Angry Planet - When Political Violence Exploded in America

Episode Date: November 14, 2018

From 1971 to 1972, the FBI reported more than 2,500 bombings in America. That’s five explosions a day, and most were tied to radical underground political movements. Political violence is on the rise in the US but many of its perpetrators are disorganized loners, attached to fringe movements that foment online but rarely follow through. In the 1970s and into the 1980s, dozens of violent political groups agitated for change and attempted the violent overthrow of the government.Today’s political violence is scary and terrible, but it’s a far cry from the explosive 1970s. Here to help us understand it is Bryan Burrough, author of Barbarians at the Gate, Public Enemies and Days of Rage: America’s Radical Underground, the FBI, and the Forgotten Age of Revolutionary Violence.You can listen to War College on iTunes, Stitcher, Google Play or follow our RSS directly. Our website is warcollegepodcast.com. You can reach us on our Facebook page: https://www.facebook.com/warcollegepodcast/; and on Twitter: @War_College.Support this show http://supporter.acast.com/warcollege. Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

Love this podcast. Support this show through the ACAST supporter feature. It's up to you how much you give, and there's no regular commitment. Just click the link in the show description to support now. Two bombs went off inside large, packed theaters in the Bronx. The bombs went off in the front of the theater. People scurried out and then nearly caused a riot when the police wouldn't turn the movies back on. You know, it was just bombs were seen as.

a part of life, especially in urban America. You're listening to War College, a weekly podcast that brings you the stories from behind the front lines. Here are your hosts, Matthew Galt and Jason Fields. Hello, welcome to War College. I'm Matthew Galt. October marked an upt in white nationalist violence in America. Proud boys assaulted people in New York City. A man killed two people in a grocery store in Kentucky while telling a bystander that whites don't shoot whites. A man mailed pipe bombs to prominent Democrats, journalists, and George Soros, a shooter murdered 14 people in a Pittsburgh synagogue. Sometimes it feels as if America is entering a new era of political violence.

Here to help us figure out if that's true is Brian Burrow, author of Barbarian at the Gates, Public Enemies, The Big Rich, and Days of Rage, America's Radical Underground, the FBI, and the Forgotten Age of Revolutionary Violence. Brian, thank you so much for joining us. My pleasure. All right, well, first of all, for people that haven't read it, and everybody should read this book, it's really wonderful. And interesting, it kind of talks about an era that I think America has forgotten about. What is Days of Rage about? What ground do you cover?

Days of Rage tells the largely untold story, as you mentioned, six or seven underground revolutionary bombing groups who were active during the 1970s and early 1980s. Some of these groups you may have heard of, like the Weather Underground, and some you probably have not heard of, like the Black Liberation Army. But it was a period in which essentially a swath of 1960s activists, black, white, and Latino, refused to give up the idea of a coming revolution in America and thought that by bombing or killing policemen, as Black Liberation Underground did, they could bring about that revolution. Okay, so give me, one of the things that I think that really struck me in the book is the numbers. Can you give us like the, like how many bombs a day or a year are we talking about here? Good question. It was most active in 1970, 1971, 1972, where one congressional subcommittee at one point counted 500 bombs,

detonated during a single 18-month period. So at its height, something like three a day. Much of it concentrated, of course, in the cities in New York, Chicago, and the Bay Area, especially the Bay Area, where this type of what you might call symbolic violence persisted longer than in a lot of places. And keep in mind back then, 95% of what you're talking about are left-wing radicals, detonating bombs outside courthouses, post office, and police stations. late at night, not hurting anyone typically, but sometimes they did. Lives were lost and mailing in or sending in communicates the next day, you know, announcing why the bombs were set off. So

bombs for a good part of the 1970s, unlike what we've experienced in the last 20 years, bombs back then were, I call them exploding press releases. They were the way leftist groups made their aims and desires known. And what was the over, what was the motivation here? Like, what were these groups exactly trying to achieve? They were trying to overthrow the government. As crazy as it sounds, in 1970, you know, the hardcore of 60s activists believed in this idea of a revolution coming to America.

And they thought that they could trigger essentially an uprising, especially in the African-American community. And obviously, it didn't happen. They fatally misread the political wins, if you will. But still, well into the 70s and early 80s, there were groups that just didn't give up who was important to do this symbolically. One or two groups had their own pet issues,

most notably, one of the most active groups, the Puerto Rican group, known as the F-A-L-L-N, which was very active, bombing, storming political campaign headquarters in Chicago well into the early 80s. Why don't we hear about this more? That's a good question. I tried to figure that out. You know, I approached this period. I approached days of rage as a straight down the middle, centrist, just the facts man, historian. that said you know

conservative commentators would tell you that it has been forgotten in large part because the media is liberal and these people were all to the left of center I think there's something to that I think that can be

overstated it's also the sheer difficulty of writing about all this yes you can say bombs went off another in Manhattan today. But after you say that, there's not much else to say in large part because for 40 years,

you know, the several hundred young militants who did this didn't give interviews. They certainly didn't give interviews to the mainstream press. And it's only now, what, 40 years later, that many of them in their 60s and 70s who were faced with, you know, end of lives in which their achievements, and I put that in quotes, have been largely forgotten. And so I found, to my surprise, that a good number of them were finally willing to talk about what was done back in the 70s. But even then, I think as we look back, I think that the mainstream media has dismissed all of this as along the lines of kind of environmental terrorism in recent years. You know, crazy people blowing up trees.

These people were not serious. Well, if you go back, they were taken quite serious. seriously, by the FBI, by the White House, especially in the early 1970s. I think as time went on and their numbers dwindled, they did become even more of a political fringe. Yeah, it's not exactly as if revolutionary manifestos make for great, you know, copy on the late night news. I think they would have been taken more seriously if there was a sense that America was primed for revolution. As a result, I think it was easy for the mainstream media to dismiss these bombings, even in the numbers that were achieved, as just kind of a political fringe. It really was, you know, bombs, especially in New York and San Francisco in the early and mid-70s, were just kind of dismissed as background noise in troubled urban America at a time where cities were kind of falling apart, if you will, especially New York. this type of revolutionary violence was seen on par with gang violence and just other kind of crazy people detonating bombs and shooting cops.

You have to go back to the 70s. I mean, one of my favorite anecdotes is this evening, this was buried in an inside page of the New York Times in early 1971. Two bombs went off inside large packed theaters in the Bronx. the bombs went off in the front of the theater. People scurried out and then nearly caused a riot when the police wouldn't turn the movies back on. You know, it was just bombs were seen as a part of life, especially in urban America. It's, you know, reading the book, it makes me think about, and this may be a crude distinction to make or a crude comparison to make. And you can, I encourage you to shoot it down.

But it reminds me a little bit of the way we. think of mass shootings, except that the mass shootings have a body count? Well, in that we became a nerd to it and felt that it was something beyond our abilities to stop as a populace, that it was something that, oh, yeah, that again, the FBI, the police will take care of it. I mean, there was this, another one of my favorite quotes was the FALN blew up a bomb at Mobile Oil headquarters on 42nd Street in New York, actually killed two people. There was a big crowd outside, and the New York Post quoted a woman walking by whose reaction I've always remembered, and her quote was, oh, another bombing, who is at this time?

That was kind of the sense of things. All right, so that kind of gives us a real clear picture of what the 70s was like, I think. When you look at what's going on today, particularly I think October was pretty bad. Do you have any sense that we are entering into something similar? How is it different? I have been reluctant to suggest that we're entering into anything like we did before because the differences do outweigh the similarities. The differences are, you know, as you look at the type of violence that we've seen, certainly here in the last couple of months, It is largely done.

It has been carried out by people who would appear to have some type of mental illness issues. You know, it is not an organized violence, if you will. Back then what you had were people who had taken up a single ideology, mostly Marxist-Leninist, and who worked in concert often with each other to carry out these things. Today, you have an ideology spread on the Internet largely and by French media. And it appeals, I think, first and foremost to people who are disenfranchised, who feel left behind. And all too often, it's carried out by people that I think you'd have to say are French members of society, and at least in the case of the Pittsburgh and Miami incidents,

who seem to have some mental health issues. So, yes, there's violence. We've dealt with that, you know, we've dealt with that off and on for 15 years. Most clearly, Matthew, I think the comparison is to the homegrown Islamists who have done, you know, bombings since 9-11, not, despite,

claims of responsibility by ISIS and other groups in the Middle East, it's pretty clear that the type of Islamist violence that we've seen intermittently in the U.S. over the last 15 years has been carried out by young people or troubled people

who pick up this ideology over the internet and then carried out in individual acts. I think that's what the latest violence, the latest right-wing violence smacks up very much. It's disorganized political violence as opposed to what we saw in the 70s, which would be called organized political violence. I think the organized part is a real big difference. And the couple of times that

organized violence has creeped out, the FBI usually catches it. I think the most recent example was the three men in Kansas who had planned to blow up the apartment complex, the Somali immigrants, right? That type of thing we are seeing fairly regularly, and I do think that's analogous to the Islamists and stuff we've seen over the last 15 years. It also should be said that the forces of law enforcement, whatever you may think of their goals, their performance is massively more effective than it was in the 1970s, when if you read Days of Rage, you know, there are dozens of...

policemen and FBI agents saying we had no clue. Not only do we not have any clue about these groups because they did not have informants, but just the basics of, I mean, they had far few surveillance tools, obviously. They didn't have, you know, IP addresses to follow up and they didn't know which phones to have, but just some of the basics of police work were still pretty much in their infancy in the 1970s. Things like following people on the streets they were generally unable to do. Today, law enforcement, the FBI, seems exponentially more effective so that someone like this Florida van bomber is found within 24 hours and nobody in America kind of sits and says, wow, other than the fact that 40 years ago you could do that and be at large for five,

in 10 years before you might be found. I mean, the Unabomber, what was this? Barely 25 years ago was at large for, what, 10 or 15 years doing that? And that type of, you know, ongoing, at-large, politically violent figure just doesn't seem to happen as much in large part because law enforcement's got a lot better at finding them. Well, and also to speak to the organizational aspect of it, one of the big parts of your book, is that there's an underground, right? There's a network that's kind of teeming underneath the surface

that's helping people disappear, right? Yeah, and it was not only, look, you could call, if you looked at the totality of right-wing violence right now, there is an online underground, if you will. There are places that one can go for support chat rooms or whatever we're calling them in 2018, where you can talk with other people about doing this type of thing. The organized right wing groups that you've seen,

such as those that came together at Charlottesville, those who have occasionally beat up protesters, have so far we have not seen those organized right-wing groups resort to anything like sustained bombing campaigns. You know, one of the few incidents that rises even within sight of that would be the young man down here in Austin, where I am last spring, who set off the rarest of political violence, a serial bombing campaign. And yet that turned out not to be part of a political group, but one young, I think fair to say, troubled young man who clearly imbibed of this right wing online underground and decided to do this on his own. Okay, what are you seeing that is, I mean, obviously this stuff is terrible in general, but is there anything particular, any strain or anything that you're worried about

that you think that may return us to something like the 70s? Well, it's funny. It's funny because right now in November 2018, we're talking about the possibility of the specter of organized right-wing violence. Two years ago, we were talking very much. I was giving the same interviews on podcast about the specter of left-wing violence, about Black Lives Matter violence. And there was a lot of questions.

Would this new wave of African-American activism lead to some type of organized bombing campaign or something? And you saw very clearly that the leaders of Black Lives Matter have learned from the past and decided that that type of bombing campaign, that type of political violence was not only ineffective, it was politically counterproductive. It seemed rather than people rising up, they got a lot of pushback. While you saw political violence intermittently in Baltimore and elsewhere, you know, that was pretty much, you know, mob type stuff, minor,

and minor in retrospect uprisings after an incident of a young black man killed in Baltimore or in Ferguson. So you saw, you got the sense, I remember reading the op-eds at the time of young African-American activists,

you know, kind of peering over the abyss down into the possibility of political violence and turning away. I think we're now approaching that same situation

with the right wing. I don't perceive that that's likely. But certainly any time we have this type of activity over the last 20 years, whether it's left wing, whether it's right wing or whether it was Islamist, you know, it's a question that gets raised. And that is, good Lord, are we going to have a right wing weather underground? Are we going to have a right wing Black Lives Matter? And I kind of doubt it.

I think the goals are different too. If you look at what I'll largely call the right wing fringe or the alt-right, they're more interested in mainstream integration and the mainstream spreading of their ideas, right? It's not like the leftist violence in the 70s was about a revolution, about changing the system. And the alt-right feels like it's more about infecting that system and kind of pushing it rightward. Well, I think more than anything, it's frankly about about, the spread of modern communications. The bombings of the 1970s, the killings of the 1970s were almost exclusively symbolic and intended to spread a message. I talked with one of my favorite guys in the

book, Ray LaVasar, who was a young man from Maine who identified strongly with the weather underground, with Black Lives Matter, excuse me, with the Black Liberation Army, and he put together a group in the middle of 70s that bombed successfully until 1984. And I talked with four hours and at one point he says, you know, today you just wouldn't have to do any of that. Back then we had to put, you know, we had to detonate bombs to get anybody to print our message, to get anybody to hear us. The fact is today, you don't need to resort to bombs to get attention. Any, you know, the press is all over you. It's, you know, you, you, it's, you, Your microphone is as close as your laptop.

You just don't need to do that type of thing. Keep in mind also bombings today represent, we think of them very differently since 9-11. 9-11 changed everything in terms of the way America views bombing and political violence. I think back in the 1970s, which came in the wake of so much violence in the late 60s in the streets, He came in the wake of revolutions around the world in 1968. You know, there was a sense that bombs were somehow a legitimate means or semi-legitimate means of political violence. I think 9-11 has changed the way that Americans think of a bomb.

Bombs today mean people are going to die. Back then, they didn't necessarily. And so I think there is a sense that this is now a bright, white line don't step across because you're highly unlikely to get public support for it. That seems so strange a concept to me to try to wrap my head around. And I think it's because, you know, I was born in 1983, went to high school, post-Columbine. It's odd to me to think of bombs as not dangerous. Or, I mean, obviously they were dangerous, but as semi-legitimate forms of, you know, revolutionary politics.

It's really hard for me to grasp. It is. It is. But then think about what these people were coming in the wake of. They were coming in the immediate wake of and greatly inspired by Ho Chi Men in Vietnam, by Mao and China, and especially Fidel and Che in Cuba, where this type of thing had been shown to be effective, that you could do it to spread your message. There was, I don't want to say a public acceptance of the bombing press release scenario, but there was an understanding between the political underground and the public that 90% of these things did not hurt anybody. I will say oddly that even there was almost no denunciation, public denunciation of these people. and perhaps because they were fringe elements and they were

largely beneath, you know, the New York Times didn't need to editorialize these people because I think they took it for granted that they were seen as fringy. But there wasn't, we were coming off a period of 15 years going back to the early 60s where this type of behavior around the world had led to governments being toppled and bombs were used not so much the way they are today. You know, people were not back then setting off car bombs to kill civilians. They were setting off pipe bombs late at night to get their press releases in the newspaper. It was just a very different thing.

And the two attacks on the World Trade Center, in which innocent civilians died, I think just pretty much cut off that as, you know, whatever relevance of your, you know, or acceptance has died. So to change tracks just a little bit, you know, we've mostly focused on, when we're talking about today, we've mostly focused on the right wing. We've touched on it briefly a little bit. You said two years ago you were talking about a return of left wing violence. What do you think of what I'll broadly call Antifa? You know, I don't follow this Antifa and the right-wing groups today anymore than as a regular and earnest newspaper reader. I kind of wondered what the heck happened to Antifa.

I mean, it seemed to be coming up strong there a couple of years ago, and I was reading something about the other day that referenced it. And I just turned to my sweetheart and just said, wow, when was the last time you heard about these guys? They're still, they're just not covered as much. I saw them, I was at Unite the Right 2, and they were definitely there. But you don't, yeah, it's not something you hear a lot about. They cause some property damage generally the places they go, but they're not, you know, they're not like, say, the proud boys who are beating up people in New York City. Yeah, but I just get the sense that Tifa was people who wanted to run around and punch a notch.

what I've heard them described as both both like proud boys and Antifa is that they're they're cosplaying or they're larping right they're enacting if they're enacting a fantasy of well there is a sense that both of these that even Charlottesville where people died that both of these are are sent to be political street theater which is very which is much more like what we saw uh you know from the Panthers and other activists in the 60s as opposed to the bombing of the 70s you know the the the Panthers were all about street theater. And that's the type of thing I think that both these groups are today. Is it possible that they morph into something organized and underground and taking the lives of innocence more often than it's happened? Yeah, it's possible. I just don't see the conditions. I don't see the fertile ground for that type of behavior to gain traction.

Well, what are those conditions? What is that fertile ground? I would just reference our early discussion the sense that there were still, when these people started bombing, when weather started bombing in 1970, they did have massive public support among the anti-war left, which was a very vital group in 1970. What Weather didn't understand is that the anti-war left was in the process of splintering into a million different isms, feminism, environmentalism. the anti-war left basically turned its back on the idea of a political revolution and certainly turned its back on anything like political violence. But there was the sense at the beginning of the 70s that you had fertile ground, and certainly insofar as weather especially lived on the handouts and donations of leftists back then

and were able to stay underground. Let's be clear, for seven years with very, what, maybe you. one of them being arrested and very few of them ever being convicted of anything, I'd have to say weather operating in a fertile ground. And I just don't sense that there's anything like that today. I mean, if Black Lives Matter or some right-wing group decides they want to go underground, there's only two ways to support yourself. You can do like Weather did, which had the fertile ground and was able to get donations from a lot of mostly radical lawyers but also radical citizenry. By the late 70s, that had largely gone away and you saw those groups

surviving by, I think, the only ways they could in what you'd have to see today, and that is by robbing banks. When you look at the Seminoese Liberation Army, which came out, I know where in 1973, at a time everybody believed this violence was going away. You know, the S.L.L. comes out, Ray Lavasseh's group starts bombing all across the Northeast, the FALM, these groups didn't no longer had the fertile ground, something had already changed by then. And so they resorted to bank robberies. You know, some of their most violent crimes were not bombings. They were the bank robberies that they carried out to fund themselves. And I question today how an underground bombing group, if not by some type of what they used to call one of my favorite words,

expropriations. And that type of thing, of course, exposes the group to even more heat from law enforcement and I think makes their endurance even less likely. You touched on something that's one of my favorite things to debunk, so I want to dive into it just briefly. The anti-war portion of this, I think of the popular consciousness gets played up much more than was actually the case, right? You know, Nixon ends the draft in 1971, it gets extended and then officially ends in 1973 and that movement kind of breaks apart. But you make the case in your book that the anti-war portion of this to some of these groups was almost secondary. That's one of the great myths of these underground groups in the

70s, especially whether, I think, to the extent that anyone remembers today, they were bombing against the war. Well, they weren't. Well, they weren't. They were happy to take support from the anti-war left, and they were, of course, virulently anti-war. But, you know, the weather underground, the BLA, the SLA, primarily about igniting some type of African-American uprising. They were all about freeing the blacks, stopping the oppression, getting the ghettos to rise up. And as crazy as, as crazy as that sounds today, that's legitimately what they thought could happen then. were so popular and seemed to have so much support, especially in the cities, that it was easy

for the most hardcore militants to believe, wow, these people are ready to rise up. And it was, so their cutting edge issue was always African American police brutality, poverty, housing, all those issues. They were absolutely happy to take support, to take support, to take. money from the anti-war left, but in 1971, 1972, on into the 70s, they weren't bombing about the war. They were bombing initially in support of the African American community later in the decade. They were bombing in support of, you know, against Americans in El Salvador or whatever the left was irked about at a time they would take to bombing about.

Right. It's almost like the anti-war stuff was the gateway drug to revolutionary politics. I couldn't have said it better myself. I wish I'd used that, Matthew. What part do you think are politicians and other personalities play in stoking this violence? You know, many in the pundit, the punditry and the commentariat lay at least some of the blame for the uptick in right-wing violence at President Trump's feet. Do you think there's any truth to any of that? Oh, I think without question. Without question, he is, his rhetoric, has inflamed these groups, has given. them hope and sucker. I just don't see how you, how you deny that, that he, that his words have emboldened this, the right-wing violence we've seen. I just don't think there's any way

around that. I think the fact that he has abrogated all moral leadership that has typically been, you know, something that the American presidency has always led. You know, I just love, I just love Trump is out there. He takes one day that Saturday where he seems concerned about the killings at the synagogue in Pittsburgh in the next day. He's back to tweeting about football. You know, just it's very clear that in terms of an intellectual fertile ground, that's what the right wing, the far right, is living in right now. We've never seen anything like this in modern American history. I hope we never say it again. We usually try to end the show

on a scary note, something worrisome to really make the audience afraid. I think that's a really good place to end. Matthew, thank you. Thank you for coming on the show, Brian. It was fascinating to talk. Anytime, man. Thanks. That's it for this week. Thanks so much for listening to

War College. War College is me, Matthew Galt, and Jason, Jason Fields. Check us out on Twitter at War underscore College or Facebook.com forward slash war college podcast. So hey, listeners. I've heard your feedback about the loudness levels and the episodes and I tried a different mixing technique this time around. Please reach out and let us know if that's working better. If you like the show, please consider leaving us a comment and a rating on iTunes. It helps others find us. I've got another bonus episode coming

this week, also on the horizon, a discussion about Saudi Arabia with Shadi Hamid and a look at the life of journalist Mary Colvin with a special guest host. Stay tuned. And.