-colonial armed struggles. The profound similarities between Weatherman and the RAF are testament to both a consciously internationalist outlook and the globalization, if you will, of certain conceptions of resistance. The absence or presence of democratic traditions is, thus, inadequate as an explanation of why violence took hold in different settings. Moreover, there are compelling structural affinities and particular points of political and cultural connection between the United States and the Federal Republic that link in such strong ways the armed struggle movements in the two countries. This is not to say that national contexts were unimportant. To the contrary, the radically different trajectories of the two groups - in the mid-70s the Weathermen scaled down their violence, whereas the RAF escalated - are best approached through an understanding of the psychological and political impact of the Nazi past on the generational conflicts of the 1960s and 70s. At a certain point, the terrorist conflict in Germany took on a vividly German cast, and ceased, fundamentally, to be "about" what the principal antagonists - the RAF and the state - said it was about. "Historical memory," on the German side, is therefore integral to my analysis. Much of my historical gaze is in fairly obvious places: debates in the American and German New Lefts about the efficacy of violence; the outrage and despair caused by the Vietnam war and state violence against dissidents; the heady sense of 60s "revolutionaries" that they were participating in a process of global emancipation; the transgressive, even sinister extremes to which some ultra-militants took their protest. To this I add a detailed analysis of the existential dimensions of violence, as well as close consideration of the language of movement militants to get a sense of how largely subterranean fears and desires drove their psychology and actions. Most ambitiously, I offer a running discourse on how deeply and pervasively the construct reality was contested within the politics and culture of radicals, and wrestled over between the dominant and countercultures. Beneath a richly documented political history, then, there is a persistent deconstructionist pulse. Indeed, among the greatest methodological and stylistic challenges was to blend narrative and interpretation, storytelling and analysis in a way that did justice to each. In substantive terms, the hardest task was to develop categories for the political and moral evaluation of Weatherman, the RAF and their governments. For this, I went into the worlds of critical theory, ethics, literature, and psychoanalysis. I offer no single judgment on the groups; rather, I re-present, again and again, the political and moral riddle they posed, hoping to furnish something like a cubist portrait in which the same object is seen through multiple refractions. You all will tell me the results of my efforts. I should say, to close, that I began this long before September 11, and did not originally conceive it as anything like case studies within an analysis of "terrorism." But, I now realize, the book does have a certain salience for any era newly dominated by terrorism and the (scandalously problematic) war against it. I hope it has some use in helping people navigate the slings and arrows of our sad, shared fortune. Jeremy Varon Drew University
 Humanities & Social Sciences Online 
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