Whatever Happened to Left-Wing Domestic Terrorism?

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The ultra-left-wing terrorist groups of the 1970s generally carried out such attacks in protest of bloody U.S. interventions abroad or the entrenched racism of American society. Clearly, their tactics did nothing to hinder either phenomenon, as the invasion of Iraq and the racial segregation that is still readily apparent in our prison complex, inner cities and educational system illustrate. Considering these continuing evils and the dire threats of climate change and soaring inequality, there are arguably even more issues to be enraged about than there were in the early 1970s. But no American left-wing radical group has resorted to the kind of murderous plot found in the  works of Tom Clancy and Michael Crichton, popular authors who cast environmentalist and anarchist groups as brutal villains.

So what has changed since the Brink’s armored car robbery in 1981? “The brief moment of left violence in the late 1960s and ‘70s was a product of leftists hooking up with anti-colonial international movements,” says Andrew Hartman, an associate professor at Illinois State University. “[American terrorists] thought of themselves as fighting against the colonial power from the belly of the beast in solidarity with these ‘Third World’ movements. It was rooted in the expectation that a revolution was right around the corner and that almost any means necessary was appropriate in trying to achieve that. Obviously this was delusional, but it was a very palpable expectation.”

American leftists’ eager identification with their counterparts in Latin America, Africa and Asia is readily apparent. “The vanguard role of the Vietnamese and other Third World countries in defeating US imperialism has been clear to our movement for some time,” reads the 1969  manifesto of the Revolutionary Youth Movement (many of whose members would join the Weather Underground). “[The movement] will become one division of the International Liberation Army, while its battlefields are added to the many Vietnams which will dismember and dispose of US imperialism.” (Even the bizarre rhetoric of the SLA reflects this: every group member took a “revolutionary" name. Patty Hearst’s choice was Tania,  after a comrade of Che Guevera.) "There were thousands of acts of violent protest happening all around,”  explained ex-Weatherperson Kathy Boudin in a 2001 New Yorker interview at the Bedford Hills Correctional Facility, where she served a 19-year sentence for her role in the 1981 Brink’s robbery. “Every day you would hear about acts of violence, so it didn't feel unusual in a certain way."  

The more exact analogy was probably the violent radical groups in Western Europe which, while just as ineffectual, were far deadlier than their American counterparts. From 1970 to 1981, the Italian Red Brigades killed “three politicians, nine magistrates, 65 policemen, and some 300 others,” according to Tony Judt’s  Postwar: A History of Europe Since 1945. A former prime minister,  Aldo Moro, was kidnapped on the day of his greatest political victory and held hostage at a “People’s Prison” in Rome. His body was found seven weeks later in the trunk of a car parked in the city center. The Red Army Faction robbed 30 banks, took 162 hostages and killed 28 people including the West German attorney general.

Contrast that with the Weathermen, who only killed each other. On March 6, 1970 a cache of bombs ripped apart a Greenwich Village townhouse, killing three Weathermen before they could deploy the bombs at a dance for officers at Fort Dix, New Jersey. Bill Ayers (who was not present) says in the 2001 profile of Boudin, who survived the blast, “The townhouse knocked us back and forced us to reassess ourselves, pulling us back from that particular abyss.” Before the group broke up in 1976, they carried out over two dozen bombings across the nation, including attacks on the U.S. Capitol building and the Pentagon, but issued warnings beforehand and avoided killing anyone.