{"id":1967,"date":"2010-08-12T23:14:59","date_gmt":"2010-08-12T23:14:59","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/meeseeks:5080\/blog\/?p=1967"},"modified":"2010-08-12T23:14:59","modified_gmt":"2010-08-12T23:14:59","slug":"recent-reading-achtundsechziger","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/vukutu.com\/blog\/2010\/08\/recent-reading-achtundsechziger\/","title":{"rendered":"Recent reading 4: Achtundsechziger"},"content":{"rendered":"

\"\"<\/a>
\nWhile elements of the left turned to revolutionary violence in most countries of the West at the end of the 1960s, three countries experienced this turn to a much greater extent than any other:\u00a0 Germany, Italy, and Japan.\u00a0 This fact has always intrigued me.\u00a0\u00a0 Why these three?\u00a0 \u00a0\u00a0 What facts of history or culture link the three?\u00a0 All three endured fascist totalitarian regimes before WW II, but so too did, say, Poland, Hungary, Greece, Portugal,\u00a0and Spain.\u00a0 The countries of Eastern Europe, however, met the 1960s still under the Soviet imperium, and so opportunities for violent resistance were few, and in any case were unlikely to come from the left.\u00a0\u00a0 Spain and Portugal and, for a time, Greece, were still under fascism in the post-war period, so opposition tended to aim at enlarging democracy, not at violent resistance.\u00a0\u00a0 Perhaps that history is a partial explanation, with (some of) the\u00a0first post-war generation, the 68ers (in German, achtundsechziger) seeking by their armed resistance to absolve their shame at the perceived\u00a0lack of resistance to fascism of their parents’ generation.\u00a0 Certainly the writings of the Red Army Fraction (RAF), the Red Brigades, and the Japanese Red Army give this as a justification for their turn to violence.
\nI have always thought that another causal factor in common between these three countries was the absence of alternating left and right governments.\u00a0 With a succession of right-wing and centre-right regimes in Italy and Japan, and right-wing and grand-coalition (right-and-left-together) regimes in Germany, how were views in favour of socialist change\u00a0able to be represented and heard?\u00a0 Indeed, in the German Federal Republic, the communist party had been declared illegal in 1956, and remained so until its reformation (under a new name) until 1968.\u00a0\u00a0 And even the USA may not be an exception to this heuristic:\u00a0 In 1968, the candidate of the major party of the left, Hubert Humphrey, was a protagonist for the war in Vietnam (at least in public, and during the election campaign).\u00a0 And while the candidate of the major party of the right, Richard Nixon, had promised during the campaign to end the war, once in office he intensified and extended it.\u00a0\u00a0 For anyone opposed to the war in Vietnam, the democratic political system appeared to have failed;\u00a0 indeed, one of those who had most publicly opposed the war, Robert Kennedy, had been assassinated. It is interesting in this regard to note that the Weather Underground only adopted armed resistance as a strategy in December 1969, a year after Nixon’s election.\u00a0\u00a0 In Chantal Mouffe’s agonistic pluralism view of democracy, a key role of political argument and verbal conflict is to bring everyone into the political tent.\u00a0 If some voices, or some views, are excluded by definition or silenced by assassination, we should not then be surprised that those excluded try to burn down the tent.
\nAnd perhaps because I like the idea of acting according to (an empirically-grounded) theory of history, I always found the primary argument of the RAF very intriguing:\u00a0 That by engaging in armed resistance to the capitalist state, the revolutionary left would force the state to reveal its essential fascist character, and that this revelation would awaken the consciousness of the proletariat, leading to the revolutionary overthrow of the state. <\/em>Although intrigued by it, I never found this argument quite compelling:\u00a0 First, it could be argued that a democratic state only has a fascist character in response to, and to the extent of, armed resistance to it.\u00a0 So predictions of its fascist tendencies become self-fulfilling.\u00a0\u00a0 Second, the history of countries ruled by fascism in the 20th century surely shows that life under totalitarian rule makes organizing and engaging in dissident activities, particularly group-oriented dissident activities, less not more feasible. \u00a0 \u00a0 Third, I believe strongly that not only do ends not usually justify means, but often means vitiate ends. \u00a0\u00a0\u00a0 This is the case here:\u00a0 suppose the violent left’s violent resistance had indeed worked in overthrowing the governments they were directed at.\u00a0 What sort of society would have resulted?\u00a0\u00a0 What we know of the personalities of Andreas Baader and Ulrike Meinhof and their revolutionary colleagues leads me to think that a Cambodia under the Khmer Rouges, rather than a Sweden under Olof Palme, would be a more likely description for life in a West Germany led by the RAF.\u00a0 Thank our stars they failed.
\nThese thoughts are provoked by some recent reading on the subject of\u00a0leftist urban terrorism in the West, both fiction and non-fiction.\u00a0 The fiction concerns the psychology and consequences of life underground, long after any thrill of plotting and executing armed resistance has passed.
\nFirst,\u00a0\u00a0a novel about the Angry Brigade (AB), the lite, British version of the Red Army Fraction:\u00a0 Hari Kunzru’s “My Revolutions”<\/em>.\u00a0\u00a0 This is a gripping first-person account by someone who had participated in AB actions, and now, 30 years later, is living under an assumed name.\u00a0 His past comes back to him, through some not-fully-explained, but dirty, tricks\u00a0that British intelligence agencies seem to be running.\u00a0 These dirty actions are (or rather, appear to be) targeted against those who were on the edges of the violent left, but not part of it, who have now risen to prominence in Government (Joschka Fischer comes to mind), and the narrator is used by the shadowy intelligence forces to blackmail or destroy the career of the target of the action.\u00a0 The writing is\u00a0fluent and plausible, and the tale\u00a0engrossing.\u00a0 Only\u00a0occasionally does Kunzru trip:\u00a0 Who ever uses “recurrent” (page 4) in ordinary speech?\u00a0 (Some people may say “recurring”.)\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0 Precisely how does the sun beat down like a drummer? (page 10).\u00a0\u00a0 But most of the novel reads as the words of the protagonist, and not the words of the novelist, indicating that a realistic character has been created by the author’s words.
\nThe same cannot be said for Dana Spiotta’s “Eat the Document”<\/em>.\u00a0\u00a0 Although this book too is riveting, it is not nearly as well-written as Kunzru’s book.\u00a0\u00a0 The story also concerns the later after-life of some formerly violent leftists, presumably once members of the Weather Underground, now living in hiding in the USA, incognito<\/em>.\u00a0\u00a0 The story is told through the purported words of multiple narrators, a technique which enables the events to be described from diverse and interesting perspectives.\u00a0 I say “purported” because too often the words and tone of different narrators sound the same.\u00a0 In addition, often a narrator uses expressions which seem quite implausible for that particular narrator, as when the teenage boy Jason speaks of “recondite” personalities in suburbia (page 74):\u00a0 these are not Jason’s words but those of the author.
\nThese works of fiction are partly engrossing to me because I once unwittingly knew a former violent leftist on the lam – the Symbionese Liberation Army’s James Kilgore,\u00a0\u00a0<\/a>whom I knew as John Pape. \u00a0I wish I could say I’d always suspected him, but that is not the case.\u00a0 Indeed, if anything, I suspected him of being a secret religious believer.\u00a0 He was serious, always intense, and softly-spoken, and ideologically pure to the point of having no sense of humour. The Struggle<\/em> was all, and life seemed to be all gravitas<\/em>, with no levitas<\/em> (at least in my interactions with him.\u00a0 I have no idea how much of this serious demeanor\u00a0 is or was his true self.)\u00a0 Adopting a position as a committed revolutionary is certainly an interesting strategy for a cover;\u00a0 one does not expect underground weathermen to be regular attenders at Trotskyist reading circles, but Pape was.\u00a0 (And<\/em> he did the homework!) But perhaps someone with a sense of humour does not join a movement of revolutionary violence in the first place, at least not in a democracy.
\nIn the non-fiction category is Susan Braudy’s history of the Boudin family, one of whose members, Kathy Boudin, was a member of the Weather Underground.\u00a0\u00a0 As with Kunzru’s and Spiotta’s novels, this non-fictional account is also riveting.\u00a0\u00a0 It is, however, appallingly badly written. For instance, for a history, the book is very fuzzy about dates – when did Jean Boudin die, for example?\u00a0 And much of the text reads like third-hand family anecdotes, perhaps interesting or amusing to the family but not to anyone else.\u00a0 (Aunty Merle always was partial to rhubarb and once asked for it in a restaurant<\/em>.)\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0 And lots of very relevant information is simply not provided, for instance the prison sentences given to Kathy Boudin’s fellow-accused in 1981.\u00a0\u00a0 As a history book, this is certainly a book.
\nFinally, a quick report on Hans Kundnani’s<\/a> superb analysis of the extreme German left, Utopia or Auschwitz<\/em>:\u00a0Germany’s 1968 Generation and the Holocaust<\/em>.\u00a0 Kundnani argues that there were competing strains within the violent German left in the 1960s and 1970s:\u00a0 one strain engaged in struggle (against capitalist and western imperialist injustice) as a form of remedy for the failure – or at least, the perceived failure – of their parents’ generation to resist Nazism, and other strains comprising German-nationalist and, suprisingly, even anti-semitic tendencies.\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0 The presence of such tendencies at least explains how some on the far left in the 1960s ended up on the neo-Nazi right thirty years later.\u00a0 Kundnani’s book is superb – interesting, well-written, humane, engrossing, and tightly-argued.\u00a0 I had only one small quibble, which is perhaps a typo or an oversight:\u00a0 On page 252, Kundnani refers to German military participation in a NATO-led attack on Serbian forces on 24 March 1999 as the “first time since 1945, Germany was at war.”\u00a0 Well, the Federal Republic of Germany perhaps. \u00a0 The DDR sent troups to join the Warsaw Pact invasion of the Czechoslovak Socialist Republic in August 1968. \u00a0 If I was a former citizen of the DDR, regardless of my opposition to that invasion, I would be annoyed that my nation’s history seems to have been forgotten by people writing after unification on German history.
\nUPDATE (2010-08-25):<\/strong> My remark about participation\u00a0by the DDR military in the Warsaw Pact invasion of the CSSR in 1968 is wrong.\u00a0\u00a0 The forces of the DDR were, at the last moment, stayed, as I explain here<\/a>.\u00a0 \u00a0\u00a0Thanks to Hans Kundnani for correcting me on this (see comment below).
\nReferences:<\/em>
\nBill Ayers [2001]:\u00a0 Fugitive Days:\u00a0 A Memoir<\/em>. Boston, MA, USA:\u00a0 Beacon Press.
\nDan Berger [2006]:\u00a0 Outlaws of America: The Weather Underground and the Politics of Solidarity<\/em>. Oakland, CA, USA:\u00a0 AK Press.
\nSusan Braudy [2003]:\u00a0 Family Circle:\u00a0 The Boudins and the Aristocracy of the Left<\/em>. New York, NY, USA;\u00a0 Anchor Books.
\nUli Edel [Director, 2008]: Der Baader-Meinhof Komplex<\/a><\/em>.\u00a0 Germany.
\nRon Jacob [1997]: The Way the Wind Blew:\u00a0 A History of the Weather Underground<\/em>. London, UK:\u00a0 Verso.
\nHans Kundnani[2009]:\u00a0 Utopia or Auschwitz:\u00a0 Germany’s 1968 Generation and the Holocaust<\/em>. London, UK:\u00a0 Hurst and Company.
\nHari Kunzru[2007]:\u00a0 My Revolutions<\/em>.\u00a0 London, UK:\u00a0 Penguin.
\nChantal Mouffe[1993]: The Return of the Political<\/em>.\u00a0 London, UK: Verso.
\nDana Spiotta[2006]:\u00a0 Eat the Document<\/em>.\u00a0 New York: Scribner\/London, UK: Picador.
\nTom Vague [1988\/2005]:\u00a0 The Red Army Faction Story 1963-1993<\/em>.\u00a0 San Francisco:\u00a0 AK Press.
\nJeremy Varon [2004]:\u00a0 Bringing the War Home:\u00a0 The Weather Underground, the Red Army Faction, and Revolutionary Violence in the Sixties and Seventies<\/em>. Berkeley, CA, USA:\u00a0 University of California Press.
\nSome previous thoughts on beating terrorism here<\/a>.\u00a0 Past entries in the Recent Reading series are here<\/a>.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

While elements of the left turned to revolutionary violence in most countries of the West at the end of the 1960s, three countries experienced this turn to a much greater extent than any other:\u00a0 Germany, Italy, and Japan.\u00a0 This fact has always intrigued me.\u00a0\u00a0 Why these three?\u00a0 \u00a0\u00a0 What facts of history or culture link […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[9,35,44,64,70,79],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-1967","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-books","category-history","category-literature","category-politics","category-recent-reading","category-terrorism","p1","y2010","m08","d12","h23"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/vukutu.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1967","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/vukutu.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/vukutu.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/vukutu.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/vukutu.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=1967"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/vukutu.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1967\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/vukutu.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=1967"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/vukutu.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=1967"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/vukutu.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=1967"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}