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4. Up Against the Wall, Motherf***er
51 Plays1 year ago
Who were the Symbionese Liberation Army, what did they want, and how do they fit into the histories (and legacies) of Leftist movements?
Film: Guerrilla: The Taking of Patty Hearst (2004) available here.
Also mentioned: The Weather Underground, A Raisin in the Sun
Intro music: Silver Jews, Candy Jail
Outro music: Jefferson Airplane, We Can Be Together
Recommended
Transcript
Introduction and Overview
00:00:00
Speaker
Is there any chance that we can be charming and banter-like right now? I mean, this is not Bernadine Dorn. Let's see. Hi, everybody. I'm Brendan. I'm here with Robert. This is Candy
Documentary Focus on Patty Hearst
00:00:20
Speaker
Jail.
00:00:20
Speaker
Today, we are going to be discussing the Symbionese Liberation Army, and we're going to be using as our entry point the 2004 Robert Stone-directed documentary, Gorilla, which on the title card is called Neverland, The Rise and Fall of the Symbionese Liberation Army. I don't know the history of the two titles, but it really is focused more on
00:00:45
Speaker
the Patty Hearst saga than the SLA in general. So Robert, you want to just give me a little bit of background about who these guys were?
Background on Donald DeFries
00:00:53
Speaker
Yeah. I think in some ways it makes sense to focus primarily on Donald DeFries as the way of introducing them, because without Donald DeFries, you would have no Symbionese Liberation Army.
00:01:06
Speaker
So basically, I'm just going to give you a quick chronological rundown of Donald DeFries and how the organization formed. So in 1967, facing criminal charges, Donald DeFries actually became a paid informant for the LA Police Department, which is fascinating. And that by itself could lead us down a thousand rabbit holes that I won't go down right now. But maybe we'll touch on it in the episode.
00:01:35
Speaker
In 1968, the Black Cultural Association, acronym BCA, was an African-American inmate group that was founded in Vacaville Prison.
00:01:46
Speaker
And DeFries receives a sentence in 1970 of five years to life for armed robbery, assault with a deadly weapon, and possession of a forged check. And it's his third felony conviction. So just to loop back quickly to the police informant piece, he winds up doing very reduced sentences for some of these charges.
00:02:07
Speaker
and many speculate, I think, without being able to conclusively verify that the reason why he got out as quickly as he did in certain instances was a result of being an informant. Right, right. So, December 3rd, 1970, DeFries begins his prison sentence at Vacaville. And this is where it gets kind of interesting. So,
00:02:33
Speaker
Willy Wolf, who becomes one of the central members of the Symbionese Liberation Army, begins volunteering to tutor at BCA in Vacaville.
00:02:47
Speaker
through UC Berkeley. He was a UC Berkeley student, as Patty Hearst was as well. Future SLA members, Russ Little, Joseph Romero, Patricia Mismun, SoulStick, and Nancy Ling Perry soon join him and meet to freeze at Vacaville. So the core members,
00:03:06
Speaker
of what will become the SLA, really meet one another and I guess most importantly, defreeze in this sort of prison student education program. And at the time, defreeze is the only one of those who's actually incarcerated, correct? Only one who's actually incarcerated and the only one who's African American in the group, which I think is noteworthy because I think with the exception of Ramirez, everyone else is white.
00:03:34
Speaker
So flash forward, he is transferred from
Formation of Symbionese Liberation Army
00:03:39
Speaker
Vacaville. This is to freeze to Soledad state prison, December 11th, 1972. I think it's noteworthy that he's transferred to this prison in particular because
00:03:50
Speaker
He's exposed while in prison to Marxist literature, certainly to Black Power literature. I'm sure he got exposed to Malcolm X's writings, but I know for a fact that he was exposed to the writings of George Jackson, who would ultimately play a very major role in the prison reform movement at the time and will wind up getting murdered actually in prison.
00:04:15
Speaker
George Jackson writes a couple very important texts. One is just letters from Soledad that become like a major text amongst the new left. Being in prison himself, DeFries is deeply moved and I think changed by encountering Jackson's writings in addition to what is the second book he wrote. I think it's called Blood in My Eye.
00:04:41
Speaker
And he cites that as being a central and transformative text for him as well. Anyway, I bring this up just to say, like, DeFries clearly has been politically formed while in prison in a very profound way. And some would probably argue that he's radicalized in prison, ironically, in some ways at the same time or close to at the same time of being earmarked as a police informer.
00:05:07
Speaker
So it puts him in obviously a very precarious position. So on March 5th of 1973, he's assigned as a trustee to work on a boiler outside the main prison, and he easily escapes from Soledad prison, and authorities take very little action to find him. And in the summer of 73,
00:05:28
Speaker
Nancy Ling Perry moves in with the freeze and Patricia Ms. Moon soul stick at their house on Parker Street in Berkeley.
Assassination of Marcus Foster
00:05:36
Speaker
And that really marks the beginning of what will become the SLA, the Symbionese Liberation Army. So that's sort of like a very quick
00:05:46
Speaker
rough-and-tumble chronology with Donald Fries being the central protagonist at this point. From there, essentially, they come up with their name. De Fries does. This comes from the word symbiosis. I can't remember which text he had been reading in which symbiosis is referenced, but he then coins the term symbionese. And the symbol of the seven-headed snake
00:06:12
Speaker
also was DeFriese's idea as the main icon of the organization, and he goes into detail as to what each head represents. But essentially, it's getting at, in so many words, the idea of seven different heads, but all working in concert for the same emancipatory ends.
00:06:32
Speaker
or communitarian ideals. And so they become a revolutionary clandestine underground group and they're sort of forced into underground nests because of DeFries' fugitive status. The two women who are housing them have not committed crimes as of yet other than housing a fugitive.
00:06:52
Speaker
but they quickly start to not only define themselves through their name, their symbols, and also the writings to sort of explain their political ideology and mission statement, I guess you could call it, but then start to try to hash out what their first actions will consist of. And you know enough, Brendan, to jump in here. Like, do you want to share a little bit about the assassination of Marcus Foster and the fallout with that?
00:07:22
Speaker
Yeah, their first major action was a cold-blooded murder of Marcus Foster, who is the superintendent of Oakland schools, who defrees, who by this point was calling himself Sincue, which is a reference to Sinche, or Sinchez, the leader of the Amistad slave revolt.
00:07:40
Speaker
who we actually talk about in discussing Robert Hayden's poem, Middle Passage, in an episode that may or may not air before this one, but Cinque had singled out the Oakland superintendent, I guess because of a misapprehension over his intentions regarding
00:07:58
Speaker
IDs that were going to be introduced into the school system. And the abshah was there as a left wing militant organization run by a black man. Their first action was to murder a black man. And so they immediately, they were not embraced on the left and they tarred their reputation from the very beginning.
00:08:22
Speaker
They actually didn't release a communique immediately, and the Weather Underground released communiques. I think the Black Liberation Army released communiques. Certainly underground leftist organizations were known for doing that. And so Foster gets assassinated, but they don't release their communique for at least a couple of days.
00:08:43
Speaker
and when they finally do from what i read the freeze and company were expecting actually to be embraced and he was shocked at. The antagonism the pushback the discussed really with the action and the failure of the panthers to understand. Yeah and for you know an organization like the panthers that was so focused on education.
00:09:09
Speaker
to assassinate the superintendent of a school district. Just from the beginning, there's an obvious disconnect there in terms of what they think they're doing and what they're actually doing and their inability to understand the way that their actions are going to be perceived. And if you're engaged in any kind of movement in which you have to consider the tactics of developing mass support,
00:09:34
Speaker
to like setting aside the sheer moral repulsiveness of shooting Marcus Foster, like to just miscalculate that badly from the beginning does not bode well for the future of the organization. And even the sloppiness with which they were interpreting Foster's actions, like I think from what I read, and this wasn't like it was a behind the scenes situation, but even Foster himself
00:09:58
Speaker
was not on board with the IDs and had different feelings about it and was working through it at the time that he was assassinated. So they completely misapprehended Foster's own politics, weren't necessarily as radical as the Panthers, but we're far from like a Reaganite, you know, pathological right wingism, right? I mean, that's just not who he
00:10:23
Speaker
He was from what I can tell. No, not at all. So they they murder Marcus
Kidnapping of Patty Hearst
00:10:28
Speaker
Foster. They seriously wound his his companion, who I think was the deputy superintendent. And then they eventually do release the communique claiming responsibility for it. They are roundly denounced on the left. And then their next major action is to single out a 19 year old college student at Berkeley.
00:10:50
Speaker
Patricia Hearst, who they chose because she was the granddaughter of William Randolph Hearst, the newspaper magnate the inspiration for Charles Foster Kane in Citizen Kane, and this is the action that more than anything else catapults them to a level of national attention that arguably no other left-wing organization had attained up to that point.
00:11:13
Speaker
And I think we should add that, in a way, this was Donald DeFriese's or Cinque, we can call him at this point, and associates within the SLA's attempt to sort of make right on their tarnished reputation immediately out the gate with this assassination. So they're saying, how do we reassert ourselves in a way that will be more palatable and gain alliances with the organizations we want to
00:11:40
Speaker
and they somehow landed on kidnapping Patty Hearst and using that as leverage to make politically motivated demands. I'll add just one other detail, Brendan, which is that I have tried to do as much homework as I can as just like an amateur historian, whatever you want to call it, that wants to get as deep as I possibly could on the SLA and their history and their ideology before recording with you.
00:12:07
Speaker
And so I did pick up a couple books, one of which basically has anthologized the entirety of their public statements so far as I can tell. And I did this in part because if you look them up on the internet, man, or actually more specifically podcasts, you will find very quickly that the vast majority of people, probably in part deservedly, but I think in part because they're assholes, just begin with mocking them.
00:12:36
Speaker
And they maintain that from beginning to end. And I think that while they're certainly deserving of severe criticism.
00:12:45
Speaker
for the actions we've already spoken to, but also things we'll get to later in the episode. I don't think that just making a mockery of them is going to be helpful in landing on any kinds of insights about the legacies of the left, even as marginal as the SLA is. They are a part of the left, albeit the extreme left.
00:13:09
Speaker
and also trying to reflect on their mistakes and try to make heads or tails of what the hell they were trying to do in respect to what they did.
SLA's Ideological Challenges
00:13:18
Speaker
And so I bring this up just to say like, they've been essentially just made fun of. And that's been at the expense of really trying to understand them as a movement. And maybe that winds up hurting deeper reflections on the left in the 60s and beyond.
00:13:34
Speaker
which I think is a mistake. And so I tried to take them seriously. And as I read the communiques, man, and the public, the various writings that they released, I can't help but be honest and say, even if they were well intentioned, even if their hearts were purportedly in the right place or in their minds in the service of the people, however abstract the people were,
00:14:02
Speaker
The the writings are just not coherent man like i really tried to give them the benefit of the doubt read that stuff charitably i'm not saying it's pure gobbledygook but it's far from compelling writing either at a theoretical level or at a actionable level.
00:14:19
Speaker
Yeah, and one of the things that the documentary gets into is that there was a media circus around this after the Patty Hearst kidnapping. The television crews were basically camped out 24-7 in front of the Hearst mansion.
00:14:34
Speaker
the documentary kind of floats the idea that this was the first modern media circus. I've certainly heard other events proposed, you know, given that designation, but they do, I think they loom larger to this day in popular imagination than much more serious left wing revolutionary groups of the era. And I wonder if part of that is because there was this cartoonish quality to them. And that is on some level,
00:15:02
Speaker
what a lot of america has always wanted to see revolution as is fundamentally absurd or fundamentally ridiculous and. An organization like the black panthers or the weather underground that whatever missteps they made tried so hard to communicate clearly and to demonstrate their earnestness and to cite their sources and to do their homework.
00:15:24
Speaker
for the SLA to come along and act like a bunch of clowns who are sort of parodying revolutionary rhetoric was maybe exactly what the country wanted on some level so that we could engage with these people without having to take them too seriously and thereby sort of just make ourselves feel better about everything in general.
00:15:45
Speaker
Yeah, and I think it is actually worth noting that the weather underground, let's actually look up really quick when the townhouse explosion was, I know it was early 1970, right? It was definitely 1970. Okay, let's just say somewhere in 1970, you have the townhouse explosion in New York,
00:16:05
Speaker
where the underground members upon basically learning of the assassination of Black Panther Party member Fred Hampton are sort of concluding that the only response now as thoughtful, anti-racist leftists of the time is to become really quite militant.
00:16:26
Speaker
Um, they'd already engaged in the days of rage event in Chicago where they smash up a neighborhood. And, um, that already was received with mixed reviews from different organizations on the left. Ironically, uh, Hampton himself leveled some pretty harsh critiques towards them. But anyway, Hampton's assassinated underground, the weather underground grows more militant.
00:16:49
Speaker
the townhouse explosion occurs in the midst of that transformative moment that intense moment for them and i bring this up because. You read about what happens after the that
Demise of the SLA
00:17:02
Speaker
event so three weather people are killed from that explosion and that was their first exposure.
00:17:10
Speaker
to losing friends like that, you know, having friends get killed. And everyone's in a state of shock, understandably. And they regroup and decide never again, never again will they engage in violence that could hurt themselves or others. They're still open to symbolic forms of I would certainly say it was beyond nonviolent protests or bombing buildings is beyond
00:17:36
Speaker
your usual protest marching, right? But they really were careful about when they chose symbolic targets that the buildings were empty and they did everything in their power to make sure that no one got hurt.
00:17:51
Speaker
And they're quite proud of that record because they essentially maintained that from that day forward. And so I wanted to bring that up just to say, like, it's it's almost doubly ironic, isn't it, dude, that like you're we're talking about nineteen seventy three. Is that when Foster gets assassinated? Yeah, I mean, it was only active seventy three to seventy five. It was a very short lived organization. And, you know, by the end of it, Cinque was already
00:18:20
Speaker
dead and the organization was limping along without him. So it was really just a period of about a year and a half that there was this organization that he was the head of.
Documentary's Narrative on SLA and Hearst
00:18:29
Speaker
So you'd think that, I mean, in a way, like the weather underground experienced a tragedy that other left wing organizations could have turned to to say, wow, they learned the hard lesson for us in a way. We know now what not to do. And that doesn't seem to be a lesson that was internalized by the SLA, by proxy.
00:18:51
Speaker
There's this sort of rush to action, but it's divorced from theory. You can't talk about the Weather Underground without talking about Bernadine Dorn. You can't talk about the Black Panthers without talking about Fred Hampton. All of these organizations are always going to have significant founding members or leaders who are influential.
00:19:12
Speaker
in forming the identity of the group. But I think SLA was very much a creation of Donald DeFries specifically. And I get the sense that he was, I mean, it's a sad story. He lived a, you know, he had an abusive father. He was
00:19:27
Speaker
He had a hard life. He was in and out of prison from an early age. But it seems like he was drawn to violence from an early age, and he was caught with bombs on more than one occasion before he began his leftist career. And there's an interesting moment in the documentary where they're interviewing one of the members who joined SLA after
00:19:49
Speaker
Cincu and the other core members were killed, and he was shocked to find when he met the surviving members for the first time that he said there was nobody there that had any charisma. The way he said it is kind of odd that matters on an ideological level, which of course it doesn't.
00:20:10
Speaker
I imagine that sink you was the charismatic head who kept that unit together and they assassinated foster because he said we're going to assassinate foster and they didn't. Have any kind of there was no internal reckoning after that fact because it wasn't an organization that was focused on ideals it was an organization that was in the thrall i think of a single person.
00:20:31
Speaker
You also forgot to mention that the person who came to the SLA late after the corps members had been killed followed up the, there was no charismatic person amidst the group with, there was no smart person amidst the group, which I thought was interesting that he dropped that.
00:20:50
Speaker
Yeah, there was perhaps a questionable amount of self-awareness on the part of that gentleman as well, but some of his criticisms were perhaps telling. So what did you make of this film that came out in 2004? It doesn't really...
00:21:06
Speaker
I mean, obviously, the Corps members were killed in L.A. when that house they were hiding in was laid siege to by the police. It went up in flames. Sinku, I believe, shot himself. And the organization limped along for a little while after that. So many of the Corps members were not available in 2004 to be interviewed because they were dead. So a lot of the Corps players are not there. But what did you make of Stone's effort to tackle the SLA and the Patty Hearst saga?
00:21:34
Speaker
I think he did an admirable job of laying out in broad brushstrokes the sequence of events and also the political underpinnings of the SLA, however incoherent and confused they were. I think Stone did his homework and tried as best he could to just basically share what is available.
00:21:58
Speaker
and didn't do it in like a Cold Warrior sort of way. I don't think he's sympathetic like a Marxist or something, but he didn't come at it from like a Fox News angle. And so I thought it was interesting that he was at least feigning critical distance. Obviously Patricia Hearst and her transformation
00:22:17
Speaker
however coerced it was, and I think that is a question that I'd like to pursue with you, was front and center of the documentary, but as it was unfolding, right? So, in theory, this was a leftist organization that had gone militant, and in practice, they were trying to, I guess, transform the United States.
00:22:40
Speaker
in their image or as they believed to be a more humane United States, however misguided those actions were, I think the story very quickly pivoted not just in the film but in reality away from those political agendas and really more towards this character study.
00:22:59
Speaker
of someone who was put in an extraordinary circumstance that almost 99.99% of the human population will never experience, and people just being fascinated probably for less than respectable reasons on some level.
00:23:18
Speaker
who the hell Patty Hearst is, what she became, and who she is now after having gone through all of what she went through. And so I don't know, I think that the movie, the documentary winds up in the same territory that the media wound up in, which is focused more on Patty Hearst and less on this bizarre organization known as the Symbionese Liberation Army.
00:23:46
Speaker
What do you think? Does that feel like a fair characterization? Yeah, I think that's what happens with the story in general, that it's kind of impossible to discuss the SLA without discussing the Hearst kidnapping and the resulting saga. And it's a place where I kind of want to tread carefully because there's still a lot that we don't know and that probably we will never know, right? The broad outline is that they kidnap Patty Hearst.
00:24:11
Speaker
who at the time is a student at Berkeley. She's the scion of one of the wealthiest families in America, a family that's instrumental in controlling the media in America. So, you know, not a family that's removed from politics, but they kidnap her and she issues a series of statements in which she insists with increasing vehemence that she's okay. And she begins to
00:24:35
Speaker
in her statements increasingly parrot the political language of the SLA and then the next thing everybody knows she's participating in a bank robbery holding an automatic weapon and has clearly fully committed to now being a she identifies herself I think when she's finally arrested they ask her for occupation and she says she's an urban gorilla.
00:24:56
Speaker
She eventually explains her actions through a combination of Stockholm Syndrome and just fear that she would be killed if she didn't go along with things. She is sentenced to prison and then eventually her sentence is commuted and she is pardoned, I believe, by President Carter and goes on to resume a relatively normal life insofar as somebody from her background can have a normal life.
00:25:19
Speaker
And she receives a full pardon from Bill Clinton upon his exit from the presidency. So Carter gives the first one and then Clinton completely expunges her record. So there's no criminal record now. And so the eyes of the world were on this for obvious reasons. I mean, you know, this would be like someone kidnapping Kim Kardashian and then Kim Kardashian all of a sudden.
00:25:44
Speaker
you know, participating in a bank robbery with a Kalashnikov or something. And I laugh at that example, but I mean, you pointed out something before we started recording, which the documentary does not get into. The documentary shows a lot of archival footage of interviews with Hearst's then-fiancé, a man named Stephen Weed. And what it does not get into, what you pointed out to me was that
00:26:07
Speaker
He had actually been her teacher, and they had started their relationship when she was a teenager, perhaps as young as 15, I believe you said? Yeah. He claims it was 17, but then I think his name is Jeffrey Toobin, who wrote a recent nonfiction book on the Patty Hearst kidnapping, said that it was probably closer to 16 or even 15. So he contests Weed's claim that it was at 17.
00:26:36
Speaker
So here you have this young woman who has been raised in this incredibly wealthy family, living with a lot of strictures, a lot of expectations. She's spent some time in what I gather was a pretty abusive Catholic school. Then she's in this kind of textbook manipulative relationship with this older man who is obviously taking advantage of her in some way or another.
00:26:59
Speaker
and then becomes engaged to him. That's, you know, that's a sad enough, it's a common story, but it's a sad enough story to begin with. Then she's kidnapped and subjected to torture and incarceration and brainwashing, possibly sexual abuse. Then she just becomes, you know, she becomes Tanya. She no longer identifies as Patty Hearst when she comes forward publicly as a now member of the organization that's
Patty Hearst's Transformation and Agency
00:27:24
Speaker
kidnapped her. She identifies as Tanya and
00:27:27
Speaker
It's just a sad story from beginning to end and even though she. You know in the end she she doesn't serve a full prison term and the other part of this is that there was a subsequent bank robbery committed by the SLA at which a bystander of.
00:27:43
Speaker
middle-aged woman who was a mother of four was murdered by a member of the SLA. And that was a case that wouldn't be finally fully prosecuted until the 21st century. And some of the SLA members who had already served their prison terms for other crimes were then reincarcerated because of that murder.
00:28:00
Speaker
There were no legal consequences for that for Patty Hearst. And so even though in a lot of ways she got off relatively consequence free and was able to resume a privileged life, it's still a really tragic story. And it overshadows the rest of the SLA discussion in a way that may be kind of inevitable.
00:28:21
Speaker
Yeah, I think the way you characterize that is absolutely right. However, I would loop back around just to add a couple, I think, important details as to Patty Hearst's political leanings and as they in some ways as they developed before the kidnapping. So according to
00:28:41
Speaker
another podcast I was listening to, whose name eludes me right now. They did some homework, did some digging. They might've pulled it out of Patty Hearst's own memoir, which actually to the great chagrin of her former lawyers, they were like, Jesus Christ. She got off or her sentence was what it was. Or no, it was when she was released from jail early,
00:29:06
Speaker
But then she released the book that documents that second bank robbery in which Myrna Opsel was murdered. And they were very worried about that actually inadvertently looping her back into another prosecution. But that's its own story. So I wanted to just say that with Weed, her fiancee, he apparently identified as a self-styled leftist. They were living in Berkeley. She was attending UC Berkeley.
00:29:32
Speaker
Apparently, he, in spite of calling himself a leftist, was quite, and this is actually symptomatic of the left in general. You find this in the Students for a Democratic Society. You actually have critiques leveled against the underground for this, but he was essentially a chauvinist and expected her to cook the food. And whenever she shared opinions about movies they watched that were
00:29:55
Speaker
Divergent from his own he basically dismissed her and called her stupid and she was understanding or like really internalize in the fact that like wait this guy. Who is supposed to be the love of my life is treating me like garbage so there's that but also he's calling himself a leftist and yet he's acting like a chauvinist.
00:30:14
Speaker
So there's obvious just like ethical incongruency here or word and deed are not matching up and so I want to give her I think my reason for going there dude is just to give her a little bit more agency and a little bit more definition as Someone who was grappling with the issues of the times with the politics as they were unfolding at the time and developing her own I don't think she was
00:30:43
Speaker
Because I think you didn't do this, but I wonder if there's a tendency to sort of paint her as a blank slate, that the SLA was able to project their ideology onto without any issues at all, as opposed to someone who actually had an identity, had formed political positions and was moving in certain directions at the point at which she was abducted. And it just, I think it changes it a little bit and empowers the portrait of her a bit more.
00:31:12
Speaker
Yeah, that's fair enough. They interview Weed at the time, and they ask him what her political views were, and he, in the footage in the documentary, he says basically she didn't have any. Who knows to what extent that is Weed's prevaricating in order to protect himself, or just sort of extending his chauvinism to dismissing whatever political views she might have shared with him at any point.
00:31:37
Speaker
I mean, to add this, and again, like I'm not, uh, this isn't the, I'm not wanting to turn this into the shit talk show, but it's also just on the record, both from weed and from the kidnappers, although they have very different interpretations of this, that when he was being beaten up, um, because they wanted a safe, they assumed that if Patty Hearst was the daughter of the Hearst, that there'd be a safe in her and weed's place, which they didn't have one.
00:32:06
Speaker
And, uh, all the SLA kidnappers were astounded by this apparently, but weed in sort of like a panic attack, um, reflex kept looking up and they kept saying like, don't fucking look up. And they kept hitting him, like kicking him in the face. So, I mean, it's a frightening situation. You have guns in your face, you're getting beaten up, but he kept almost like as a, as like an erotic reflex.
00:32:28
Speaker
compulsively looking up at their faces, which would obviously ID them. And so anyway, they do this. And in the midst of it, Patti's tied up in another room. He said he could hear her. And his way of basically explaining the next action was, I tried to do whatever I could to scare them off and to get help from someone. So I fled the apartment with blood in my eyes and knocked on every door that I could.
00:32:54
Speaker
The SLA recount this as he basically had a panic attack and left his fiance to the kidnappers and her fate, which I think is who knows, right? Again, we'll never know. Only the people in that apartment that night will know, but I'm inclined to actually believe Bill Harris's rendition that he ran out of there to save his own life.
00:33:14
Speaker
Yeah. And actually the thing that struck me most in that story is so they, the SLA goes in there assuming that because Patty Hearst is a rich girl, that she has a safe full of money in her, her dorm room or her apartment. This is like, as opposed to just like having access to a fucking bank account. Like this is like one step above like Cartman on South Park, thinking that Jewish people have a bag of gold under their shirt. Like,
00:33:41
Speaker
that it's, it's this cartoonish understanding of the world that has already caused the death of Marcus Foster and is now about to cause more, you know, more pain and more trauma to more people because they, like I, I know you said earlier, you don't want to turn them into caricatures, but they're fucking idiots on some level. Yeah. Yeah. True. I think I just wanted to also point out that like she winds up, and this is another thing I actually don't want to touch, man, because it is too hot to handle and it's, I don't want to,
00:34:11
Speaker
speculate, but she winds up having a sexual relationship with Willie Wolf, who assumes the name of Kujo. And she goes on the tape, one of the communiques and basically says she wants nothing to do with weed ever again. She's not interested in him at all. And even if whatever those relationships were, as they emerged within the SLA under those coerced conditions, whatever that is, I think that like what we learned about how weed was treating her
00:34:41
Speaker
Prior to the abduction just the sort of snide dismissive condescending this condescending way of relating to his fiance Cruel in a way in addition to leaving her in the apartment I mean if I were in her shoes, I don't know why I would go back to that guy So I think that that particular portion of her decision from from the evidence that we've with that we have at our disposal and
00:35:09
Speaker
makes total sense to me while you would write that guy off. Yeah. And the more we talk about this, I think the more that I'm disappointed in the film because the just taken on its own, the documentary provokes more questions than it answers and that's fine.
Historical vs. Personal Narratives of SLA
00:35:26
Speaker
There's, there's nothing wrong with the documentary doing that, but it,
00:35:28
Speaker
It glides very quickly over the formation of the SLA, over Donald Defries' background, over the background of the other members. It is clearly in a hurry to get all that stuff done with so it can get on with the Patty Hearst business.
00:35:44
Speaker
It doesn't get very much into Patty Hearst's psychology or her background. It doesn't talk about her existing political views. And it doesn't say anything whatsoever about Weed and his relationship with her. And those to me are glaring omissions that once I have that information, it reframes the way that I see her and it reframes the way that I see a lot of aspects of this. And I think for the documentary to leave those things out as completely as it did is kind of a pretty serious series of omissions.
00:36:13
Speaker
I agree and I wonder if that was in part a byproduct of the restrictions or the constraints that Stone himself was under. I did learn that this was PBS that funded the documentary and it was originally part of the American Experience series.
00:36:31
Speaker
And so who knows what sacrifices you have to make to fit within the bounds of funding that comes from them and the final product that you're supposed to put out for viewers. But there was a 2018
00:36:46
Speaker
multi-part documentary that came out from CNN. That's actually excellent. And it re-interviews Bill Harris. He's now, you know, they all did, as you put it, prison sentences in 2002. They've been released by 2018. And it goes into much more extensive detail, not just into the SLA as an organization, but also into
00:37:09
Speaker
Patty Hearst, her family background, Weed, et cetera. Weed was also interviewed in it as an older man. And so I'd recommend the CNN multi-parter. I think it's six parts came out in 2018.
00:37:22
Speaker
Is this story, the story of the SLA and the story of the SLA and Patty Hearst, is this story ultimately a historical story or a personal story? And of course, all history is personal and all of us are part of history and all that, but you know the distinction I mean, right? Do we come to this as students of history looking to learn something about politics and society and revolution, or is this ultimately a story of a small group of personalities and the way that they interacted with one another?
00:37:52
Speaker
In my opinion, I actually think it's both. And I think that you could easily stay domestic and say, well, what mistakes were made in the weather underground? What mistakes were made in other self-identified militant leftist organizations in the United States that were responding to injustice in the country in ways that in some instances were just deeply misguided and destructive? But if you even
00:38:21
Speaker
Zoom out, man, and use a broader lens and make this international. Like I just did a, I'm starting to dip my toe into learning about the, the red army faction. These were young Germans who were protesting Vietnam. So they were showing solidarity. Actually they named dropped the weather underground throughout their existence, but basically saying they're anti-imperialist, anti-Vietnam war, anti-capitalist.
Moral Complexities in Revolutionary Actions
00:38:48
Speaker
But they wind up engaging in crimes that would blow your fucking mind, man. Like, do you think the SLA caused damage? Look up the Red Army faction. It is astounding. And I think they even struggled to articulate why they did what they did at certain points and also were on the receiving end of harsh criticism, not just from the German population in general, but from left circles in Germany.
00:39:14
Speaker
I do think it is a historical, like we are sort of approaching this as students of history and we are asking questions within a historical register in that we're trying to ask the question in my mind of when you have young people who for whatever reason have come to a place where they say, I'm bearing witness to atrocity.
00:39:35
Speaker
maybe I haven't previously, and that's an extension of privilege or an expression of privilege, but now that I have, either seeing it on TV or seeing it with my own eyes, and I'm appalled by this, and I don't want it to continue, what do I do? So to reframe that, now that I know what I know, what do I do to try to stop this? And I think that you have some people that were incredibly thoughtful
00:40:00
Speaker
and how they went about answering that for themselves tactically. I think that there are many moments within the Black Panther Party that there's incredible responses that are defensible. Absolutely. There's incredible responses with Dr. King and
00:40:16
Speaker
nonviolent resistance movements. And then you have, you know, the ambiguous legacy of the Weather Underground. And I think the not so ambiguous legacy of the SLA and the not so ambiguous legacy of the Red Army faction. And again, I need to learn more about the RAF. But to me, that's the question is, how can people who, if we're going to take them at their word or in their hearts, really want to change the world for the better?
00:40:41
Speaker
wind up in these kinds of positions where they're engaging. It's like the cliche of in order to fight fascism, you become a fascist.
00:40:54
Speaker
Yeah, no, I hear you, but let me rephrase the question. You and I are doing a deep dive into the weather underground right now, which we'll talk about here eventually. But you could look into the relationship between, say, Bernardine Dorn and Bill Ayers as part of your attempt to understand the weather underground. But if you took that too far, it would simply become a distraction. It's relevant to a point, and then past that point, it's a distraction.
00:41:23
Speaker
with the SLA, looking at Donald DeFries, looking at Patty Hearst, looking at their personalities, is that a distraction from a larger story or is it in fact the heart of the story? And if it is the heart of the story, what do we do with that? Because you mentioned a second ago, like looking into people's hearts, like
00:41:44
Speaker
We're never going to know the extent to which Donald Defries wanted to be a champion of the people and to what extent he just liked blowing shit up, right? We just don't know. And even with Patty Hearst, however sincere her convictions might have been when she was living and acting as Tanya,
00:42:04
Speaker
those convictions were achieved under duress and so therefore can be to a certain extent discarded, right? You don't need to know a whole lot of psychology to know that if you put people under enough stress, you can convince them of things they wouldn't otherwise be convinced of. And if you then take away the stressors and the triggers
00:42:23
Speaker
they may no longer believe those things. And that's independent of whether those are things that should be believed or things that may have valid reasons behind them. I myself am a leftist, but if you caught me at a time in my life when I was a conservative, because there was such a time in my life,
00:42:39
Speaker
and kidnapped me and held me in a closet and abused me and kept me at gunpoint, you probably could have made me a leftist. And I wouldn't have been wrong to be a leftist, but I would have been wrong to be a leftist for that reason, for those reasons, right? Does that make sense? It does. And I think you touch on an important detail, which is that all the other SLA members became SLA members completely voluntarily.
00:43:04
Speaker
I think as a result of Patty Hearst becoming an SLA member as a result or as a consequence of being abducted, it does taint, not her, but the purity of that conversion because as you put it, it's no knock on Hearst, it's survival. I feel like anyone who would judge someone for doing what they needed to do to get through something like that,
00:43:29
Speaker
is an asshole. But I think more to the point, she isn't an equal member because of the fact that everyone else got to decide for themselves without any coercion whether to commit themselves to that organization or not. She was not granted that option. And so for that reason, it makes the decision to join Forever murky.
00:43:57
Speaker
Yeah, the security camera footage of her at the Habernia bank committing the robbery, obviously there's no sound. The law enforcement brought in lip readers to see if they could see what she was saying. And it seems like she was saying two things. One is she was saying over and over again, I'm Tanya, as if she were
00:44:14
Speaker
reiterating that identity to herself. But at one point, apparently she also says Up Against the Wall, motherfucker, which at the time was kind of a slogan. You know, there's a Jefferson Airplane song that uses Up Against the Wall motherfuckers part of the chorus because they're trying to take the
00:44:28
Speaker
the leftists at the time are trying to take the language of the police and turn it back against the police. But at any rate, she's using that phrase, presumably voluntarily there in the bank. What does that tell you? I mean, it doesn't really tell me anything. At that point in her life, she had a lot of things to be angry about. So if you can get out a little bit of anger by saying up against the wall, motherfucker, I don't see anything in there having to do with any kind of conviction other than that's just
00:44:55
Speaker
It feels really good to hold a gun and say up against the wall, motherfucker, I would imagine. Well, back to your point about the Stockholm Syndrome and
00:45:06
Speaker
just never losing sight of that. I know that you originally entered into this, this line of questioning with just like, what is the, is there, is it actually harmful or a distraction to focus on personalities and individual psychology is when dealing with political movements or just like larger world historical events or issues. And I think that there's,
00:45:27
Speaker
much to defend that position that it's problematic.
Role of Anger in Revolutionary Movements
00:45:32
Speaker
But I do think just like adding to where you've gone, that's one instance of like, all right, well, is agency involved in the words that came out of her mouth and even the choice to participate in that robbery?
00:45:46
Speaker
And I think at that point in this story, it's not so clear. I think there's still room to be like, you know, she might be told if you don't do it, you're going to die. But then there's subsequent situations like one where
00:46:01
Speaker
Bill and Emily Harris are in that sporting goods store and they are flagged for shoplifting, whether they did it or not. They claim they didn't. The owner certainly claims they did. And a citizen arrest is underway for Bill Harris, who basically realizes his
00:46:18
Speaker
His cover is cooked and he screwed and he just assumes because the way this was set up was Patty Hearst was in the van that they drove to the sporting goods store that was parked probably a hundred yards away adjacent to the store with all the rifles and the keys in the ignition.
00:46:37
Speaker
And not only does she not start the ignition and drive away when she realized that Bill Harris was going to go to prison or get arrested, not only did she not just run away in general, she pointed an automatic rifle out of the window of the van and opened fire on the storefront in an effort to successfully get Bill and Emily Harris away from
00:47:01
Speaker
the folks making the citizens arrest, which she did. And so, you know, then comes the, this is like in the courtroom, the prosecution is like, how do you explain that? We understand coercion while she's in the apartment. We understand maybe some degree of coercion in the first bank robbery. When you're in a van left unattended with a loaded weapon and the keys in the ignition, plenty of time to run, drive away, whatnot.
00:47:26
Speaker
You not only don't take those options, you defend the folks that have originally captured you and continue on. And that's where this idea of agency or the question of agency, I think, becomes even more complicated and tricky. I mean, how do you situate that particular moment?
00:47:46
Speaker
Well, I mean the term that always comes up is Stockholm Syndrome, which I don't want to dispute that that's a thing. My problem with it is that it pathologizes something that I don't think is pathological, like if you
00:47:59
Speaker
If you spend a lot of time with people, whether it's voluntary or not, even if they're holding you at gunpoint, you are going to begin to empathize or identify with them to a certain extent. That's just human nature. And what you have to do or say or believe to survive, these are very complicated subject of personal issues. And I don't want to ever put myself in a position of trying to analyze Patty Hearst, especially not 19 or 20 year old
00:48:27
Speaker
Patty Hearst in the middle of a traumatic experience. I will say that like a lot of us, I think she had a lot of things to be angry about.
00:48:35
Speaker
And sometimes anger just needs to be given a uniform and pointed in a direction and told where to march. And people who become militants sometimes start from a place of realizing that the world is fucked up and sitting down and really thinking about it and reaching an intellectual decision that they are going to become a militant to do something about the way the world is.
00:48:58
Speaker
Other people are just angry and the first successful sales pitch that they hear is the ideology that they hitched their anger to from then on, whether it's the left wing or right wing or what. And so, like I said a minute ago, I suspect that holding a gun and saying up against the wall motherfuckers very satisfying on some level.
00:49:17
Speaker
I suspect that shooting an automatic weapon out of a vehicle is also a pretty good way to let off some steam so it's not outside the realm of possibility that somebody in that situation who had a lot of bottled up anger that they'd never in their life been given an opportunity to to vent you know to get out like
00:49:36
Speaker
It's cathartic like i can see it just being a cathartic thing for her on a on a level that wasn't even conscious where she herself didn't even know exactly what she was doing or why she was doing it but she was doing it cuz she needed to do it in that moment for some really deep psychological need that is is in no way political.
00:49:52
Speaker
Yeah. And so, you know, maybe in an effort to honor the fact, I like how you put it, which is just like, listen, I don't want to psychoanalyze someone's actions that's under extreme duress in a circumstance that really we can't fathom. I think that that is a fair approach. But maybe that's a good way to pivot into a kind of question that's nagging at me, man. And I do think it still ties into
00:50:22
Speaker
the SLA, Patty Hearst, and the left in general. So here it goes. Todd Gitlin, one of the
00:50:30
Speaker
most well-known names who's written about the 60s and was a participant in much of the protest movements, not the violent militant side, but the nonviolent member of SDS, prominent figure, still writing today. He basically created a fairly, this has been more or less accepted in the mainstream, his formulation. This is how he's formulated the 60s. He basically says you've got the good 60s and the bad 60s.
00:50:59
Speaker
And he marks the bad 60s, I think similarly to the way Kirkpatrick Sale does in his book on the SDS. The bad 60s began when the weather underground emerged and the good 60s died when the townhouse explosion occurred. And so obviously we're now in the 70s essentially, but if you extend that out, the SLA would be a byproduct of the bad 60s.
00:51:27
Speaker
But I think he's making a broader claim about what protest should look like. He's making the argument that any protest that involves violence
00:51:40
Speaker
would count as bad protest and would fit squarely into his bad 60s dichotomy. And I wanted to ask you because the Weather Underground's patron saint, they don't have a lot of them, but if there's one historical figure that they clearly admired, it was John Brown.
00:51:59
Speaker
He's controversial to this day, but Frederick Douglass, incredible figure, called him a hero. And when he was hanged, he said, you're losing, this is a martyr. He's a saint. I'm sure people today would still, some would characterize John Brown as a monster. And certainly, some would also say, what a fool. He got killed, his sons got killed.
00:52:23
Speaker
It didn't destroy the institution of slavery, and it was a bloodbath. What the fuck was the point of that? While others might say, well, he was the catalyst on some level that began the Civil War that ultimately undid the institution of slavery. So if you look at it from a long view, he's not as foolish as he seems. But how do you situate like a person like John Brown? I mean, to use this good 60s, bad 60s,
00:52:49
Speaker
dichotomy and the thesis that I think Gitlin is forwarding that bad is anything that involves violent militancy. Well, John Brown is definitely a violently militant abolitionist if there ever was one. How do you situate him?
00:53:10
Speaker
I believe that it was certain members of the Black Panther Party, I don't want to misattribute this to the wrong person, so I'm just going to attribute it to the Black Panther Party in general who would sometimes assess the commitment of white leftists to anti-racism by saying, how do you feel about John Brown? And they would use him as a litmus test because he was one of the few white men who was willing to die for the cause of abolition. And I have nothing but respect for that.
00:53:40
Speaker
I think that he was not very good at what he did. He did win a battle in Osawatomie, Kansas at one point, but his raid on the armory at Harpers Ferry was ill-conceived and ill-carried out and his end was swift almost to a comical degree in comparison to the ambitions that he had.
00:54:02
Speaker
And so I have boundless respect for his conviction and for the fact that he was willing to die to remedy a situation that he did not suffer from, right? At no point was John Brown himself going to become a slave. And so for him to have that conviction, I think, is something you can't look away from. Like you cannot do it the disservice of looking away from it. And I don't want to do that disservice. I am ambivalent about him.
00:54:30
Speaker
However, because having the courage of your convictions is not the only piece of information you need in order to be able to evaluate someone. I don't want to oversimplify anything, and I know you don't either. I don't necessarily like Gitlin's formation of the good and bad sixties, and I don't like the
00:54:52
Speaker
you know, let's equate violence with what is bad and nonviolence with what is good. And I also think about like, you know, I've heard the same thing said where like the, you know, the end of the sixties was marked by Altamont, or the end of the sixties was marked by the Manson murders, or there's always something that people have to point to and say, okay, this is where the sixties ended. And all of that is, is overly simplistic. It can be useful in some ways, but it's overly simplistic. But
00:55:16
Speaker
You know, in 1968, you had inner city black uprisings around the country that were violent. You know, not just the Watts Rebellion is what everybody remembers, but that was, you know, my my family's from Baltimore and the ghettos rioted in Baltimore after Martin Luther King was assassinated. That's that's violent activity. And that's in the 1960s, before all of the end of the 60s things happened, it's pre Manson, it's pre Altamont, it's pre townhouse explosion.
00:55:45
Speaker
yet we're just going to include those under the banner of the Good Sixties, presumably because that was something that black people were doing, whereas the Good Sixties was mainly run by white people or something. There's something there in that formulation that rubs me really the wrong way. And I think focusing on John Brown is an excellent idea because at some point we have to reconcile, we have to reckon with the idea of violence, right?
00:56:10
Speaker
we have to figure out how do we feel about violence. But any kind of simplistic like violence, bad, nonviolence, good, that distinction, it strikes me as overly simplistic. And so I know that we're not discussing Gitlin here and I have not read him, so I don't want to mischaracterize him. But I think that's potentially a dangerous way of making distinctions like that.
00:56:32
Speaker
I agree with you and I want to go a step further and say the more that I read, the more that I actually feel the line that is presumably clear and distinguishing nonviolence from violence is actually not as clear as we think.
00:56:47
Speaker
For instance, let me use a different example. You have the Catonsville Nine, right? And these were Catholic activists who burned draft files to protest the Vietnam War. They took 378 draft files from the draft board office in Maryland and burned them in the parking lot. And I think they also burned
00:57:09
Speaker
at least one, maybe more ROTC buildings. Now, again, like we've had discussions prior to this where you made an important distinction. There's a difference between a target and a victim. And obviously these Catholic activists made a point of only burning property rather than harming people. But I think many folks, even I, like if I imagine actually dowsing a
00:57:36
Speaker
army recruitment building in gasoline and burning it to the ground? That's a radical act. That is an act that 99.9% of people would be very uncomfortable engaging in. And these are from people in positions of front and center mainstream American authority, clergymen and nuns.
00:57:58
Speaker
I guess I just wanted to float this out there because with this good 60s, bad 60s, reductive formulation that as you put it is dangerous on some level, I think it also misses the point which is that this stuff is a lot more complicated and muddier.
00:58:17
Speaker
than we usually get in a sort of sanitized mainstream American US history high school class or even a college class. And I guess I'm trying to just like figure out where I land with this stuff, but also where you do and just in a general sense, like assessing the legacies of that kind of activism.
00:58:39
Speaker
You know, you kind of the, the normal formulations, you have Dr. King on one side and then you have the Panthers or Stokely Carmichael and then the white anti-racist like the weather underground on the other side. What do you make of that part, man? Not just that it's dangerous and reductive, but actually that the line is much less defined than we think it is or would even like it to be.
00:59:05
Speaker
Well, no, I think you're right about the line just in passing that the Baltimorean in me cannot let this moment go by without pointing out that it's Catonsville.
Courage and Sacrifice in Activism
00:59:16
Speaker
Sorry. Catonsville. And all right. So burning a recruitment office, you said that's a radical act. Is it now if you if you were to find if you were to just walk out of your house right now and find the nearest army recruitment center,
00:59:33
Speaker
and dowsing gasoline and toss a match, I think we could both agree that was a radical act. In the 1960s, at the height of the Vietnam War, during the draft, when everybody in the country is talking about what's happening in Vietnam and what the U.S. is doing over there, is it actually a radical act compared to invading Vietnam and killing civilians and dropping napalm on villages and so on and so forth?
00:59:59
Speaker
is just burning down a building that doesn't have any people in it, really a radical act under those circumstances. I mean, I think, you know, David Dellinger might respond to you by saying it's not really that radical of an act. So I think, you know, like this is where that, and I'm not saying that you are at fault for this, but I think this is the sort of logic that can become very slippery. So Ray Lavasser, who was not a part of the SLA, but was a radical activist who became, went underground and engaged in
01:00:30
Speaker
targeted bombings and what they would call expropriations, which was essentially just a revolutionary term for bank robberies. And I don't say that dismissively because I think they're positioning it as expropriations to make it clear that that money is funneling into
01:00:46
Speaker
revolutionary activities rather than just lining their own pockets. But with that being said, Ray LaVassar was a Vietnam veteran. He didn't see combat, but he saw atrocities and he witnessed terrible things and he had a couple friends die while he was out there. And when he visited the monument in Washington, D.C. commemorating the veterans, the American veterans of the Vietnam War,
01:01:11
Speaker
He had this interesting comment. He said, it's deeply moving and tragic. But if you actually think about the total number of Vietnamese civilians and children and even soldiers that were killed as well, the wall would stretch in both directions on and on for miles. And he points that out to say,
01:01:32
Speaker
If the United States government is waging a genocidal war in his mind against Vietnam and engaging in imperialism overseas, and I, Lavasser, here in the United States, am engaged in petty bank robberies where all I'm taking is a couple hundred thousand bucks or $50,000 to funnel into revolutionary activity here,
01:01:59
Speaker
How am I the terrorist with the United States or the freedom fighters? And I think on a certain level, that argument is compelling. But I think it misses the fact that when you engage in something like a bank robbery, you put all these civilians at risk, and there's so many variables you don't get to control. And even if you are a drop in the bucket compared to what warfare on a mass scale does,
01:02:25
Speaker
um at the damage that it that it brings i think that it covers over the recklessness of those actions and the consequences that can result in civilians getting killed who were just in the bank to make a deposit or to withdraw money and are probably working class who are the very people you're purportedly claiming to defend or be fighting for and now they're victims of your expropriation and so
01:02:52
Speaker
That's where I think this kind of logic, if we're not careful, can be used to cover up, at the very least, to put it charitably, deeply sloppy and arguably ethically questionable actions, however politically motivated in the most humane sense they purport to be.
01:03:14
Speaker
Yeah, absolutely. I was thinking exactly the same thing, that blowing up an empty building is in a way a lot less violent than robbing a bank with a gun that you never fire because of the risks, the elements that are out of your control.
01:03:30
Speaker
I was just thinking, I want to go back to the idea of John Brown for a second because you asked, I think, a really important question. And I think it deserved a better answer than I gave it. And one of the things about John Brown is that he was written off at the time and is still written off now as being crazy.
01:03:47
Speaker
And I've taught US history, and I've shown, I've talked about John Brown to classes, and I've shown them his photograph. And the most common photograph of John Brown, he looks like an absolutely crazy person. I mean, he looks like someone whose eyes contain no relationship to reality whatsoever. But he's written off as crazy because that's what we do with people who have the courage of their convictions, that they do the things that we are not brave enough to do, we say they're crazy.
01:04:14
Speaker
John Brown, however, was a deeply problematical person. He was a fanatic in bad ways as well as good ways. And that makes him a very difficult person to wrestle with. And in some ways he reminds me of people who I despise. For instance, people who attack abortion clinics or people who fly planes into skyscrapers. For instance, people who do despicable things whose convictions are wrong and yet
01:04:42
Speaker
you have to reckon with the courage of their convictions. These are people who believed extreme things and took extreme actions, and most of us never act on the extreme things that we believe. I don't think that it is fair for me to try to offer
01:05:00
Speaker
a black and white response to John Brown because the truth is I am ambivalent about him and I think I'm ambivalent about him for good reasons, but that doesn't change the fact that I'm, I'm then ambivalent about the fact that I'm ambivalent about him because I worry on some level that I'm, I'm comparing myself to him and falling short. Don't you realize that what you just did was almost perfectly encapsulate Bernardine Dorn and Bill Ayer's own son's assessment of his parents and on some level, the legacy of the weather underground.
01:05:30
Speaker
This is exactly how we characterize them. Yeah, you're talking about Zane Dorn and you're specifically referring to his podcast, Mother Country Radicals, which I'll just take a minute here to recommend because we will be getting into the weather underground at some point on Candy Jail. And if that's a subject that interests you, Mother Country Radicals available wherever you get your podcasts, highly recommended.
01:05:51
Speaker
So yeah, and I mean, just to loop back into one other thing, which is like in the same breath that we are characterizing the SLA as cartoonish, maybe deservedly so.
01:06:02
Speaker
for not only their foolish actions, but maybe additionally their incoherent mission statement or politics. But I think it's interesting that the way you've just framed John Brown is he kind of is or was cartoonish and on some level remains cartoonish
01:06:23
Speaker
And that doesn't always automatically mean that these people are to be not respected and that if you give it enough time and enough distance, you recognize what looked insane then is now taken as self-evident today. But it took someone behaving maybe fanatically or bizarrely or outside of the norm in a major way to drive home a conviction that should have been driven home anyway.
Cycle of Revolution and Oppression
01:06:52
Speaker
And so I just find it interesting that we are characterizing John Brown in some ways, similarly to the SLA, but concluding, I think correctly, that John Brown's actions, however extreme they were and they were, are much more justifiable than the actions of the SLA. No easy answers, huh?
01:07:17
Speaker
Yeah, absolutely no easy answers. And I think the thing about violence, which I feel like at this point we should put the word violence in quotation marks, is that we want some kind of easy answer. We want some kind of clear distinction, you know, nonviolence, good, violence, bad, whatever. There isn't. And one of the rocks that I think revolutionary movements so often founder upon is the fact that committing to
01:07:44
Speaker
a program of violence requires such a level of commitment that it is effectively superhuman.
01:07:51
Speaker
And at some point, you're either going to be too reflective to be able to continue the commitment or the level of commitment required, you know, the superhuman level of commitment is going to turn you into someone who no longer has any kind of reflection at all, like no self-awareness, no ability to evaluate your own actions. And the people who are most likely to do that are the people who are
01:08:16
Speaker
perhaps the least reflective and in some ways the least likely to be trusted, I guess, with that level of responsibility. And so it almost goes back to like Yates, you know, the best lack all conviction while the worst are full of passionate intensity. Like that's certainly something that I see, have seen many times in my life and it's a standard to which I continually measure myself and I continually fall short, but at the same time,
01:08:43
Speaker
I've never shot a mother of four during a bank robbery and I've never accidentally blown up a building that had somebody inside it because I didn't do my homework well enough. And that's not an insignificant thing either. No doubt. But I think also just the irony embedded in this as well, which is I think an issue that the left is contending with today. And that is people say a lot, but they do very little. And I think what is embedded in that critique
01:09:13
Speaker
is that in order to actually walk the talk, especially when it involves leftist liberation or emancipatory projects, sacrifice is a prerequisite.
01:09:27
Speaker
And that doesn't mean that the ultimate sacrifice, like sacrificing one's own life is a requirement, but it does mean that some degree of sacrifice is required in order for one's convictions to feel authentic and to express themselves authentically. And I think that is what makes this kind of stuff murky as well, as we assess John Brown or the Weather Underground, in that on the one hand, I respect, I think, the sacrifice.
01:09:55
Speaker
And on the other hand, I'm not sure how I feel about the actions. And those two things can coexist. Respect for the sacrifice, ambivalence about the tactics, you know? Because there is courage involved. Yeah, I guess one advantage of nonviolence, among others, is that there is very little for you to second guess yourself about. Like, I didn't hurt anyone. Whatever else happens, if I get hurt,
01:10:23
Speaker
if my cause fails, I didn't hurt anybody else. And I think there's a tendency to, to, we'll go ahead, go ahead, interject. Well, and the cliche of, you know, the very thing you're trying to destroy, you know, you sort of like in order to destroy the enemy, you have to think like the enemy or behave like the enemy. And I think we did see like,
01:10:44
Speaker
instances with the underground, weather underground for sure. And certainly the Red Army faction were like, that's even more insane to me where they're fighting fascism in their minds and the crimes of their parents who had yet to, in their minds, reconcile with their Nazi past, which was true.
01:11:02
Speaker
But then their way of dealing with that, these children of those parents and grandparents was to wind up behaving fascistically. And there's a kind of tragic Greek tragedy level irony in that.
01:11:16
Speaker
that the very thing you're so passionately opposed to and committed to destroying, you wind up becoming in your quest to destroy it. I'm reminded of Lorraine Hansberry's play, A Raisin in the Sun. There's a character in that who is a West African
01:11:35
Speaker
anti-colonialist, and he's been in Chicago. He's one of the American young women who's the protagonist of the play. One of the protagonists has become his lover, but he's returning to West Africa to continue the struggle, and he has hopes of becoming a revolutionary leader, of leading his country to freedom. And she says to him, well, what if you succeed in your anti-colonial struggle, but then you yourself become the dictator, you yourself become the oppressor?
01:12:03
Speaker
Of course, he's an entirely fictional character, but his response is, then I will become an old man and some young revolutionary will come and kill me in my sleep and that will be the right thing for them to do. I love that formulation so much because it doesn't bypass the reality of what this stuff looks like. It may be that you only defeat fascism ultimately,
01:12:29
Speaker
through becoming a bit of a fascist yourself and that you then become the thing that has to be defeated in your turn and that this is an endless cycle. Because, you know, we can, we can cavil or carp or make as many caveats as we want about the RAF or any other any other revolutionary leftist organization. Did they go too far? Did they not go far enough? Did they become fascists?
01:12:56
Speaker
But they didn't solve all the problems. The previous generations did not fix racism. They did not fix colonialism. They did not fix imperialism. They made some of those things better. Colonialism now operates differently than it used to.
01:13:12
Speaker
And racism now has fewer legal protections than it used to and so on and so forth, but they didn't win the fucking war.
Influence of Community on Beliefs
01:13:21
Speaker
So you could argue that they didn't go far enough. And maybe if they had gone far enough, they would have fixed those things, but then they would have become themselves the problem that subsequent generations had to fix. And there is no easy answer there, and there is no end to the process.
01:13:36
Speaker
But I do think that there was this kind of proving mentality machismo that came on the stage with the weather underground and certainly with the Red Army faction where they're basically like, listen,
01:13:48
Speaker
we need to prove our revolutionary credentials or our solidarity with groups like the Panthers by engaging in violence. And I think there was a kind of arrogance on some level in being dismissive of, no doubt, you know, like you go, if we had been flies on the wall at any number of SDS debates, right? We'd probably want to fucking puke because of how tortured and theoretical and divorced from concrete action some of those debates got, right?
01:14:18
Speaker
as did many debates, I'm sure, in Europe between Marxists. With that being said, I think they wound up sacrificing theory completely in the service of action. And again, I think that is dangerous. I think you don't want to be so burrowed into theory that you never do anything, hence the term armchair revolutionary.
01:14:40
Speaker
But you also don't want to be so quick to action that you're not thinking about why you're doing what you're doing or if what you're doing is in the service of your goals. And I do think the Weather Underground and the Red Army faction and a laundry list of others felt victim to that and they're impatience to prove themselves through action without tying it to sound tactics. But at the same time, and I
01:15:07
Speaker
We really do need to do an underground episode soon, I think, because we're talking about them so much here. But I don't have in front of me the complete list of weather underground bombings, but it was something like 17. It was over a dozen buildings that they successfully bombed. By successfully, I mean, number one, they didn't get caught, and number two, they didn't kill anybody.
01:15:27
Speaker
which was their goal. There was no collateral damage in any of those bombings, and yet, so in a sense, that part of their organization is the perfect balance between theory and practice, between fanaticism and conviction and self-awareness. And yet, the cumulative political effect of those bombings was, as far as I can see, nothing.
01:15:52
Speaker
Right. Like measured revolution accomplishes nothing. Right. And armchair revolution accomplishes nothing. Moderate revolution, restrained revolution accomplishes nothing. And full on revolution by its very nature is probably going to go too far.
01:16:10
Speaker
Again, there's no easy answer, but I do think that because what the underground did with those bombings is in some ways like what you would draw up as your ideal program to incorporate violence and restraint. We're going to make bombs, but we're not going to use them against people. We're going to use them against symbols, and yet what good did it do? It didn't do any good whatsoever as far as I can see. I just want to end with one final question, man, because
01:16:38
Speaker
In a previous discussion we had prior to the pod recording this, I thought you touched on something important and it'll help us bookend it back with the SLA and specifically with Patty Hearst with Stockholm Syndrome and this phenomenon of her conversion. And without getting into the weeds of was the conversion authentic, was it not? You brought up something I thought that was extremely interesting, which was
01:17:05
Speaker
How do people who are brought up in particular political milieus a very conservative religious conservative christian conservative background in the united states how do these how do certain individuals in the midst of that ideological inundation.
01:17:24
Speaker
gain the critical distance on an individual level to begin questioning the presuppositions of those environments and push back against them and even get out of them and maybe not take up totally opposite positions, but essentially do work their way out of it. Since from what I've gathered, it's statistically very unlikely that 90% of children adopt the politics of their parents. So that means that the vast majority
01:17:53
Speaker
are what their parents believe, believe what their parents believe in a tiny minority. Somehow if they decide that they don't agree with their parents, wedge themselves out of that. What is that? I mean, is that a kind of like,
01:18:08
Speaker
Stockholm syndrome and miniature, like we're all victims of Stockholm, the Stockholm syndrome of our environments, of our parental, you know, upbringings. And some of us get out and some of us don't. That's not to say that all parents are equally idiotic in their politics or equally enlightened. But clearly, if you're the child of a Klansman,
01:18:30
Speaker
and you work your way out of that ideology even though you've been steeped in it from the moment you came on to the onto earth that's impressive. Yeah i don't i'm fascinated by this question and yes it is like that ninety percent figure ninety percent of people believe with their parents believe that is a kind of stockholm syndrome. You know you can use the term metaphorical if you don't wanna minimize the experience of people who actually physically been held captive but it's the same the psychology of it is the same.
01:18:57
Speaker
we believe what people around us believe for survival reasons. And I find that it's a deeply, deeply, deeply depressing thought. And I'm fascinated by people who, not just people who change their mind, but people who actually get out. You know, like if you read about, I'm not going to remember her name, but the woman from Westboro Baptist who, you know, from childhood was participating in
01:19:23
Speaker
horrible. The Westboro Baptist, anti-gay, anti-everything protests, and then managed to get out and change her mind.
01:19:34
Speaker
I'm full of admiration for people like that. And yet I don't know what the source of it is. And I don't even know if there is a single source of it, if you could create a formula somehow for creating a situation in which people are able to change their mind. But I do know that it's just it's uncomfortable. And I know this from experience. You know this from experience, even in a much healthier environment than a Westboro Baptist kind of situation. It's really uncomfortable to believe things that are different than what the people who are closest to you believe.
01:20:04
Speaker
One of the things that we need more than we need anything else is to be a part of a community. There's research that suggests that the number one driver of a long lifespan is not smoking or eating certain foods or something. It's, are you a member of a community that you feel like you are a productive part of? If you don't have that, you die young. If you have it, you may live longer.
01:20:29
Speaker
regardless of how reliable that research is, there's definitely something there, right? Like this is a really, really primal thing. And so when you're asking people to not believe what their parents believe or what their peers believe, you're asking people to distance themselves from their own community. And that is something that, that a lot of people just cannot do. Yeah. And it requires so much courage.
01:20:54
Speaker
You know, there is a kind of, and an honesty, integrity, I think, in that you're basically saying, I'm gonna, whether I
Breaking Away from Inherited Beliefs
01:21:02
Speaker
am fully aware of this or not in the moment, I'm about to make my life much more uncomfortable as a result of deciding to act on what has become a conviction, which is that the environment that I was brought up in or the beliefs of my family or friends
01:21:24
Speaker
are inconsistent with what I believe to be true or decent or right, and therefore I'm going to, I'm going to alienate myself at least temporarily until I find wherever that community is that shares my own convictions. There's an old joke. I don't even know if it's a joke or if it's a, it might be in a movie or a novel, but the gag is that there's an underground organization that's been infiltrated by a double agent for a law enforcement agency.
01:21:54
Speaker
He then finds another double agent from another law enforcement agency in the same underground organization. And at the end of the day, it turns out that everybody in that underground organization was actually an undercover agent for law enforcement and nobody actually believes the stuff that the organization believed. And I sometimes wonder when it comes to things like religion, you know, we'll use that as like the example of what your parents believe that you believe if you're in the 90%.
01:22:18
Speaker
How many people are there who don't actually believe it, right? But they go through the motions because that's what they have to do to maintain relationships to be a part of their community. It's just too much trouble for them to really stand up and say, I don't believe this nonsense.
01:22:34
Speaker
what is the percentage of people who actually don't believe it but are part of the 90% who act like they believe it? And they're, you know, I don't think it's extreme as like, nobody's actually a Presbyterian. They're all just pretending to be Presbyterians because everybody else is around them is pretending to be Presbyterian. But like, I wonder often what the actual number is, like how many people actually believe the things and how many people are just going along with it because they don't see an alternative. Final note, there was a study done
01:23:02
Speaker
I remember when where psychologists shared a slideshow of lines and they said, they asked the question of whether or not the lines in the slide were equal in length or unequal. If there was a single one that was unequal, you're supposed to respond in the negative. They're not all the same length. And it was a, what do you want to call it? Like a control test or like where they
01:23:30
Speaker
told nine of the 10 participants to say upon seeing the slide that they were all the same when it was obvious one of them wasn't and one person was blind that went into it. And what do you think they did?
01:23:44
Speaker
nine of them were in on it or nine of them were ignorant. Nine of them were in on it and were told in spite of the fact that one line was clearly not the same length as the other lines in the slide to claim that they were equal in length. Right, so I would imagine then the 10th person just went along with that and did not speak up. Yeah.
01:24:02
Speaker
Yeah, and I would imagine too that you could do that maybe even with a larger like you could try having two or three people that weren't in the know like I bet you could push that pretty far before you could get somebody who would actually stand up and say no, no, no, no, no, I disagree.
01:24:16
Speaker
So yeah, just like the power of peer pressure, the power of fear of being humiliated or being different, and also the wildness in that of maybe overriding your own gut, which goes back to our discussion of speak no evil. Do you wind up in a psychological position where you're like, maybe I am fucking crazy, maybe I am wrong, as opposed to just trusting yourself, which is what I think you should do, because what else can you trust in the end but your own
01:24:46
Speaker
mind.
01:24:47
Speaker
Yeah, and you doubt yourself in the least helpful way because you're sitting there thinking, well, God, that looks different to me. But like these nine other people are saying it's not. So it must be my perception that's fucked up. Like extrapolate that to politics or religion. Someone, you know, who comes from a Republican family and a Republican county and a Republican school and a Republican church and so on and so forth. If you're asking them to consider the possibility that Republicanism is wrong, you're asking them to consider the possibility that
01:25:16
Speaker
almost literally every single person they know and love is also wrong. Most people are not gonna be able to even begin to entertain that idea, much less to do anything about it. And I mean, it's a dismal fact, but it does make perfect sense. I mean, nine people looking at a line on a screen is nothing compared to your mom, your dad, your sister, your brother, your girlfriend, your pastor, your teachers, your school buddies, like, you know, it's just,
01:25:47
Speaker
How do you put somebody in that position and expect them to be open-minded and not to just shut down and remain part of the 90%? I think that's what makes the 1960s on some level so endlessly fascinating for us is that you have a lot of people, and you could actually argue that the numbers got big enough that you wind up conforming to anti-conformity, but that's its own discussion. I would say you have a lot of very earnest young people
01:26:12
Speaker
that are in that exact position that you're describing, where their very identity has to be remade if they are going to level critiques against the belief systems of their families and their schools and their churches and their government, which is exactly what a lot of these people went through. You really have to be courageous to explore territory that is going to
01:26:41
Speaker
tear holes in your sense of reality, in your sense of self, which is exactly what I think a lot of these young people at their best were doing. I think that's the perfect place to end it.