MANIACS AND MURDER
H., I.
A little unexpectedly but not the less welcome, some sensible words on terrorism come in the May 1974 issue of Ramparts, the New Left monthly. A piece signed by "the Editors" details the ugly...
...But before touching on those, we need only add that the outcome of the SLA affair has been entirely predictable: a ghastly shoot-out in which the brutal Los Angeles cops gave the half-dozen SLA people ten minutes in which to surrender and then mowed them down...
...It is not a very strong answer, since, for one thing, the rightness or wrongness of NLF and Cuban executions, about which the "former New Left activists" asks, is in no way dependent on whether "millions" support the agencies undertaking those executions...
...Ramparts itself quotes "one former New Left activist" who asks the pertinent questions, "Do we really believe every Vietnamese village chief cut down by the NLF deserved to die...
...H. COMMENTS AND OPINIONS 373...
...Foster was given no chance to answer the charges, or plead his case...
...Damn any enraged witless "radical"—black or white, young or old, rich or poor—who dares pump bullets into another human being because of a delusionary doubling with "the people...
...What is the ground for believing, after the torment and shambles of 20th-century history, that "a mass movement" would necessarily be superior in its moral character to a handful of desperadoes...
...Well, there's a portion of truth in that, though I think it's time murderous gangs like SLA no longer be considered as merely "distorted" expressions of legitimate discontent but also as pathological phenomena which in many respects are not very different from fascism...
...It refused on the principled ground that it wanted no part of -a program enforced through terrorism...
...In whose name and on whose behalf did the SLA execute Foster...
...But even if we grant the Ramparts argument, all that it says is that under certain conditions SLA adventurism might not flourish...
...The only group that seems to have emerged from the California mess with any honor or self-respect is Cesar Chavez's farm workers' union, which refused to participate in the "food distribution" program decreed by Patricia Hearst's kidnappers...
...But Ramparts has not thought through the issue of the moral appropriateness of violence and/or terrorism in a democratic society...
...And all Ramparts can answer is that "the Cuban Government and the NLF are legitimized by mass movements numbering millions of supporters, by political organs, by legal codes which are enforced and respected...
...Ramparts is rightly appalled at the destructiveness and self-destructiveness of SLA, but finally the case against it and its half-shamed apologists cannot be made short of a principled defense of democracy...
...A piece signed by "the Editors" details the ugly story of how some 20 people, mostly middle-class white women and declassed black men, decided—in the name of "the people," of course—to murder Marcus Foster, the black Oakland superintendent of schools...
...Damn the brutal cops waiting for a chance to kill the killers but not ready to wait a few hours in the hope they might surrender...
...In what sense is their Court of the People, of the people at all...
...it is not yet giving a reason for opposing such methods, or it is not yet giving a reason that goes beyond the merely tactical or expedient (terrorism calls down the cops, it is counterproductive, etc...
...But leave that aside, and turn to the question of "a mass movement...
...Blood has been spilled, ugly passions were aroused, vicious sentiments reinforced: that is the total effect of the course undertaken by the SLA...
...The Ramparts editors have taken a significant step away from the arrogant elitism, the usurpation by gangs of declassed and deranged maniacs of the power of "the people," which has characterized the worst segment of the New Left...
...These points raised by Ramparts are welltaken, and one can only hope they have been read with some attention in California—though there are problems here Ramparts hasn't thought through...
...Damn all these linked murderers and maniacs who debase politics and threaten freedom...
...So long as Ramparts can be published, Bobby Seale run for mayor of Oakland, demonstrators cry freely that "the bum" should be thrown out of the White House, political movements of opposition organize and function—so long as we live in a democracy, and yes, an imperfect, debased, vulgarized, manipulated democracy, then, no private group, tiny or not-sotiny, has the right to appoint itself prosecutor, judge, and executor of violence...
...Perhaps it's true that "a mass movement" of the Left would act as a brake on SLA-type kamikaze gangs (though it seems not to have been true in Chile recently, and in Germany during the '20s it wasn't true, either...
...Still, the "people" having decided and assigned Field Marshall Cinque to the job, Foster was murdered...
...Proposing to analyze the SLA and similar phenomena, Ramparts argues that their acts of desperate violence are often conceived as protests against inaction itself, and vigilante 372 COMMENTS AND OPINIONS groups like the SLA see themselves as substitutes for the missing mass organizations...
...by courts of justice and judicial review procedures to which military functionaries are responsible...
...Ramparts, which ought to know, since it has plenty to answer for in earlier provocations of mindless leftism, admitsthat it hasn't the faintest idea of what "Bio-Dossiers" refer to...
...And as for their "legitimacy," when, editors of Ramparts please tell us, was the last time the Cuban government submitted itself to a free election, so that the "millions" could express their judgment of its conduct...
...As for the rest— Damn all those mindless "theoreticians," the 30-day wonders who came up with such rockheaded notions as "liberal fascism," and thereby prepared the way for the Cinques...
...The very presence of a mass movement acts as a restraint on destructive violence, since it creates a moral community for people in revolt...
...Have we such supreme faith in the Cuban government that we can state categorically its revolutionary firing squads were never aimed in the wrong direction...
...As for the kidnapped Patricia Hearst, who may since have been promoted to Field Marshal herself, she may or may not be alive by the time this is read...
...In the gibberish that now passes for "revolutionary" language, the Symbionese Liberation Army announced it would kill Foster for participating in "the implementation of Bio-Dossiers through the Forced Youth Identification Program...
Vol. 21 • July 1974 • No. 3
