Jerry West writes: "I was a bit impressed with the New World Liberation
Front who tried to make a point of not hurting anyone while they were blowing
things up. "
In this regard, they but carried on a recent national tradition. In 1971,
Scanlan's (I:8) published an issue devoted mainly to itemizing domestic
bombings. I forget whether it was from there only or other sources also that I
derived a cumulative estimate of 5,000 - 8,000 for the period 1965-72;
whether the peak average was 6 or 8 bombings per day; and whether this total
referred only to bombings or included also "fire-bombings" and other arson at
military and commercial targets. Whichever, the total was staggering -- but
scarcely incredible, given the widespread and anarchic character of our
dissent; the agonizing political textures of that period; and the paradoxical
tendency of mainstream media to suppress reference to this national phenomenon
as such, which perhaps extended to underground media as well. (*)
In retrospect, this cumulative figure -- which I suspect dates almost entirely
after the first violence against the anti-war movement in April 1967, and
perhaps not till after that fall -- is so significant that I hope someone more
knowledgeable than I will confirm or discredit it. As it stands, it implies
several things. One is that this massive wave of bombings was carried out with
remarkable caution and regard for human life. So far as I know, the
fatalities were limited to one late researcher in the U. Wisconsin math
building bombing, an unwished accident; and several Weatherman in the
Manhattan townhouse explosion. Here again, as my knowledge and recollection
are quite fragmentary, I hope that someone better informed will tally up the
scores. As these stand here, this wave of largely-unpublicized sabotage may be
said to have been quite scrupulous in distinguishing between people and
property -- or in other language that may draw reproof, to have been quite
pure of heart, and quite responsible in this regard, howsoever inefficient
otherwise in execution. In such qualities, I venture to suggest, lay the
organic connection between this front of activity and the
peace-love-good-vibesness of the "hippie" axis.
Another implication of the cumulative figure is to emphasize the tendency of
Sixties apologists and allied historians to avert consideration of this
dimension of activism; and to undermine their tendencies to attribute the wave
of "reckless" bombings (or such of it as they recognize) largely and merely to
a perverse alliance of police provocateurs and sectarian vanguardists crazed
with vainglory. Granted, that "intelligence" agencies throughout the nation
infiltrated provocateurs into radicals' open ranks to inspire discrediting
actions, including many bombings where such connection was exposed and
doubtless many more. But if the sum of such were really some thousands, or
even many hundreds of bombings, I find it hard in the first place to conceive
that some among this array of undisciplined, uncontrollable, and merciless
agents of power would not have recognized the discrediting value of bombings
that killed innocents -- and hard in the second to conceive that the
recklessness of such agents, putatively driving and leading this wave, would
not have occasioned some deaths accidentally even without their intention.
In sum, I doubt that the afore-specified "perverse alliance" accounted
directly for more than a small fraction of the cumulative total of bombings
and arson. One might argue that their examples stimulated and directed
imitation. But even this requires us to consider, in effect, a "popular
mainstream" of independent actors and action extending far beyond surveillance
and infiltration or direct contact with small, tightly-ingrouped ideological
bands; and requires an accounting of their motivations for engaging in such
sabatoge, less superficial than merely describing them as mesmerized,
undisciplined, and reckless. If we instead subtract such
oh-so-readily-identifiable agencies as police and idelogical provocateurs from
their presiding, distracting post in the center of our attention to this
subject, and instead locate their influence at some remove on the periphery of
this "popular mainstream"'s consciousness, though nearer than the romanticized
influence of international guerrillas -- as if we were turning a world-map
inside out on the pivot of personal consciousness -- we get a quite different
picture. Though such peripheral influences were magnified by our own media, we
remained more nearly a diverse **public** than a **mass** as we digested them
independently in our own feelings and decisions.
To speak personally, as one who never so much as broke a window or kicked over
a trash-can in protest, I noted in my book in 1971 that some of us had already
discussed sabotaging power-lines during the terminal sit-in of the FSM in
1964, well before provocation of such provocation began. The first bombing of
the Berkeley draft board office occurred, if I recall aright, after mass
frustration with the stifling of VDC marches towards Oakland in fall 1965, but
well before hundreds were beaten there while blockading the Induction Center
two years later. Conceivably, some police agent was involved; but it's much
more likely to have been an independent, personal action, and it was taken as
such in popular understanding. I confess that my heart leaped at this, as at
later report of the bombing of a particular PGE tower, in uneasy tension with
my other, frowning feelings. Being technically-minded and apt to tinker, I
enjoyed browsing the recipes in the various versions of The Anarchist Cookbook
as these evolved and circulated in the political and then countercultural
community. That I never got round to trying any myself, even in a vacant
field, may speak less to my innate inhibitions than to circumstance; for I was
quite confident that I could do so readily, and a few times -- most noteably
after being in Chicago in August 1968, being shot-at during People's Park in
1969, and being gassed by a government helicopter during protest of the
Kent/Augusta/Jackson murders in May 1970 -- I clearly imagined and foresaw
doing so if things got worse. Had I gone to live in rural isolation as many of
my countercultural friends did during this period, I might well have turned
sooner and more readily to practical mischief, back in the city or in my
locale, perhaps for environment's sake.
In putting the matter personally, I mean to suggest two things. One is that my
case was more representative than isolated, or was at least quite widely and
independently duplicated in every stream and locale of activism, in younger
cohorts as in mine, among people as qualified and motivated as I to pursue
such tactics in that era's surges of despair. The other is that although it is
convenient to characterize the massive tapestry of bombings as the work of a
distinct catagory of duped and misguided Bombers, including at most two
thousand such, the phenomenon can scarcely be understood in this perspective.
More nearly, I think -- or at least also, in significant ways -- this
scattered array of volunteers for the assignment represented a tendency that
enlisted a thousand times as many among us in more partial degree, as it
enlisted me. In this sense, despite all fastidious efforts at disavowal, I
think the bombers were truly among my representatives and ours, though not to
be misjudged as such simplistically in single mind.
Moreover, I think their exploration of sabotage was **necessary**, in a sense
somewhat stronger than **inevitable**. So to speak, they occupied a
fundamental niche in the political ecology of the time, exercising a distinct
form of political speech in a manner quite responsible in some regards, as
I've remarked. (To describe the bombings so is not to dignify them falsely,
nor to confess a more simplistic sympathy than I've expressed, which some may
already find cause for pillory.) Insofar as they expressed popular sentiment
and impulse, I imagine that if these few thousands of actual Bombers had been
literally removed from the overall scene, or neutralized by religious
conversion, a tapestry of bombings and other sabotage not greatly less
extensive would have resulted from other actors among us, moved as obscurely
as these were to their roles.
Michael Rossman <mrossman@igc.org>
(*) Re this last point: One might think that mainstream media would
automatically have exploited the sensationalism of these incidents and their
overall development. But one effect of the Scanlan's study was to document
instead the degree to which they held back from this -- for the very premise
of the Scanlan's issue was to publicize the repressed subject of "guerrilla
war in the U.S." Granted, there were enough local and national reports of
particular bombings and arson to stimulate public fears of anti-war activists,
Black Panthers, and hippies as violent crazies. But in retrospect, and
thinking back to the easy mechanisms that whipped up anti-Red hysteria in the
preceding era, that Scanalan's issue makes it evident that a far more
systematic and vicious campaign of dyscreditation and hysteria-mongering could
readily have been mounted against us by coordination of "intelligence" and
media forces. If I am correct in this assessment, the fact that its force was
deferred begs for explanation. The only obvious factor I can see amounts to
this: In sharp contrast to the previous situation with Reds, key authorities
feared that publicizing such incidents and activity would encourage their
multiplication -- not only by advertising such tactics as popular, but also
by inadvertantly publicizing the low risk of their perpetration, for
perpetrators were so rarely identified or caught.( Insofar as this line of
reasoning holds, it implies a picture of us in minds from Nixon and Hoover on
down as the agency of chaos, almost the Devil incarnate, that accords with
what other evidence suggests, unless one misjudges them simply as cynical
rationalists.) Such inhibitory motivation may have strongly determined the
overall pattern of mainstream media exploitation of the overall pattern of
bombings and arson during this period. As for underground media, I suspect
that review will show that these also made less of bombings, severally and as
a wave, than they well might have made, for reasons presently obscure to me.
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