Status 451: Days of Rage
Days of Rage is important, because this stuff is forgotten and it shouldn’t be. The 1970s underground wasn’t small. It was hundreds of people becoming urban guerrillas. Bombing buildings: the Pentagon, the Capitol, courthouses, restaurants, corporations. Robbing banks. Assassinating police. People really thought that revolution was imminent, and thought violence would bring it about.
One thing that Burrough returns to in Days of Rage, over and over and over, is how forgotten so much of this stuff is. Puerto Rican separatists bombed NYC like 300 times, killed people, shot up Congress, tried to kill POTUS (Truman). Nobody remembers it.
Also, people don’t want to remember how much leftist violence was actively supported by mainstream leftist infrastructure. I’ll say this much for righty terrorist Eric Rudolph: the sonofabitch was caught dumpster-diving in a rare break from hiding in the woods. During his fugitive days, Weatherman’s Bill Ayers was on a nice houseboat paid for by radical lawyers.
Most ’70s of the bombings were done as protest actions. Unlike today’s jihadists, ’70s underground didn’t try to max body count. And ’70s papers didn’t really give a shit. A Puerto Rican group bombed 2 theaters in the Bronx, injuring eleven, in 1970. NYT gave it 6 paragraphs.
Source: Days of Rage | Status 451
I wonder how much of this is due to the then-proximity to the draft.
When the military is something that, seriously, every able-bodied man knows that he’s got a shot at partaking in, does that change something about society?
If something like what happened in the 70’s happened today… what would be the response? “Workplace violence” will only work for so long…Report
As they say, when the goal of violence is clearly not a body count, it’s hard to spin it as murderous, which is really what gets people riled up.Report
People who turned 20 between 1969 and 1974 were also probably the most leaded generation in human history.
Also, what is it about this niche of writers that make them all Hugo and Tolstoy in that they’re not into the whole brevity thing?Report
They’re all Hugo because they’re sad puppies.Report
*golf clap*Report
As the comments point out, this is all the Jews’ fault.Report
I originally read the essay on the 20th and sent the email suggesting the essay to Trumwill on the 21st.
The points in the essay hadn’t yet been undercut by Sam J’s insights when I originally read it.Report
I think that’s spelled “underlined”.Report
The essay talked about the Jews?
Is this one of those things where I’m not hearing obvious dogwhistles?Report
There was this part:
Which, lemme tell ya, was downright prescient, wasn’t it?Report
It talked about how the left is an organized conspiracy aimed at destroying everything we hold near and dear, abetted by the mainstream liberals who pretend they’re altruists but really want to murder us all in our beds, which the right is helpless against since they’re just individuals bound together only by their love of freedom.
Who could have predicted that would have led to anti-semitism?Report
Oh, I’m just not hearing obvious dogwhistles, then.Report
Well, there was the part where the guy wrote
Report
Huh, I suppose I need to be better at making distinctions between “the people who did this were Jewish Ivy League Types” and “The Jews Did This“.
Were the folks in SDS leadership Jewish?
Or is that something that I shouldn’t even freaking notice and why am I bringing this up oh my god?Report
Jay,
apparently mentioning that is less bad than mentioning who was in charge of the particular banks involved in the 2009 banking crisis. That’s gotten me warnings around here.
Next it’ll be bad to blame the Dutch for the Tulip Financial Crisis.Report
It’s true that there’s a difference between “Jewish” as a stereotype smear and “J-E-W-S” blood-libel conspiracy thinking.Report
I like the part where he says that God in the Old Testament is actually a demon who was lying to everyone about the Jews being the good guys.Report
That’s straight Gnosticism. It goes back to ancient Rome.Report
Rightwingers should do everyone a public service and list the degrees of separation between Jews and apocalyptic outcomes in a handy, easy to read pamphlet. It gets so confusing!!Report
Still, don’t you know that, for the right, it’s ALWAYS the joooooos.
For the left, it’s ALWAYS “the MAN”Report
Libertarians hate the Man to.Report
Libertarians are equal opportunity haters. Or fully general, depending on perspective.Report
I remember reading a review of this book when it was originally published that was largely fair but did say that the author clearly had a pro law and order/prosecutor outlook.
The review published confirms that to me. The book could be interesting but I think it is vastly overstating how much support mainstream liberals gave to 1970s radicals. It is true that “radical chic” was a thing and Leonard Bernstein did host parties for the Black Panthers but the Black Panthers also did things like set up school lunch programs and neighborhood health clinics. The Weather Underground and Symbonese Liberation Army were a radical fringe, albeit ones more active than the Black Bloc.
Yet the right-wing wants to believe that all mainstream liberals and Democrats were really cheering on the radicals and the violence. This was not true in the United States or in Europe. Social Democrat Willy Brandt was tough on the Badder-Meinoff Gang. Something that was illustrated in the great novel, the Last Honor of Katrina Blum.
And as Mike notes, the comments out there are full of really far-out anti-Semitism. My god, Jews wrote the Koran as a conspiracy to create Islam and a war against Christianity. Jaybird, do you really want to be associated with this kind of stuff? Is your radar set to finding interesting so high that you just dive deep into the wellsprings of hate?Report
Jaybird, do you really want to be associated with this kind of stuff? Is your radar set to finding interesting so high that you just dive deep into the wellsprings of hate?
What are we talking about? Reading the essay in the first place?
I love reading essays.
Reading essays that are also read by nutballs?
Hey, sometimes I end up reading essays that are also read by nutballs.
I suppose I should do a better job of waiting until the comments to the essay I enjoyed reading have died down, wait to see if any nutballs commented, and then decide whether I want someone else to read the original essay.
But when I read the original essay, the nutballs hadn’t yet commented on it.Report
Screw the comments. While they provide an interesting “peek into certain sectors of society”, what is said there has no bearing on the original writing AT ALL. That stands or falls on it’s own merit.
Haters gonna hate. Nuts going to be squirelly.
But because you had the temerity to post a link to an essay you are forever “associated” with what some wack-job said on that site in the comments. Yeah…..you should worry about that a lot @JaybirdReport
Also, I’d like to point out the following comment that you may remember:
I would rather read essays that make me upset that are accurate than read essays that calm me down that are wrong and will be demonstrated to have been wrong, and made bad assumptions, and require the writer to eat a bug on live television.Report
Saul,
So let me guess, you’re broadly in favor of the people having nice parties for Hamas as well?
Because Hamas is a charitable organization, a political organization, and a terrorist organization.Report
“do you really want to be associated with this kind of stuff? ”
Please tell us what other blogs you read, and what accounts you follow on social media, so that I can cherry-pick the comments and smear you with the rotten ones.Report
This essay is the pefect combination of half-extremely insightful, half-batshit perspective I’ve come to expect from the Clarkhat.Report
So, basically like the MSM then yes?Report
Yeah, I thought so too.
It was awesome.Report
It’s actually neither, it’s one of the other writers at Status 451 (and as far as I can tell they were never affiliated with Popehat).Report
I realized my mistake on the authorship after I said that. So instead I’ll say this author that writes on Clark’s site is provokes a similar to reaction to Clark’s work in its combination of insight and bugfuckery. Which is I would say is a tendency to analysis a small thing well, but to over-generalize from that small thing to make excessively grandious theories that they then widely over-apply. Good analysist, awful theorists.Report
The entire essay seemed 100% premium, grade A batshit to me. It was an exercise in trying to extrapolate what happened in the late 1960s and early 1970s to today and painting the Democratic Party of the present as a covert force that supports violent Social Justice Warrior radicals. This is even though nearly all political violence is on the right and the connection between the Alt-Right and the Republican Party is closer than that between the Democratic Party and BLM.Report
I don’t know if you’ve heard, but a black bloc anarchist punched a white supremacist in the face.
And sadly, the left felt schadenfreude.The Great American experiment is over. It’s time to join Team Right now, if you’re not a horrible hypocritical leftist.Report
And sadly, the left felt schadenfreude.
But none of the critics are sad that the left felt shadenfreude about the punching, they’re sad that the left is so tactically stupid that they permit themselves to publicly feel that way.
You gotta climb that ladder to see the truth!!Report
And they way we embraced Madonna for saying she’d blow up the White House, together with the way the right shunned Ted Nugent for wanting Obama to suck on his gun — man, we’re awful.Report
It also said explicitly that during the era it talked about that only the left harbored those who committed political violence. Which kind of ignores the state sponsored political violence that these movements were a reaction against.Report
It didn’t say “only the left harbored those who committed political violence”.
It said:
The examples it gave were explicit and specific.
And measurable, for that matter.Report
And Bull Conner was an elected member of the local government. Or we could use the lynchings which in which the white perpetrators weren’t ‘caught,’ or were acquitted. All acts of political violence in which the perpetrators were harbored/protected by the conservative community.
Suffice to say, there are other examples. He decided to use a worse example from a different era.Report
Which is the structural reason for why the violent “left” was better at the revolutionary cell game. Reactionaries don’t form revolutionary cells, they control the levers of state violence or form imprompto gangs/mobs.
The “right” revolutionaries were by their very nature going to be the tiny fraction that are beyond being reactionaries and seeking an extremist revolution. In America that’s largely the province of the Neo-nazis (distinct from the Klan, who get their guys in local government in order to run hog wild) and violent religous groups.Report
But this assumes that the state was right-wing at that time. The revolutionary groups are pretty easy to identify as left wing, they call themselves that along with identifying left wing philosophies etc. But the state, especially outside the US at the time, was not always so explicitly rightist.
Rather, the state employs violence in support of the state much of the time, it seems to me. In other words, the revolutionary activities before ’68 and Nixon where definitely anti-war, but the Johnson administration was also very pro civil rights, signing the civil rights act in ’64, the war on poverty, great society-ism.Report
National governments aren’t really what I was talking about in this context, although Nixon did his level best to make conflict between political enemies with the feds (something that the histories on the War on Drugs is making increasingly clear). I was thinking more about the local an regional reactionaries, particularly in the South making use of state violence.
As many know, that wasn’t a Democrat-left, Republican-right thing.Report
OK, got ya.Report
The FBI while JFK & LBJ were in office bugged MLK’s rooms, sent him letters telling him to kill himself, etc.Report
See? That’s an awesome counter-argument!
You can point to how Bull Connor was in elected public service until weeks before his death and do a compare/contrast to Bill Ayers!
You can even do a compare/contrast between the Black Panthers and the KKK and the Weathermen/Weather Underground and both! Awesome! And then compare all of those with the elected government! Awesome!
But there are still some really weird things that went on when it comes to stuff like “theaters getting bombed” in the 1970’s that seem really, really weird in 2017.
I’m down with not agreeing with the narrative that Hines constructs to explain what happened in the 70’s.
But *I* didn’t know about half the things that happened in the essay. And I find myself wondering “Why didn’t I know about these things?”Report
I totally agree regarding his summary of the book, especially the stuff regarding the Black Panthers and Puerto Ricans (which I had never even heard of). Why we didn’t hear about some of these things is an interesting question, one with probably a number of answers.Report
How about all the right-wing juntas that over threw democratically elected but socialist or semi-socialist governments in the 1970s? Or is that totally okay because small government?
How about the fact that Alberto Fujimori is being treated nicely by right-wing Japanese businessmen in exile instead of facing charges in Peru.Report
I apologize for linking to an essay that talked about America in the 1970’s without also talking about Central America in the 1970’s.
Please provide an essay to Trumwill that you’d like me to read and argue about and I read it and then find something in it to argue with you about.Report
I think he’s calling you out on your inherent anti-left, pro-right inclinations more than anything else, Jaybird.
And, well, you do have anti-left, pro-right inclinations.Report
Yep.Report
I’d say kneejerk more than inherent though. I don’t think Jay is that right-wing. I suspect he would do the right-thing if he saw Neo-Nazis attack or harass a minority person. But he does seem drawn to right-wing arguments because they seem more fresh, more interesting, and more hot-takey than whatever liberals are offering.Report
“Right-wing arguments”.
What is meant by this? National Review? Weekly Standard? David Brooks? George Will? FirstThings?Report
Anti-liberal.Report
Pro-Enlightenment.
Where they don’t overlap, yeah. I suppose I see how I could be seen as “anti” whatever that would be.Report
I think this could have been said better like “I have no doubt he would do the right think…”Report
Saul,
Wait, what the fuck is the “right thing” if you see neonazis attack or harass a minority person?
Are we talking call the police, who will GET THERE IN AN HOUR?
Or are we talking hauling out a gun and murder the fucker?
[Yes, I suppose there are other options. These seem the least likely to cause damage to me and mine. Suggest others if you think they’re appropriate.]Report
Trumwill had a quote the other day that made much sense to me.
“My gods are dead and my enemies are in power.”
I will admit that I do gain some consolation from the lamentations of the Social Justice crowd.
But that’s not being pro-right.
But I can see how someone might say “well, they’re not on my side, therefore they’re on the other side.”Report
Jay,
The SJ crowd is being paid for by the right. But the memes are self-propagating.Report
I love, love, love how Jaybird has never said anything different than what he’s saying now and yet somehow he’s anti-left, pro-right.
Like, “hey guys, maybe you shouldn’t normalize the idea that suckerpunch-and-run-away is a valid method of political discourse”, that’s a pro-right idea?
“hey, if you keep telling people who ask to hang out with you that they aren’t cool enough to hang out with you, eventually nobody will want to hang out with you” is a pro-right idea?Report
In the same way that they act as avatars for certain beliefs for me, I act as an avatar for certain beliefs for them.
I don’t really have too much of a problem with that.
I wish that they were less into tying moral judgments into that sort of thing but, hey. It’s not like I haven’t done that. That’s one hell of a siren’s call.Report
Maybe its more of the “reflexive opposition” thing which rings oddly.Report
The essays implies that the entire liberal establishment was in on coddling the radicals though. A few radical lawyers putting Bill Ayers on a houseboat is not the entire liberal establishment or most Democratic Party voters.Report
This is one of my takeaways, as well as ignoring the extensive informal poltiical violence the right then and later was better at than the rest. Segregationists didn’t need a acronym or a kooky manifesto to beat and kill civil rights activists after all.
There’s a point that the far-left did this one particular type of political violence more and with more support than the far-right of the time. i.e. cell-based “revolutionary” activity. Than does not extend itself to a grand theory of American political violence like he seems to think though.Report
The analysis of what the happened in the 1960s and 70s was interesting to a degree is what I was saying.
The extrapolation to today or to a grand theory of the American Left to the American Right (in particular the idea that everything falls into Left v Right) is pretty batshit to me.
Which is what I associate with Clark’s work. He can make a pretty interesting point about a small thing. He then blows it up into a grand idea about the world without considering if his idea can scale that large without running into confounding factors, or considering the perspective of someone who isn’t like him. It makes he and people like him interesting to read because there might be a useful idea in there that I wasn’t primed to consider, but it comes mixed in with a lot of nuttery.Report
I found the analysis of the 1960s and 70s just as batshit as the extrapolation.Report
Expand on this please.
We’re looking at a left wing terror group running around blowing things up which was cheered on by mainstream left. Similarly I can think of some union getting upset at lines being crossed and killing several dozen civilians just to make a point. And then we have the occasional riots by groups mainstream left needs to get elected.
That’s a pretty high bar to exceed, much less exceed to the point where “nearly all political violence” is Right.Report
Similarly I can think of some union getting upset at lines being crossed and killing several dozen civilians just to make a point.
Is that something that happened, or a hypothetical?Report
96 to 98 dead (guests of the hotel count as civilians), 140 injured, root cause union thinking management plans to fire 60 union workers and replace them with non-union.
Wiki’s write up is kind to the union btw, I’ve seen other write ups where other members of the union enabled it.
Correction, wiki does cover it: “he had urged hotel employees to make a “curtain” to shield him from view as he started the fire.”
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dupont_Plaza_Hotel_arsonReport
That’s horrible.
As are https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Timothy_McVeigh and https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Eric_Rudolph, of course.Report
My strong inclination is to discount the lone nuts and look at organizations. John Hinckley wasn’t right wing when he was stalking Carter nor left wing when he shot Reagan.
Eric Rudolph hits the radar as a lone nut, and as far as I can tell, got zero support from any organization much less any politician. He was hiding out in the wilderness by himself for a reason.
McVeigh had help from his friend Nichols, there might have been a few other people who knew about it, maybe enough to stop it. The amount of political support they got (before or after) was zero, and remains zero.
You contrast that with political support (either at the time or on going) for all the Leftish groups I mentioned. For example BLM could burn down a city and Left politicians would still be supporting them.
The closest thing I can think of as far as mainstream Right political support for violence would be the Pro-Life movement flirting with thinking that shooting abortion doctors was a good thing (that didn’t last long), and that riot in some Florida official’s office during the Bush v Gore count of the ballots (at a handwave I’m limiting this to the last 50 years).Report
Dark,
We’ve got tons of righties, including those who showed up out west and camped out on government property. Ruby Ridge, bunches of people who want “no government no way”. The government is better at “leaving these people alone”, that’s all.Report
IMHO that’s mixing the “violent” with the “potentially violent”, which seems unreasonable.
But it is probably where “The Right is more violent” claim originates.Report
You can do this if you want, but don’t you fuckin’ dare turn around and mope about BSDI arguments.Report
Although I still consider the write up to be very, very, kind. At some point, after enough of the union knows about it and gets involved to support, you have to say the union was involved.Report
WOW. Where is this group?
I wanted to find their Facebook page and like them, perhaps even join, but no luck.Report
They broke up and became mainstream Left. I think one of them was an Obama mentor.
Just think about that. You spend a few years setting off bombs, and then just rejoin what passes for the mainstream and they let you, even embrace you.
I just can’t picture the Right doing the same thing for McVeigh.Report
You can’t?
Really you can’t?
Allow me to familiarize you with Rep. Peter King, Republican of Long Island.
http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/
You may also wish to read up on Luis Posada Corrales, a terrorist who set of a bomb blowing up an airliner killing 73 innocent civilians, later given sanctuary by several American Presidents.
Then perhaps read the history of the Nicaraguan Contras, a terrorist group who were embraced by Ronald Reagan.
Or the Afghan Mujahadeen who were so warmly embraced by the Right that Rep. Dana Rohrabacher Republican from California proudly posts a picture with them.
One of their leaders was named Osama Bin Laden, perhas you’ve heard of him? The Leftists finally killed him.Report
That is a really strange claim, unless you happen to know something about the political leanings of Seal Team 6 or the CIA agents on the Bin Laden Issue Station.
People should stop doing that thing where they attribute to the president everything that happened in the four or eight year period that president is in office. That’s not how the country works. That’s not even how the government works.Report
jr,
Yeah. I have heard the binLaden kill pinned on Clinton, who did the operational analysis that saw the problem with bush’s methods.Report
Yes, back in the time when they were fighting off the Soviets (who invaded them because they were insufficiently communist or something), the Mujahadeen were our allies. And your point is?
Sanctuary? We arrested him and tried very hard to find a country to deport him to which wouldn’t torture him. When that failed we tried hard to find some way to keep him in prison here. He’s out of prison because he was found not guilty of whatever. This is an example of the government failing to deal with a criminal, but not from lack of trying.
An example of us openly supporting another country’s revolutionary movement, complicated by Congress and POTUS fighting over who was in charge of foreign policy.
An open supporter of another country’s revolutionary movement… although weirdly he seems to be doing this in his personal life rather than his professional one. As odious as he is, afaict he’s done no violence here and what he’s doing seems to be covered under the 1st AM.
None of these are examples of someone running around setting off bombs or murders or whatever inside of America, and then joining the mainstream (or, worse, apparently never leaving the mainstream), without changing ideology.
In the last 50 years, the American Left is a lot more politically violent than the Right, and it continues to be more violent.
It’s easy for me to picture some “protest” getting out of hand and burning down a city (or just having some people beaten up and/or killed), and then the Dems continuing to give support to its leaders. There’s even multiple groups where this might come from.
The GOP equiv would be… what? I can picture some separatists shooting it out with the police, but until that happens we don’t know whether the mainstream right supports them or cooperates with their arrest.Report
You gotta see, Jaybird, the enemy is capitalism so it really doesn’t matter what you link to, nor who winds on commenting on those links.
You merely have to submit to the State. Or just die like a good kulak.Report
i sold lemonade and smoothies for Karleton Armstrong over a number of summers when I was a yout in Madison.Report
I’ve never been a big one for “wooo plagiarism“, but I do wish he would have at least credited Scott Alexander for the bit about the Dazexiang Uprising.Report