The Weather Underground: a different approach to political violence
I recently watched The Weather Underground, a 2002 documentary on the eponymous radical organisation active within the United States during the 1970s. The film may be of interest to those studying radicalisation, insurgency and political violence, as it effectively explores the rise, evolution and demise of a revolutionary organisation. It also raises some semantic/ethical questions about ‘who is a terrorist’.
Let us not forget that the Weather Underground Organisation (WUO) successfully attacked the Pentagon and the State Department, along with the Capitol building and a host of other targets, so a two-bit organisation it was not. That this happened in the United States makes it all the more interesting, because it illustrates that given a particular political climate — the Vietnam War, the Civil Rights movement, student protests — even the most stable of polities can experience the incipient signs of insurgency. It also raises the question of whether it could happen again, given the right (or wrong) circumstances.
Radicalisation and the use of force
One of the more interesting parts of the film is the process by which some members of the Students for a Democratic Society (SDS) were ‘radicalised’. This may be an opportune moment to highlight my lack of knowledge about WUO — this post is based largely on this one documentary. With that caveat in mind, it would seem like radicalisation occurred because sections within SDS felt that all peaceful means of making the point had been exhausted. The Vietnam War looms large here, fuelling SDS’s membership and providing it with a central cause, which translated into frequent marches and demonstrations. Yet despite a rapidly growing membership, SDS actions had no effect on US policy or on the Vietnam War, which if anything intensified.
This triggered SDS’s splintering and the creation of the Weathermen. Amid a flurry of causes, this new group was outraged by US government policy in Vietnam and wanted to wake up American citizens to the actions carried out in their name. Perceiving peaceful means as futile, WUO rejected nonviolence as an operating principle. This shift to violence was interpreted in moral terms: failing to take a stand, or doing so in an ultimately ineffective way, would be to acquiesce with acts deemed grossly unjust. From their perspective, silence was another form of violence. So, somehow counterintuitively, they themselves turned to violence.
In October 1969, we witness WUO’s early experimentation with using force to make itself heard. The first attempt is the Days of Rage, an anarchic march of destruction through Chicago, with windows smashed and cars destroyed, which culminated in a brawl with the local police. This was far removed from SDS’s peaceful protests but as the WUO leadership soon realised, indiscriminate violence of this type only served to isolate the group, by scaring away the very people whom the organisation, through its acts, sought to mobilise. At worst, its intended audience flocked to traditional authorities instead, looking to the security forces for protection against this new threat.
This leads to a strategic shift in the use of force, which was henceforth calibrated to gain maximum attention without alienating. From around 1970 onward, what the Weather Underground did was to use carefully targeted attacks to broadcast its discontent with specific government policies. In other words, the group moved toward a radical form of ‘signal politics’: following the killing of George Jackson by prison guards, the Weather Underground bombed the Department of Corrections in San Francisco and the Office of California Prisons in Sacramento; following the Kent State shootings, WUO hit the National Guard Association building in Washington DC; to protest against the US bombing of Laos, WUO bombed the US Capitol building; and in response to a raid over Hanoi, WUO attacked the Pentagon.
What is curious about these attacks is the effort that went into avoiding casualties. In some cases, the group would call the targeted building in advance, inform them that a bomb had been planted and have security forces evacuate the premises. The media would then take care of publicising the blast, which WUO would complement with a communiqué claiming responsibility and explaining the act. Through such high-profile yet carefully targeted violent acts, it was hoped the silent majority would be made aware of the cause and ‘self-radicalise’, rather than be scared off by any apparent excess in the use of force.
Were they terrorists?
The use of violence for political messaging may be viewed as ‘terrorism’, and this is typically how the Weather Underground is understood. But is this accurate? Terrorist groups deliberately target civilians to scare or terrorise wider populations into a certain political behaviour. The WUO refrained from such action: they used violence against buildings rather than people, to symbolise their discontent with specific policies and actions, but without killing those held responsible. It was ‘propaganda of the deed’, but without the bloodshed. Accordingly, none of WUO’s attacks resulted in casualties (the one exception has not been definitively linked to the group), and for this reason alone, it is difficult to call WUO a ‘terrorist’ organisation. [UPDATE: this refers to the period between Declaration of a State of War in 1970 to the demise of the group in 1976, i.e. after the ‘strategic shift in the use of force’ discussed above].
Given their zeal and evident organisational capabilities, it is actually quite astounding that the group never crossed the line into pure terrorism, into murdering or maiming American civilians, or even its security forces and appointed officials. From an ethical standpoint, the choice in targeting made the campaign a less obvious target for outright condemnation, which may have been one reason for the relative restraint. Or perhaps there was an uneasiness about killing ones own, or a realisation that ‘killing in the name of peace’ would have made the group the very thing they were struggling against.
Precedence?
For many reasons, WUO’s s approach to violence would appear to offer a more promising route for militant outfits than to attack human targets. Terrorism proper quickly results in blanket condemnation and justifies the harshest retaliatory acts by the powers that be. Intuitively, killing ones own also seems counterproductive, to the degree that these campaigns are competitions for popular appeal and support. By instead sticking to carefully defined rules of engagement, the group can be accused of sabotage, of naivety, of property destruction, but not of terorrism, lest we radically change the meaning of that term. Fewer dead victims, fewer wailing relatives but instead a consistent series of reminders that there is a conflict of interest out there, an alternative to the status quo and a serious and able organisation pushing to make that alternative heard.
This raises the question of why this does not happen more often? Why do virtually all subversive groups opt for terrorist tactics (the Animal Liberation Front is the one modern exception I can think of)? Is it the difficulty of avoiding casualties that discourages such precision, or a conviction among revolutionaries that to get the message across, it is not enough, or perhaps even helpful, to spare civilian lives. Certainly, doing so did nothing for the Weather Underground: it is difficult to see any way in which the organisation satisfied its aims or even affected political life in the United States. Would it have been different had it taken the terrorist route? In terms of avoiding the long arm of the law, its members faced certain jail terms regardless of any restraint in their M.O. (in the end FBI misconduct in investigating and pursuing the group prevented full prosecution). And the way the group is now remembered, it is most often as a terrorist organisation. So perhaps there is simply no incentive for restraint, which may explain why it is so rare. As the old Ibo proverb goes, ‘if you are going to eat a toad, make it a fat and juicy one’.
Originally published at kingsofwar.org.uk on January 26, 2011.
