I promise.
Todd Gitlin has weighed in on the meaning of the new SLA trials in the LA Times. He makes a good case (not difficult) that the SLA "soldiers" were the very worst of the worst, "gangsters pretending to politics." He concedes that the SLA did operate in a violent tradition, though not the "main tradition," within the New Left in the 60s and 70s. Cautioning the current left as well as the right against the view that the defendants are representative of an entire "generation of activists", he stresses "the sheer senselessness--and worse--of the SLA, whose obscurantism ("Symbionese"), vagueness ("liberation") and chutzpah ("army") were of a piece with the vileness of their tactics."
He's right of course. What is interesting here, though, is the reluctance to engage, in any serious or specific way, the issue of radical violence in the main tradition of the New Left. It's surely a relevant question when the claim is that the SLA were a "special case." Gitlin is himself no apologist for this sub-tradition, and he has harsh words for the Black Panthers. Yet, like most would-be apologists, he tends to dismiss the violent acts of non-SLA "militants" as petty and inconsequential. "Most movement violence," he writes, "was spasmodic, impulsive and targeted on property--smashing a window during an antiwar demonstration or torching your neighborhood. This was usually stupid, but it was, in some sense, sane."
I suppose that depends on how you define "sane." But is this really true? The "body count" of the SLA's predations was lower than the body count of the Baader-Meinhoff gang (who I presume were also "out of the main tradition"); it was higher, I believe, than that of the Weathermen. How many of their lunatic schemes actually "came off" is a bit beside the point: schemes there were, and the SLA weren't the only ones who hatched them. I'll concede that smashing a window isn't as bad as murdering a little old lady (though "torching your neighborhood" doesn't seem quite as harmless.) But what about manufacturing a nail bomb to be detonated at an ROTC dance, as members of the Weatherman did? A stroke of luck and their own ineptitude mercifully prevented these hip terrorists from carrying out their murderous plot (they blew themselves up while making their bomb.) Surely this fortunate "own goals" accident doesn't absolve them, or their "tradition." Suppose the SLA had botched the murder of Marcus Foster and blown themselves up instead: would they then have been part of the relatively harmless, "sane" tradition of "movement violence" too?
Gitlin is "right on," as they used to say, here:
Like the Latin American urban guerrillas from whom the SLA and other such gangs took inspiration, the [SLA] soldiers predictably drew down the wrath of the armed state and left nothing behind but the blood of their victims and of themselves. In its farcical, nightmarish way, the SLA helped inter the dreams of a decade. Whatever our political persuasion, it is worth remembering for two reasons: to remind us that murder, however adorned, is murder, and to remind us that whoever professes politics is also required to make sense.
Former Weatherman Jonathon Lerner had a thoughtful mea culpa in yesterday's Washington Post. He tells the story of a childish prank, a plot to crash a radio-controlled toy airplane into the Times Square New Years Eve ball:
None of us had ever been close to the mechanism of the dropping ball. We paused for a brief discussion of what might happen. Was there a ledge to catch any falling, possibly flaming, debris? Or would the whole rig just tumble into the crowded street? What about the people watching from across the country? Mass panic? If anyone got hurt, we shortly concluded, it would just be their tough luck: Innocent people were dying every day in Vietnam, so why not at home? In the end, we couldn't get the little engine to start in the cold, so we'll never know.