To: h-1960s@h-net.msu.edu
Subject: Re: Varon discussion

Jeremy Varon's _Bringing the War Home: The Weather Underground, the Red
Army Faction, and Revolutionary Violence in the Sixties and Seventies_
is a pathbreaking book in the new history of the New Left and the
Sixties more generally. He has provided us with the first rigorous
history of the Weather Underground, one that helps us begin saying
something more substantive about the organization that simply pointing
to it and its de facto accomplices in the dismantling of SDS. In the
process, Varon reveals the urgency of developing a historical
literature on radical violence, a topic which Sixties historians have
been reluctant to engage with critically, perhaps preferring to focus
on the "years of hope" rather than on the "days of rage."

Furthermore, Varon rightly insists that we bring a global perspective
to our understanding of the Sixties – and thus implicitly anchors the
Sixties in a far longer Cold War history. In the past few years, works
such as Jeremi Suri's _Power and Protest_, Lawrence Wittner's
_Resisting the Bomb_ trilogy, and Mary Dudziak's Cold War Civil Rights_
have demonstrated the urgency of studying Cold War-era social movements
in tandem with state reaction, and doing so within a global perspective
front and center. _Bringing the War Home_ is an important contribution
to this emerging literature, one that also prompts us to reconsider (as
H-1960s members have been doing since the network's inception) the time
frame of the Sixties.

The questions of state reaction and the memory of the Sixties have been
on my mind these past few days, with the deluge of elegies for Ronald
Reagan, who won California's governorship in large measure by
positioning himself in opposition to the New Left, the counterculture,
and the civil rights movement, a political card he later played to win
the U.S. presidency. So it was somewhat eerie and yet completely
understandable to reach the second-from-last page of _Bringing the War
Home_ and read Varon quoting Reagan sounding positively Weather-like,
threatening student protestors that "if it takes a bloodbath, let's get
it over with" (p. 309).

In my own work on anti-Vietnam War organizing (which includes
substantial material on Weatherman), I am working through the
relationship between insurgency and state reaction, especially as that
relationship is shaped by sexuality and gender. (Indeed, given the
incessant gay-baiting of the New Left, the counterculture, and radical
pacifists by representatives of the state, I would have liked to hear
Varon do more to theorize how Weatherman developed a culture of
insurgency overwhelmingly masculine in character – notwithstanding its
expressed intellectual support for women's liberation and gay
liberation). I am particularly interested in exploring how since at
least World War II, in a society perpetually preparing for war,
violence has become normative in American culture and politics;
correspondingly, nonviolent means of conflict resolution often becomes
the deviant "other" – even queer, one might say.

I would be curious then to hear Varon address how Weatherman (and RAF,
if he sees fit) and the vision arm struggle fit into this dialectic of
normal and deviant. Is this where Weatherman might in fact be trapped
in their own history as Americans, as reluctant as they might be to
claim that label? After all, this logic, if it holds, leads to the
conclusion that Weatherman, and the entire turn to violence late in the
life of the New Left, are effectively a turn _away_ from the work of
radical social transformation. Does it then follow that state reaction
– whether through discursive bloodshed such as Reagan's fiery rhetoric
or the active repression of police infiltration, the murder of Fred
Hampton and other movement figures, and various other tactics –
facilitated the normalization of Weatherman and their fellow targets
even as they waged war on them?

For students of the long Sixties, this relationship between discourses
and practices of state violence is critical (if declarations such as
Reagan's are not morally equivalent to the shooting of Fred Hampton or
the carpet bombing of Vietnam, it is also disingenuous to detach them
completely). I found Varon's discussion of the relationship between the
Red Army Faction and the state reaction in the Federal Republic
fascinating and illuminating, and would like to push Varon further on
the American side of the story. In saying that, I should note that the
extent that I'm not fully satisfied with the U.S. half of this question
may reflect how Varon has a far larger body of literature to engage
with when discussing the RAF as compared to Weatherman or even the
entire New Left; likewise, it also clearly reflects the near-total
paucity of models of transnational New Left history.

Those caveats noted, I must agree with David Barber that the
relationship between Weatherman and the Black Panther Party – and with
international revolutionary movements beyond the RAF – needs to be
front and center to answer the questions that Varon poses. As a general
rule, the historiography on the American New Left dramatically
undertheorizes the ways in which, from ERAP to Weatherman (that is,
during _both_ the "years of hope" and the "days of rage"). white
middle-class movement participants developed a vision of social
transformation premised upon their fantasies of "authentically
revolutionary" white working-class men, African Americans, and
revolutionary movements in the global South.

At times, Varon does this quite effectively, for example, citing two
anonymous Weathermen comparing the risks they faced at the Days of Rage
as compared to those faced by the Black Panthers, the Viet Cong, and
the Tupamaros (p. 110), but I believe more was necessary to fully
address his agenda. I'll let Barber's comments on the Panthers stand by
themselves, but in terms of the transnational context, here I have in
mind the quasi-ritual of Jeff Jones, Jonny Lerner, and their fellow
proto-Weathermen in New York, circa 1967, watching the _Battle of
Algiers_; likewise, I'm thinking of the caucus of Weatherwomen at the
Flint War Council who, discussing the same film, decided that they
should emulate the Algerian women depicted as faking pregnancies and
carrying bombs under their dresses. Similarly, Bill Ayers' recent
reflections of how he and Terry Robbins loved _Butch Cassidy and the
Sundance Kid_ come to mind: the fact that the two outlaw train robbers
"died in a rain of gunfire" in Bolivia – not unlike their real life
hero and role model, Che Guevara – "was, for us, besides the point,"
Ayers concedes. [1]

[1] Bill Ayers, _Fugitive Days: A Memoir_ (Boston: Beacon Press, 2001),
p. 198.


As a general observation, I'm quite sympathetic to John McMillian's
query whether Jeremy Varon's intellectual history does credit
Weatherman with a level of ideological and programmatic lucidity,
rationality, and (I might add) consistency far beyond what was apparent
at the time –and beyond most former Weatherman would claim with the
hindsight of history. I'll also echo the other commentators high praise
for how Varon rejects the tendency to treat each national "Sixties" in
isolation, and to treat the U.S. New Left as de facto different from
their counterparts in West Germany, Japan, and Italy because of the
democratic and fascist heritages of the respective countries. I find
Varon's handling of the recent Nazi past vis-ΰ-vis the Red Army Faction
and its members' desire not to be just "good Germans" – and their
sloppy slide into anti-Semitism in the name of supporting Palestinian
self-determination – masterful.

I have various other questions and comments I'm still trying to
formulate (what can we say about the relationship between the symbolic
violence of the Weatherman versus that of radical pacifists such as the
Berrigans? What would the enthnographers working in the emerging field
of emotions and social movements have to say about Weatherman and
RAF?). I think in the interests of moving this forum ahead, however,
I'll sit on those for the moment and let Jeremy Varon begin preparing
his response.

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