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<h1 id="reader-title">Criminalizing the History of US Radical
Underground Movements</h1>
<div id="reader-credits" class="credits">Dan Berger - August 22,
2015<br>
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<p>As Black Lives Matter continues to disrupt business as
usual, a number of observers are judging the movement
against the history of Black radicalism. As often
happens in an era of renewed activism, we look to books
about previous movements to tell us something about the
uprisings of our own day.</p>
<p>That is what makes Bryan Burrough's <em>Days of Rage</em>
not just disappointing but dangerous. <em>Days of Rage:
America's Radical Underground, The FBI, and the
Forgotten Age of Revolutionary Violence</em> is a
history as "true crime." Burrough chronicles six
revolutionary underground organizations from the late
1960s to the mid-1980s: The Weather Underground, which
emerged out of Students for a Democratic Society; the
Black Liberation Army, an offshoot of the Black Panther
Party; the Symbionese Liberation Army, whose best known
act was kidnapping heiress Patty Hearst; the New World
Liberation Front, a curious sequel of sorts to the SLA;
the Puerto Rican independence group Fuerzas Armadas de
Liberacion Nacional; and a New England group of
working-class white radicals that ultimately called
itself the United Freedom Front. Despite a growing
legion of memoirs from partisans of the underground -
especially the Weather Underground, which receives the
most attention in Burrough's book - as well as scholarly
histories of these organizations, Burrough is the first
to bring all of these groups together in the detail that
he has done.</p>
<p>But these groups and the young people in them, seen
through Burrough's "America's Most Wanted" lens, are not
activists seeking to rebuild a racist, bellicose country
from the ground up. They are naïve bad guys and
narcissistic thugs. In his eyes, their goal was not
revolution so much as it was "killing cops." Burrough
provides hackneyed depictions of one-dimensional human
beings with the kind of deluded stereotypes that
everyday lead police to stop and frisk, lock up or kill
Black people across the United States. To render them as
history provides a dangerous justification to such
violence.</p>
<p>A special correspondent at Vanity Fair and the author
of several previous books on both finance and the FBI,
Burrough aims to tell the story of these organizations
and that of the FBI agents and police officers who
chased them down. His lack of any stated ideological axe
to grind, together with the support of a major
publisher, might explain the book's generally favorable
mention in mainstream media, including some liberal
outlets, by credulous journalists who, like everybody
else, enjoy a good story. Burrough has been interviewed
on NPR's "Fresh Air" and received mostly positive
reviews in publications like The Washington Post, The
New Yorker and even The Nation.</p>
<p>
</p>
<h3>The book consistently relies on a series of outmoded,
cartoonish and just plain inaccurate approaches to
history.</h3>
<p>These reviewers seem either unaware or unconcerned that
the book contains serious errors of both fact and
interpretation. The book consistently relies on a series
of outmoded, cartoonish and just plain inaccurate
approaches to history. Burrough, for instance, claims
that underground movements did not care about the war in
Vietnam or the counterculture, despite ample evidence,
presented in the book itself, to the contrary. Indeed,
these groups operated at the intersection of Black
radicalism, antiwar sentiment and countercultural
communities. He says that the Black Panther Party was
declining by 1968, when by all accounts (see, for
instance, Joshua Bloom and Waldo Martin's <a
target="_blank"
href="http://www.ucpress.edu/book.php?isbn=9780520271852"><em>Black
Against Empire</em></a>) the organization was at its
height, with new chapters forming worldwide. He reduces
the 1970s to a caricature of a time when people cared
about disco, not politics. Such mischaracterizations,
which appear throughout the book, fly in the face of two
decades of historical scholarship on the period.</p>
<p>More to the point, it means that a book striving for a
comprehensive portrait of underground movements fails at
a most basic level to capture why such organizations did
what they did - meaning both going underground and
engaging in armed struggle - when they did it and to
what effect. The book is woefully undersourced and
surprisingly naïve about its historical context. While
this absence of serious analysis seems more naïve than
malicious, it forecloses any possibility that this book
might help us better understand the history of the
underground or the larger time period. Burrough rests
his expertise on the interviews he conducted with
participants, but there are serious flaws here. Already,
former Weather Underground member <a target="_blank"
href="http://www.nytimes.com/2015/05/17/books/review/book-review-letters.html?_r=0">Cathy
Wilkerson has disputed</a> Burrough's depiction of her
as the group's "West coast bombmaker." Numerous other
such errors, some big and others small, comprise the
book throughout and remove any pretense that <em>Days
of Rage</em> might expand our historical thinking.</p>
<p>Like so many true-crime books, <em>Days of Rage</em>
is overflowing with stock characters. Most troubling are
the banal ways in which the book justifies police
harassment and killings through disturbing portraits of
Black criminality and women's emotional imbalance.
Behind its self-presentation as objective history lies a
book rife with errors and naiveté, led by white saviors,
destroyed by Black villains and saved by diligent cops.
In an era of renewed nativism and explicit white
supremacy, <em>Days of Rage</em> hardly rates. Yet its
distortions of history may prove more damning precisely
because it will be taken more seriously than the
far-right extremists whose logic it shares.</p>
<p>Throughout this massive tome, Burrough describes white
leftists as smarter, more humane and just plain more
interesting than their Black or Puerto Rican
counterpoints. He opens the book with a chapter on Sam
Melville and Jane Alpert, a pair of bumbling bombers in
the late 1960s who Burrough claims started it all
(despite the fact that bombings had been happening for
years at that point), and follows that through with a
rigid focus on the Weather Underground. Indeed, the
Weather Underground becomes the litmus test against
which he measures all other groups: Did they bomb more
or fewer targets than the Weather Underground? Were they
structured similarly or differently than the Weather
Underground? Did they think similarly or differently
than the Weather Underground?</p>
<p>Meanwhile - and contrary to the stunning scholarship by
<a target="_blank"
href="http://uncpress.unc.edu/browse/book_detail?title_id=3686">Sherie
Randolph</a>, <a target="_blank"
href="http://uncpress.unc.edu/books/T-391.html">Barbara
Ransby</a> and <a target="_blank"
href="http://www.penguinrandomhouse.com/books/221039/the-rebellious-life-of-mrs-rosa-parks-by-jeanne-theoharis/">Jeanne
Theoharis</a>, among <a target="_blank"
href="http://radicalblackwomen.com">many others</a> -
Burrough describes Black Power as the province of a
small group of charismatic men, each one neatly passing
the torch to the next after being felled by death,
incarceration or, since he doesn't know why they were so
important, irrelevance. Black Power becomes a series of
charismatic men enjoying 15 minutes of fame, and
spreading a politics of unbridled "anger." Even more
maddening, he casts the relevance of Black organizing
only to the extent it interested, conned or was itself
conjured by white leftists.</p>
<p>
</p>
<h3>For a history that involved so many women
participants, it is rather remarkable that Burrough so
routinely describes them as props.</h3>
<p>Take his discussion of the 1970s prison movement.
Burrough calls prison activist and bestselling author
George Jackson "a thug with a fountain pen." It is not
only an offensive claim but one whose factual inaccuracy
testifies to Burrough's limited historical
understanding: Like all California prisoners at the
time, Jackson was given only a short golf pencil with
which to write. The "thug" invective is transparently
offensive, but the "fountain pen" reference is equally
revealing of the ways Burrough imagines Black radicals
to be luxurious con artists.</p>
<p>His listing of the book's cast of characters includes
only one Black woman, Assata Shakur. Meanwhile, it lists
Twymon Meyers as "probably [the] most violent
revolutionary of the underground era" and Sekou Odinga
as the "most important black militant of the underground
era," whatever that means. The white radicals listed are
exempted from such hierarchical rankings.</p>
<p>That is not to say that the book is only about men. But
white men are the only semi-rational actors in <em>Days
of Rage</em>. For a history that involved so many
women participants, it is rather remarkable that
Burrough so routinely describes them as props. Former
Weather Underground member Cathy Wilkerson "is a
sixty-eight-year-old grandmother now, freckled and still
very attractive." He describes Fay Stender, by all
accounts a dedicated attorney and tireless advocate on
behalf of incarcerated people who committed suicide in
1980 after being shot six times, as a "plain woman with
a smoldering sexuality." Stender was shot by an
erstwhile militant, but Burrough sacrifices a genuine
opportunity to inveigh against left-wing violence for a
cheap catcall.</p>
<p>His puerile objectification of former Weather
Underground leader Bernardine Dohrn, who went on to a
distinguished legal career at Northwestern University,
constitutes a narrative thread in itself. He goes out of
his way to describe her sexual appeal and (imagined)
activities, at one point suggesting that she was "too
beautiful to take seriously." He quotes FBI agents
bragging about having stolen a pair of underwear from
Dohrn's sister Jennifer during an illegal break-in of
her apartment but does not discuss that <a
target="_blank"
href="http://www.democracynow.org/2005/6/2/exclusive_jennifer_dohrn_i_was_the">the
Bureau also considered kidnapping Dohrn's infant son</a>,
too. Meanwhile, the women in the United Freedom Front
spend most of the book fretting and worrying; they have
no politics, no ideas of their own. In the <em>dramatis
personae</em> list at the front of the book, they are
described only as wives and mothers, whereas their
husbands are "charismatic leader," "radical" or
"recruit." A secretary on "Mad Men" has more depth of
character.</p>
<p>Burrough had fantastic, even startling, access to
former members of the underground. He interviewed
several participants, seemingly at length, including a
number of people who had not shared their stories
publicly before. Yet it is the police, especially the
FBI, who provide the book's interpretive frame. It is
not only that he relies on FBI agents to fill in the
blanks or settle any disputes in the historical record.
Burrough is interested in their morale. As with any
garden-variety cop show, <em>Days of Rage</em> sees
police efforts to capture radicals quelled by government
bureaucracy and political correctness, what Burrough
absurdly calls "newfound sensitivities about race."</p>
<p>The "sensitivities" in question are the revelation of
the FBI's counterintelligence program (<a
target="_blank"
href="https://vault.fbi.gov/cointel-pro">COINTELPRO</a>),
a paramilitary underground set up by J. Edgar Hoover in
1956 to destroy the American left, focusing especially
on Black as well as Puerto Rican and indigenous
communities. COINTELPRO included mass surveillance,
identity theft, illegal break-ins, physical attacks,
specious arrests, and direct and indirect
assassinations. For a book so interested in the
previously undisclosed details of who did which illegal
action, <em>Days of Rage</em> fails to give us some
much-needed inside scoops: Which agents wrote the
letters encouraging Martin Luther King Jr. to commit
suicide? Which agent determined and procured the drug
combination used to subdue <a target="_blank"
href="http://www.democracynow.org/blog/2014/12/4/watch_the_assassination_of_fred_hampton">21-year-old
Black Panther Fred Hampton so that Chicago police
could kill him</a> in his sleep? Who drew the cartoons
mocking rival Black organizations in order to provoke
such rancor that ultimately led to two members of the
Black Panther Party being shot and killed on the UCLA
campus in January 1969? And how do such dirty tricks
show up in contemporary campaigns against anarchists,
radical environmentalists, Muslims and others? There is
so much about <em>this</em> underground - which has had
a far more decisive role in shaping the contemporary
United States than the six underground organizations
spotlighted here - that Burrough fails to uncover or
much mention.</p>
<p>It is easy to criticize from the safety of historical
distance. Yet this history is an active part of our
present. Burrough notes that, for all the bombings, the
revolutionary underground killed few people. The same
cannot be said for the protagonists of <em>Days of Rage</em>:
the police. The <a target="_blank"
href="http://www.bjs.gov/index.cfm?ty=tp&tid=82">Bureau
of Justice Statistics estimates</a> that police have
killed at least 38,000 and perhaps as many as 52,000
Americans since 1973. "<a target="_blank"
href="http://www.theguardian.com/us-news/ng-interactive/2015/jun/01/the-counted-police-killings-us-database">The
Counted</a>," a new database maintained by the
Guardian newspaper, reports that police have killed 572
people in the fist six months of 2015 alone. Put another
way, US police kill more people in a week than six
underground groups did in more than 20 years. <em>Days
of Rage</em> profoundly misses both the source and
substance of violence.</p>
<p>Burrough says the underground was motivated by the
"plight of black Americans," yet it is a plight he fails
to engage with or understand. The few Black Americans he
discusses are described as "bloodthirsty cop killers,"
"thugs" and irrationally "angry." This is the same
double-talk used by commentators who today bloviate
about "Black-on-Black crime" and "inner-city thugs" when
confronted with examples of police violence.
Collectively, they refuse to see the many ways in which
police violence structures and eliminates life in the
United States. But it does. They refuse to see the many
ways people stage creative, life-affirming forms of
resistance to state murder. But they do.</p>
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<div class="moz-signature">-- <br>
Freedom Archives
522 Valencia Street
San Francisco, CA 94110
415 863.9977
<a class="moz-txt-link-abbreviated" href="http://www.freedomarchives.org">www.freedomarchives.org</a>
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