70s Hits
The double hit on New York and Washington produced a rolling fog of hyperbole that was easy to get lost in. For a while, it really felt like "everything had changed." That Tuesday appeared as good a candidate as any for the "day America lost its innocence." Surely nothing would "ever be the same again."
Now its 2003, and were staring at comic book movies and bitching about a fare hike. While forever remarkable in its scale and daring, we can see the mass murder of 9/11 as the non-paradigm-destroying cat swipe that it was. It dramatically altered the political landscape in this country, but it didnt cripple the world economy or decapitate the U.S. government. It didnt flatten Manhattan or put an end to knock-knock jokes. It wasnt even the first big attack in Americas recent memory; it was just the biggest. And if the country had buried the ghosts of Oklahoma City and the first World Trade Center bombing, the 90s offered plenty of other gruesome reminders that terrorism is a permanent fact of modern life: Algerian nail bombs in Parisian trash cans, Sarin gas in Tokyos subway, car trunks of Semtex in London shopping districts, fertilizer truck bombs outside U.S. embassies, disrupted plots to level LAX, the suicide brigade on Israeli public transport. The decade was one long prep class for whatever happened next.
By the time of the 9/11 attacks, many frank commentators openly admitted a sort of perverse relief at their limited scope, given what they knew to be possible in an age of suitcase nukes and starter smallpox kits. The day an unconventional weapon is used to kill tens of thousands will truly be the day "everything changes." For all its horror, September 11 was just an extreme example of terror with a conventional weapon–jet fuel. It strained against but stayed largely within a tradition of terrorism pretty well established in the last third of the 20th century.
This tradition and its staples–hijackings, the destruction of symbols of corporate and military power, the use of media to multiply the force of a spectacle–is not new to the U.S. or Europe. Its a tradition that involved radical ideologies, nihilistic instincts and shadowy international networks long before al Qaeda was a gleam in Osama bin Ladens checkbook. Who today remembers that between 1971 and 1973 the Weather Underground sent blasts through the Senate wing of the Capitol Building, the Air Force wing of the Pentagon and the New York offices of the International Telegraph and Telephone Company? Or that European terrorists for years had a working relationship with radical Arab groups that regularly hijacked international flights?
When viewed against a backdrop of terrorism and political violence going back over three decades, 9/11 can be seen as part of a continuum as well as a slicing open of a new era. In a jab against degenerative social amnesia, Creation has released a collection of essays on the so-called "golden age" of terrorism, roughly covering the late 60s to the early 80s. The title–Guns, Death, Terror–unfortunately appears in thick type at the top of the pages, and the book isnt recommended for the subway. It frightens people.
Despite a shameful editing job by Jack Sargeant, together the essays help erode any myths about this eras–and this countrys–exceptionalism. Terrorism is not new to these or any shores. Guns, Death, Terror takes us back to a time when anti-capitalist ideology spawned violent organizations in the U.S. and throughout the West, when middle-class kids and professionals routinely defected to the cause of bloody revolution and the propaganda of the deed, when the Anarchist Cookbook was at the top of all the subcultural bestseller lists. While their weapons werent as apocalyptic as those of tomorrows nightmare terrorists, their hatred of the "system" was just as intense, and the frequency of their attacks imitated the machine gun, compared to todays random and infrequent elephant gun blasts. (The State Departments annual report on terrorism shows that 2002 had the fewest recorded number of attacks worldwide since 1969.)
A major accomplishment of the book is its dispelling of the common misconception that New Left radicalism peaked in the late 1960s and early 70s. In fact, radical groups turned en masse to violence throughout the 1970s. (Richard Nixons expansion of the war in Vietnam is often pointed to as the trigger for this transformation.) Groups that caused terror well into the disco decade and beyond include the Weather Underground in the U.S., the Red Brigades in Italy, the Red Army Faction (Baader-Meinhof Gang) in Germany, the Shining Path in Peru, the Japanese Red Army in Japan, and the Angry Brigade in the UK.
Chris Barbers fine essay on this last forgotten group helps correct another air-brushed myth of the period. This is the idea that the UK somehow escaped the worst of the 60s, moving smoothly from the flower-powered marches of the Campaign for Nuclear Disarmament right into the acid-fueled fashion orgy of swinging London, with only the IRA crashing the party. As in the U.S. and continental Europe, 60s radicalism spawned a 70s terror unit in England–one with the stupidest name of all. The Angry Brigade drew inspiration from the Situationists across the channel and the outlaws of the American old west; in the 1970s they committed more than 30 property bombings, each followed by playful communiques claiming responsibility. Their targets included high-profile institutions like Londons Post Office Tower and the offices of government ministers, but media attention was scant, as the British Press Association granted Scotland Yard requests not to report many of the attacks.
Unlike the Weather Underground and Baader-Meinhof, the Angry Brigade carefully targeted property over people, and one could argue whether they were really "terrorists" at all. And the Black Panthers, with their school breakfast and community policing programs–can they really be spoken of in the same breath as Carlos the Jackal? The subjects stand shoulder to shoulder in Guns, Death, Terror, and though the subtitle of the book tries to paper over the problem of classification, it dogs the volume nonetheless, just as it complicates todays efforts to lump groups like the PLO, the IRA and al Qaeda under tidy official rubrics. The books occasional attempts at theorizing the contentious and socially conditioned term "terror" are awkward, flat and mercifully short.
The groups remembered here all professed dedication to some variant of socialist revolution, with Dadaist or Maoist spices added to the mix, depending on the organization. Some fought in the name of specific groups (Palestinians, black Americans, the rural poor) and most sought a new world for all built upon the ashes of the property system. Despite their differing ideological pedigrees and goals, Guns, Death, Terror reveals a high level of international cooperation. European radicals trained together with members of the Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine at camps in Jordan, and the IRA received high explosives from Pan-Arabist Moammar Qaddafi. (As late as 1977, Palestinian militants hijacked a plane and shot its pilot in a failed attempt to win freedom for imprisoned members of the Baader-Meinhof Gang.)
Also treated is the curious solidarity between white and black radicals, the American counterculture and some Arab states. When the Weather Underground broke Timothy Leary out of prison in 1970, he was granted asylum by the Algerian government and immediately made his way to the Black Panther compound in Algiers, where he stayed with fellow refugee Eldridge Cleaver. The famous roommates didnt get along, however. Cleaver thought the acid guru was a crazy motherfucker, wouldnt let him near the guns and ultimately placed him under house arrest.
But thats a funny moment in an otherwise serious book about a serious phenomenon. The groups in Guns, Death, Terror believed that violence was a legitimate and productive form of politics. And they werent alone. In 1971, a full fifth of Germans under 30 claimed a "certain sympathy" with the bomb-happy Baader-Meinhof Gang. Most of those people have since changed their views, and probably now support the Green Party of their foreign minister (and Baader-Meinhof associate) Joschka Fischer. One hopes that the disaffected professionals running al Qaeda cells will likewise outgrow their terrorism. One also tends to doubt it.
Guns, Death, Terror Edited by Jack Sargeant Creation, 251 pages, $17.95