Jeremy Varon (2 page)

This book explores the international character of New Left rebellion by focusing on complementary experiences in two countries: the “armed struggles” of American and West German radicals. Violence against the state is not supposed to happen—not in formally democratic societies that boast institutional channels for addressing the grievances of dissident minorities. Not in prosperous, technologically developed societies that provide most of their citizens with the opportunity to earn a decent living. And not, certainly, at the hands of well-educated youths of the middle or upper classes who have seemingly everything to lose and little to gain from attacking societies that have endowed them with great privilege and promise. Political violence, rather, is expected to be the last resort of the disenfranchised and dispossessed, fighting oppression in societies that permit them no other choice.

And yet in the 1960s and 1970s, middle-class white youths in the United States and West Germany took up arms in hopes of overthrow-ing their governments. Chief among the “armed struggle” groups in the two countries were America’s Weatherman (later renamed the Weather Underground) and Germany’s Rote Armee Fraktion (Red Army Faction), or RAF.3 In 1969–70, both groups began to wage guerrilla campaigns modeled on those in Latin America. Although their attacks on military, corporate, and political targets were meant to be the catalyst for larger armed revolts, neither group was able to attract more than several dozen members into its highest ranks, and their violence was a dramatic failure from a tactical standpoint. Yet Weatherman and the RAF provoked reactions vastly disproportionate to the violence they unleashed. They each became a potent symbol of both the extremes to which New Left rebellion had gone and the profound social and political divisions their societies experienced in the 1960s and 1970s. As both a cause and a symptom of broad-based crises of legitimacy, their violence constituted an im-Introduction

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portant episode in the histories of their nations, of the developed West as a whole, and of global conflict.

Even so, their violence may appear far removed from the mainstream of the New Left. “Armed struggle” emerged in the United States and West Germany only at the tail end of the 1960s, and shortly before the New Left’s decline in both countries. Most activists rejected violence as a political strategy, and many accused its advocates of corrupting the New Left’s core values. Weatherman and the RAF were denounced by leftists in their own countries as everything from self-indulgent fools living out Bonnie-and-Clyde fantasies to “left-wing adventurists” hopelessly cut off from “the masses.” Yet armed struggle was an extreme expression of ideologies, attitudes, and sensibilities deeply embedded in both the American and West German New Left movements. As early as 1967, New Leftists in both countries discussed the possibility of taking up arms.

(America’s Black Panther Party, formed in 1966, both preached and practiced from its inception the armed self-defense of African-American communities.) Though such discussions often remained at the level of speculation or fantasy, many activists took the prospect of violence very seriously. Some promoted violence as a means of self-defense against police assaults at demonstrations, but others advocated waging an actual guerrilla war. And in both countries, state repression, coupled with activists’ declining faith in the value of peaceful protest, caused those skeptical about violence to seriously contemplate it and those persuaded of the need for violence to take the radical leap into action.

Weatherman and the RAF were only the best-known New Left groups to make this leap. In the United States, dozens if not hundreds of collectives—most often small circles of friends and fellow activists whose identities were never publicly revealed—committed bombings, arson, and other destruction of state, corporate, and university property in the late 1960s and early 1970s. Though no fully reliable figures exist, one estimate counts as many as 2,800 such attacks between January 1969 and April 1970 alone.4 Such protest violence, combined with eruptions of civil unrest, prompted urgent studies on the causes and scope of political violence and the widespread sense that America was experiencing one of the most violent periods in its history.5 The RAF was joined in combat by the West Berlin anarchists of the “June 2 Movement”; by the Socialist Patients Collective, a group of psychiatric patients who formed armed cells; by the semi-underground Red Cells, formed in 1973; and by a slew of small, ad hoc “urban guerrilla” groups. However fresh the memories 4

of the Nazi era and the turmoil that had preceded it, violence was once again part of the German political landscape.

Given the extent of political violence in the United States and West Germany, it would be a mistake to view armed struggle as an aberration or as simply a fringe phenomenon. Although this view dominates commentary on the New Left, it minimizes the broader revolutionary impetus of the late 1960s and threatens to make scapegoats of those who acted on the prevalent rhetoric among radicals encouraging violence. More deeply, it serves in the present day to subdue or even repress potentially painful memories of how contentious the late 1960s and early 1970s were in the United Sates and West Germany. Focus on the margins of the New Left may therefore disclose something about its center—the principles, passions, ideals, desires, fantasies, and fears that defined young activists’

consciousness and conduct.

Beyond what they tell us about 1960s radicalism, Weatherman and the RAF raise questions of enduring importance in the United States, Germany, and elsewhere. One set of questions concerns the origins, purpose, and effects of political violence: How and why does violence develop from within social movements? Under what conditions may violence not sanctioned by the state be considered legitimate? What, if anything, can it accomplish, and what are its special hazards as a form of political action?

What can states do—and what may they legitimately do—to protect themselves from the threat of violence? In addition, the examples of Weatherman and the RAF pose questions for the contemporary Western left, however distant the issues and imperatives of the 1960s and 1970s may now seem: How can political and moral outrage be turned toward constructive ends? What are the possibilities of, and barriers to, solidarity across economic, racial, and national boundaries? What limits must social justice movements observe, such that one’s actions remain consistent with one’s values? As a student of social theory who finds societies most interesting when they experience crisis—when the legitimacy of established institutions and ideologies is widely questioned—I am keenly interested in the first line of inquiry. As someone committed to social change, my attention never strays far from the latter.

The recent World Trade Center tragedy has added urgency to a final set of concerns. For Americans, 9/11 illustrated the capacity of terrorism truly to terrorize. It also prompted the controversial restriction of civil freedoms, the further militarization of American culture, the killing of innocents by the United States and its allies in the name of fighting

“terror,” new wars, and the articulation of a new set of reductive frames Introduction

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for understanding the world and America’s place within it—frames that may poorly serve the goals of security and peace. Troubled by all this, I seek from the past some insight into how to address profound conflicts of ideology and interest constructively and nonviolently, so as to strengthen the possibility of creating a meaningful and lasting peace, the foundation of which is justice.

New Left violence in the United States and West Germany has nowhere been systematically compared.6 Historians and others typically attribute the violence in the United States to qualities they present as specific to America: despair over the inability of peaceful protest to end the war in Vietnam; the impulse of middle-class whites, plagued by race and class guilt, to emulate “authentic” revolutionaries like the Black Panthers; a characteristically American preference for action over critical reflection; and the desire for instant gratification rooted in the ideology of the consumer culture.7 Weatherman, it is said over and over again, was a quintessentially
American
phenomenon, an
American
story. Conversely, scholars of the German 1960s and 1970s typically cite Germany’s historic illiberalism, principally its tendencies to political extremism and tradition of authoritarian rule, to account for the emergence of violence and the severe reaction it provoked.8

In studies of “left-wing terrorism,” most often conducted by those who find it deplorable and seek to understand it in order to eliminate it, comparisons of violence in different countries have not been uncommon.

However, the mistaken assumption prevails that New Left violence developed significant force only in the former Axis powers, Germany, Italy, and Japan, and not in the former Allied powers.9 The inference follows that the absence of established liberal-democratic traditions accounts for the emergence of violence in those countries, and that the United States, with its “mature” democracy, was spared such strife. This interpretive bias distorts the sense of the causes and scope of New Left violence, obscuring the similarities between the American and West German cases.

It also implicitly reinforces two deeply ideological, inverted modes of historical analysis: American exceptionalism, which holds that the United States, as the West’s great democratic frontier, has largely escaped the tensions and traumas that have afflicted Europe; and the notion that German history has followed a “special path”
(Sonderweg),
dominated by a resistance to democratic values that has doomed the country to cycles of destructive violence. Neither view adequately captures the American and German 1960s and the internationalism of the New Left. Whatever its history and reputation, American democracy was not functioning ex-6

ceptionally well in the decade, given the violation of the basic civil rights of African Americans and other racial minorities, fierce opposition to a war fought on the basis of government lies, and the widespread belief among the young that American democracy was a sham. Nor were the circumstances precipitating the RAF’s violence unique to Germany or shared only by societies with fascist pasts.

Focus on national experiences and narrow comparisons also inhibit an understanding of how the dynamic
interplay
of global and national contexts served simultaneously to unite and separate individual New Left movements. On the one hand, global opposition to U.S. power, mediated through Third World revolutionary discourse, gave ballast to the New Left’s professed internationalism. On the other hand, the American and West German armed struggles—particularly as they diverged in the mid 1970s—reveal the importance of national experiences in shaping individual New Left movements. In their inability to transcend their own cultures more fully and create political links across national boundaries, Weatherman and the RAF expose the limits to the New Left’s internationalism.

Much recommends the comparison of radicalism in the United States and West Germany. Following World War II, the two countries were both leading industrial democracies and among the world’s staunchest opponents of communism. The United States had tried to create the Federal Republic of Germany—West Germany—largely in its own image, and West Germany saw its alliance with the United States as key to both its survival and its redemption; adopting American values was to enter the modern family of nations and achieve the long-elusive “normality”

so desperately sought after the catastrophe of National Socialism.

America and “Americanism” were also focal points for criticisms of the Federal Republic. For West German leftists, to attack the United States was to condemn their own society. Conversely, Germany played a role in the minds of American activists, who often invoked Nazism to denounce their own government, whether for its “genocide” in Indochina or its “fascist” response to protest. Activists also made reference to Nazism to frame their rebellion. Just before a violent protest, a Weatherleader exclaimed, “We refuse to be ‘good Germans!’” (by failing to take a stand of militant opposition as their society grew more destructive).10 American and German activists alike described the postwar United States as the world’s arch-oppressor, as if it had taken over that role from the defeated Nazi regime. The narratives of Weatherman and the RAF, as they dovetail and then diverge, convey a larger story of Amer-Introduction

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ica and Germany’s close alliance, shared destinies, interwoven cultures, and enduring differences.

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With the barest hindsight, the notion of 1960s radicals waging successful armed revolutions in the United States and West Germany appears utterly fantastical. But for at least some activists in both countries, armed struggle had a compelling political basis. American and West German radicals were united, above all, by their mutual commitment to “revolutionary anti-imperialism,” whose main premise was that the prosperity of advanced industrial societies depended on the economic exploitation of developing countries, evident in the intensity with which the United States battled left-wing insurgencies in the Third World. Relatedly, an anti-imperialist analysis saw the decolonization movements in Asia, Africa, and Latin America as clear signs of a crisis of global capitalism.

New Leftists derived a mandate for revolution from Third World movements. Che Guevara’s global call to “create two, three, many Vietnams” succinctly conveyed that the greatest contribution First World radicals could make to Third World struggles would be to bring the war for socialism home to their own countries. Anti-imperialism also provided a way for the New Left to account for the absence of the conditions considered from a traditional Marxist viewpoint to be prerequisites for revolutionary change. Within an anti-imperialist framework, the working classes in wealthy societies could be seen as benefiting from the exploitation of foreign labor and resources. By extension, the initial or even primary impetus for radical change would have to come from new groups, among them students and intellectuals, who were not fully integrated into the benefits of the capitalist economy and absorbed by its ideology.